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Annotation is now a web standard

hypothes.is

131–140 of 164 posts

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#131
Comments you can't turn off and can't moderate and from which you can't ban misbehaving users seem to me like they will turn immediately into a cesspool of hate, bullying and stupidity.

You'd think we'd have learned our lesson by now. Free speech, by awful people, is overrated and can result in disasters.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#132
post #76
post #52

So who manages Annotation Central? Disqus? Google? Facebook? The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People's Republic of China?

Part of the goal of making it a standard, and one in particular where annotation clients could listen to multiple annotation service providers, is precisely to avoid "Annotation Central". Our client does not currently operate this way, but our intention is to move that direction this year. Many underlying architectural changes are being made now to support that change.

Okay, to make this proposal work in practice initially, we do need some annotation service provider(s).

Who is both (a) eager to be one and do the integration before there is a market/large community and (b) is trustworthy enough to be included by default in the largest likely annotation clients such as the major web browsers?

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a network effect. You have to be on the same annotation service as the people whose annotations you want to see. This leads to centralization.

I think it's more akin to clustering. There might be an HN annotation service that lawers would rarely use and vice versa.

I don't really feel so - as long as there's overlap in reputation, the network effects would favour "HN annotation service" and "lawyer annotation service" to be done by the same provider, simply different people would annotate different websites simply they each visit a different subset of them.

Kind of like the Stackexchange network of sites - many different communities, but with significant overlap as many users are active in multiple domains.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#134
post #129
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It increases the discoverability significantly. The negative information or spam that's not on your site is suddenly...on your site. It's like making it mandatory for restaurants to have a live updating Yelp! review display scrolling at the front door. (assuming I understand the proposal correctly...I didn't see much control there for website owners)

I think it's more like customers always being able to display Yelp reviews for the restaurant they're currently standing in front of on their phones or AR glasses or whatever.

In a world where AR glasses are ubiquitous, and each pair does this by default, sure.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#135
post #119
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It increases the discoverability significantly. The negative information or spam that's not on your site is suddenly...on your site. It's like making it mandatory for restaurants to have a live updating Yelp! review display scrolling at the front door. (assuming I understand the proposal correctly...I didn't see much control there for website owners)

I guess you'll have to choose wisely your annotations sources... If you see too much spam on 1 source, just unsubscribe. As said earlier, it's not so different of reddit/HN discuussions abouut content. The publisher may not even be aware of the discussion.

Again, it's about discoverability. If browsers support this natively, visiting a website would put up a virtual "link" of some sort to see the discussions for every url, as you visit them. There's a difference between discussion exists somewhere, and discussion is tied to your website/url.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#136
post #100
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I think that is the entire problem.

An open protocol gives at least a shot for compatible self-hosted/locally running solutions, assuming client makers actually implement it.

Yes, ok, you're right.

I think, however, that doing that for all the things in the world each people would like to store, is too complicated to be true.

I only say that because I was an enthusiast of things like the remoteStorage protocol -- not what it has become actually, but the idea behind it. I would prefer something like remoteStorage to be standardized instead of a different protocol for each thing.

Perhaps Urbit is in the same space as remoteStorage, only much more complicated.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#137
post #77

I know Dan Whaley, the author of the post, personally. This is not about promoting a company. This is about allowing people with knowledge to combat fake news. He has been working to make annotation a web standard for years. The fake news that he, in particular, is worried about is climate change denial. The pages of the WSJ and much of the Web are riddled with BS. This annotation enablement will allow, for example,…

How will these annotations be seen by anyone not already on board with the message? Maybe that's all that it's for? If not, how do you keep it from being overloaded by trolls?

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#138
post #115

Is anyone using these? The blog post is put out by a company I've never heard of, and the credits listed on it include nobody who works on a browser, no major websites, and no comment-widget company. Historically, web standards where a committee gets together and decides how a feature is going to look without the buy-in of users or browser vendors have a very poor track record of adoption. The way actually-successful…

First, this would require that the browser vendors adopt the standard, right? How long time does that usually take? Is it a few months for Chrome/Firefox and a few years for Safari/IE, or how would that usually play out?

It's varies rather extremely. No simple answer to this one. Generally, it correlates well to the interests of the browser vendor.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#139
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thaat would be a really wonderful thing. Although im not as much a fan as 1 profile universally.

It can be a good thing. Imagine Donald Trump saying that Obama wasn't born in USA. Obama or anyone could create an annotation with a witty response on that particular sentence or video time frame and a link to the PDF with his birth certificate. Trump could also defend himself inside the "fake news" by commenting directly and exposing the malicious attempt of manipulation.

You just described twitter.

Re: Annotation is now a web standard

#140
post #36

I first met someone working on hypothes.is at a party about, I don't know, eight years ago? Ten years ago? They pitched me more or less this exact idea. It seemed interesting at the time. Is this really how long it takes to realize something like this? Sort of boggles my mind.

Given how many years Ted Nelson spent on (the admittedly more ambitious) Xanadu concept, it doesn't overly surprise me.
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