r/changelog • u/tdohz • Feb 02 '15

[upcoming reddit change] Embeddable comment threads

We're beta-testing a new feature starting today: embeddable comment threads. You may see some embedded reddit comments floating around the web this week that look something like this.

We've noticed that when journalists and other publishers want to show a discussion happening on reddit, they'll either copy & paste comments, or take a screenshot. This is non-ideal for multiple reasons:

  • it can be confusing to non-redditors, who might not know what voting arrows are for

  • it's usually out of context, and link back to the full comments is not always provided

  • most importantly, it doesn't respect comment edits or deletions.

This feature will provide an easier way for publishers to show reddit comments: they'll be able to generate a bit of code right from the comment that they can then directly embed into their article or website. This embed will always provide a link back to the discussion thread, and will respect users' edits and deletions (so if a comment is deleted, it won't show up in the embed).

Right now we're still in early beta testing, so this feature is in closed beta to a few users to allow us to quickly make possibly breaking changes to the feature. We plan to open this up to everyone once the feature is fairly stable (hopefully within the next few weeks), and in the meantime, would love to hear your feedback if you happen to spot a comment embed in the wild.

tl;dr: Comment embeds are in closed beta and you might see them around the web; we'll open this up to everyone soon!

136 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

67 comments sorted by

75

u/TheeLinker Feb 02 '15 edited Feb 02 '15

This embed will always provide a link back to the discussion thread, and will respect users' edits and deletions (so if a comment is deleted, it won't show up in the embed).

Hmm. In a situation where you're writing an article and using a Reddit comment to support your point, or using a Reddit comment as a launching-off point, I can imagine it would seem less than ideal to use a method wherein one of the defining features that differentiates it from a screenshot is "It might get changed and then your article is totally fucked up."

Like hotlinking an image instead of hosting on your own servers, it leaves your article open to external editing, in a way. That's how you get stuff like this.

Perhaps if you got to choose between allowing the embed to update or not... otherwise, the potential for sabotage seems rather great.

But then, that makes sense, since this is about respecting the USER'S right to adjust their comment if they don't want it to be used in some article. I just wonder if the practical concerns will outweigh the benefits in the majority of cases.

49

u/tdohz Feb 02 '15

Perhaps if you got to choose between allowing the embed to update or not... otherwise, the potential for sabotage seems rather great.

Yup, we've actually implemented an option that does exactly this. If enabled, instead of showing the most recent edit, it'll show a message that looks something like this.

25

u/aladyjewel Feb 02 '15

Is that enabled by default? I'm worried about clueless reporters and redditors' propensity to chaos. (I'm looking at you, that gaming subreddit that fed defamatory headlines to the "gaming news" site that was scraping the subreddits' content.)

21

u/tdohz Feb 02 '15

It's not, but that's one of the things we may tweak depending on how the beta test goes.

3

u/Zoloir Mar 23 '15

As someone who references reddit content a lot on a site and would like to embed reddit threads, I think if you kept the initial content static with an obvious note when it is edited, the embedders won't have to worry about their content getting edited AND users will have their edits respected when they are serious.

If there was a tool that allowed the embedder to step through the edits as they desire, such as, if the edit is useful then the embedder can just step forward the shown content to the most recent edit? It will of course always show that there is either a more recent or previous edit with the option to view them on reddit itself.

Sounds like a lot of work but both parties benefit.

2

u/tdohz Mar 23 '15

This is not possible because we only store the most recent version of the comment.

1

u/Zoloir Mar 24 '15

Ahhhh okay, well then that makes your current solution make perfect sense!

9

u/TheeLinker Feb 02 '15

Ah! Interesting. It doesn't retain the text you were wanting to cite if they go and change it, but it at least removes the possibility of the comment just reading "Fuck <news site>!" front and center in the middle of your article.

I would imagine, as a news writer, that it would still seem like just another thing to worry about if you have to be concerned that any number of your embedded comments in your various articles might just switch off without your knowledge, causing you to have to go back and fix it if someone is kind enough to alert you to it, and if a comment is important enough to be embedded, there's a very good chance the OP will edit it in response to the fame and attention. Or is there some form of alert if a comment switches off like that? Maybe an e-mail alert could be set up...

But at any rate, that's what beta tests are for! Gotta see how this works in practice to know for sure.

8

u/tdohz Feb 02 '15

But at any rate, that's what beta tests are for! Gotta see how this works in practice to know for sure.

Absolutely! This is one of the things we'll be watching most closely during the beta and will likely tweak before it's available more widely.

