Mozilla to develop New York Times' new comment/contribution system

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in internet on (#3P7)
Wow - This is big. The New York Times has selected the folks from Mozilla to develop their new comment and contribution system.
The New York Times and The Washington Post announced on Thursday that they had teamed up with Mozilla to develop a new platform that will allow them to better manage their readers' online comments and contributions. The platform will be supported by a grant of roughly $3.9 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an organization that gives substantial money to promote journalism innovation.

Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser and a nonprofit that works for open standards on the web, will help The Times and The Post build the technology for a platform tailored to news organizations. The platform, which will take approximately two years to complete, will eventually be available for other news organization to download free.
Looks like opportunity in many senses: a chance to rethink online commenting, a chance for Mozilla to make a buck, and a chance to put an axe in the head of "Sign into Facebook to comment" type approaches. Me, I would've recommended they install Pipecode. But hey.

Re: Peter Principle (Score: 2, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-19 19:27 (#26H)

I'll explain simply where the hatred comes from -- they're taking something away. People tend to resent that, whether it was a free lunch or not. Raising the price from "free" is never a popular move.

In general people do NOT hate the Wall Street Journal or scientific periodicals for their paywalls, simply because those paywalls have ALWAYS been there. But the NY Times has created and then progressively tightened its paywall over time, going from a site that was all-access and ad-supported for the general public to a closed site that will allow the public to read 2-5 articles before throwing up obnoxious blocks. It also greatly reduces the Times' value as a news source on the web.

We (the nonsubscribers) have lost access to something that was once available to us, simply because the NYT decided it couldn't make advertising work. It's sad, but not sad enough to make me comply with their demands to pay them...

In any case, it was only a small tangential remark about how neither Mozilla nor NYT are doing the right things, for themselves OR their users.
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