
Talk: An open-source commenting platform focused on better conversation - ashitlerferad
https://coralproject.net/talk/
======
theon144
The focus on "identifying journalists", muting "annoying" voices, the
"RESPECT" button and pushing specific comments to the top by featuring them
kind of leave a bad taste in my mouth...

And I would be the last to argue that comment sections below news articles are
anything but a cesspool - they're notoriously bad! But I'm just not sure a
control model this heavy handed and lip-servicey is the right approach.

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
Same. Reading "Five Myths of Community Design" on the same site [1] left me
kind of wondering if they really built a service people would want to use.
Personally, I've always thought the "like" model of modern online interaction
is broken, but my idea about fixing it would be to add "Agree" and "Disagree"
buttons, but only display the sum the two as a measure of engagement.

[1] [https://coralproject.net/blog/five-myths-of-community-
design...](https://coralproject.net/blog/five-myths-of-community-design-day-
one/#myth1)

~~~
jdavis703
You need more than agree and disagree to measure engagement, otherwise you're
just measuring polarization. For example you might want to measure several
reactions such as: interesting, funny, angering and sad.

~~~
olah_1
>interesting, funny, angering and sad.

If facebook is any indication, these end up being used mostly ironically. I
can't imagine they give facebook any real indication of emotion on their
platform.

Even the "angry" react (which is mostly an ironic reaction), is missing the
context. Are you angry with the commenter? Are you angry about the something
the commenter is referencing?

~~~
new_guy
>Even the "angry" react (which is mostly an ironic reaction), is missing the
context. Are you angry with the commenter? Are you angry about the something
the commenter is referencing?

Interestingly on my site we have a total of 31 custom reactions people can use
to express their reaction to a piece. The ONLY one people feel the need to
qualify is the dislike one, anytime someone uses it they qualify it with
'disliking the content, not the post'.

There's no obvious reason for it though, the dislike is just one among many
and it looks the same as all the other reactions, but it's the only one to
generate a unique response.

~~~
olah_1
It would be interesting if _all_ reactions could have some system of reacting
to different parts of a post.

Perhaps you can attach a react onto the username instead of the comment? Or
you can attach a react onto a specific sentence of a comment instead of the
entire comment?

------
olah_1
>In our study of gender nonbinary people of color, women of color, and online
commentary, participants talked about having to constantly run a cost-benefit
analysis on participation in any online conversations, based on the likelihood
that they would be attacked, merely for participation.

4chan solved this problem a decade ago. Put your content before your identity
rather than the other way around.

In many spaces today, being a straight white man is far more inflammatory than
being a non-binary person of color. This is especially true in the open-source
community.

The solution is to stop pushing your identity onto people when it's completely
irrelevant. I'm not saying hide who you are. But it's simply not relevant to
the vast majority of discussions.

~~~
gdubs
Did they, though? The only demographics I could find on 4chan are their
advertising stats, and according to that the site is 70% men under 35, mostly
from the US and a handful of European countries. [1]

Doesn’t really sound like a thriving wellspring of diverse opinions.

1: [https://www.4chan.org/advertise](https://www.4chan.org/advertise)

~~~
davesmith1983
You are working under the fallacy that diversity of opinion will be correlated
somehow to arbitrary characteristics such as Race, Gender and Sexuality. This
is patently not true.

~~~
gdubs
Those characteristics aren’t arbitrary; they equate to an entirely different
life experience. That means a more diverse set of viewpoints.

“People who are different from one another in race, gender and other
dimensions bring unique information and experiences [...]”

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-
mak...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-
smarter/)

~~~
davesmith1983
Sorry assumptions about how an individual thinks based on their race, gender
or sexuality is clearly a nonsense. You cannot point at any _individual_ and
know their thoughts. The best you can do is say "This _demographic_ in this
place _tends_ to agree with this statement".

As for the the actual article you linked, the author herself has nice race-
bait titles of work such as "The White standard: Racial bias in leader
categorization", you can't seriously tell me that this is an objective body of
work? There is also the piece she wrote called "Office Holiday Parties
Highlight Racial Dissimilarities and Fail to Promote Team Unity" ...
apparently the office party isn't safe from race based politics. Sorry but
this sets of alarm bells in my head.

The piece itself doesn't cite any evidence for anything it claims.

~~~
olah_1
If anything, communities like 4chan have helped to _dispel_ my preconceived
notions about specific races, genders, etc.

People would be surprised.

------
KajMagnus
Seems the project isn't being so actively developed any longer?

[https://github.com/coralproject/talk/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/coralproject/talk/graphs/contributors)

Why is that? (In the summer of 2018 and onwards, 90%? 95%? of the GitHub
activity abruptly disappeared)

Two other open source blog commenting system that are being actively developed
are Commento [https://commento.io](https://commento.io) and Talkyard
[https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments)
(I'm developing it).

~~~
wyattjoh
We’re doing all the development under the next branch, a big rewrite to
typescript :)

~~~
KajMagnus
Ok :- ) Thanks for the reply. Curious about the new features / benefits /
things you'll add, is there any roadmap? (didn't find in GitHub or the blog)
(If you're doing more things than moving to Typescript. Typescript is great
b.t.w. :- ))

~~~
wyattjoh
We're working on a more public roadmap, but the move to Typescript also
allowed us to switch out Apollo on the client side with Relay as well as some
other pretty significant improvements to the software as a whole (as you said,
TS is pretty great :) )

------
cloud_thrasher
Coral Talk is a Vox Media endeavor.

~~~
Fellshard
That certainly puts a very different angle on how this will be used, and what
use cases it's targeted towards.

From prior experience, Vox outlets are extremely stringent about what they
permit in their comments: specifically, only people who agree or can extend
the arguments of a given article further are preserved; or quibbles about
minor details. No true discussion is allowed outside the article's bubble.

