A long time ago, there was a W3C standard for this called web annotations². It never really caught on, possibly because people and organizations were expected to host their own annotation servers.
A rather obscure browser by the W3C called Annotea also had support for web annotations. I vaguely remember downloading and installing it just to try annotations.
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…
Yeah, this has been tried over and over. Unless it becomes a standard browser feature (and decentralized, e.g. dht-backed), it's always been a nonstarter for technical reasons alone. Also, if you start from an anti-censorship anti-moderation position, in this day and age, you are likely to attract the worst of society right off the bat.
The technical problem here is way easier to solve than the social one. You'd want to avoid having hatespeech or some attack being planned on URLs of your blog. This is by definition a tricky problem. Should moderation follow us to the remotest and most deserted corners of the web? Should prying eyes follow humans all the time, even on this abstract ocean of digital content?
On technical side I think we'd need some sort of widespread micropayment mechanism baked into major browsers or at least Firefox. Then decentralized commenting solutions will follow.
I 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…
I have this vague memory that Gab was associated with some alt-right/neo-nazi/something-or-other thing and I should stay far away. Their website refers to Blocking "Big Tech" (which smells like "Deep State" to me).
Is this something I should be using/supporting? I'm not an overtly political person but I just don't want to be in bad company.
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...
You might be able to do with just a bookmarklet into the algolia search for HN.
EDIT: I've just created a proof of concept that works:
Wow... I feel old, remembering 'third voice'. Maybe even older, because no one else mentioned it... ? https://www.wired.com/1999/05/readers-speak-with-third-voice...
Don't feel bad, "Third voice" is modern compared to web annotations.
In an age where everything other than hard left speech is quickly labeled 'hate speech', I think that any censorship-free areas will quickly be judged as having a 'bad community'. Have you ever actually tried Dissenter or Gab, or are you basing the 'bad community' off of what you've heard elsewhere?
I have tried it. The public feed given to me had something about "killing all trannies", putting back in Africa by force, climate change denial, and questioning why America doesn't yet arm everyone who isn't Muslim so the Muslim people can be shot on demand. And I seriously wish I made this all up. This place is a violent cesspool.
That was my experience as well. In the first six posts I saw were two by _literal_ Nazis, so I left and never came back.
Technically the thing is nothing new, the really important questions are those related to real life operation, and I don't see them answered. * Position in regard to censorship, and technical tools to do, or counter it. * Viability/resilience of the server which keeps comments. * Under which jurisdiction it is hosted? * If it depends on a domain name who owns it? * Can a commenter be traced, and by whom? * Can anybod…
A true decentralized solution would have no moderation, no edit, no deletion. It would be basically a 4chan on every single page.