6 ms·

A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way t

by md224 9y ago

A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.) I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary occurring across the web. Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented?

robotbikes 9y ago
Part of the problem is the walled garden affect of Facebook, is there a public API that provides you with links to public posts about a piece of content ? I doubt it, although Facebook uses this internally to show me random strangers blathering about various news stories. Twitter might be easier but still not sure if there is something that an API can query to find links to a certain article or piece. I remember back in blogging days there was a ping back functionality that was supposed to do something like this. Usually if I find something interesting in the tech sphere I just find people commenting about it on Hacker News and it's a tight but broad enough community to get good discussion.
guelo 9y ago
Because the web has devolved into a bunch of walled gardens that try to sell their user bases to advertisers.
- krapp 9y ago
  No it hasn't. Those walled gardens still comprise a miniscule amount of the actual content on the web. In fact many are link aggregators and depend the existence of content beyond the walled garden to survive. Nothing has devolved except the willingness of users to explore to find new content. But that's not because it no longer exists, but because for the most part new content is delivered to them.
- ehnto 9y ago
  I think it's okay that the web has different communities on it. The web has grown in population at a staggering rate, if we had the same system we used to have of public boards that would be full to the brim and people would be seeking quieter spots anyway. I don't like the idea of walled gardens for advertising at all mind you. But different communities, some of them private, makes total sense for such a large population.
ehnto 9y ago
Discourse is fragmented because there are dozens of different communities that like to talk amongst themselves. I think that's fine. I don't always want to be talking on an internet megaphone and I definitely don't want to be listening to one all the time.
- codinghorror 9y ago
  Yes, fragmentation is a feature. Otherwise you are re-inventing Facebook, and we aren’t even sure we want the one of those we have.
  - robbrown451 9y ago
    If the only idea you have for non-fragmented is Facebook, ok, but I can imagine many other things that are useful, far better than Facebook and nothing like it.
styfle 9y ago
I cross post to medium from my blog. I figure if people want to comment, they can do it there. Here's an example of the original[0] and the copy[1]. [0]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-10-16-es6-modules-today-with-typescript.md https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-10-16-es6-mo... [1]: https://medium.com/@styfle/22969cd360f0/ https://medium.com/@styfle/22969cd360f0/ Medium allows you to import pretty easily and sets the canonical URL so Google (hopefully) won't get confused with duplicate content.
- godot 9y ago
  Didn't know Medium supported a canonical url to point somewhere else. Thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, I think a comment system is one of the things Medium does poorly (I actually like Medium a lot in terms of other aspects, unlike most of HN it seems). They seemed to try to re-use their regular post system too much for commenting and each comment is like its own post, making a threaded discussion almost impossible to be had or read.
  - styfle 9y ago
    Yeah, I have a love-hate relationship with Medium. The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre. Also, comments have become increasingly hidden behind suggested articles and require a click to load. But I like that you can highlight a word or sentence and comment on that. The clapping thing is kind of interesting because you can give more "internet points" to better articles. The one thing that Medium is great at is getting an article into the eyes of the people who want to read it, which is something that my personal blog will not do. Also, there is something nice about consistent look n' feel with the same font when reading blog posts, so someone who is used to medium might be more likely to click on a medium.com link than a ceriously.com link.
    - clusmore 9y ago
      >The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre. And yet right here on Hacker News, submissions and replies are both just "items" and the UX is fantastic. It's not so much about the way they are represented as the way they are presented.
eref 9y ago
For me on Firefox on macOS that is just a couple of key strokes away: cmd-l cmd-c ctrl-a r <space> u r l : <enter> cmd-t cmd-v ctrl-a h n <enter> I have set up `r` as keyword to search on Reddit and `hn` to search on Hacker News [1]. `url:` is the Reddit keyword to search in the url field of the items. (In Firefox, you can right click any search field and add a keyword bookmark for it.) [1] https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  DDG (from the browser navbar) functions in much the same way. !hn => hacker news !se => stack exchange !w => wikipedia !r => reddit (Not all of these are forums, natch.)
taitems 9y ago
I had a go at building this general idea as a browser extension about 5 years ago, but abandoned it as writing browser extensions is a pretty fragmented, horrible experience. The general idea was take the current page URL, hit Reddit/HN various APIs and coalesce various posts (multiple for Reddit) and single HN instances (perhaps with and without hashes, "?new" and other reposting conventions).
seepel 9y ago
It often breaks with different query parameters for example on YouTube videos, but I just created a couple of bookmarklets. hn: javascript:window.location.href='https://hn.algolia.com?query='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)%20+%20'&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story' reddit: javascript:(function()%7Bwindow.location.href%20%3D%20%22https%3A%2F%2Freddit.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Durl%3A%22%20%2B%20encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)%7D)()
EpicEng 9y ago
>Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented Good reason? I don't know, probably only because no single platform has become ubiquitous. Of course, as soon as that happens we'll be seeing a lot of comments here about how it's terrible that online discourse is centralized and that people should abstain from using <platform>. In thinking some more, I prefer to spend my time here as opposed to reddit because the level of discourse is just much higher. Can you imagine sifting through potentially _millions_ of comments, many of which are of youtube level quality? Maybe fragmentation is ok here.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  It’s because no one wants to do the job of moderation. Reddit uses moderators to police their subreddits basically for free . All of the founders have been admins which police the moderators or do the things that mods can’t do. It’s not like this phenomena is new. Digg and Slashdot had similar problems . Newsgroups even before that with eternal September. Facebook , LinkedIn and Twitter use paid moderators (but have the pockets to do so) and they still are deluged with issues. Microsoft even has some class action lawsuit over people having PTSD after performing image moderation. 4Chan has had similar problems also. We haven’t gotten even to advertisements that have conflict of interest. Even worse though is that if you have groups that your site allows in and your advertisers see it they will flee you really fast. Also, the fact that those same brands can just buy social network PR services for a fraction of the cost and all of the upside. Even better that they will be platform agnostic which means when reddit gets replaced they will still be there.
ad_hominem 9y ago
There's a W3C Web standard that is supposed to address this (Annotations), but I don't think it has gotten much traction yet: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar...
Nicholas7900 9y ago
COMPOSITE HACKS If Truly you Are In Need Of A PROFESSIONAL LEGIT HACKER Who Will Get Your Job Done Efficiently With Swift Response, Congratulations, You Have Met the Right HACKERS. WHO ARE COMPOSITE HACKS??? • We are a Team Of Professional HACKERS , a product of the coming together of Legit Hackers from the Dark-Web, (pentaguard,CyberBerkut, RedHack , Black Hat, White Hack ) we have been existing for over 12years, our system is a veryStrong and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas and directives. JOB GUARANTEE: • Frankly speaking, I always give a 100% guarantee on any job we are been asked to do, because we have always been successful in Almost all our jobs for over 12years and our clients can testify to that .To hack any thing needs time though, but we can provide a swift response to your job depending on how fast and urgent you need it.Time also depends on what exactly you want to hack and how serious you are.Enough time with social engineering is required for hacking.So if you want to bind us in a short time, then just don't contact us because We can't hack within 30minutes,sorry.Basically, time depends on your luck.If its good luck, then it is possible to hack within 30minutes but, if it is in the other way round, it would take few hours.I have seen FAKE HACKERS claiming they can hack in 30min, 20min , but there is no REAL HACKER who can say this (AVOID THEM). Please Note : we have only one contact email : compositehacks@gmail.com We will be happy to have you join over 2000 satisfied clients around the world to use our services. OUR HACKING CAPABILITIES: There are so many Reasons why people need to hire a hacker, It might be to Hack a Websites to deface , retrieve information, edit information or give you admin access Some people might need us for Hacking any smart phone giving you access to all activities onthe phone like , text messages , call logs , Social media Apps and other informations.Some might need to Hack a Facebook , gmail, yahoomail, Instagram , twitter and every other social network Accounts, Some might need to Hack into Court's Database to Clear criminal records.However we can also Hack into school's websites (server) to change grades without any trace, Also Some Individuals might want to Track someone else's Location probably for investigation cases. All these Are what we can get Done withing few hours. SOME OTHER SPECIAL SERVICES WE OFFER: Hacking and sales of Programmed credit cards & CREDIT CARD TOP-UP Sales of untraceable phones (even the pentagon can not track our phones) Sales of Tutorial packs for Beginner Ethical Hackers. You can also contact us for other Cyber Attacks And Hijackings, we do almost All. Contact Us for Your Desired Service Via: compositehacks@gmail.com We Treat Every Request With Utmost Confidentiality
rayalez 9y ago
I just add links to HN/reddit threads at the end of my posts. Simple and elegant solution.
Alex3917 9y ago
> when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so Surprised no one else has pointed this out, but that was one of the original problems that Disqus was trying to solve. E.g.: https://www.usv.com/blog/disqus https://www.usv.com/blog/disqus
frankquist 9y ago
There used to be the Trackback system that would allow someone to write blog post and "ping" the blog post they wrote the response to. I am not sure what happened to that system.
- skymt 9y ago
  It was massively abused by spammers.
franciscop 9y ago
I tried to do this but I was told to stop by HN itself: https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ Seriously thinking about giving it a spin, remove the parts that HN was not happy with and relaunch it.
- rahulroy9202 9y ago
  what are the parts that HN was not happy with?
ploggingdev 9y ago
There's a standard for that called Webmention, but it's not widely used : https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention You can see it in action on this page : https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/ https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/
- hmans 9y ago
  And there's a beautiful little tool named Bridgy that can pull replies/mentions off Twitter and Facebook and turn them into Indieweb-able entities. It's all really quite great, but of course assumes the terrible, terrible inconvenience of running your own website.
  - KajMagnus 9y ago
    Bridgy is only able to see the comments one's social media account, like one's Facebook account, gets notified about, right? If some to me complete strangers start talking on FB about a post I made, I won't get to know about that via Bridgy? But if some friends of mine, whose comments my FB connected Bridgy account gets notified about, start talking about the blog post, Bridgy detects that?

