19 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2023
    1. Keep Comments Open! by Dan Allosso

      Some thoughts about the ability to turn off public comments on Substack posts, which may diminish the conversation.

  2. Nov 2022
  3. Jun 2022
    1. I regularly check in on comments for this website and will generally respond!
    2. Although Hugo works with a number of commenting systems, I’ve chosen to use the social annotation software Hypothesis as the social layer on this website.

      https://spencergreenhalgh.com/hypothesis/

      Someone else using Hypothes.is as a commenting system in the wild.

  4. Apr 2022
  5. Oct 2021
  6. Mar 2021
    1. Years ago, I helped build a storytelling platform called Hi (a simplification of its original name: Hitotoki, now shuttered and archived) and one of the things I’m most proud of our team having concocted is the commenting system. We had tens of thousands of users and almost no issues with harassment. You could comment on anyone’s story and your having commented would be public — a little avatar at the bottom of the page — but the comment itself would be private. This allowed folks to reap the public validation of engagement (“Whoa! So many comments!”) while simultaneously removing any grandstanding or attacks. It wasn’t quite messaging. It wasn’t quite commenting. It felt very much like a contemporary, lighter take on email, and in being so was a joy to use. Here’s what the bottom of an entry looks like: "Commenting" on Hitotoki

      I like the design and set up for this feature. Perhaps something for the IndieWeb to pick up? In some sense the implementation of Webmention-based likes, bookmarks, and facepiled mentions on my site is just this sort of design.

      The anecdotal evidence that there was little harassment is a positive sign for creating such a thing.

  7. Oct 2020
    1. I just wrote a long, considered, friendly, and I hope helpful comment here but -- sorry, I have to see the irony in this once again -- your system wouldn't let me say anything longer tahn 1,500 characters. If you want more intelligent conversations, you might want to expand past soundbite.

      In 2008, even before Twitter had become a thing at 180 characters, here's a great reason that people should be posting their commentary on their own blogs.

      This example from 2008 is particularly rich as you'll find examples on this page of Derek Powazek and Jeff Jarvis posting comments with links to much richer content and commentary on their own websites.

      We're a decade+ on and we still haven't managed to improve on this problem. In fact, we may have actually made it worse.

      I'd love to see On the Media revisit this idea. (Of course their site doesn't have comments at all anymore either.)

    1. But note well, my friend, that all of these people are speaking to you with intelligence, experience, generosity, and civility. You know what’s missing? Two things: First, the sort of nasty comments your own piece decries. And second: You.

      Important!

    2. Why can't there be more sites with solid commentary like this anymore? Do the existence of Twitter and Facebook mean whe can't have nice things anymore?

    1. Comments are enabled via Hypothes.is

      This may be the first time I've seen someone explicitly use Hypothes.is as the comment system on their personal website.

      I wonder if Matthew actively monitors commentary on his site, and, if so, how he's accomplishing it?

      The method I've used in the past as a quick and dirty method is Jon Udell's facet tool https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?wildcard_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fmatthewlincoln.net%2F*&max=100, though it only indicates just a few comments so far.

      Use cases like this are another good reason why Hypothes.is ought to support the Webmention spec.

    1. This week, host Bob Garfield did a piece ostensibly about the problems newspaper sites have with website comments. Unfortunately it just came out sounding like another old journalist kvetching about how everyone on the net is an idiot. You can listen to the story here.

      Here's the new link to the audio: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/131068-july-25-2008

      Here's the link to a version of the site in August 2008 with the commentary, which makes a fascinating rabbit hole to go down: https://web.archive.org/web/20080907233914/http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2008/07/25/segments/104537

    1. Another good time to slow people down is when they’re about to post something nasty online. Friction-positive design can help here, too. Civil Comments was an app you could apply to your comments section that forced commenters to rate three other comments before posting their own.
    2. Trisha Prabhu was fourteen years old when she was named a Google Science Fair Global Finalist for her ReThink plat-form, which, according to research she presented at the event, reduced teen hate-posting by 93 percent! How did she do it? Very simple. Let’s say you’re on a social media platform using the ReThink technology. You’re about to post a hateful mes-sage. ReThink catches it; when you hit “send,” a screen pops up that says:ReThink has detected that this message may be hurtful to others. Are you sure you want to post this message?93 percent of adolescents who saw that intervention didn’t post.
  8. Feb 2020
    1. The comments on this piece are interesting and illuminating, particularly all these years later.