

Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments - fivedogit
http://www.words4chrome.com/what-is-words/

======
RazorCrusade
Cool, I've thought about something like this for ages, but lazy always
prevails. The only thing I don't really agree with is:

"Let’s face it. One major problem with embedded web comments is that everyone
is invited to participate. They’re too open.

The WORDS community, on the other hand, is necessarily comprised of people who
(a) use Chrome and (b) desire a better commenting experience. Why else would
they have installed WORDS?"

That's true for now, but any system that gains any amount of steam will
inevitably pick up trolls, flamers, and generally idiotic people. You can't
stop it from happening. And I don't know that anyone has ever found a good
solution for it. In fact, the whole 'Top Comments' and up/down-voting thing
most third-party comment widgets employ is literally to combat that problem,
in the hopes that garbage falls to the bottom. It obviously doesn't work
perfectly and I do still agree on the whole with your assertion of it being
overall detrimental to good discussion.

Anyway, I'm guess I'm mostly curious if you have plans for the future of
if/when the extension gets more popular and you do start finding discussions
bogged down by trolls/spammers/etc and what ways you'd try and combat such
things when you have 100k+ users or whatever.

~~~
fivedogit
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean
Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start
over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky.

Words benefits from the fact that it's web-Wide. If a user is terrible, they
get silenced _everywhere_.

You're totally right (as was Paul Graham when he spoke about how Hacker News
is evolving) that these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And
that getting too big too fast is definitely a bad thing. Just look at Digg.

So I definitely anticipate badness down the road, but feel the code foundation
is there to deal with it as it comes.

~~~
visarga
> these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And that getting too
> big too fast is definitely a bad thing

I was thinking about it - why not add a view mode displaying only the comments
of the early adopters? On reddit, for example, it would be interesting to see
only comments of users with accounts 5+ years old.

~~~
mplewis
Gawker's network effectively does that by focusing on only Featured Comments
when you scroll down and making you click through to the plebs.

------
hrrld
[http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/images/hoodblink.gif](http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/images/hoodblink.gif)

I miss _why.

~~~
riffraff
for those who don't get this: hoodwink'd[0][1] was this experiment/hack/art
project by _why some years ago, which allowed implementing a parallel unified
commenting system for the web.

It was super cool because you'd go to, say, hackernews or slashdot and if you
were part of the network you'd get access to a different set of comments, but
integrated in the website rather than as an external popup (individual sets of
stylesheets+js had to be written for each website of course).

For example, here you'd get the blinking hood gif, and on click you'd see new
comment threads appearing with red usernames. Integration came through, iirc,
a custom proxy server or a greasemonkey script.

It was super cool.

[0]
[https://github.com/whymirror/hoodwinkd](https://github.com/whymirror/hoodwinkd)
[1]
[http://ecmanaut.blogspot.hu/2006/01/hoodwinkd.html](http://ecmanaut.blogspot.hu/2006/01/hoodwinkd.html)

~~~
hrrld
Nice explanation. (:

------
greggman
Consider removing the downvotes? Keep only the upvotes?

Downvoting IMO feels bad for the poster. They stop feeling like participating.
They might have very good and insightful posts which might not be popular. The
downvotes end up driving them away and all you're left with is an echo chamber
of groupthink

~~~
notduncansmith
As someone who's received a nontrivial amount of downvotes in this community
and others, I can confidently say that I appreciate them as a mechanism.
Almost every downvote that I've received was for a legitimate reason - a few
were just out of disagreement, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

In a way, it does create an echo chamber: when the community consistently
downvotes things that don't conform to X (in HN's case, X usually being "well-
reasoned commentary relevant to the thread"), people tend to shy away from
those things. One could consider the utter lack of response gifs on HN
"groupthink", in the sense that everyone knows the community is unfriendly to
them so they don't post them (even when they're funny).

~~~
underrated
A well-organized hate group can use downvotes to silence reasonable discourse
and trumpet their ideology, so it looks like the popular opinion when it's
nothing of the sort.

You see this happen on Reddit. A hate group called SRS does it. They've even
been leaking onto Hacker News recently, with some of the same lines they
regularly use.

~~~
notduncansmith
Wow, that's really disheartening to hear. I've personally never seen that
around here (thankfully), but now that I'm over my minor obsession with
Dogecoin I don't spend much time on Reddit.

------
okonomiyaki3000
This is very sketchy. When I try to login with Facebook, it shows me chromless
modal window with (what appears to be) a facebook login page. Except that I'm
already currently logged in to facebook so this shouldn't be necessary. Sorry,
I'm not going to hand you that info.

~~~
fiatjaf
The Google login window seems to be safe, but I'm intrigued about the how and
the why.

------
redisair
Is there way to register without Google or Facebook account?

~~~
fivedogit
No. See my dissertation about it here:

[http://www.words4chrome.com/2014/about-words-login-
options-a...](http://www.words4chrome.com/2014/about-words-login-options-and-
privacy/)

~~~
dingaling
That doesn't explain _why_ it doesn't have a native log-in, though ( even
though the preamble says it will ), or support a general protocol such as
OpenID.

~~~
fivedogit
Here you go.

