From the blog post: "Primer isn’t another large front-end framework, though. It’s rather limited in functionality and isn’t intended to replace something like Bootstrap. It will always be GitHub’s internal toolkit first, designed to help build GitHubby things. That said, we love to share."
That was kinda my take away, too. It's pretty minimalist overall.
Cool, I've thought about something like this for ages, but lazy always prevails. The only thing I don't really agree with is:
"Let’s face it. One major problem with embedded web comments is that everyone is invited to participate. They’re too open.
The WORDS community, on the other hand, is necessarily comprised of people who (a) use Chrome and (b) desire a better commenting experience. Why else would they have installed WORDS?"
That's true for now, but any system that gains any amount of steam will inevitably pick up trolls, flamers, and generally idiotic people. You can't stop it from happening. And I don't know that anyone has ever found a good solution for it. In fact, the whole 'Top Comments' and up/down-voting thing most third-party comment widgets employ is literally to combat that problem, in the hopes that garbage falls to the bottom. It obviously doesn't work perfectly and I do still agree on the whole with your assertion of it being overall detrimental to good discussion.
Anyway, I'm guess I'm mostly curious if you have plans for the future of if/when the extension gets more popular and you do start finding discussions bogged down by trolls/spammers/etc and what ways you'd try and combat such things when you have 100k+ users or whatever.
And as someone not in the U.S. with an unreliable ISP, t.co just flat-out times out half the time unless you modify your DNS settings to point to OpenDNS or Google or something.
I understand the value of being able to track click-throughs and quantify virality or whatever, but there really needs to be a better way to do this.
I was just counter-pointing what the article seems to be touting as a huge positive, specifically from the research they cite: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/05/firearms_final_.... The "49% decline" is based on gun-related homicides per 100,000 people. I never intended for that to be taken as "gun homicides are the only homicides that matter". That's silly.
That's nice, but when almost every other civilized country in the world is at less than 0.25 gun-related homicides per 100,000, we have a long, long ways to go.
I've lived in the Philippines for awhile, and the big telcom here, PLDT, has terrible DNS. t.co links are the most obvious point of contention, where they just won't resolve 90% of the time. It's incredibly obnoxious, especially on a mobile device where DNS settings aren't (easily) exposed.
That was kinda my take away, too. It's pretty minimalist overall.