by md224 9y ago

robotbikes 9y ago

Part of the problem is the walled garden affect of Facebook, is there a public API that provides you with links to public posts about a piece of content ? I doubt it, although Facebook uses this internally to show me random strangers blathering about various news stories. Twitter might be easier but still not sure if there is something that an API can query to find links to a certain article or piece. I remember back in blogging days there was a ping back functionality that was supposed to do something like this. Usually if I find something interesting in the tech sphere I just find people commenting about it on Hacker News and it's a tight but broad enough community to get good discussion.

guelo 9y ago

Because the web has devolved into a bunch of walled gardens that try to sell their user bases to advertisers.

krapp 9y ago
No it hasn't. Those walled gardens still comprise a miniscule amount of the actual content on the web. In fact many are link aggregators and depend the existence of content beyond the walled garden to survive. Nothing has devolved except the willingness of users to explore to find new content. But that's not because it no longer exists, but because for the most part new content is delivered to them.
ehnto 9y ago
I think it's okay that the web has different communities on it. The web has grown in population at a staggering rate, if we had the same system we used to have of public boards that would be full to the brim and people would be seeking quieter spots anyway. I don't like the idea of walled gardens for advertising at all mind you. But different communities, some of them private, makes total sense for such a large population.

ehnto 9y ago

Discourse is fragmented because there are dozens of different communities that like to talk amongst themselves. I think that's fine. I don't always want to be talking on an internet megaphone and I definitely don't want to be listening to one all the time.

codinghorror 9y ago
Yes, fragmentation is a feature. Otherwise you are re-inventing Facebook, and we aren’t even sure we want the one of those we have.
- robbrown451 9y ago
  If the only idea you have for non-fragmented is Facebook, ok, but I can imagine many other things that are useful, far better than Facebook and nothing like it.

