@Ray, it's very possible we'll support inline comments in the future, but I'm not 100% sure right now. I plan for us to try the “separate community” direction at first, where it's more of a social space than classic blog comments. Then I hope that'll reveal what makes the most sense, as far as embedding comments on blogs themselves (“inviting someone to write on your wall”). I imagine it'll definitely be important for sites that are more standalone destinations / need more independence from our little network.

Otherwise, Webmentions are 100% on the roadmap. End goal is that this works with the fediverse, across independent sites, anywhere on the web, etc. You can find some of my general thoughts here: #comments

MVP

I’ve settled on the MVP being a social space for Write.as users — it’s the simplest path to releasing something usable, and it’ll test my primary thesis: that blog comments need better social context (not just the blog itself, but the larger sphere the blog lives within).

You can imagine how that “larger sphere” could eventually encapsulate many blogs and communities across technical / website / server lines. But for now, we’ll prove the concept in a smaller space.

Shared space

This initial version will also test another new concept: that of a shared, malleable space.

In thinking about how to design digital spaces that connect and free people within it, without becoming an addictive cage (à la ad-based social media), I’ve become enamored with the idea of a digital place that can be directly modified by its inhabitants, just like a physical space.

The underlying thought is that a significant amount of emphasis needs to be placed on the collective (i.e. community / platform) over the individual (i.e. my blog / profile) if we’re going to build something that doesn’t make people more lonely.

At best, the hope is that this leads to feelings of a shared experience, like being at a concert or sitting in a busy public square, rather than the lonely, egocentric popularity contests that make up today’s social web. It’s to bring the social context to the forefront, where you’re naturally still a free individual, but you can’t easily ignore the culture around you.

In the tech world, I think we’ve largely failed to acknowledge how directly the tools we build affect the people that use them. Of course, this is plain on world-eating platforms like Facebook, where their scientists experiment on users’ behavior without their consent. But even everyday tools affect what we’re able to create, how we can communicate, and how we feel afterward.

I think it makes sense that we should be able to move and rearrange our digital social spaces, like tables in a restaurant, because in the right environment, humans are dynamic — not predictable drones. What happens if we build an equally dynamic social space with this worldview in mind, rather than the dull, Zuckerborgian view that people are just robots with behavior you can sell to advertisers? I hope we can find that out with Remark.as.

The Web as a social medium

Overall, I don’t think these ideas are entirely new. People have been socializing on the Internet even before the “World Wide Web” existed. As I mentioned on my website poking fun at Facebook’s re-brand, the Web itself is a social medium. We don’t actually need these walled gardens to socialize; they just make it a brainless process (and profit on our data while we’re at it). In more grounded terms, Remark.as is meant to demonstrate exactly this truism: the Web is a social medium.

What we think of “profiles” can take many forms, like blogs or personal sites — we can actually bring those together into a convenient space, without diminishing their original independence.

What we know as “leaving a comment” can be a much more natural, everyday process that isn’t tied to a single platform. We can form small, interesting communities instead of living within these culture-less, mass-appeal mega platforms. We can use the Web as a tool to connect with new people and new ideas from elsewhere in the world, instead of having these meganetworks use us to feed their ad machine.

Practical terms

I’m still aiming to launch Remark.as before the end of the year, per our roadmap and stated plans. As I mentioned on my microblog, I want it to be as accessible as possible, so we’ll have creative and affordable options for getting into the community. But on launch day, it’ll be available to active Write.as Pro users.

Marketing

I’m also having some fun thinking about how I’ll present Remark.as to the world. As a more social tool, its tone is going to be much more playful than how I talk through our other products. I’ll poke a little fun at the current visions for the web’s “future” coming out of Silicon Valley right now. The voice will be as dynamic as the platform. Overall, it’ll be a blast. Follow the @remark_as Twitter account and have a healthy chortle with me.

Otherwise, follow our progress on our blog, and @remark_as@abunchtell.com in the fediverse.

#comments #remarkas #dev

The idea so far

I've talked about the idea for our Remark.as commenting plugin before, on the forum and in a lengthy blog post, where I came to this conclusion:

To make commenting more human, it needs to become conversation rather than commentary. Someone talking at you through a television or lonely comment on a blog isn't natural and human; a conversation is. If you want to talk to an author, you should be able to do that directly — no public side is needed. Then, if your conversation turns out to be of interest or use to more people, you should be able to make it public, where it can stand as a work in itself.

My aim is to address the problems of spam and trolling on personal blogs by gently adding friction, while sending conversation to the most fitting digital channel (which might not be blog comments).

