
Mozilla to Develop Comments Platform for New York Times and Washington Post - jamessun
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/business/media/new-york-times-and-washington-post-to-develop-platform-for-readers-contributions.html
======
cs702
Regardless of how successful this project ends up being, I find this to be its
most interesting aspect: instead of building or buying a proprietary system,
the New York Times is retaining a _not-for-profit, pro-open-web_ organization
to build what I can only assume will be a free, to-be-open-sourced platform.

I like that.

~~~
Alupis
Is there not a comment platform that already exists?

Seems strange if there isn't...

~~~
andypants
The two most popular that I've seen are facebook comments and disqus.

~~~
Natsu
Those are two of the biggest reasons I don't comment on many such sites, ever.
Of course, I must be one of the last three technical people who has never had
a Facebook account, despite having known about them since the days you needed
a .EDU address to sign up.

------
knowtheory
From my position as a fellow Knight grantee (i run DocumentCloud, and interact
with many of the folks involved in this upcoming project) i'm pretty excited.

The NYT and WaPo have world class developers, and the OpenNews folks are
people who very clearly get both the web and the news.

And a project like this serves some concrete needs including one that
DocumentCloud itself would benefit from. If this project ends up tackling part
of the single sign on problem for news organizations, integration with 3rd
party tools & platforms like DocumentCloud becomes a _lot_ easier.

Sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post upload documents to our
site, and then embed on their pages. Rather than requiring their users to
login to DocumentCloud _as well as_ the host site, we'd love to be able to
have a standard way (that has buy-in from news sites) to authenticate users,
especially if it's one that allows us to feed back moderation and the like
back to the host organization.

~~~
icedbergs
It's interesting you say that the NYT has world-class developers, because it
seemed like (from the leaked memo a few weeks back) that the digital side is
kind of a mess right now - but maybe that's a direction vs. talent problem.

~~~
knowtheory
Yeah, if you read the innovation report there's a breakout box that
specifically highlights a number of their development talent.

To name but a few: Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, Underscore, Coffeescript), Mike
Bostock (D3), Amanda Cox (creator of a lot of the NYT's great data
visualizations), Kevin Quealy (Amanda's partner in vis), Gregor Aisch (wrote
much of DataWrapper), and until recently David Nolen (aka Swannodette of
Clojure & Clojurescript fame) all work for the NYT.

I haven't done a detailed read-through of the innovation report, but
Niemanlab's writeup comports with my sense of the state of digital journalism
(and the Niemanlab folks are quite good):
[http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-
times-i...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-
innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/)

Key to many of the problems that orgs like the NYT have are _not_ a lack of
prestige or ability to attract top tier talent. The problem news orgs have are
organizational and structural, which are partially a matter of leadership and
priorities.

Anyway, irrespective of any of that, the NYT does innovative things with data
and visualization before anybody else in journalism, or hell even
visualization in general, does (not to say that they're the only ones pushing
the state of the art).

~~~
sogen
wow, the rat pack of development

------
dec0dedab0de
The best part of this is that Mozilla is getting money from a source other
than Google.

------
malandrew
The biggest question mark in this whole thing is how they are going to raise
the level of discourse around articles via smart moderation features. News
sites are often a race to the bottom in terms of comment quality where all the
trolls kill off any meaningful discourse.

A while ago when this very problem for news sites was discussed on an HN
thread, someone posted a pertinent question "Why should the discussion of an
article occur in the same place as the article itself?". The point that person
was making is that all the aggregator sites like HN and Reddit for example,
have done a good job providing a forum for commenting on content posted
elsewhere (like the NYTimes and WaPo). With that in mind, how would one turn
this splintering into manageable communities into a feature. There needs to be
a way where there is automatic segmenting based on quality of commentary.
Maybe like a Major leagues, minor leagues and troll leagues, where there are
two or three simultaneous threads going on. People who've never commented
before and have no karma end up in the minor leagues by default. If they get
upvoted enough their, their comments go to the major leagues. Likewise, if
their comments get downvoted enough it ends up in the troll leagues, where the
trolls can quibble among one another.

