[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.

[fivedogit]

I thought about this idea -- only displaying comments from users with high ratings or whatever -- but decided it would break conversations. Users would see comments, but not some responses or worse, some responses without the original comment, etc.

[frankacter]

>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.

How is this different than any other 3rd party commenting system like Disqus or Facebook?

[fivedogit]

So. Many. Reasons. Just give it a try and you'll see.

[visarga]

> necessarily comprised of people who (a) use Chrome and (b) desire a better commenting experience

That also means that it will be a ghost town, and probably never bootstrap to a decent user base with interesting discussions.

[fiatjaf]

I've thought about something like this for ages also. But lazy always prevails.

Now, do you know something about a Google product from some years ago that did something like this, but was discontinued?

[fivedogit]

Here's my explanation of Google SideWiki... near the bottom.

http://www.words4chrome.com/eli5/

Q: “What happened to it?” A: “It had several problems. (1) sidebars are the worst (2) web site owners hated it, presenting a threat to Google’s core business, and (3) because Chrome had negligible market share in 2009, it had to function in all browsers at once, harming UX. Hence, the sidebar. And the name."

Also, it was open to everyone. Words is designed to select for -- um -- not everyone. Internet explorer users, for instance.

[fiatjaf]

Precisely. I've been trying to remember that name for months.

[walterbell]

Did you mean Google Wave? It was open-sourced as Apache Wave.

[michaelmior]

I don't recall Google Wave having website commenting features.

[walterbell]

It was a federated protocol for real-time editing, one could layer various workflows (group editing, email, IM, wikis, comments, etc) on top of that protocol.