The following is what a minimal viable product (MVP) might look like. This is merely a concept that could change radically. It doesn't represent everything that'll be developed, but only the initial product.

Commenter UX

I read a post. At the end, there's a comment section. It presents two choices: Reply via Email (private) or Publish a Reply (public).

When I choose to Reply via Email, I get a unique email address that will go to the author. I fire up my email client and write a private email to them. That's the “comment”; it doesn't go to their blog. (Technical note: the generated address hides the author's real email address and will allow Remark.as to optionally moderate messages in the future.)

When I choose to Publish a Reply, I'm taken to a new Write.as post. I write my reply and publish it to my blog (any blog on my account). When I publish the post, it pings the original post, so the author is notified that I replied to them. (Technical note: this will use ActivityPub at first, then ideally Webmentions later.) (MVP note: this “Publish a Reply” action will eventually support any blogging platform.)

Author UX

I receive a notification that someone published a reply to my post. I visit my Remark.as inbox where I can find and read the reply on its author's blog. I have a few actions I can take:

• Publish the reply on my original blog post. It'll show up in a list of comments as only: Post Title [linked] and Author Name. Readers will need to click through to read the reply.
• Create a new post in response to this reply. This takes me straight to the editor for a new blog post, and lets me easily quote different parts of the reply. When I publish, it'll go to my blog as a standard post and notify that author.
• Mark as read. This toggles a “read” flag on the reply and does nothing else.
• Delete. This permanently gets the reply out of my inbox.

(MVP note: eventually you'll be able to set the level of moderation: automatically approve all, manual approval, etc.)

Some notes

One assumption this design operates on: the idea that no one has the right to publish whatever they want on your blog [in the form of a comment]. So for example, when replies are eventually published to your blog, they're in minimal form. And the MVP will probably only support manual approval for all comments.

Overall, this is designed for a very narrow use case: public blogging. It assumes a broad audience, and thus introduces friction to discourage bad actors. It won't fit small, trusted communities (it'll be too needlessly tedious). It won't fit authors who want a public conversational format, though it should support private conversations just fine.

Its underlying message is that a standard blog's commenting system shouldn't be for any kind of conversation. There are a gazillion places online to find hectic, noisy yapping via the written word — if you value the kind of conversation you get on reddit, Twitter, chat rooms, email, etc., you should just share your article there. But the off-the-shelf “blog” should be a place of peace and quiet. It should facilitate human connection, yes, but without succumbing to chaos and spam.

Shortcomings

One major issue I can imagine involves what back-and-forth exchanges will look like. I like the current design for how simple and neat the first level of replies will be, but I could imagine things getting messy past that.

I imagine this could be mitigated with longer, more contextual replies. But ultimately, we'd need to see how people end up using the system to know for sure.

What's next

There are many incremental ways to get this started:

• Adding the inReplyTo attribute on our ActivityPub posts
• Storing ActivityPub Articles and Notes that mention a Write.as / WF actor, to later show in the Remark.as inbox UI
• Building the Remark.as email pass-through system

Not sure when this will make sense to start on. We'll see.

For now, let me know your thoughts by replying to this post in the fediverse and I'll continue this conversation @matt@writing.exchange.

#comments #remarkas

When it comes to software that enables the spread of commentary, we need to remember the human side. That's what I'm hoping to do with our upcoming product, Remark.as.

As an individual, sometimes this kind of modern commentary improves our lives. Someone might post about a new band they discovered on their Facebook page, which might lead to you discovering some new music you like. They might say that some local event seems interesting, and might lead to you going and meeting people or otherwise enjoying yourself. Particularly when “sharing” (as our social / surveillance platforms call it) is done with other people in mind, it's largely beneficial. I think this is the original promise of social media — and a good one, at that.

But too much commentary can take a toll on us. Watching too much TV filled only with commentary (especially on “news” channels) can make us start to think the world is a certain way. Enough of this commentary can make us forget reality, and our own experiences. The same goes for consuming too much talk radio, YouTube, social media, or podcasts or blogs.

As social creatures we crave the opinions of others in order to enrich our own lives and open our minds to others' experiences, so that we may make them part of our own. But today we're too often detached from the context around these opinions that help us correctly determine how much weight to give to them. Anyone who consumes media today receives more opinions from people they don't personally know than who they do. Instead of hearing mostly from acquaintances and close friends and family — our “tribe” — we hear from TV and internet personalities we've never met before. I, too, am participating in this machine right now by spelling out my opinions for you, a reader I have probably never met before.

