> Through the new platform, the news organizations said in a news release, “Readers will be able to submit pictures, links and other media; track discussions; and manage their contributions and online identities.” The news outlets can then collect and use the reader content “for other forms of storytelling and to spark ongoing discussions.”
So it sounds like they want to create a new social network, or at least their own form of Discourse/phpBB....why? The impetus for this seems to be the infamously dreadful comment sections of news sites...so...why not start by building a better commenting filter system? Even something that can sit atop of Disqus or any other third-party platform, and quickly sift for comments that are irrelevant, based on such heuristics as user account's signup time, the user's overall "karma", the length of comment, maybe even some configurable NLP factors to determine how relevant the content of the comment is to the overall article? This wouldn't/shouldn't have to be an auto-flag system, but merely create a priority queue of messages to be modded...which would be far more efficient than whatever system most news sites currently use.
But to build a system that is basically another social network, except for news sites? That's a lot of faith in your customers to think they'll sign up for something new that is also cognitively demanding.
So it sounds like they want to create a new social network, or at least their own form of Discourse/phpBB....why? The impetus for this seems to be the infamously dreadful comment sections of news sites...so...why not start by building a better commenting filter system? Even something that can sit atop of Disqus or any other third-party platform, and quickly sift for comments that are irrelevant, based on such heuristics as user account's signup time, the user's overall "karma", the length of comment, maybe even some configurable NLP factors to determine how relevant the content of the comment is to the overall article? This wouldn't/shouldn't have to be an auto-flag system, but merely create a priority queue of messages to be modded...which would be far more efficient than whatever system most news sites currently use.
But to build a system that is basically another social network, except for news sites? That's a lot of faith in your customers to think they'll sign up for something new that is also cognitively demanding.