The hardest part is going to be establishing a culture that reinforces high
quality content like here on HN. I can't even begin to see how you build
something like that overnight. It takes weeks to months of slow stable growth
with really good people to establish a high quality commentary culture that is
self policing without using their moderation powers for censorship. I have no
earthly idea how you create a feature that promotes the same in a community
where hundreds to thousands of commenters are going to show up on day one.
Maybe you could launch the comment system as a private beta feature where
entry into the private beta is based on posting a really high quality comment
and that good enough comments get inducted into the thread so that current
private beta people can comment. Once you've posted enough such high quality
comments, you get general access to participate. Then, like on HN, you
eventually earn the right to upvote comments and one day, with enough points,
the right to downvote comments.

~~~
snowwrestler
I don't know if you're referring to my comments, but I've made that point here
a few times.

Great comments come from great communities. Building a great online community
is hard; online forums and social media platforms have succeeded far beyond
any content website I can think of.

So: the technology of a commenting system is the least hard part. The
challenge is social: why would people come to the WashingtonPost or NYTimes to
build human relationships? I don't think people relate to newspapers that way.

In contrast, social media and forums are optimized around enabling human
relationships. So I think the wave of the future for content publishers is to
optimize their integration with those existing communities. Otherwise they are
basically trying to compete with them directly--in addition to producing great
content. Good luck with that.

------
danso
> _Through the new platform, the news organizations said in a news release,
> “Readers will be able to submit pictures, links and other media; track
> discussions; and manage their contributions and online identities.” The news
> outlets can then collect and use the reader content “for other forms of
> storytelling and to spark ongoing discussions.”_

So it sounds like they want to create a new social network, or at least their
own form of Discourse/phpBB....why? The impetus for this seems to be the
infamously dreadful comment sections of news sites...so...why not start by
building a better commenting filter system? Even something that can sit atop
of Disqus or any other third-party platform, and quickly sift for comments
that are irrelevant, based on such heuristics as user account's signup time,
the user's overall "karma", the length of comment, maybe even some
configurable NLP factors to determine how relevant the content of the comment
is to the overall article? This wouldn't/shouldn't have to be an auto-flag
system, but merely create a priority queue of messages to be modded...which
would be far more efficient than whatever system most news sites currently
use.

But to build a system that is basically another social network, except for
news sites? That's a lot of faith in your customers to think they'll sign up
for something new that is also cognitively demanding.

------
Buetol
Looks like they want to build a open-source discussion API with identity
management (so people can be anonymous) and good moderation tools. So you can
spin-up a forum, a comment box or even an HN-like community with the same API
(ala Discourse/Disqus).

I don't know if I would bet on their success (see Persona, another great idea
that flopped) but, a least, there are trying something big.

~~~
001sky
_with identity management (so people can be anonymous)_

love this.

It will be amazing when faceless, nameless people are allowed to comment
without vituperative editing/obfuscation on anything the NYT publishes--given
NYT is a brand around telling people what to think.

They are currently the ultimate "don't talk back" old-media platform.

~~~
tormeh
Well, most comments on the net are utter shite. I don't blame them. Hacker
News is different, but you don't have to go further than arstechnica to see
the start of rapidly declining comment quality. A mainstream publication like
NYT? Hats of to them if they manage an open discussion that's not just
trolling, hatred, keyboard warriors and bigotry. I'll believe it when I see
it. Just read the comments to The Economist. You'd think such an
archetypically highbrow publication would have highbrow comments. You'd be
wrong. Only niche websites have good comments.

I guess some spamfilter-like technology could be applied to filter out bad
ones, though. Wikipedia also has an engine to filter out bad edits. Should
have lots in common.

~~~
Crito
I find it interesting to compare "second tier" 4chan boards like /g/
(technology) to the discussion boards of other websites (like arstechnica).
Typically, a place like /g/ compares very well, if not better.

Sites like to blame things like the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory", but I
think most of the blame lays on the site for having poor moderation.

~~~
tormeh
4chan's moderation is mostly just filtering for child porn. /g/ being good is
because it's a niche place. Proper moderation costs proper money, and proper
moderation doesn't scale. Moderation can't be the solution.

~~~
Buetol
But crowd-sourced moderation like reddit/HN scales really well: Let the users
do the hard work of flagging/voting and a small community of moderators to do
orientation-related work.

------
akilism
A little more info from Dan Skiner's blog

[http://dansinker.com/post/89256288060/opennews-building-
new-...](http://dansinker.com/post/89256288060/opennews-building-new-
communities-with-the-new-york)

------
guelo
At first I was wondering why Mozilla would send its developers out on a
consulting gig instead of working on its products. But then I see that this
isn't Mozilla, it's OpenNews, which seems to be some kind of internship
program funded by Knight Foundation and Mozilla.

This article is misleading, almost like the NYTimes got bamboozled into
thinking they were hiring Mozilla.