And this “meeting” thing is a pretty important standard for human interaction, because it grounds relationships in the natural world. There is so much we intuitively gain from real-world interactions (even if we can't put it into words) that we lose in the digital environment — this world is truly unnatural to us. We haven't been this detached from facial expressions, vocal tone, intonation, and immediate physical responses from other humans in all of our history. Yes, we've had letters and remote correspondence since the dawn of written language, but we've never had so much interaction on a daily basis where we aren't physically in another person's presence, hearing their voice or seeing their face.

We're starting to feel the downsides of this world only a few decades into the information age, and I personally think it'll only become clearer and elicit stronger resistance from people over time.

What to do

But if we are to enjoy the upsides of our digital, globally-connected world, I think the tools that operate on it need to consider these issues. They should understand that communication online is not a perfect substitute for interaction in the natural world — and indeed the digital realm will always be an inferior medium for this. If we're going to live through the information age, we should also have control over the amount of daily information we have to wade through.

These are my general ideas as I think about creating our first product that enables one-on-one interaction, called Remark.as. Already, Write.as and Snap.as are one-to-many tools that I think work well for the digital medium. They let you publish “books” (or “picture books”) of the digital age.

Remark.as will enable comments on Write.as blogs. But I don't want to clone other commenting systems, say it's “the same, but with privacy,” and call it a day. I have some different ideas in mind that come from questioning this type of product at its core.

For one, by having public comments on a blog post, each post essentially becomes its own blogging platform for anyone to come and give their commentary to the world (not just to the author). Besides the moderation and spam issues that come with this model, from a design perspective, it's redundant — a multi-author blog within a single author's blog post.

To use the book analogy, it's like opening a used book where different people have all written in the margins. There's generally little cohesion between each person's commentary, besides the vague connection to the book itself. Without social context or physical responses, people can ramble on about whatever they want, without any regard for what other readers care about.

Then there are certain intrinsic qualities about current comment systems that ensure they cause problems for both authors and readers. The public mode of blog comments introduces certain incentives for commentators — the comment section is great for spam, because the post has a built-in audience. The same goes for trolls — not only is there an audience, but offended people can quickly and easily respond, enabling more trolling. Spreading misinformation is frictionless, as an article with factual information can easily be filled with conspiracy theories and opinions that muddy the waters of consensus for future readers.

With public comments, a writer must take on new jobs outside of their primary pursuit: curating commentary from and for strangers, and defending against bad actors.

Comment sections are also a great place for unconstructive criticism. Whereas in the natural world we're hesitant to tell people directly that we didn't like their creative work, online we're detached from the unspoken expressions of hurt feelings, disappointment, anger, etc. This lets us say things to other people without the natural social self-regulation we've evolved to have over millennia. We can criticize, attack, and harass people without the repercussions we'd normally receive in the physical world.

Lastly, as an author, you simply might not care about what others have to say. You might be writing only for yourself, and putting it out into the world for the chance that someone else might relate to it. And I think that's okay — actually, it's much more than okay. We shouldn't be forced to hear everyone's opinions on everything we do or create. We shouldn't be forced to respect the opinions of people we don't know (and that don't know us), especially when it comes to the highly personal, creative work we're making. Expecting that of everyone is accepting tyranny for everyone.

A solution

Especially in our age of information overload, as writers we need control over who we listen to, and the ability to have conversations that are as human as possible.

Solving the first issue starts by having commentary off by default. Again, no one is obligated to hear from the peanut gallery. Then for writers who do want to receive commentary, it means making the process of commenting a non-trivial process for the commentator. No one should be able to effortlessly leave a comment that says “you suck” and then move on with their life. Before the internet, readers had to find a mailing address, pull out a piece of paper and pen, write a physical letter, get postage, put the letter in an envelope, put the envelope in a mailbox, and then maybe wait to get a response from an author. We need a similarly taxing digital experience that requires thought and effort for the commentator.

To make commenting more human, it needs to become conversation rather than commentary. Someone talking at you through a television or lonely comment on a blog isn't natural and human; a conversation is. If you want to talk to an author, you should be able to do that directly — no public side is needed. Then, if your conversation turns out to be of interest or use to more people, you should be able to make it public, where it can stand as a work in itself.

This is what I hope to do with Remark.as. Like Write.as, it'll be built on a philosophy instead of the status quo. And if the philosophy is right, hopefully it'll enable a new kind of interaction on the web. We're still in the design stages right now, but I hope to release this new platform this year. If you'd like to give your input and help shape what this platform becomes, I'd love to hear your feedback over on our forum!

#comments #communication #remarkas