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Google has tried this once and it failed to gain traction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki
But, I guess first a number of problems should be solved w.r.t. moderation, trust, spam, ...
These 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...
How do you keep all the toxic and evil comments out? How do you give website owners a way to opt out?
This sounds similar to the (in)famous Dissenter comment functionality. What are the differences?
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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.
Then allow me to comment on this repo and display those comments prominently. Because if I’m not allowed to add whatever opinion I want to the readme, I am being horribly oppressed.
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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.
So if I do not add support for unlimited anonymous comments at my own expense to my website, I am engaging in Orwellian oppression? Then allow me to comment on this repo and display those comments prominently. Because if I’m not allowed to add whatever opinion I want to the readme, I am being horribly oppressed.
I'm literally just saying that some people like to be able to say what they are allowed to, that this could be a tool to do so, and that that is OK. That was a direct response to the phrase "people still think unrestricted user content could somehow be a good idea", which implies that free speech is NEVER a good idea. I disagree with that.
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>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.
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Sounds like there is a graveyard of these things. I remember Google Sidebar. It might be called Sidewiki actually...
Google Sidewiki is what I was thinking of, too. And as I recall, people were not a fan. Giving up control of your website to these anonymous, semi-invisible comments seems like a bad idea. The description calling content moderation "orwellian" is also concerning. I think at this point we've all seen how twisted unmoderated comments get. If the platform is built on this premise then I can only guess how toxic such a c…
And if malicious comments are a problem on the platform, then that's a failure of the design of the platform rather than the idea of it. The nature of commenting as it exists now dishes out proportional exposure to those who are the loudest and most persistent, or can otherwise game the system. We've tried to solve that with human moderators (sometimes as bad as the trolls themselves), and simple voting algorithms (lowbrow meme humor gets voted to the top).
It's now 2019, we're long overdue for a better way of doing things. Taking two steps backwards toward a completely unmoderated soapbox is a non-starter, and the fact that we're even having this discussion on HN is evidence that far too little effort has gone into solving these problems collectively.