From the blog post: "Primer isn’t another large front-end framework, though. It’s rather limited in functionality and isn’t intended to replace something like Bootstrap. It will always be GitHub’s internal toolkit first, designed to help build GitHubby things. That said, we love to share."
That was kinda my take away, too. It's pretty minimalist overall.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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?
And as someone not in the U.S. with an unreliable ISP, t.co just flat-out times out half the time unless you modify your DNS settings to point to OpenDNS or Google or something.
I understand the value of being able to track click-throughs and quantify virality or whatever, but there really needs to be a better way to do this.
I've seen a similar thing with related services (mainly Google - although they appear to have removed it for a 'ping' now). I'm not exactly sure what causes it, but my browser gets stuck on "Waiting for t.co...". Refreshing the page just takes me back to the page I clicked the link on.
The fact that t.co don't have global servers probably doesn't help, in Asia and Australia ping times to t.co are 250ms+. Even in Europe it's over 100ms.
I can confirm this - I've stopped clicking links in the official Twitter client on Android when I'm outside in Australia, Australian mobile Internet is already slow, combined with t.co's huge latency all links just time out.
Even without those conditions, it's a problem. If I have too many tabs open in mobile Chrome, t.co will flat out not work. As soon as I "close all tabs", it starts working again. I have no explanation for this.
Why would your ability to resolve t.co be any different than your ability to resolve the actual host? If anything, it should be much easier to get a reliable DNS response for t.co.
That's nice, but when almost every other civilized country in the world is at less than 0.25 gun-related homicides per 100,000, we have a long, long ways to go.
Why do people care about "gun-related homicides" so much? Homicide is bad regardless of how it's done, I wonder how the US stands in overall homicides versus other countries.
I was just counter-pointing what the article seems to be touting as a huge positive, specifically from the research they cite: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/05/firearms_final_.... The "49% decline" is based on gun-related homicides per 100,000 people. I never intended for that to be taken as "gun homicides are the only homicides that matter". That's silly.
> I never intended for that to be taken as "gun homicides are the only homicides that matter". That's silly.
I didn't interpret things as extremely as that, I just feel that I don't think the distinction really matters (as long as someone got murdered, I'm not sure it matters whether it was by gun).
What also bothers me is that numbers on gun homicides feel to me like pro- or anti-gun propaganda, which is annoying either way.
Interesting: USA is fifth-lowest in the Western Hemisphere. If nearly all of the Americas (and Africa!) are considered high, perhaps the colonial history plays a role? This wouldn't really be a factor you could blame on current political systems.
I've lived in the Philippines for awhile, and the big telcom here, PLDT, has terrible DNS. t.co links are the most obvious point of contention, where they just won't resolve 90% of the time. It's incredibly obnoxious, especially on a mobile device where DNS settings aren't (easily) exposed.
That was kinda my take away, too. It's pretty minimalist overall.