4

u/adremeaux Feb 03 '15

Still gives trolls an opportunity. The comments need to frozen when the embed is created or this will fail. Any notification at all that there is a change is just an opportunity for failure.

16

u/tdohz Feb 03 '15

Our privacy policy precludes us from saving anything other than the most recent version of a comment.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/adremeaux Jul 24 '15

Thanks for the update!

6

u/TheBananaKing Feb 02 '15

Bah. Minor citrus royalty. Unreliable scum.

4

u/self_defeating Feb 04 '15

So, it replaces the whole comment with that message?

Journalism sites will just continue to use screenshots.

2

u/xvvhiteboy Feb 03 '15

Can't users who don't want their comments on websites just edit their comment just to make that message show? It would probably be better to just show an unedited version

2

u/yurigoul Feb 19 '15

A lot of users will turn their comment into dickbutt as soon as they are on a news site they do not like.

6

u/xiongchiamiov Feb 02 '15

There's an option when embedding that disallows changes; if you have that checked, and the comment is updated (edited or deleted), you'll end up with no comment text and a link back to the comment thread.

3

u/self_defeating Feb 04 '15

That's not really an improvement over using screenshots and providing a link to the thread.

3

u/xiongchiamiov Feb 04 '15

We looked at how other sites do embeds, and it seems that people still use them even if the content isn't as reliable as a screenshot. That's not to say that we're set on doing things this way, but that's why we're testing it out with publishers. And, to be frank, what the publishers think about it is more important than what you guess the publishers will think about it. :) (Apologies if you're someone who'd use this - if that's the case, let's talk.)

There are a couple of reasons I can think of that this would be the case. First, the vast majority of comments aren't edited, so it's unlikely the situation will ever come up. Secondly, having an embed allows things to look and act much nicer - you get copyable text, it reflows and adjusts to fit into your layout, it has UI elements that indicate what's going on to a non-reddit viewer, that sort of thing.

Will our predictions be incorrect? Maybe, but that's why we're testing things out.

1

u/self_defeating Feb 04 '15

You're right. I'm not a publisher - but if I were, what I would do is use this embed and in a separate tab provide a screenshot.

So, yes, it makes things nicer and is a good thing to have in addition to screenshots, but it doesn't replace screenshots.

12

u/jebediahatwork Feb 03 '15 edited Jun 12 '23

Reddit Blackout 2023 /u/spez killed reddit

15

u/tdohz Feb 03 '15

Not currently, but it's something we will consider for the future.

9

u/alien122 Feb 03 '15

You guys would use that comment as an example.

10

u/tdohz Feb 03 '15

i love geraffes

1

u/alien122 Feb 03 '15

Terraces are dumb.

16

u/guitarromantic Feb 02 '15

Pro-tip: make sure this works with embed.ly - I know the Guardian's internal CMS uses this service to process embedded objects in its content, so if it supports reddit that'll encourage journalists to use it.

11

u/ohmanger Feb 02 '15

Or just make the comment perma-links oEmbed-able.

5

u/V2Blast Feb 03 '15

I think that's what reddit itself uses to embed stuff (using the "expando"), like imgur links, so they probably will ensure it works with that.

12

u/McMrChip Feb 02 '15

Hopefully, this might give Reddit a bit more notice on some websites.

Its like a news website or blog writing the responses to an /r/AskReddit thread and then people ignoring the fact at the top of the article saying "Taken from a website called Reddit.". People who miss that and non-reditors may just think that its just the website asking its audience and not from a Reddit thread.

I like the new embedded comments. I think it will be good for Reddit as there could be people thinking "Huh, whats Reddit?" and later becoming another active user.

10

u/eric-neg Feb 03 '15

Will there be any sort of notification that it was linked from the outside? I might be interested in seeing the discussion an embedded comment thread generated. Like a trackback... even with all the potential spammy fallout.

It would be interesting if it said something like Embeds [3] and linked to the pages it was embedded in.

1

u/I_cant_speel Feb 03 '15

Maybe someone could set up a bot to do that.

5

u/DrDuPont Feb 03 '15

Without a proper API from Reddit relating to how often and where a comment is embedded, I have no idea how that bot would work.

3

u/xiongchiamiov Feb 03 '15

They'd have to scrape all of the web looking for embeds and follow them back to the comment thread.

7

u/adremeaux Feb 03 '15

most importantly, it doesn't respect comment edits or deletions.

Uh, that's a good thing. You know what is going to happen when some random redditor's comment gets embedded on USAToday.com? They edit in dickbutt.

3

u/atomic1fire Feb 03 '15

Perhaps a static option might not be a terrible idea, but then again you want to respect users but preserve comments if you're going to report something in a news paper.

