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

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

#171

Post by floatingatoll »

brokenmachine wrote: post #170
floatingatoll wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is solving this "basic problem" ethical? The implied assumption here is that it's a "basic problem" that most sites do not have a readily-discoverable public commentary board. Sites such as Reddit, HN, and Facebook are popular , readily-discoverable public commentary boards about other sites. This much is true. However, it is incorrect to say that the absence of this is a "basic problem" as stated above. Given the pa…

The printing press has also been nothing but trouble.

The printing press has nothing inherently to do with worldwide instantaneous coordinated global same-day information sharing. A better analogy here would have been the telegraph, as that would at least serve as evidence on its own a rudimentary connection to whatever pithy point you’re trying to make with this reply. Unfortunately, your chosen example does not connect the dots so readily. Please clarify?

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

#172

Post by brokenmachine »

tetizera wrote: post #73
s9w wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your comment is misguided. I have neither used the term Orwellian or opressions, nor do I have any affiliation with this extension. 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…

The problem isn't free speech, but rather the distribution of illegal pornography and other illegal things.

I don't know about this project specifically, but usually comments are simply plain text.

If there's links to illegal stuff there, then something needs to be done about the actual site hosting the illegal stuff.

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

#174

Post by brokenmachine »

balzss wrote: post #36
Crinus wrote: post #22

Earlier 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…

>I'm not really familiar with IPFS, what does it mean that unpopular comments disappear? Is it like seeding the only torrent (comments) that you like?

Uploading to IPFS is like creating a torrent for any file you share. Someone always needs to be seeding that file for it to remain accessible to people.

So what OP meant by unpopular comments disappear is that nobody would be seeding them.

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

#175

Post by brokenmachine »

siphon22 wrote: post #48
balzss wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obli…

I'd be more concerned about spam than speech I dislike.

Is there any kind of rate-limiting to stop bad actors from making a million comments per second?

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

#176

Post by brokenmachine »

mehdix wrote: post #99
brokenkebab wrote: post #85

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.

You could have decentralized with the original poster able to edit. Every post/thread could be like it's own git repo.

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

#178

Post by brokenmachine »

I wonder, how would this work on, eg an ebay auction or another site where the same content is available at lots of different URLs?

The same auction is available at, eg

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/1992-WIDGET-THE-WORLD-WATCHER-NI...

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/113314026367

https://www.ebay.com/itm/113314026367

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/113314026367

, and probably limitless other URLs.

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

#179

Post by comntr »

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

[2] is very similar to what I want to do. They chose to insert an iframe into the current page and I don't agree with this decision: the extension should have as little access as possible to the page, ideally it only gets a hash of the url.

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

#180

Post by comntr »

manifestsilence wrote: post #156
apostacy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd want to avoid having hatespeech or some attack being planned on URLs of your blog. How could you possibly expect to control people saying things about your blog on a remote webserver? There is no solution that is not worse than the speech. This is not a problem that needs solving.

Then the problem instead becomes what is a valid comment, and a valid commenter (identity). Otherwise the vast majority of comments will be: WaNt A BiGgEr SoMeThInG? Go tO wWw.S0mEgR0$$sItE.cOm

There should be at least basic formatting filter that would block 1 MB comments or clearly non human written comments. This won't stop the spammers, of course. It should be time consuming to create a user id. It should be anonymous, but it should take a few minutes of your time (not your CPU time) to generate a valid user id. once this is done, it'll be easy to spot one spammer's comment, find all others (since comments are signed with ed25519) and dump them all. The spammers then won't be able to delegate the work to scripts.
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