It is the newsroom's site.

Then this is evidence that comments should not be on the site. It's not the place of the newsroom to control discussion.

Then don't comment on their site? I mean if you're looking for discussion online, there are thousands of places to go. But this is specifically about the comment sections they provide. It seems entirely reasonable that a room they provide should be subject to their rules, and one violating those rules should be shown the door.

My observation is that Mozilla Talk does nothing to advance the decentralized Web, so why is it a good thing?

Just because something doesn't advance your pet cause doesn't mean it's not good.

The decentralized web does nothing to advance universal health care, so why is it a good thing?

I'm just going to point out that Mozilla and the NSF recently offered $2M for ideas to decentralize the web.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/21/2-million-prize-dec...

They never said that Talk was aimed at moving that goal further along, however. They're trying to use it instead to allow better curation tools to make comments manageable.

It seems that their goal is to help sites move away from 3rd-party comment management services such as Facebook and Disqus. Based on this discussion, I think federated (not site-owned) comments are the way to go long-term. Maybe Talk can eventually be adapted to help with decentralized comment moderation.

The thing about federated comment feeds is that these news outlets will not be incentivized to embed them directly to their website, as they lose control of the content. This problem will damage the exposure that a federated system would receive.

Better than having news outlets embed them, is having browsers support mixing federated comments with the original content. How about it, Mozilla, Brave, and Chromium? Afraid to bite the hand that feeds you?

Okay, I'll give it to you that your idea would be really damn interesting. Still, there would have to be some semblance of moderation, and as to who that responsibility will be placed on is a hard question.

Agreed. I trust the guy who runs uBlock Origin over AdBlock Plus not for any great reason, but because I vaguely remember people on this site recommending it.

I imagine people could delegate moderation responsibility to people and organizations with a strong reputation. Let's say GNU, EFF, and Larry Lessig would all publish moderation data and metadata; as well as your "friends" on various social media sites, friends-of-friends, etc.