EDIT: This comment might be confusing now that HN changed the headline, but
the NYT article still says that Mozilla is the one doing the job. If I was
Mozilla I would not be happy.

~~~
knowtheory
No.

Mozilla is actually two legal entities. Mozilla the Corporation and Mozilla
the Foundation (but the mantra is "One Mozilla").

The Open News team is part of Mozilla the Foundation, just the way that the
Open Badges and Open Science teams are.

Mozilla the Corporation is responsible for Firefox and a variety of other
projects.

But as ever, Open News and all of the efforts within the Foundation are very
much part of Mozilla, and there is, obviously, no deception going on.

The Knight Foundation, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are not
stupid enough to be bamboozled in the manner that you appear to be implying.

P.S. if the mods are reading this... OpenNews is developing the tools WITH the
NYT and WaPo, not (just) FOR them as @dansinker notes here:
[https://twitter.com/dansinker/status/479645936168493057](https://twitter.com/dansinker/status/479645936168493057)

~~~
johansch
So Mozilla is shifting (partially) to b2b consulting, then?

~~~
wil421
I dont know if would be considered consulting for NYT or WP. It looks like
they are all in a strategic partnership of some kind. The article stated in 2
years when the project is done it will then be available for download by other
news agencies, this leads me to believe they are "all in it together".

------
dpeck
Discourse seems like it'd be a good candidate and let everyone win
[http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/)

~~~
rplnt
Is there some example of embedded discourse? As a general discussion forum
it's quite bad, but seems ideal for this kind of stuff (as an alternative to
disqus). Additionally, are there providers of discourse, either paid or ad-
powered, so people don't have to take care of it?

~~~
alxndr
> "As a general discussion forum it's quite bad"

I'd be curious to hear what makes it so bad.

~~~
rplnt
It's flat.

~~~
dpeck
Its creators would say thats a feature.

~~~
rplnt
I've read some reasoning about that when they introduced the product... and it
wasn't convincing (something about keeping discussion on topic I believe?). I
really think their reason is ease of design, implementation, maintenance and
scalability.

~~~
dpeck
I dunno, I think they actually believe it, and they do have some experience
from the SO days.

Threading has its place, but creates sub-discussions, something that is
understandable to want to avoid if your vision is for more inclusive
conversation.

That said, in higher traffic forums I see this approach being a nightmare to
keep up with, and will read like a schizophrenic journal.

------
aikah
Good luck Moz.An exemple of what not to do is the Huffpo comment plateform.

It is so horrible they are downgrading to Facebook comments(which are horrible
too but at least one can follow comments without context switching). I wonder
who thought comments in popups were great UX,horrible and stupid.

Keep the think simple and readable.Dont over do realtime features.When I read
something I dont want my eyes to be distracted with "X new comments"
notifications. Dont over nest either. Limiting nesting levels is good for the
discussion flow. And of course,the main job is to make moderation easy.

------
cabbeer
Online commenting is something I'm secretly passionate about.

“The Internet is the first medium in history that has native support for
groups and conversation at the same time. Whereas the phone gave us the one to
one pattern. And television, radio, magazines, books, gave us the one to many
pattern. The Internet gives us the many to many pattern.”

Think of how awesome it would be if we figured out how to refine
communicating/ commenting online. Does anyone know if it's possible to
contribute to this project?

------
jayzalowitz
Having been a product manager at a newspaper working on a comments platform..
Good luck Mozilla

------
a3n
Would be cool if The Times and The Post could figure out some way for their
respective readers to engage each other via this new platform.

------
malandrew
Please please please use Mozilla Persona as the login mechanism. Pretty
please.

~~~
Lennie
They are definitely looking at it and talking to Persona developers.

------
kn0thing
Hopefully they'll take advantage of reddit's open source and use our
commenting system as a model.

~~~
galago
Hopefully they adopt Reddit's pattern of constant tweeking and improvement.
Reddit now has a significant track record of adapting to the harsh comment
environment that is the open internet, and it works surprisingly well.

~~~
dang
I'd be interested in hearing your observations about what works surprisingly
well, if you'd care to share them. Probably best at hn@ycombinator.com, so we
don't pull the thread off topic.

------
wallzz
Enabling comments in newspapers and website that have world wide reputation
and high quality articles will reduce the number of pages visited by a single
users, and will affect the final perception of the reader on the article that
he read. witch in a long term will affect the future articles wrote by
journalist making them targeting "narrow low minded" people that are the
general stereotypes who comments on articles by letting their hidden violence
go out through subjective violent comments.

please don't do that.

~~~
nknighthb
Your use of the future tense is strange. Both newspapers have had comments on
their website for a long time.

~~~
wallzz
Haha , long time in a no english speaking environnement!

------
itry
It will take 2 years to develop this bitch?

My bet: It will flop. Systems that take long to complete usually flop. Reminds
me of Diaspora. The things that take off are usually created in a short time.
Hacker News, Git...

How long did the first version of Facebook take? Wikipedia says "Zuckerberg
wrote a program called Facemash on October 28, 2003". Does that mean it was
coded in one day? Since it was a hot-or-not type site, that could very well
be. About the second version - then called "Facebook" \- Wikipedia says it
took less then a month to code.

My most successful project ever took me one day before I launched it. My
second most successful one weekend. Then years of development went into these.
But only after I saw people use the core functionality.

~~~
Crito
While completed projects almost always take longer (git is still under active
development, Facebook obviously is still paying developers to come in every
week, etc), it is probably a sign of good project planning to be able to get a
functional prototype out the door in under a week. It's the difference between
a project with realistic and obtainable goals and milestones, and a project
with a pie-in-the-sky grand vision but no idea how to get there.

