Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

words4chrome.com

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#21

Good luck getting traction. The web is littered with the corpses of "comment on any website" apps. The problem is that there are too many websites and too many incompatible "comment on any website" standards for any one of them to emerge as a clear leader. P.S. You list non-tracking as a differentiating feature, but how do you silence speech you don't like without tracking users?

'The web is littered with the corpses of "comment on any website" apps.'

There is one "comment on any website" tool that has existed from the beginnings of the web and still thrives. The way it works is, you put the comments on your own website.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#22
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about something like this for ages also. But lazy always prevails. Now, do you know something about a Google product from some years ago that did something like this, but was discontinued?

Did you mean Google Wave? It was open-sourced as Apache Wave.

I don't recall Google Wave having website commenting features.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#23

Good luck getting traction. The web is littered with the corpses of "comment on any website" apps. The problem is that there are too many websites and too many incompatible "comment on any website" standards for any one of them to emerge as a clear leader. P.S. You list non-tracking as a differentiating feature, but how do you silence speech you don't like without tracking users?

'The web is littered with the corpses of "comment on any website" apps.' There is one "comment on any website" tool that has existed from the beginnings of the web and still thrives. The way it works is, you put the comments on your own website.

Do you mean, post comments you have about another website on your own site? Definitely works, although obviously harder for others to discover your comments compared to a single commenting tool which everyone used. Although I'm sceptical such a tool will ever exist.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#24

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 insta…

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky. Words benefits from the fact that it's web-Wide. If a user is terrible, they get silenced everywhere . You're totally right (as was Paul Graham when he spoke about how Hacker New…

>One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky.

How is this different than any other 3rd party commenting system like Disqus or Facebook?

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean Google Wave? It was open-sourced as Apache Wave.

I don't recall Google Wave having website commenting features.

It was a federated protocol for real-time editing, one could layer various workflows (group editing, email, IM, wikis, comments, etc) on top of that protocol.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky. Words benefits from the fact that it's web-Wide. If a user is terrible, they get silenced everywhere . You're totally right (as was Paul Graham when he spoke about how Hacker New…

>One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky. How is this different than any other 3rd party commenting system like Disqus or Facebook?

So. Many. Reasons. Just give it a try and you'll see.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#29
post #8

Is there way to register without Google or Facebook account?

No. See my dissertation about it here: http://www.words4chrome.com/2014/about-words-login-options-a...

That doesn't explain why it doesn't have a native log-in, though ( even though the preamble says it will ), or support a general protocol such as OpenID.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#30

This is my 4-year, off-and-on passion project. All suggestions and feedback are appreciated. I'd especially welcome product/feature-based ideas about how to overcome the enormous cold-start hurdle. Note: Re-posted with permission from Dan. Last week's post got dinged by a semi-false-positive algorithmic penalty after only a few minutes.

Ok, so if I understand this correctly, in order to be certain I'm not tracked, I need to host my own back-end server? And the server stores the comments? And if I'm hosting my own server, I'm likely to end up talking mostly with those that sign up with "my" version of this? And if I want it to work in eg: Firefox I'd have to port it? Finally, wrt. tracking -- if the comments are stored on the server (and that's a REST service or something like it) -- wouldn't it be trivial to log activity at the routing level (eg: ha-proxy/nginx/other front-facing web server)?

This isn't meant as negative criticism, just trying to figure out if I've understood how it works correctly? (Note, I appreciate that the source is available, but obviously I can't know that the source you share is the source you run on your back-end. So we're back to trust, which is fine in my book).

[edit: re other clients -- the most straightforward thing to do would be to make an iframe(or js)-based proxy service (a la stumble upon) in order to enable any browser, I suppose?

I've thought about something similar, and I wonder if an XMPP back-end with one "room" pr url and the server-side log-extension might work? That should then make it trivial (unnecessary!) to enable better clients than web-only -- ie use a command line xmpp client to participate in the discussion, rather than forcing the use of the web browser. I realise many people think using the web browser is an advantage -- I generally find GUIs built on top of browsers to be slow and not very efficient. Extensions less so -- but the problem is of course that you'd have to port to Firefox, Opera, Webkit and IE (along with mobile variants) -- to achieve parity with systems like disqus etc]

Post reply on HN