One of my habits while browsing the web is to spend time reading the comments section. I am positive majority of the avid web users spend time engaging with the comments section, by either reading or writing comments. Comments are an integral part of many of the most visited UGC websites, like Youtube, Medium, etc. They are highly engaged with because comments are insightful or just plain fun. On pieces of content related to critical issues of the society, comments act as catalyst for a good dialogue, interesting conversation and a tool for audience to raise their opinion. Comments have the power to democratize dialogue and debate. Many times, reading comments further my knowledge on the topic of the content. More importantly, comments make me critique the content, aiding me filter out unsubstantiated claims by the content creator, which without the filter may lead to me believing in false narratives(‘Fake news’, if you will).
For all the reasons mentioned above, I feel comments are a fundamental part of the world wide web experience. But there are two issues IMHO (one major and one not so much) with the current state of comments on the web:
1 — Centralized Moderation: In almost all websites having comments, moderation of comments is controlled by the content creator. Youtube channel owners have the authority to remove any comment they want. Medium allows publishers to hide any comment on their story. Disqus, a very popular comments plugin, also allows web admin(s) to approve or remove comments. These are just a few examples amongst many others. Why is this an issue you may ask, since moderation helps weed out spam comments. True that, but it also gives power to the content creator to filter out critical comments. Comments that rationally point out flaws in the content, or in the narrative they are trying to create through their content. Having the power to remove comments, enables them to control the narrative they are trying to build through their content, including spreading unfactual information, which leads to fake news. In such cases, the comments that usually make it through are just decoration for the content.
Hiding responses I don’t like from my Medium story
I am not implying every content creator does this, but many of them do, and the worst part is we would not even know it unless we write the comment only to find out that it was removed. To make it worse, many comment systems employ shadow banning of comments, wherein the commentator wouldn’t even know their comment has been banned.
It is necessary to remove such control from the hands of a few, because users impacted by this, who have more knowledge on the content, could easily correct any factually incorrect parts, thereby mitigating the spread of a false narrative.
Comment moderation on Youtube. I can completely hide a user’s comments from every video on my channel.
2 — Not every website has an out-of-the-box comment system. There is so much great content hidden around the web on small niche websites. I usually come across such content mostly via link aggregator websites and Twitter. Most of them dont have a comment section. This is probably because not everyone knows or has time to integrate a comments plugin to their website. From the lack of comments, I always leave such websites wanting more. Yes, most link aggregator websites do have comments, but there are so many out there. So naturally comments about a single content are also scattered all around. Also, its not the best user experience to go back and forth between the content and the link aggregator’s comments section. Having a way to comment right there next to the content for every website could help improve this experience.
In short, two issues with the current state of comments on the internet are — moderation in control of the content owner, i.e its centralized; and lack of widespread integration. Now, what if we use blockchain technology to decentralize the former issue. If the comments were on a blockchain/decentralized database, then we get rid of the moderation issue. So when a user visits a website, comments for that URL are pulled in from the blockchain. This also solves the second issue for free, because the website owner don’t need to do anything for enabling users to comment on their website. What I am saying here is — lets create a blockchain that will contain comments for any URL on the internet.
HOW DO WE DO THIS ?
Without going into the technical nitty-gritty, for every URL on the web, map it to comments on the blockchain database. In other words, when a URL is loaded into the web browser, the browser would ask the blockchain to find comments for this particular URL. Similarly, when a user posts a comment while on a URL, the browser will tell the blockchain to store it under this URL. Since, the browser is directly talking to the blockchain, we would bypass the moderating middleman, in this case the website admin/content owner.
The vision, as I see it, is that the browser (in general any client that wants to support these comments) needs to integrate the ability to directly talk to the blockchain. It’s going to be a while before this is adopted by the big-boy-browsers as a native feature, therefore to get the ball rolling, we could create a browser extension(eg. - chrome extension) that accomplishes this functionality. Also, since the browser takes care of handling the comments, there is no need for any website developers to setup a comments system on their website.
CHALLENGES
I would like to point out some challenges with the above approach in solving this problem.
- Multiple URLs for the same web page:
There are scenarios where two different URLs generate the same web page content. Since URL is the key to finding comments on blockchain, for such cases, the user won’t be able to see all the comments related to this content, since they will be scattered under different canonical URLs on the blockchain. Obvisioulsy, that is not an ideal scenario.
One possible solution is that it can be solved at the client(browser) level, wherein clients be smart enough to identify all URLs that lead to the same content. And then pull comments for each of the identified URLs from the blockchain and render as one set of comments on the client.
- Decentralized Moderation :
There needs to be some sort of moderation to filter out spam comments. Now what defines spam is something I believe ‘wisdom of crowds’ can identify well enough. The crowd can flag the comment they think is spam, which is also stored as a property of the comment on the blockchain. The browser(or other clients) can use the flag count as a filter. It can even give the user the control to fine-tune the filter. Similarly, crowds can vote up comments they think are useful. Using vote up count, the browsers can rank relevant comments and show them at the top to the users. The crowd, aka all of us, will curate/moderate the comments on all of internet.
- Incentives :
Humans are goal oriented, and therefore there needs to be incentives for the crowd to curate comments. This is where the blockchain currency comes into play. There will be 3 types of participants in this blockchain setup, who need to be rewarded: the miners, the comment curators, the comment creators, not necessarily in that order. The currency should be distributed among these 3 types. This is very similar to how Steem blockchain works, although I am not convinced that Steem’s currency distribution algorithm is the most optimized algorithm for this case. This is mainly because - first, Steem currency will be shared amongst all different types of apps built on top of it. Second, Steem only rewards till first 7 days of content creation. No rewards after that. This is something I am not convinced is the best way to keep the comments curated for long periods of time. I don’t have a concrete solution right now. The first problem may be solved by SMT, which is expected to launch sometime in 2018.
WHAT NEXT:
I sincerely believe comments make us critically think before believing anything and everything we see on the web. And for those commentators who want to make the masses wise, decentralization of comments will certainly empower them.
Whatever else is withheld, the shepherd never withholds himself
— Frederick Buechner
Next step for me is to implement this. Creating a whole new blockchain is a full time task, which I don’t think I will be able to do in the near future. But, I have been playing around with Steem blockchain lately, and it works great for this use case. I have created a chrome extension that talks to Steem blockchain to store and get comments for any URL you visit on chrome. I am going to release it on chrome web store and open source the codebase of the extension on github as soon as I am done with a MVP version of it. In the mean time, if any of you tech nerds want to sync up with me on the nitty-gritty of it, please feel free to send me a DM on Twitter @karyfy . If this idea sees traction, maybe I will start working on a dedicated blockchain.
Finally, I would love to know your thoughts about this application of blockchain. Let me know in the comments below (I won’t remove any responses). Like I said, ‘wisdom of crowds’ can definitely help enhance this idea more than I can ever alone.
Thanks for reading.