Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform • Hacker News Board

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#51

Post by memexy » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

slightwinder wrote: post #25

xnx wrote: post #5

I've long felt that annotation was one of the greatest missed opportunities of the web. Every major content website implements commenting differently and often poorly. I'd much prefer to have comments come from a third party system where I can: own my own comments, not be subject to removal by the author of the content, and choose the group of people I want to discuss with. Imagine if hackernews discussions appeared…

> not be subject to removal by the author of the content That's why everyone is doing it themself. They don't wanna make it to easy for people to find their dirt, also make it harder for trolls and spammer to harm them. Protecting yourself from others is a legit problem with this. But besides that, aren't sites like hackernews and reddit basically like that? All you need is an extension which querys them for the acti…

This is a good idea actually. Figuring out a way to make HN comments visible next to the content that is being commented on would be very useful.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#52

Post by kontxt » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

I'm the founder of a new service in this space: https://www.kontxt.io. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

Enterprise - It’s Slack, but on top of digital content.

Education - LMS with interactive layer for notes and assignments.

Website - It’s Disqus, but inline with your content.

Personal - It’s Pocket, Genius, and Reddit combined.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#53

Post by ianhorn » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

vannevar wrote: post #38

The idea of collaborative annotation has been around since the beginning of the web. I tried to launch an annotation startup myself back in 2000, and there were several funded competitors back then. It never catches on. It would be interesting to analyze why people just don't use these systems when given the opportunity. Is this a solution in search of a problem?

I'd imagine an issue is that there's just no place to go for it. If a big existing community introduced annotations, I'd bet it could catch on. Imagine clicking through an article from facebook and you automatically get annotations. Hell, on mobile you already have these apps using built in browsers so you don't leave the app. Something like that, where annotations are discoverable, could definitely gain traction. Then there'd be no escaping facebook (or twitter or reddit or HN) even on other sites.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#54

Post by tgbugs » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

My PhD work would not have been possible without Hypothes.is. My group uses it for a variety of information extraction and curation tasks, and I'm fairly certain that one of my colleagues has the highest number of human made annotations in the system (though in private groups).

Hypothes.is is great for prototyping curation workflows to explore what is possible before spending time implementing yet another tool. It also hits the sweet spot for having a UI that is just accessible enough for non-technical users that can display annotations made by bots. We have been using hypothes.is as the backend to crawl [0] research resource identifiers from the scientific literature for 4 years, and it has been solid the whole time.

I see some questions/concerns about the w3c compliance of the API. I'm pretty sure that there is just a switch the needs to be flipped, and that it has been implemented. Yep, it has [1]. Also as others have suggested it is fairly straight forward to set up your own annotation store, though it is not simple to replicate the Hypothes.is setup.

I hope that the pivot to education continues to go well so that it can fund the infrastructure, because Hypothes.is provides a very valuable (if hard to capture the value of) service.

0. https://github.com/SciCrunch/scibot 1. https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/master/h/presenters/ann...

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#55

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #28

smarx007 wrote: post #2

I tried them a while ago. Really liked it but put it aside till they implement https://www.w3.org/annotation/ as promised. Just checked https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/ and the v2 API in development has nothing to do with the W3C standard. UPD: there is not a single issue open on the main repo wrt W3C standard implementation: https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aope... . The post I took as…

If your use of a piece of software is contingent on something like that, it sounds like you didn’t really have a need for it in the first place

[deleted]

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#56

Post by tedmiston » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #36

woah wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your use of a piece of software is contingent on something like that, it sounds like you didn’t really have a need for it in the first place

Rather, OP is probably already using one and don't see the point of migrating to yet another closed system.

Hypothesis has an open API - https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#57

Post by tedmiston » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

mjayhn wrote: post #23

Hi, I started using this as a training tool for people I'm trying to help in meetups and my community (people who have never used AWS, GCP, etc) but a huge problem I found out after writing a lot of annotations (and clearly having the wrong expectation) was that you can't edit or have any control over the URLs that the annotations are based on. If the devs are interested in my use case (understood if not) which is ba…

Making the annotations portable across the same site hosted in difference places is an interesting idea.

I use Hypothesis a lot to highlight e.g., the few important lines of codes, commonly used config values, etc buried in longer dev docs.

This mostly works pretty well. But I do lose my highlights when the URLs change e.g. version 1.0 to 1.1. Sometimes there is a "latest" docs site available to work around this issue but not always.

I imagine that a script could be made with the Hypothesis API to migrate annotations across pages and approximately re-anchor them as much as possible.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#58

Post by tedmiston » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

ncr100 wrote: post #14

Does this fingerprint text to be annotated and collect annotations, allowing the "top rated annotation" to be the most strongly "trusted" annotation for this unique slice of text? And does it ensure the integrity of the text, so that no bad actor may modify the text to turn it into "fake news"? I think that ^^ could help diminish corruption of knowledge / the negative impact of information distribution which the Inte…

I'm not entirely sure that these fully answer the questions you're asking, but:

- The annotations get "anchored" to the text in place at a given URL. There's a video online of Rap Genius [née Genius] discussing fuzzy annotation anchoring [1]. I would guess Hypothesis does something similar. Also, their client code is on GitHub.

- Annotations can be replied to but as far as I know there is no mechanism for voting or any one particular annotation being more trusted than others. The site owner could make an official group for their site I suppose.

- The underlying page can be modified at any time. If something is annotated and that underlying text is significantly changed or removed, the annotation becomes "orphaned" and shows in a separate area. If you really want to, you could archive the page first with e.g., archive.is and then annotation an archived version.

- I do think that Hypothesis maintains an archived version of an annotated page, or at the very least the portion of its text which you've anchored annotations to so that you can view them outside of the context of the page.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJyqfRcyYIQ

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#59

Post by tedmiston » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

holler wrote: post #46

how does this compare to Genius? edit: looks like Genius moved away from aiming to annotate the web, and focused instead on their core business of annotating music.

Exactly what you said. Also Hypothesis has more features around privacy (private annotations) and groups.

For me Genius's annotations were more of a tool for surfacing authoritative knowledge on a song. I use Hypothesis more for personal notes across the web, but other people use it collaboratively as well.

Re: Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

#60

Post by jerf » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

memexy wrote: post #50

jerf wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think generalized annotation has the following problem: Draw a graph of all web pages ordered by how many times they are visited. You get a power law distribution. On the left are things like CNN's front page, on the right things like a text file containing a cheesecake recipe someone posted in 1995 that is technically still online but nobody has visited in years. On the left side are pages that are visited too oft…

Annotation systems don't have to be public. The default should be private with an option to make parts public as necessary. Comments in some sense are annotations that are anchored at the wrong place and with the wrong visibility (public instead of private). The main value of annotations is as a personal knowledge system anchored on top of public knowledge. As one's private knowledge grows it eventually reaches a poi…

The person I was responding to specifically mentioned "collaborative annotation" and startups. Non-collaborative annotation has different tradeoffs. It may be useful to you, but I can't imagine there's any money there for a startup. It avoids the anti-network effects that kill annotations, and it avoids publisher objections too, but it also doesn't have a very compelling value proposition for very many people. It's like trying to make money off of people who like mind maps, literate programming, or who use personal wikis.... it's non-zero amounts of people, often very passionate people, but it's not much of a market.