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Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every documentation

metadocs8.com

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every documentation

#41
lovely! aaah i have such a soft spot in my heart for ideas like this. reminds me of "hoodwink'd," a similar project by _why the lucky stiff from 2005 that let readers leave comments on webpages tagged by URL. (see http://web.archive.org/web/20080106065546/http://hoodwinkd.h... )

Back in 2010, I also ran my own project in this space called "Goggles." https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/goggles It was a bookmarklet that turned any webpage into multiplayer MS Paint; viewers with the bookmarklet active could see others painting on the webpage in real-time, before websockets made this kind of interaction commonplace. The entire thing ran on a single-threaded nodejs instance, serving something like 1k simultaneous connections at peak. Every half-hour or so it would crash from memory leaks. Good times.

Moderation was the thing that killed my project. Some users became victims of targeted harassment campaigns; bullies would draw dicks, swastikas, nooses, racial epithets etc on their personal tumblrs or homepages. There's something insidious about knowing that folks could be graffiti-ing your own webpage behind your back unless you're constantly checking goggles, so it didn't feel right to keep the project running knowing I didn't have the motivation to add proper moderation tools and didn't want to build user accounts or any sort of reputation system to keep the UX simple.

Some folks made absolutely stunning pieces of art on corners of the web that nobody saw. I probably still have the shapefile database archived somewhere... maybe we could reunite artists with their work someday.

Re: Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every documentation

#42
post #4

There was a cool link curator service called StumbleUpon. You click a button, and it takes you to a random interesting web page. One of my favorite things about this is you can comment on these pages as well. It was fun to see other peoples reactions to random pages, flash videos, memes, art, essay, etc. Eventually I realized that you can click the 'discussion' button even on pages that StumbleUpon didn't bring me to…

This webpage has the story of what happened to StumbleUpon, a link to it's successor Mix, and some alternatives:

https://techboomers.com/websites-like-stumbleupon

Re: Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every documentation

#44
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation should work peer-to-peer. If somebody wants to post they have to first review posts which were flagged by users to violate the TOS. If sufficient users agree on the flag, the post is taken down.

This. You should read up about how recaptcha worked in the early days to do 'authority of the masses'. (I don't know any particular sources, maybe these methods are properly defined now in some framework.)

I would absolutely love to see this attempted.

In order for a user for flag a post. They must highlight the portion of the ToS that is violated.

This has the added benefit of requiring people to actually read the frickin ToS to use the app!!!!!

Re: Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every documentation

#45

I've dreamed of something like this for a long time. However, the actual tool is only a tiny part of the problem. The bigger part is moderation and spam. While this is niche that's not a big deal, but it's also nothing like reddit in that case. What if it does take of? How will you handle spam/astroturfing/hate/illegal comments?

All of that is valid, but you shouldn't worry about it until it actually becomes a problem.

99% of the struggle for any social network is getting people to use it at all. Those problems you list would actually be great to have to deal with, because it means the network is taking off.

Re: Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every documentation

#46
post #9

Cool! How does it identify elements to anchor to, and what happens when the original text changes?

If you're asking how the "Highlights" feature works, its using something called text fragments. When the original text changes then the highlight is dead. Meaning you can still discuss it, but it will no longer be highlighted in the window. You can read more about text fragments here - https://web.dev/text-fragments/

That seems like it would be a problem for something like a documentation site, where even small changes to the text would break the entire highlight. Maybe you can implement something via diff to maintain a fuzzier anchor.

Re: Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every documentation

#48
post #47

This looks very useful. Do you need a user account to use it? Where are the comments stored?

You only need a user account if you want to post a comment or vote on one.

You can browse as guest.

The comments are stored in metadocs servers.

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