~~~
andrepd
Source? Those are pretty serious accusations.

~~~
ggm
Funny, I don't see these as accusations, I see these as curated engagement.

The upside is there, if you know up-front its the basis of the engagement. If
its applied retrospectively it sucks, for a number of people.

But curation is not always bad. "it depends"

~~~
Noos
There's no "engagement." It just ends up with banal "I agree" posts that add
nothing to the article. And it doesn't add many to them, Polygon's comment
sections tend to be tiny and not worth reading, for example. You get better
news and engagement on reddit.

~~~
Fellshard
They used to be larger, and I believe that restrictive, inconsistent
moderation drove people away, but that's merely a guess of one probable cause.

------
sittingnut
non recognition of subjectivity of terms like "journalist", "annoying", "off
topic", etc., used in description, don't bode well for success of this
project.

~~~
hnarn
The term "journalist" is no more subjective than "author" (literature) or
"programmer". As with many things, the line is normally drawn where people
start to making (wholly or partyly) a living from the activity or not, i.e.
whether they are professionals.

~~~
naasking
> The term "journalist" is no more subjective than "author" (literature) or
> "programmer".

It's more contentious than that. Journalists supposedly deal with "facts", but
there's often considerable disagreement over facts or their interpretation. No
matter your political persuasion, I'm sure there are "journalists" making a
living on this, as per your definition, but who operate on the opposite end of
the political spectrum from you and from whom you'd want very badly to strip
that title of legitimacy.

~~~
adamsea
I would say defining who is and isn’t a journalist can sometimes be
complicated and difficult, but rarely genuinely subjective.

There has been a lot of writing and thinking and discussion around what makes
a journalist, and different styles of journalism, for some time now.

Ultimately the challenge is differing views of reality - disagreement about
truth. I think that’s the root issue.

------
a3n
The bullet list seems to describe Twitter.

I've wondered why most publishers of comments don't just give up and say
"comment on Twitter." Not that I would like that, but still ...

~~~
hanniabu
It would be interesting to have a commenting system powered by Twitter where
each article/post has a Twitter post with the article name and link so others
not finding this post through your website can still comment, and the replies
to this Twitter post can be pulled into you article/post and listed as
comments.

~~~
KajMagnus
> the replies to this Twitter post can be pulled into you article/post and
> listed as comments

I think that wouldn't work because of copyright and Terms of Use. Probably
somewhere in Twitter's ToU there's something that says you cannot copy Twitter
discussions and add to your own website. — If you study Twitter's ToU,
probably the people who post to Twitter, never gave you permission to include
their tweets on your blog.

I like the idea, and would want to do sth simiar, but just linking to tweets,
instead of "downloading" them to the blog. And the blog author could write a
summary of what the Twitter discussion is about (what sub topic related to the
blog post, the Twitter discussion discusses), next to the link.

I'd also like to automatically find and link to discussions at HN and Reddit
and Mastodon (in a commenting system I'm developing, seem my profile)

------
shib71
The copy implies very strongly that comments can be a respected part of the
article as a whole, and by implication - of journalism.

My experience in the past has been that comments are not taken seriously by
the publisher, seemingly just added to tick the "social" checkbox. But to make
a commitment to the dialogue an article can generate seems like a positive
development for journalism.

~~~
rtpg
Though comments are always hard, places like the NY Times have a lot of
content in the comments section. Moderation helps a lot I imagine.

And some of it is kinda trash, but they'd still be better replacements for
Bret Stephen's 100th "Democrats should listen to me, a person who will never
vote for a Dem, on what to do" article

------
brighter2morrow
It took a few clicks to find the license so here it is: Apache v2. Not bad,
I've been looking at open source social network software recently and
unfortunately all the widely used ones are AGPL3. I get the benefits but I
could find anything reasonably of remotely similar quality that was even GPL3.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Do you have particular uses for open source social network software for which
the AGPL would be a problem for your usage?

~~~
brighter2morrow
Yes, I wanted to add automated moderation policies (including but not limited
to word filters) to improve conversation on a platform I was considering
building, but as I understand it all the algorithms to implement the policies
would have to be published with the rest of the site under AGPL

~~~
mikekchar
I'm not trying to criticise your decision (I think it's up to you to choose
the best path that's good for you), but moderation policies seem like the
ideal thing to have under an AGPL license. It would certainly allow users to
know _exactly_ what's going on rather than speculate (sometime vociferously
and accusatively). Obviously the downside is that being able to look at the
source may allow them to game the system (and maybe it's not great for spam
detection). However, even that might be turned into an advantage in that if
gaming the system forces them into better ways of communicating then it's
fine.

From a commercial perspective, I think you would be better off with the AGPL
as well (perhaps dual licensing). I don't think you'd be able to sell such
software on a per-license basis anyway (or, at least you'd not make much money
at it as the audience is pretty limited). I think you'd be much better off
positioning yourself as an expert in the area and selling contract services
for other (perhaps proprietary) systems. Cheaper to hire you than to implement
it themselves while tip-toeing around your implementation which they can't
infringe.

------
Mindwipe
Oh look, an AUP that explicitly discriminates against sex workers and sexual
minorities! I'm shocked.

------
USNetizen
So....like Disqus but open source then?

------
cybersnowflake
TLDR: Looks like stripped down run of the mill commenting system with things
taken out or rearranged mostly with little common thread other than to make it
more difficult to follow or connect, with typical buzzword woke commentary.
Not sure how revolutionary this is when theres already tons of commenting
systems that don't do any of the things theyre afraid of by virtue of being
older, floating around. Pretty subpar even by the standards of HN/Slashdot
vaporware.

