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Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

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Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#31

Post by juretriglav »

walterbell wrote: post #12
georgiapeach wrote: post #7

Good luck getting traction. The web is littered with the corpses of "comment on any website" apps. The problem is that there are too many websites and too many incompatible "comment on any website" standards for any one of them to emerge as a clear leader. P.S. You list non-tracking as a differentiating feature, but how do you silence speech you don't like without tracking users?

W3C is tackling the compatibility issue. http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/ https://hypothes.is/blog/peer-review-annotation/

Listen to Walter, you don't want to be an island of comments in this case. Following annotation standards will allow this content to be gathered and reused elsewhere, for things like fact extraction, sentiment analysis, meta-discussion, +++, it will also allow others to immortalise your content if you happen to fail.

On the other hand, maybe that's exactly what you don't want. My personal pet peeve is comments on scientific papers, where openness of this content is not only desired, it's crucial. Your situation might be different.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#32

Post by blitzprog »

lajlev wrote: post #27

@fiveogit: Love the idea. Need to be prettified though. How would I see comments on mobile devices or non chrome browsers? Can I inject with JS into my website? That was some of my first thoughts :)

Exactly my thoughts. I use Chrome at home while I can't get around Firefox at my workplace - is there any way to at least fetch the comments by different means?

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#33

Post by visarga »

RazorCrusade wrote: post #6

Cool, I've thought about something like this for ages, but lazy always prevails. The only thing I don't really agree with is: "Let’s face it. One major problem with embedded web comments is that everyone is invited to participate. They’re too open. The WORDS community, on the other hand, is necessarily comprised of people who (a) use Chrome and (b) desire a better commenting experience. Why else would they have insta…

> necessarily comprised of people who (a) use Chrome and (b) desire a better commenting experience

That also means that it will be a ghost town, and probably never bootstrap to a decent user base with interesting discussions.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#34

Post by rohan404 »

The Google login is a bit too disconcerting for my liking. At the very least showing the url bar would've have been less unsettling.

Only by opening the chrome inspector was I able to verify that it was indeed a valid login page and not a phising attempt as it appears to be at a cursory glance.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#35

Post by visarga »

fivedogit wrote: post #10
RazorCrusade wrote: post #6

Cool, I've thought about something like this for ages, but lazy always prevails. The only thing I don't really agree with is: "Let’s face it. One major problem with embedded web comments is that everyone is invited to participate. They’re too open. The WORDS community, on the other hand, is necessarily comprised of people who (a) use Chrome and (b) desire a better commenting experience. Why else would they have insta…

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky. Words benefits from the fact that it's web-Wide. If a user is terrible, they get silenced everywhere . You're totally right (as was Paul Graham when he spoke about how Hacker New…

> these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And that getting too big too fast is definitely a bad thing

I was thinking about it - why not add a view mode displaying only the comments of the early adopters? On reddit, for example, it would be interesting to see only comments of users with accounts 5+ years old.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#36

Post by mplewis »

visarga wrote: post #35
fivedogit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky. Words benefits from the fact that it's web-Wide. If a user is terrible, they get silenced everywhere . You're totally right (as was Paul Graham when he spoke about how Hacker New…

> these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And that getting too big too fast is definitely a bad thing I was thinking about it - why not add a view mode displaying only the comments of the early adopters? On reddit, for example, it would be interesting to see only comments of users with accounts 5+ years old.

Gawker's network effectively does that by focusing on only Featured Comments when you scroll down and making you click through to the plebs.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#37

Post by jitl »

georgiapeach wrote: post #7

Good luck getting traction. The web is littered with the corpses of "comment on any website" apps. The problem is that there are too many websites and too many incompatible "comment on any website" standards for any one of them to emerge as a clear leader. P.S. You list non-tracking as a differentiating feature, but how do you silence speech you don't like without tracking users?

Everyone wants to be Google Sidewiki

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#38

Post by akbar501 »

This reminds me of a product from the 90's where it let you leave post-it style notes on any website. You could then turn the nodes on/off for any given site.

Anyway, that was a great product, so I'm glad to see that you're thinking around similar lines. A meta-commenting system that runs any site is a great idea.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#39

Post by riffraff »

hrrld wrote: post #19

http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/images/hoodblink.gif I miss _why.

for those who don't get this: hoodwink'd[0][1] was this experiment/hack/art project by _why some years ago, which allowed implementing a parallel unified commenting system for the web.

It was super cool because you'd go to, say, hackernews or slashdot and if you were part of the network you'd get access to a different set of comments, but integrated in the website rather than as an external popup (individual sets of stylesheets+js had to be written for each website of course).

For example, here you'd get the blinking hood gif, and on click you'd see new comment threads appearing with red usernames. Integration came through, iirc, a custom proxy server or a greasemonkey script.

It was super cool.

[0] https://github.com/whymirror/hoodwinkd [1] http://ecmanaut.blogspot.hu/2006/01/hoodwinkd.html

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#40

Post by XorNot »

e12e wrote: post #30
fivedogit wrote: post #2

This is my 4-year, off-and-on passion project. All suggestions and feedback are appreciated. I'd especially welcome product/feature-based ideas about how to overcome the enormous cold-start hurdle. Note: Re-posted with permission from Dan. Last week's post got dinged by a semi-false-positive algorithmic penalty after only a few minutes.

Ok, so if I understand this correctly, in order to be certain I'm not tracked, I need to host my own back-end server? And the server stores the comments? And if I'm hosting my own server, I'm likely to end up talking mostly with those that sign up with "my" version of this? And if I want it to work in eg: Firefox I'd have to port it? Finally, wrt. tracking -- if the comments are stored on the server (and that's a RES…

The problem with XMPP rooms is that if you can connect to them with a chat client, people start using them like a chat client. Which is not necessarily what you want.
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