@powforge/comment-witness

DoI-weighted comment credibility scoring. A comment from one long-tenured human, vouched by three more, outranks one flooded by 500 fresh sock-puppets. Sybil-resistant comment ranking with no central registry.

Same DoI pattern as @powforge/vote (proposals) and @powforge/news-witness (stories), applied to discussion threads. The pattern is now canonical.

Install

npm install @powforge/comment-witness

Quick start

const {
  submitComment,
  vouchComment,
  getCommentCredibility,
  getTopComments,
} = require('@powforge/comment-witness');

const { commentId } = submitComment(
  'This is the alpha take on PowForge.',
  authorPubkey, // 64-char hex Nostr pubkey
  'https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345',
);

vouchComment(commentId, voucherPubkey);

const cred = await getCommentCredibility(commentId);
console.log(cred.weightedScore, cred.doiBreakdown);

const top = await getTopComments(
  'https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345',
  10,
);

Why DoI-weighted?

Reddit ranks by upvotes. HN ranks by upvotes. Twitter ranks by hearts. Every count-based ranking surface is gameable by one operator with 500 fresh accounts. Centralized identity gating (Reddit karma minimums, HN account-age throttles, blue checks) tightens the gate slightly and leaks who you are.

@powforge/comment-witness makes the credibility weight of a comment AND each vouch on it a function of the author's Depth-of-Identity score — accumulated irreversible work across social, access, vouch, and economic dimensions. A 500-account farm contributes ~500 × ~0 weight; one long-tenured human contributes one × ~50.

Threading

submitComment(content, pubkey, topic, parentId?) accepts an optional parentId to thread replies. By default getTopComments ranks only top-level comments; pass { includeReplies: true } to rank the whole tree. getReplies(parentId, { recursive }) walks descendants.

Self-vouching

An author vouching their own comment contributes doiWeight=0 to the weighted score (same rule as @powforge/vote). Raw weight is still surfaced in doiBreakdown.vouches[].weight for inspection.

Custom scoring

Pass { scoreFn } to getCommentCredibility or getTopComments to inject a deterministic mock or a non-default DoI source:

const scoreFn = async (pubkey) => ({ weight: customWeights[pubkey] || 0 });
await getCommentCredibility(commentId, { scoreFn });

The default scoreFn lazy-loads @powforge/identity, so the SDK is only required when you actually use the production scoring path.

License

MIT