David Cuenca wrote:
Perhaps also relevant:
http://wapo.st/1vXz9nb
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Washington Post, New York Times and Mozilla team up for new Web site
comment system
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I read about this earlier this week. I thought it was a bit strange for
these companies to be seemingly fixed on building their own tool. I got
the impression that this foundation simply had money to burn. It also
wasn't clear to me whether the project would be open source or not, though
given that it includes Mozilla, I'm somewhat hopeful.
Jeff Atwood has been working on <http://www.discourse.org>. I haven't been
following the project too closely, but it feels as though it's trying to
solve at least some of the same problems.
There are also tools such as <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus>, which
due to privacy considerations wouldn't be good for sites such as Wikimedia
wikis. But for older publishers such as the New York Times and the
Washington Post, who already try to track every visitor with a dozen or
more tracking pixels and cookies and whatever else, this wouldn't really
be an issue and it's already a fairly popular and well-known tool.
This isn't to say that this new endeavor is focusing on an easy problem or
a problem that doesn't need additional attention. Global communication is
a very tough nut to crack, without a doubt. But it feels like some of
these efforts aren't working with each other to achieve the same goals,
and that's a bit frustrating and annoying. Putting $3.89 million into
improving an existing tool (or tools) seems like a better use of money
than creating yet another tool, in my opinion.
MZMcBride