styfle 9y ago

I cross post to medium from my blog. I figure if people want to comment, they can do it there. Here's an example of the original[0] and the copy[1]. [0]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-10-16-es6-modules-today-with-typescript.md https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-10-16-es6-mo... [1]: https://medium.com/@styfle/22969cd360f0/ https://medium.com/@styfle/22969cd360f0/ Medium allows you to import pretty easily and sets the canonical URL so Google (hopefully) won't get confused with duplicate content.

godot 9y ago
Didn't know Medium supported a canonical url to point somewhere else. Thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, I think a comment system is one of the things Medium does poorly (I actually like Medium a lot in terms of other aspects, unlike most of HN it seems). They seemed to try to re-use their regular post system too much for commenting and each comment is like its own post, making a threaded discussion almost impossible to be had or read.
- styfle 9y ago
  Yeah, I have a love-hate relationship with Medium. The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre. Also, comments have become increasingly hidden behind suggested articles and require a click to load. But I like that you can highlight a word or sentence and comment on that. The clapping thing is kind of interesting because you can give more "internet points" to better articles. The one thing that Medium is great at is getting an article into the eyes of the people who want to read it, which is something that my personal blog will not do. Also, there is something nice about consistent look n' feel with the same font when reading blog posts, so someone who is used to medium might be more likely to click on a medium.com link than a ceriously.com link.
  - clusmore 9y ago
    >The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre. And yet right here on Hacker News, submissions and replies are both just "items" and the UX is fantastic. It's not so much about the way they are represented as the way they are presented.

eref 9y ago

For me on Firefox on macOS that is just a couple of key strokes away: cmd-l cmd-c ctrl-a r <space> u r l : <enter> cmd-t cmd-v ctrl-a h n <enter> I have set up `r` as keyword to search on Reddit and `hn` to search on Hacker News [1]. `url:` is the Reddit keyword to search in the url field of the items. (In Firefox, you can right click any search field and add a keyword bookmark for it.) [1] https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com

dredmorbius 9y ago
DDG (from the browser navbar) functions in much the same way. !hn => hacker news !se => stack exchange !w => wikipedia !r => reddit (Not all of these are forums, natch.)

taitems 9y ago

I had a go at building this general idea as a browser extension about 5 years ago, but abandoned it as writing browser extensions is a pretty fragmented, horrible experience. The general idea was take the current page URL, hit Reddit/HN various APIs and coalesce various posts (multiple for Reddit) and single HN instances (perhaps with and without hashes, "?new" and other reposting conventions).

seepel 9y ago

It often breaks with different query parameters for example on YouTube videos, but I just created a couple of bookmarklets. hn: javascript:window.location.href='https://hn.algolia.com?query='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)%20+%20'&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story' reddit: javascript:(function()%7Bwindow.location.href%20%3D%20%22https%3A%2F%2Freddit.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Durl%3A%22%20%2B%20encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)%7D)()

EpicEng 9y ago

>Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented Good reason? I don't know, probably only because no single platform has become ubiquitous. Of course, as soon as that happens we'll be seeing a lot of comments here about how it's terrible that online discourse is centralized and that people should abstain from using <platform>. In thinking some more, I prefer to spend my time here as opposed to reddit because the level of discourse is just much higher. Can you imagine sifting through potentially _millions_ of comments, many of which are of youtube level quality? Maybe fragmentation is ok here.

zitterbewegung 9y ago
It’s because no one wants to do the job of moderation. Reddit uses moderators to police their subreddits basically for free . All of the founders have been admins which police the moderators or do the things that mods can’t do. It’s not like this phenomena is new. Digg and Slashdot had similar problems . Newsgroups even before that with eternal September. Facebook , LinkedIn and Twitter use paid moderators (but have the pockets to do so) and they still are deluged with issues. Microsoft even has some class action lawsuit over people having PTSD after performing image moderation. 4Chan has had similar problems also. We haven’t gotten even to advertisements that have conflict of interest. Even worse though is that if you have groups that your site allows in and your advertisers see it they will flee you really fast. Also, the fact that those same brands can just buy social network PR services for a fraction of the cost and all of the upside. Even better that they will be platform agnostic which means when reddit gets replaced they will still be there.

ad_hominem 9y ago

There's a W3C Web standard that is supposed to address this (Annotations), but I don't think it has gotten much traction yet: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar...

