Google Sidewiki

Google Sidewiki
en.wikipedia.org

But looking back, looking at what the web has become, there was no chance this could have ever worked. At best, it being centralized, it would have become essentially a Google controled social-media-ish space where all the "inconvenient" comments would be removed anyway. Probably Google would even disable the comments on some pages, like disabling sidewiki comments on the pages of some big newspaper that demanded Google to do it because people were criticizing that giving media outlet. Let alone the sheer problem of dealing with spam, which, specially now with LLMs will get much harder to filter.

All these things could have been solved and dealt with it one way or the other, if we REALLY wanted. But ultimately, I think there was no interest on the people who maintain the internet, the people who create the tools that most use to access the internet: there is no reason why they would keep a tool that would allow people to voice their opinions.

On the contrary, what we have been seeing on the internet is precisely the oppose happening. They removed the dislikes, they removed comments in many videos. Hell, Netflix used to have an option where people could leave reviews on the movies they watched. The internet of 2020 is clean and "family-friendly" and "politically correct" and it fits the narrative and the current thing, and they knee before the big corporations and anything that could hurt their brand must be eliminated.

In the 2020s internet there is no space for a service like Google Sidewiki, and even if someone build this as an open standard, and even if the spam issue wasn't a problem... Google, Apple and Microsoft would never implement and built this feature on their browsers, and most people using the internet are too noobs to sideload an extension themselves that enables this feature to a point of it gaining enough of a userbase to matter and actually be useful.

In short, this whole product is a child of a more naive internet where people still believe that services could actually be better. Funnily enough, Gab launched a similar extension called "Dissenter" some years later and it got banned from Chrome and Mozilla extension stores.