What would a sociable comment system look like?

Natalie

nex-3.com 19 Oct 2024

A Sociable Web

The process of building out this site has inevitably involved design choices about how to engage with various technologies and other people's web presences. It's a truism that you can't solve social problems with technology, but social media has made it just as clear that technology does shape the social dynamics that emerge in the spaces it mediates. This drives me to wonder: as more of my friends and friends-of-friends move to individual websites and blogs, what social dynamics does this give rise to? And what different technical designs could improve those dynamics?

I think it’s most interesting to approach this question from the social direction rather than the technological. Our first priority should be a set of social goals for interacting on the internet, and …

Natalie’s vision of a sociable web is exactly what I’m hoping for in the post-Cohost blog era. Her post got me thinking about what a comments system for an indie, blog-based web could look like.

• Obviously the main attraction is leaving comments, which should be tree-style.
• I also think it would be nice to have a Cohost-style like button^[1].
• Posters should have a display name and a link to their homepage(s).
• For abuse prevention reasons I think I’d want “all comments go into an approve queue” as the default or only behavior. Probably there’s some more anti-spam magic you’d want; that’s a losing game if you need to beat every spammer but I bet you can beat something like 80% of the spam with 20% of the effort.
• I’d also like to have the ability to mute/block a poster across all sites in the comment network. The more sites that use the same comment network, the more useful mute/block becomes.
• On the same token, cross-site signin would be nice. That way it’s pretty frictionless to like a post or leave a short comment, even on a blog you don’t frequent.

There are three main reasons I’m not planning on building this, even though I want it to exist:

1. You probably want a comment system to send email, so you know if your comment has been approved or you have replies. Sending email at any scale beyond personal seems like a bit of a headache.
2. I don’t want to be responsible for the social aspects. Technically I’m happy to spin up a server and provide a little support, but I don’t want to be making moderation decisions like “should we ban this user?” (outside the scope of my own blog).
3. I don’t want to market it. If I want the 15th standard to take off, I’d have to convince a lot of people to use it, and that seems like work I wouldn’t have fun doing.