What anti-spam capability does this have? What's to stop someone from just flooding the DB for the top Alexa sites with junk?
Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
41–50 of 247 posts
Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Puzzling that after 20 years of internet stupidism, people still think unrestricted user content could somehow be a good idea.
Some people just want to be able to say what is legally allowed. That ability is attacked again and again. You don't have to want that freedom yourself, but imposing that restriction on others can be criticized.
Does this extension give any party the power to unpublish not-legally-allowed content?
Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
#43These were generally called metaweb tech when they were popular about 15-20 years ago. The problem was that everyone had to have a particular author's plugin to see the extra content. Some of them were better than others, allowing cross referencing, citation insertion, and a number of other sophisticated features. I don't know if they still are around. Sites like reddit and hn are really inverted versions of this con…
I wrote a chrome extension that went the opposite direction: hit the extension button and you would get a list of hacker news and reddit submissions for that URL. Was super useful for finding some cool comments on a page
I’ve since moved to Firefox and gave up on the extension, but it might be an easy port...
Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
#44I recommend people checkout Dissenter [1] if they are interested in this, it has quite the user base already (almost a million users late 2018 [2]). Some of the discussions had on there have been really quite interesting.
My motivation for using their comments add-on is mostly to avoid tracking, although it's quite annoying they rely on Cloudflare.
On a different note, the Wikipedia article on Gab/Dissenter is quite politically charged [2]. It seems that Wikipedia editors are mostly left-leaning (after clicking through several political articles).
Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people just want to be able to say what is legally allowed. That ability is attacked again and again. You don't have to want that freedom yourself, but imposing that restriction on others can be criticized.
Does this extension give any party the power to unpublish not-legally-allowed content?
I have no idea. But I would assume they would comply with the law in order to not get sued?
Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
#46The only way this can be useful is if everybody has it. Not having it available on Chrome is not a great start.
I fail to see any merit in the claim that mainstream adoption is necessary for a tool like this to have any value.
You're not going to be using this tool for synchronous conversations between commenters, or even conversations at all. Any information you leave in the form of a comment is going to matter to the people who visit the site after you. You're also commenting about the website's content in question, not having a soapbox discussion.
The tool doesn't need to suffer from the effects of the empty room problem known to social networking, because there is no "social" in this network.
Granted, it's going to take something a lot more clever than what's already there to deal with the separate moderation issue.
Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Puzzling that after 20 years of internet stupidism, people still think unrestricted user content could somehow be a good idea.
Some people just want to be able to say what is legally allowed. That ability is attacked again and again. You don't have to want that freedom yourself, but imposing that restriction on others can be criticized.
>Some people just want to be able to say what is legally allowed.
Not all speech is legally allowed, is this extensions going to deal with copyright violations, threats, libel, etc. Or even someone posting the name of a person arrested on a news story when the laws disallow that information being public.
Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, perhaps a better solution would be for the comments to be stored in something like ipfs? Though if i understand ipfs right, it works like torrents, meaning that unpopular comments will disappear over time.
This is the thing that I was thinking about. That a blockchain-like solution would better fit the goal of the extension. And I don't think this because I worry about censorship or free speech. I think the main benefit of this extension is that it creates an option to comment on sites where to creator of the site didn't make commenting possible. However I do worry about moderation and trolls. Allowing people to make a…
>Allowing people to make as much noise as they can is almost as damaging to free speech as censorship.
The thing is, to see that noise you would first have to be on the specific link, want to see comments on it, then go out of your way to install the addon if you haven't already. This is so much better for the people running the websites as they do not have to even acknowledge the comments' existence and are not obligated to moderate anything. Anyone who wants to comment or see them should know what they are getting into. They can grow a skin or uninstall the addon.
Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people just want to be able to say what is legally allowed. That ability is attacked again and again. You don't have to want that freedom yourself, but imposing that restriction on others can be criticized.
>Some people just want to be able to say what is legally allowed. Not all speech is legally allowed, is this extensions going to deal with copyright violations, threats, libel, etc. Or even someone posting the name of a person arrested on a news story when the laws disallow that information being public.
Well they have to, as it is law. I specifically wrote about legal speech. Extensions like this (or much more popular: dissenter) allows people to exercise that right on sites that limit their free speech.
Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, also while they can not be censored by the administrator of the website, they can still be censored (or moderated) by the Plugin Owner, right?
If this got popular, and an administrator wanted to disable comments, one thing that they could do is add a unique random prefix to every request to a URL. The web server would just generate a random prefix for each link it produces, and strip the random prefix from the path in every request it receives. For example, HN's front page contains a set of URLs for each item. This item would be https://news.ycombinator.com…
If the content is to be found via search engines, then this may not be advisable, and the plugin owner could try the same techniques that say Google would to use the canonical URL.