I’ve heard from several people that they’d like the option to have comments or otherwise interact with people around their blogs, so I’m planning to build a product called Remark.as just for this. I’d love to get your input!
Overview
Commenting system you can easily embed on your Write.as blog or any other website, similar to Disqus.
Features
(Tentative)
Anonymous or pseudonymous commenting
Export your comments, as site owner and/or comment author
Import comments from other platforms
Spam prevention / filter
Questions
What would you like to see in a commenting system?
What problems / pains have you run into with comments before?
What good experiences have you had leaving comments on the web?
Would you like comments on your blog? On anonymous posts?
As far as comments, if I used them, I would want to be able to delete and block people…as to control the trolls. But thats the main stuff I would like for.
There was a short-lived social media platform called Imzy that did anonymous comments in an interesting way:
Instead of all anonymous commenters being lumped under one “Anonymous” name, everyone who commented anonymously was given their own randomly generated anonymous name for that post, and that post alone. For example, you would be AnonymousRibbonCowBerry when commenting on one post’s thread. When you moved to a different post, your randomly generated anon name would change.
So even though you were still anonymous, people would know that the messages on one particular post were coming from the same person. They just didn’t know who that person was in the bigger scope of the site, and they couldn’t connect who you were across different posts.
This system also made it possible to ban certain abusive anonymous commenters without banning anons as a whole, which is always a plus.
I’m not sure how well this setup would fit into your general plans for the platform, both technically and philosophy-wise. Among other things, it requires sign-up and some way of keeping track of a user, so that’s already more difficult than simply letting people plug in a name and comment. But it’s a nice middle ground between traceless anonymity (where anyone can post anonymously without any way of tracing them) and non-anonymity. If it is possible, I would be interested in seeing both traceless anonymity and this sort of middle-ground anonymity as options, since I can see both privacy and moderation being concerns for different groups.
On Dreamwidth, there is an option to create an “Access List.” This Access List is used for all sorts of privacy-based things, such as being a whitelist of who can view certain posts you make. One thing it’s also used for is commenting. You can set it so that only people on your Access List can comment at all, or that all comments by other people have to be manually approved by you before they’re shown while people on your Access List are approved automatically.
I’ve seen the latter used far more than the former, but both have been used by people writing about sensitive topics that attract harassers. Sometimes it’s easier to manually approve everything than lose sleep worrying that people had a field day while you were gone.
Really great feedback – I didn’t know about either of these services (or at least how they worked) before. The name assignment for anonymous users makes a lot of sense, both for having better conversations and doing moderation.
Going off this idea, I’d imagine sort of progressive identities, where you can generate a new one any time (but no more than 1 per post) and switch between them like you can on Write.as. This way you could stay anonymous between posts, or carry a name across certain posts if you want – whether that’s 2 different ones or for all the commenting you do.
The access list is another great idea. The options could be something like:
Open comments
Comments require permission (you’re able to request)
Comments only by invite (you can’t request access)
I do think moderation is going to be important for a lot of people, especially since many are already writing on a privacy-focused writing platform. I’d like to have support for varying levels of anonymity too, but I’m thinking the best route might be to give the site owner that ultimate control, and the service just provides a range of options.
I’m thinking like including ActivityPub/Federation support would be a nice feature, as suggested in this this tweet. I could imagine people commenting on a website and responding to other commenters in mastodon on the same comment box. That’d be cool.
Yep, I’m thinking the same thing. Having replies to federated Write.as blogs appear here would fit with our design philosophy, and enabling anyone to embed an AP-enabled commenting system would be really useful.
No actual progress on this yet, besides gathering ideas.
What would speed up development is if we see more demand for this, or if people were willing to pay for it, or contribute to a small crowdfunding campaign to get it launched.
I completely agree with what @alfie has to say here. Most of the websites I visit have commenting system but very few people use it and most of them flock to Facebook or Twitter or other social media sites to provide feedback. The better thing to do would be to have a link at the end of the blog post connecting to the shared post on any social media site so that people can go there and give feedback. Often times, comment systems are only used by trolls where they force writers into having a biased preference. I don’t think remark.as is needed at all.
Personally think it would be awesome if something could show comments from the fediverse embedded. So conversation happens in fediverse but can still be displayed.
I’d love to see actual ActivityPub enabled comments! I would also spend some money on a crowd funding. I’m not sure about a regular payment for a service though.
@matt Here’s an open source embedded comments system, similar to Disqus (but no ads, no tracking).
Maybe could be useful, for Write.as? (I’m developing it. Maybe we could cooperate somehow, if I slowly slowly implement features you need)
Among the features you’ve listed above: Guest / anonymous commenting, & spam prevention, implemented. Import & export is on the roadmap.
About the questions, “What would you like to see”: I have been thinking about integrating the blog comments with the fediverse, so that e.g. Mastodon replies or Webmentions, appear as comments, together with the other directly-posted comments, and can be upvoted and replied to. Sounds like what @geekgonecrazy has in mind?
Tools that promote real conversation. What is that? No idea, but I know that FB and Twitter et al promote disingenuious conversation by the way they trigger addictive behavior my stimulating the amigdula (I think?). So a good way to start/learn is to do something different than they do. Sardonic grin.
I don’t have much to offer on the technical side. My singular rule for any forum I moderate is people need to strive to uphold everyone’s human dignity with their comments, so a simple way to remind them occationally when they post would be helpful. Thanks! I’ve been puzzling how to have interactive capacity that people use, and comments get used more than email, but as someone said in the thread, people are addicted to flockig to FB and Twitter. Sigh. I really do not want to promote that.