~~~
tormeh
Well, some things are just hard, take time and can't be divided into vertical
slices. That's usually not the case with web technologies, if my impression is
correct, but it certainly is the case in many other disciplines.

~~~
Crito
Sure. There are certainly some things which don't lend themselves to regular
achievable goals. If you were tasked with building a bridge, you'd probably be
hard pressed to put out anything within the first few days, let alone a
prototype. That can happen in software too, but I suspect that situations
where that is the case are in the minority. This isn't fighter jet avionics,
it's a glorified discussion board.

~~~
tormeh
I guess the real problem here is that the NYT and the WP wants it to be
perfect when it's out on their website. They don't want iteration. If my hunch
is correct they'll also use some kind of machine learning to filter out bad
comments.

~~~
philosophus
Should be interesting to see how they define "bad."

------
BorisMelnik
My hope and wish for this project that it will turn into an open-source, non-
profit comment system able to be deployed and plugged into any and all web
apps. Kind of like what Google+ is trying to do (with comments, YouTube) but
not so evil.

------
tmsh
I find it interesting and old-school that people still assume the best way to
create software is via the capital-new-project-investment system instead of
the strengthen-existing systems. The latter approach takes advantage of the
millions of people and the free, evolutionary market (i.e., selecting from
github or the best out there, forking, etc. - like with say KHTML). The former
approach is one or two people thinking they can outperform the filtering,
evolutionary processes in all that (sometimes they can, but it strikes me as
old school in the sense of maybe capitalism is old school in the sense of
single large investments of capital).

------
walterbell
Is this project going to interoperate with W3C web annotation efforts,
[http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/](http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/)
?

How about interoperability with crowdsourced Linked Data for events, people,
places and times? NYU has a project:
[http://pleiades.stoa.org/](http://pleiades.stoa.org/) for ancient history,
but the concepts apply to journalistic fact-checking.

------
jqm
I think it is fantastic that Mozilla is getting funding.

That being said I have some reservations about browser maker in bed with news
organization. While I perceive no immediate danger, I guess I feel platform
should be independent of propaganda.

~~~
asadotzler
Mozilla has never been just a browser maker. We exist to make the Web better
for people, and browsers are one of the products we build to do that. We also
build other products and do other things that make the Web better for the
world. This program, as part of the Mozilla+Knight OpenNews initiative, is a
good example of how we are more than a browser maker.

~~~
jqm
Sure. I use Thunderbird as well and love it and I am aware you are involved
with other projects.

But....no matter what else you do, you are a browser maker. And, I have some
reservations about your involvement with news organizations that are sometimes
used to push governmental (or other) positions. The concerns are not large,
(after all the same type of concerns could exist with Google involvement). Nor
is it necessarily my decision and I'll probably continue to use Firefox up to
the point it welcomes me with "Hello Citizen...for your protection your
surfing habits and posting opinions will be reported to the Ministry of
Attitudinal Correction".

I'm just pointing out a potential conflict and minor concern. Hopefully it
does not grow larger.

~~~
Lennie
What is great about this is better diversity in their funding.

------
akilism
interesting...kind of like a news focused discourse?

------
niix
This is really cool. I'm excited to see how Mozilla takes on a CMS (or
whatever it may be at that point).

------
alexvoda
Any idea where can one check the status, participate in discussions and
contribute to this project?

------
nsxwolf
Better idea - turn off comments.

~~~
r00fus
If the moderation tools aren't strong, I'd agree.

------
a8da6b0c91d
Ha, I bet the main design goal of this system is to figure out how to make
sure comments they don't like aren't right under the article. It's been
typical that a highly upvoted and articulate top comment blows massive holes
in the political agenda of a given article or oped. This is why so many of
these publications have yanked comment sections altogether.

~~~
pjc50
Sometimes this is the case, and sometimes the top comment is going on about
Obamacare or chemtrails or Keynsianism or global warming. Regardless of the
topic of the article.

------
NYCHacker
$3.9m over 2 years? Give me 2 years and I'll build that for $3.8m.

~~~
digitalboss
-3 Karma

Do better. Be useful to this community.

~~~
NYCHacker
My point is that it's a ridiculous sum of money over a long time frame for
something that's not very complicated and of questionable value.

I don't care about internet points.

------
Cthulhu_
So Mozilla's a web development company for hire nowadays?

------
g8oz
It seems to me that Mozilla has over expanded and is in search of a mission. A
useable browser not beholden to the latest UX fads would be a start.

~~~
Kiro
What UX fads?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
They're probably moaning about Firefox 'copying Chrome' or something. Though
they're not copying Chrome; Firefox has its own distinctive style and I much
prefer it to Chrome's.

