Wow, I’m impressed! This is pretty close to how I imagined it, and it also seems simple enough for everyone to understand.
Essentially, by default you only see content recommended by someone you care about (i.e. in long term you care about the people you follow; and in short term you care about the person whose article you are reading right now). So people cannot insert themselves into debates forcefully.
I’m trying to imagine how Facebook would look like if they switched to this system (using the existing “like” button as the sign of approval). So when you post something on your wall, the comments you “liked” are displayed to all readers; the comments to didn’t like are displayed only to friends of the person who posted them, and you are not allowed to remove any comment.
Sounds reasonable, assuming there is a visible difference between “the comments I didn’t approve because I don’t want to approve them” (e.g. the “hide” button), and “the comments I haven’t approved because I haven’t seen them yet”.
The only possible form of “spamming” here is to annoy someone by posting many replies to their articles, and even then you are only annoying them privately. (There should be a way to block a user, that is “auto-hide” all their replies, so the only possible way of “spamming” would be posting many replies with many sockpuppets. This would take the usual attacker much more time than the attacked person.)
Maybe the disadvantage is that it kills the “linear debate of trivial comments”; the type of discussion where everyone only types a line or two, which best resembles how people chat, but maybe that’s good. People who want to chat without writing an article-length reply might miss this feature.
So I guess my perfect system would be a combination of the Medium way, plus old-style linear discussion below the article, where all replies are invisible until approved by the author (optionally, the author could switch it to “auto-approve” with possibility to delete anything afterwards). Or, to make it more unified, every reply would start as a comment below the article, but you would have the checkbox “also show this reply on my homepage as an article”. All approved replies would be displayed below the article, but replies longer than three lines (that includes full articles) would be shortened until you click to expand them.
Wow, I’m impressed! This is pretty close to how I imagined it, and it also seems simple enough for everyone to understand.
Essentially, by default you only see content recommended by someone you care about (i.e. in long term you care about the people you follow; and in short term you care about the person whose article you are reading right now). So people cannot insert themselves into debates forcefully.
I’m trying to imagine how Facebook would look like if they switched to this system (using the existing “like” button as the sign of approval). So when you post something on your wall, the comments you “liked” are displayed to all readers; the comments to didn’t like are displayed only to friends of the person who posted them, and you are not allowed to remove any comment.
Sounds reasonable, assuming there is a visible difference between “the comments I didn’t approve because I don’t want to approve them” (e.g. the “hide” button), and “the comments I haven’t approved because I haven’t seen them yet”.
The only possible form of “spamming” here is to annoy someone by posting many replies to their articles, and even then you are only annoying them privately. (There should be a way to block a user, that is “auto-hide” all their replies, so the only possible way of “spamming” would be posting many replies with many sockpuppets. This would take the usual attacker much more time than the attacked person.)
Maybe the disadvantage is that it kills the “linear debate of trivial comments”; the type of discussion where everyone only types a line or two, which best resembles how people chat, but maybe that’s good. People who want to chat without writing an article-length reply might miss this feature.
So I guess my perfect system would be a combination of the Medium way, plus old-style linear discussion below the article, where all replies are invisible until approved by the author (optionally, the author could switch it to “auto-approve” with possibility to delete anything afterwards). Or, to make it more unified, every reply would start as a comment below the article, but you would have the checkbox “also show this reply on my homepage as an article”. All approved replies would be displayed below the article, but replies longer than three lines (that includes full articles) would be shortened until you click to expand them.