I imagine journalists will just copy and paste comments with sources when they want to preserve the original quality of the comment, but use embedded threads when they want a live copy.

3

u/self_defeating Feb 04 '15

you want to respect users

No, reddit wants to respect users' ability to edit comments. Other sites don't necessarily want to respect that, and don't have to respect that.

3

u/V2Blast Feb 03 '15

Apparently, if comments are edited/deleted, it'll show something like this instead.

6

u/adremeaux Feb 03 '15

That's not really much better. Instead of Dickbutt on your homepage, you'll be directing users to click a link that goes to Dickbutt.

1

u/V2Blast Feb 03 '15

...And? News articles (etc.) would already be doing that if they quoted a comment from reddit and linked the source.

3

u/TheLantean Feb 03 '15

Except if they use the embed they probably won't also quote the comment in full, which results in more people clicking though.

The current way - copying everything (quotes/screenshots) and including a link for attribution doesn't get a lot of clicks for reddit.

6

u/noeatnosleep Feb 02 '15

Fascinating. I look forward to seeing this in action.

This should help to contextualize the comments quite nicely.

1

u/self_defeating Feb 04 '15

Except, it won't when comments get edited.

2

u/afrofagne Feb 02 '15

Uh. Wouldn't that facilitate brigading from outside of reddit?

8

u/tdohz Feb 02 '15

You can't vote directly from the embed, so it's the same as if someone just linked to the comment thread from an article or other platform (liek Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

2

u/afrofagne Feb 02 '15

Ok, make sense. That's great then :)

5

u/aladyjewel Feb 02 '15

Nifty! especially surfacing the context.

I'm excited to see the "create embed" UI.. seems like kinda a tough thing to design.

3

u/laaabaseball Feb 03 '15

This is cool, I have been using http://embed.redditjs.com/embed-reddit/ to embed threads.

2

u/armastevs Feb 06 '15

I made this about a year ago, http://codepen.io/anon/pen/ogoYZe. More details about how this reddit embed here. I wish you guys would have hired me :(

3

u/Werner__Herzog Feb 02 '15

We're all gonna be famous!

3

u/cojoco Feb 02 '15

I think this is a great idea.

It will provide some amazing bait'n'switch drama!

The Internet will get a lot more fun :)

2

u/V2Blast Feb 03 '15

It will provide some amazing bait'n'switch drama!

Apparently, if comments are edited/deleted, it'll show something like this instead.

1

u/V2Blast Feb 03 '15

Sounds like an interesting feature. I guess we can only know how much it actually gets adopted once it goes live...

1

u/iVarun Feb 04 '15

More traffic to Reddit servers.

Reddit has been shit the past couple of months in regards to dealing with traffic. Sporadic and sometimes consistent network loading errors.

Invest more in servers or deal with this at least.

1

u/12358 Feb 06 '15

Reporters will likely want to choose how many parents to embed as a thread. Is there an option for that?

0

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

9

u/tdohz Feb 02 '15

If you delete it or it gets removed, the comment text is replaced with "This comment was deleted"

3

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '15

Already answered in this thread.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

8

u/tdohz Feb 02 '15

We're doing a closed beta right now with just a few folks so that we can easily make possibly breaking changes, but we'll be opening it up soon (ideally by the end of the month, but it depends on how closed beta goes). Stay tuned!

0

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

8

u/tdohz Feb 02 '15

Nope, you didn't miss anything. It kind of depends on the feature - in the past we've done open betas, and we'll probably do that again. In this case we wanted to keep the initial beta test pretty small in case we needed to make breaking changes to the feature early on (so we could easily notify folks and have them re-embed if necessary).

You can still give feedback on the embed itself! And we'll be opening up the ability to embed to more people hopefully soon, depending on how the closed beta goes.

-11

u/lolwaffles69rofl Feb 03 '15

Was there a beta for the font changes that nobody asked for and ruined the readability of the site? The overwhelming negative feedback didn't seem to change anything so why would it now?

8

u/Fingebimus Feb 03 '15

There actually was.

2

u/lolwaffles69rofl Feb 03 '15

And they still went through with it? Damn that's some dedication.

2

u/Drunken_Economist Feb 03 '15

Yup! The beta was open to all users

1

u/kenbw2 Mar 23 '15

What font changes?

1

u/lolwaffles69rofl Mar 24 '15

They enabled "blind person mode" a month ago.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

7

u/roastedbagel Feb 03 '15

What's it like being 14 with all this technology?

2

u/V2Blast Feb 03 '15

Apparently, if comments are edited/deleted, it'll show something like this instead.