[http://www.words4chrome.com/design-
choices/#nonative](http://www.words4chrome.com/design-choices/#nonative)

------
fivedogit
This is my 4-year, off-and-on passion project. All suggestions and feedback
are appreciated. I'd especially welcome product/feature-based ideas about how
to overcome the enormous cold-start hurdle.

Note: Re-posted with permission from Dan. Last week's post got dinged by a
semi-false-positive algorithmic penalty after only a few minutes.

~~~
e12e
Ok, so if I understand this correctly, in order to be certain I'm not tracked,
I need to host my own back-end server? And the server stores the comments? And
if I'm hosting my own server, I'm likely to end up talking mostly with those
that sign up with "my" version of this? And if I want it to work in eg:
Firefox I'd have to port it? Finally, wrt. tracking -- if the comments are
stored on the server (and that's a REST service or something like it) --
wouldn't it be trivial to log activity at the routing level (eg: ha-
proxy/nginx/other front-facing web server)?

This isn't meant as negative criticism, just trying to figure out if I've
understood how it works correctly? (Note, I appreciate that the source is
available, but obviously I can't know that the source you share is the source
you run on your back-end. So we're back to trust, which is fine in my book).

[edit: re other clients -- the most straightforward thing to do would be to
make an iframe(or js)-based proxy service (a la stumble upon) in order to
enable any browser, I suppose?

I've thought about something similar, and I wonder if an XMPP back-end with
one "room" pr url and the server-side log-extension might work? That should
then make it trivial (unnecessary!) to enable better clients than web-only --
ie use a command line xmpp client to participate in the discussion, rather
than forcing the use of the web browser. I realise many people think using the
web browser is an advantage -- I generally find GUIs built on top of browsers
to be slow and not very efficient. Extensions less so -- but the problem is of
course that you'd have to port to Firefox, Opera, Webkit and IE (along with
mobile variants) -- to achieve parity with systems like disqus etc]

~~~
XorNot
The problem with XMPP rooms is that if you can connect to them with a chat
client, people start using them like a chat client. Which is not necessarily
what you want.

~~~
e12e
A valid point, but it's generally what _I_ want :-) Well, at least as long as
I can create the right kind of echo-chamber of like-minded people... ;-)

Perhaps XMPP+Server Log extension+rate limiting?

The inability to edit messages might be a worse strike against using (a not
too heavily modified) XMPP server, though.

------
akbar501
This reminds me of a product from the 90's where it let you leave post-it
style notes on any website. You could then turn the nodes on/off for any given
site.

Anyway, that was a great product, so I'm glad to see that you're thinking
around similar lines. A meta-commenting system that runs any site is a great
idea.

------
rohan404
The Google login is a bit too disconcerting for my liking. At the very least
showing the url bar would've have been less unsettling.

Only by opening the chrome inspector was I able to verify that it was indeed a
valid login page and not a phising attempt as it appears to be at a cursory
glance.

------
lajlev
@fiveogit: Love the idea. Need to be prettified though. How would I see
comments on mobile devices or non chrome browsers? Can I inject with JS into
my website? That was some of my first thoughts :)

~~~
blitzprog
Exactly my thoughts. I use Chrome at home while I can't get around Firefox at
my workplace - is there any way to at least fetch the comments by different
means?

------
evmar
From a skim of the source, this extension appears to ship every URL you visit
to a third party. (It does so to fetch the comment count on the current URL.)

~~~
fivedogit
The backend code is open source and available here:

[https://github.com/fivedogit/words-
backend](https://github.com/fivedogit/words-backend)

The URL is required to retrieve the proper comment thread for that page, but
is never associated with the current user.

Look for the line "else if (method.equals("getThread"))" in
co.ords.w.Endpoint.java and you can follow the url variable from there.

------
ASneakyFox
I like the idea though I'm on opera.

Edit: oh and it requires google login. No thanks.

~~~
fivedogit
Here is my answer to the Google/Facebook login question:

[http://www.words4chrome.com/2014/about-words-login-
options-a...](http://www.words4chrome.com/2014/about-words-login-options-and-
privacy/)

and

[http://www.words4chrome.com/design-
choices/#nonative](http://www.words4chrome.com/design-choices/#nonative)

Even though there is no privacy downside, people are still afraid of Google
and Facebook logins. I guess there's no way to change that perception.

Just out of curiosity, you and several others have singled out Google, not
Facebook, for criticism re: the login. Why?

------
georgiapeach
Good luck getting traction. The web is littered with the corpses of "comment
on any website" apps. The problem is that there are too many websites and too
many incompatible "comment on any website" standards for any one of them to
emerge as a clear leader.

P.S. You list non-tracking as a differentiating feature, but how do you
silence speech you don't like without tracking users?

~~~
walterbell
W3C is tackling the compatibility issue.

[http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/](http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/)

[https://hypothes.is/blog/peer-review-
annotation/](https://hypothes.is/blog/peer-review-annotation/)

~~~
juretriglav
Listen to Walter, you don't want to be an island of comments in this case.
Following annotation standards will allow this content to be gathered and
reused elsewhere, for things like fact extraction, sentiment analysis, meta-
discussion, +++, it will also allow others to immortalise your content if you
happen to fail.

On the other hand, maybe that's exactly what you don't want. My personal pet
peeve is comments on scientific papers, where openness of this content is not
only desired, it's crucial. Your situation might be different.