Nicholas7900 9y ago

COMPOSITE HACKS If Truly you Are In Need Of A PROFESSIONAL LEGIT HACKER Who Will Get Your Job Done Efficiently With Swift Response, Congratulations, You Have Met the Right HACKERS. WHO ARE COMPOSITE HACKS??? • We are a Team Of Professional HACKERS , a product of the coming together of Legit Hackers from the Dark-Web, (pentaguard,CyberBerkut, RedHack , Black Hat, White Hack ) we have been existing for over 12years, our system is a veryStrong and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas and directives. JOB GUARANTEE: • Frankly speaking, I always give a 100% guarantee on any job we are been asked to do, because we have always been successful in Almost all our jobs for over 12years and our clients can testify to that .To hack any thing needs time though, but we can provide a swift response to your job depending on how fast and urgent you need it.Time also depends on what exactly you want to hack and how serious you are.Enough time with social engineering is required for hacking.So if you want to bind us in a short time, then just don't contact us because We can't hack within 30minutes,sorry.Basically, time depends on your luck.If its good luck, then it is possible to hack within 30minutes but, if it is in the other way round, it would take few hours.I have seen FAKE HACKERS claiming they can hack in 30min, 20min , but there is no REAL HACKER who can say this (AVOID THEM). Please Note : we have only one contact email : compositehacks@gmail.com We will be happy to have you join over 2000 satisfied clients around the world to use our services. OUR HACKING CAPABILITIES: There are so many Reasons why people need to hire a hacker, It might be to Hack a Websites to deface , retrieve information, edit information or give you admin access Some people might need us for Hacking any smart phone giving you access to all activities onthe phone like , text messages , call logs , Social media Apps and other informations.Some might need to Hack a Facebook , gmail, yahoomail, Instagram , twitter and every other social network Accounts, Some might need to Hack into Court's Database to Clear criminal records.However we can also Hack into school's websites (server) to change grades without any trace, Also Some Individuals might want to Track someone else's Location probably for investigation cases. All these Are what we can get Done withing few hours. SOME OTHER SPECIAL SERVICES WE OFFER: Hacking and sales of Programmed credit cards & CREDIT CARD TOP-UP Sales of untraceable phones (even the pentagon can not track our phones) Sales of Tutorial packs for Beginner Ethical Hackers. You can also contact us for other Cyber Attacks And Hijackings, we do almost All. Contact Us for Your Desired Service Via: compositehacks@gmail.com We Treat Every Request With Utmost Confidentiality

rayalez 9y ago

I just add links to HN/reddit threads at the end of my posts. Simple and elegant solution.

Alex3917 9y ago

> when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so Surprised no one else has pointed this out, but that was one of the original problems that Disqus was trying to solve. E.g.: https://www.usv.com/blog/disqus https://www.usv.com/blog/disqus

frankquist 9y ago

There used to be the Trackback system that would allow someone to write blog post and "ping" the blog post they wrote the response to. I am not sure what happened to that system.

skymt 9y ago
It was massively abused by spammers.

franciscop 9y ago

I tried to do this but I was told to stop by HN itself: https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ Seriously thinking about giving it a spin, remove the parts that HN was not happy with and relaunch it.

rahulroy9202 9y ago
what are the parts that HN was not happy with?

ploggingdev 9y ago

There's a standard for that called Webmention, but it's not widely used : https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention You can see it in action on this page : https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/ https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/

hmans 9y ago
And there's a beautiful little tool named Bridgy that can pull replies/mentions off Twitter and Facebook and turn them into Indieweb-able entities. It's all really quite great, but of course assumes the terrible, terrible inconvenience of running your own website.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Bridgy is only able to see the comments one's social media account, like one's Facebook account, gets notified about, right? If some to me complete strangers start talking on FB about a post I made, I won't get to know about that via Bridgy? But if some friends of mine, whose comments my FB connected Bridgy account gets notified about, start talking about the blog post, Bridgy detects that?