Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#131

Post by comntr » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

tedmiston wrote: post #121

Tepix wrote: post #91

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. NCSA Mosaic had the feature back in 1993. Check out this post from Marc Andreesen on the www-talk list: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/0416.ht... A rather obscure browser by the W3C called Annotea also…

The Genius Web Annotator [1] was quite popular (and funded by Andreessen), though since the pivot into a media company, I believe it's no longer actively developed. Hypothesis (Hypothes.is) [2] is active [3] and awesome. They are involved in the Web Annotation standardization efforts. [1]: https://genius.com/web-annotator [2]: https://web.hypothes.is/ [3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01427-9

Thanks for the links! I'll do some research before rolling out v2 of my extension.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#132

Post by apostacy » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

phoe-krk wrote: post #5

This sounds similar to the (in)famous Dissenter comment functionality. What are the differences?

Dissenter is a great example of why we cannot trust Mozilla. Being able to link URLs to a message board is such basic web functionality. They clearly banned it out of a political grudge, and this is just another example of how they have zero credibility and should not be trusted.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#133

Post by comntr » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #82

syx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you just described exactly what I've done a year ago [1] I always promised myself to rewrite it for Firefox but was too lazy. [1] https://github.com/syxanash/commentdat

FYI: converting a Chrome to a FF extension is easy to do now. They are mostly the same, and Firefox has a compatibility library that stubs most of the incompatibilities.

Yep, I didn't have to do much other then doing if(chrome.contextMenus){...} to make this extension run on Firefox and Firefox Android. But I intentionally chose the approach to minimise the browser-dependent surface, so the draws the UI and the extension only makes a few basic things like updating the icon color.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#134

Post by 333c » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

syx wrote: post #74

tetizera wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to have this extension! Let us know if you ever pick up that extension. I do have one question though. Links on e-mails usually have "?utm_campaign=id_campaign&utm_source=nytimes" for example. Is it possible to avoid duplicates? To this day this is one of the major headaches for mods on Reddit. There's also the mobile links for the same news article.

This was more of a kludge than a serious project, but glad I was not the only one to find this useful, will definitley continue working on it. >Is it possible to avoid duplicates? I thought about this as well in the past but never actually found a solution. Maybe someone here knows if there's research or an algorithm to uniquely identify the URL. Edit: typos

Some pages will link to a canonical URL in the head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#135

Post by davesmith1983 » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

cachehit wrote: post #59

s9w wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't refer to freedom of speech like something everyone is obliged to provide. That's not what it means. https://xkcd.com/1357/

This comic routinely used as a "Gotcha". However it so over simplifies the position that we are in.

Youtube now totally owns online video, there isn't any competitors that are even close. Facebook has almost half the world signed up to its platform. This isn't someone's online forum or a news site. These companies completely own their respective parts of the industry.

The major social media sites like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook are so large they are considered to be a "public private space" (I forget the exact legal term).

These platforms agree to DMCA safe harbour where they are considered to be a "platform" and not a "publisher". That means they shouldn't be censoring anyone on their political opinions and must be politically neutral (otherwise they are taking on the role of a publisher as they are acting as an editor), now IANAL but there is certainly an argument that can be made. Whether a judge would rule it so, who knows.

This is worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

Tim Pool in this video manages to point out quite clearly how Twitter terms of service are political and they don't even realise it.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#136

Post by comntr » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

mehdix wrote: post #97

afandian wrote: post #10

This is very similar to hypothes.is, apart from the hashing: https://web.hypothes.is/

I stopped using it as I moved to Firefox a year ago. More important, they didn't provide a link to download my data at least in that time.

All the data here is actually stored in indexedDb and localStorage. I guess I'll implement import/export next time.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#137

Post by comntr » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #41

What anti-spam capability does this have? What's to stop someone from just flooding the DB for the top Alexa sites with junk?

Currently nothing. But I've only mentioned this extension to a small technical audience, so I wouldn't expect a flood of spam. In practice, this needs some sort of "local captcha" that doesn't involve 3rd parties, i.e. the storage server returns a puzzle (like guess what's shown on this 3d image) and if solved correctly, it results in a proper hash that's easy to verify. A simpler, but uglier solution is to ask the user to produce a hash with N leading zeros.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#138

Post by 6cd6beb » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #127

sascha_sl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://witches.live/@anna/102343755810317766 (hn mods, if this is too political, it's okay to delete)

I'm already nauseous just browsing this, WTF? Is this where people are headed? Extreme tribalism in the unmoderated portions of the Internet where you're either "a known SJW" or "a Nazi" with no room in between? If so we're fucked.

It's definitely like that on the internet; a lot of people on both sides of the US political spectrum seem to think there are two problems:

1 - Their chosen political party is not pushing far left/right enough

2 - The opposing party is obviously criminally bent on destroying the country.

Actually maybe three problems; the third being that "centrists" (anyone who isn't radicalized one way or the other) haven't come out against the party that's obviously criminally bent on destroying the country.

I guess that might bleed into real-world politics, but it's unfortunate. I think I remember when it was more "their political ideas are stupid and don't work" and less "they're 100% acting in bad faith and literally trying to destroy the nation".

All I can say is prepare for some hard times, followed by the US not having the geopolitical 1st place. Maybe it's too stark a warning but unless we start to see each other as something other than demons hell-bent on destroying all good in the world, I don't see how anything productive is going to happen.

A note of hope though - the AOC/Cruz collaboration sounds nice.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#139

Post by siphon22 » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #76

siphon22 wrote: post #31

I love this idea, was thinking about how nice something like this would be myself. Sad it'll get no chance because of people going "muh nazis", even though it will work with any URL. It appears theres this assumption that it will be used for politics related stuff which i have no concern with myself. No neonazis will be gathering on the URLs that are meaningful to me and id say most people. Read.write.as blogs/posts…

Every discussion method eventually gets abused. Then the owner figures out what rules they want to enforce, and how. Every website is one URL away. You can't rely on being relatively invisible. "If I wrote blogs there, id like to see feedback and supportive comments" -- yes, but (a) if you write a blog, you can choose a platform that has comments and (b) eventually the Nazis or the pedophiles or the Nazi pedophiles w…

There is no turning off or moderating those comments. It's an external function of an addon that has nothing to do with my hypothetical blog in which lacks a native comment section.

To see those comments, I would have to willingly decide that I wanted to see them and go to download the addon.This is the same for anyone else. If there are people who do this and think they can make any kind of association or blame on me for having pedos commenting on my blog's url, well, they are wrong, since I had nothing to do with that comment section and have no control over it. What do they want me to do? It's some other guy's addon and other people talking amongst themselves a great distance away.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#140

Post by celdon25 » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #89

celdon25 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 havi…

This kind of tool, to make sense, needs to have as many people as possible on it otherwise you'll see no comment on any site you open. You can indeed leave a comment yourself, but probably people won't if they see nobody's ever going to read them. So that's why it's strange that such an extension, which I think does have a social aspect, would ignore 60% of browsers.

If the data is open and federated (as it should be), it will still be available for ingestion by other future (and past) attempts at the idea. I don't see any fundamental problem with the idea, but understand that it's important to get the details right.