Respectify
A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better
Details
- External ID
- 47151842
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Respectify
- Website domain
- respectify.org
- Launched
- Feb. 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 224
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9588948787061995
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
My partner, Nick Hodges, and I, David Millington, have been on the Internet for a very long time -- since the Usenet days. We’ve seen it all, and have long been frustrated by bad comments, horrible people, and discouraging discussions. We've also been around places where the discussion is wonderful and productive. How to get more of the latter and less of the former?Current moderation tools just seem to focus on deletion and banning. Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and teach people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better?A year ago we started building Respectify to help foster healthy communication. Instead of just deleting bad-faith comments, we suggest better, good-faith ways to say what folks are trying to say. We help people avoid: * Logical fallacies (false dichotomy, strawmen, etc.) * Tone issues (how others will read the comment) * Relevance to the actual page/post topic * Low-effort posts * Dog whistles and coded languageThe commenter gets an explanation of what's wrong and a chance to edit and resubmit. It's moderation + education in one step. We want, too, to automate the entire process so the site owner can focus on content and not worry about moderation at all. And over time, comment by comment, quietly coach better thinking.Our main website has an interactive demo: https://respectify.ai. As the demo shows, the system is completely tunable and adjustable, from "most anything goes" to "You need to be college debate level to get by me".We hope the result is better discussions and a better Internet. Not too much to ask, eh?We love the kind of feedback this group is famous for and hope you will supply some!
Enrichment
- Theme
- network bypass and Discord utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- comment moderation that improves discourse
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The core product is an API wrapper and moderation dashboard that evaluates user comments against standard LLM prompts or moderation models to return toxicity and reasoning scores.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Copilot email coach, Other LLM-based moderation tools
Concerns raised: Tool inherits bias from authors and underlying LLM training data, Disproportionately flags legitimate political/factual statements as negative, Tuned for American culture, not culturally neutral, Lacks transparency in scoring methodology, Could enable suppression of free speech if reediting disabled by admins
Feature requests: Add forgiveness/redemption button for community second chances, Enable users to block or cut specific people from interactions, Implement neutrality testing across political viewpoints, Make AI moderation disclosure mandatory and visible to users, Allow comment reediting to be transparent
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 86 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 87 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 115 days after the earliest competitor.
- Open Notes · hn · 2026-02-13 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Jevdit · hn · 2026-09-27 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Meepr · hn · 2026-01-18 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- RootBadger · hn · 2026-07-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- TopComment App · ph · 2026-09-27 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Turning 100-plus comments HN threads into readable discussions · hn · 2026-01-02 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- I built a platform where audiences fund debates between public thinkers · hn · 2025-11-12 · 42 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- I built whatstype.org · hn · 2025-11-13 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.