
Testing The Reverberations Of ECHO Commenting - vaksel
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/07/31/testing-the-reverberations-of-echo-commenting-on-techcrunch/
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TomOfTTB
I admire the fact that people are looking at the problem of decentralized
conversations on the web but I don't think this is the solution to it.

First, community has a legitimate purpose. I come to Hacker News because I
find the people here are, on average, more likely to produce a thoughtful
comments (and thoughtfully respond to my comments) than on other sites. So a
solution that mixes all those results with the content from other sources
seems counterproductive.

Second, real time has very little legitimate purpose (in this context). If
you're watching a news story than there might be some value to real time but
in responding to articles on the web you're much better off without it.
Because it creates noise and the last thing you want is to drown out the
really great comments with noise.

In the end this is a solution that didn't look at the actual problem. The
actual problem is getting THE QUALITY comments from around the web and putting
them in one place. This solution chooses to pick "real time" over quality and
that leaves me with little interest in it.

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yankeeracer73
I agree, looking at the thread it's simply a ton of noise. Given so many
comment systems have voting mechanisms associated with each comment, I wonder
if it could instead be pulling comments that are already deemed "worthy" by
the respective communities they've been made in, say all comments receiving at
least 5 points.

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Osmose
I feel like attempts to publicly aggregate stuff will just result in more
clutter. Like TomOfTTB, I come to Hacker News for Hacker News.

I'm not smart enough to think up a good solution, but I think that having the
aggregation on the client side (IE I can choose to aggregate for myself, but
others only see site-specific conversation) is better than clogging
_everyone's_ comments with noise.

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nico
Had a look at the comments from the article and it looks like the ECHO guys
have a lot of room for improvement. Nice idea though, at least in principle. I
hope they manage to do a good implementation and sort out the problems.

