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Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform

285 points by karlicoss 6y ago

smarx007 6y ago
I tried them a while ago. Really liked it but put it aside till they implement https://www.w3.org/annotation/ https://www.w3.org/annotation/ as promised. Just checked https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/ 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%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc+w3c https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aope.... The post I took as a promise: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar...
- smarx007 6y ago
  Slightly on a tangent, but https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues/777 https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues/777 could be a good target for https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ to address. The Web Annotation Vocabulary is defined in RDF, so there should be zero overhead.
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    I'm not entirely up-to-date on the annotation spec, but if all that's needed is to host the annotations somewhere, then Solid should already support that. It's just not really clear to me how a user should find out that there are annotations about a page available somewhere. (I work with Solid.)
    - jchook 6y ago
      This seems pretty critical. I imagine the concept of annotations would benefit from "communities" of annotators who have a common interest. Otherwise popular pages may get annotation overload and have a poor news-to-noise ratio.
    - the_duke 6y ago
      Do you have views on the state and direction of Solid? I check up on it every few months, and it seems like nothing has really happened since the announcement years ago. The spec is mostly a stub , with no activity on Github. There still seems to be only the node-solid-server implementation, which also sees almost no work. Inrupt seems to have tried linking with/appropriating the project for the company brand for a while, which also felt weird.
      - Vinnl 6y ago
        There is quite a bit of activity happening around the spec, I believe (though I'm not following it too closely), but lots is spread around a number of different repositories [1], and it's not immediately clear which are active. (People are discussing how to improve that [2].) In terms of servers: there has indeed not been too much activity there recently, which relates to efforts having mostly focused on stabilising the spec (as far as I've seen, at least) rather than new things having been added. It's undeniable that Inrupt and the project are very intertwined, given how many of the original project members are working for/with Inrupt, and it being founded by TimBL. I think both the community and Inrupt are still figuring out the best way to work together. And I think we've had the reverse problem as well to some extent, where the community might be making themselves a bit too dependent on Inrupt. I think the project can grow in two (complimentary) ways: top-down, with large organisations getting the project adopted at scale in big bangs, and bottom-up, where early adopters encourage additional adoption and it spreading from there. Inrupt is probably best positioned to support the former, but we haven't seen too much from the latter yet. That said, there are a number of community projects that aim to make a dent there, and the best way to keep up with those is through the This Month in Solid newsletter [3]. (Note: these are my personal views.) [1] https://github.com/solid/process/blob/master/panels.md https://github.com/solid/process/blob/master/panels.md [2] https://github.com/solid/process/issues/202 https://github.com/solid/process/issues/202 [3] https://solidproject.org/newsletter https://solidproject.org/newsletter
- woah 6y ago
  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
  - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
    Rather, OP is probably already using one and don't see the point of migrating to yet another closed system.
    - tedmiston 6y ago
      Hypothesis has an open API - https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/ https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/
      - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
        It's not the matter. If you use a saas, unless it's open source and you can self host, you are at the mercy of it. If the service is good enough and the team behind it seems in good faith, it can give you confidence for the switch. But promising to adopt a standard then not doing it doesn't inspire confidence. The system being closed source (no open API can change that), they need to build trust with some users. Particularly the tech saavy ones that have been burnt in the past and hold data that is precious to them.
        the_duke 6y ago
        Both the frontend and server seem to be open source. https://github.com/hypothesis/h https://github.com/hypothesis/h https://github.com/hypothesis/client https://github.com/hypothesis/client
        BiteCode_dev 6y ago
        Then I stand corrected. If it's open source, and it's just a matter of following a standard, I don't think it's a reason for not giving it a try.
- aeontech 6y ago
  A sibling comment points out that it seems to be implemented here: https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/master/h/presenters/annotation_jsonld.py https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/master/h/presenters/ann... Or is this something different from what you have in mind?
heyoo 6y ago
Clever domain!
xnx 6y ago
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 right along the content instead of being hidden away where no reader of the content could find them.
- kirubakaran 6y ago
  Hey I'm working on exactly this with https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/
  - shigeo 6y ago
    Nice idea! Some cheapshots: 1. The comments aspect of this doesn't really jump out at me from the landing page. 2. The words "knowledge base" scare most people. 3. "You will be our customer and we promise to treat you the way we’d like to be treated too… with respect" is much more ominous with ellipsis than it would be with an em dash or a colon.
    - kirubakaran 6y ago
      Thank you. Great points. I'll fix that.
  - armitron 6y ago
    We've had enough problems stemming from the powerful parasitic middlemen that have ruined the Internet, we don't need more of them. Why would I ever give you my data? Because you promise not to sell it? Sorry that's not going to fly.
    - kirubakaran 6y ago
      I understand. Thanks for the feedback. I think about this too. I'm not an anonymous person. I've been a Hacker News user since the very beginning. I share my contact info in my profile. My reputation is my livelihood. I've never done anything shady and don't intend to start now :-) So I'd like to believe that people see that judge for themselves whether to trust me or not. Knowing who is behind a product, at least for me personally, makes a difference. Just a couple of days ago I started a Youtube channel to openly talk about my thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHkgOonAQd5haT8HHJhpg6g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHkgOonAQd5haT8HHJhpg6g But yeah I hear your concerns, and I respect your decision to not use my app.
erikig 6y ago
It seems like annotation is coming into its own. In addition to the W3 standard, there are a lot of interesting UI/UX ideas in the space for instance this UI/UX that was posted by Azlen Elza (in Twitter) that would be perfect for annotation. https://twitter.com/azlenelza/status/1272600877493137408 https://twitter.com/azlenelza/status/1272600877493137408
pivic 6y ago
I've used Hypothesis for years. Very good blog support (plugin for WordPress) and built with WC3 in mind. Very fast support. Great tool.
ncr100 6y ago
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 Internet enables.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tedmiston 6y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJyqfRcyYIQ
onyva 6y ago
My biggest problem with it was the lack of support for frames. Many sites I use serve documents in frames making hypothes.is unable to see them. Also, why not work with NextCloud and create an app to annotate documents there. NextCloud over public or private share?
- karlicoss 6y ago
  In a way, Nextcloud is a silo (even though it's open source and can be selfhosted). If you annotate documents there, you'd have to snapshot the page and move it into the app which kills the social function? In contrast, Hypothesis only keeps track of the metadata and uses fuzzy anchoring to make it resilient to the markup changes.
godzillabrennus 6y ago
These guys have been working on this problem for years and have a cool solution if you have a budget: http://www.myire.com http://www.myire.com
mempko 6y ago
Love this but please for the love of everything holy make a firefox extension. The bookmarklet works but you only see annotations if I click on the link. It's sad and clear chrome is the new IE and mozilla is again the underdog.
- weswpg 6y ago
  Unofficial versions exist https://github.com/Abdillah/hypothesis-firefox https://github.com/Abdillah/hypothesis-firefox The one I use works fine
- nikisweeting 6y ago
  It's pretty easy to do yourself: - https://github.com/nt1m/convert-crx-to-xpi https://github.com/nt1m/convert-crx-to-xpi - https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/23/install-google-chrome-extensions-firefox/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/23/install-google-chrome-exte... - https://shinglyu.com/web/2017/08/07/porting-chrome-extension-to-firefox.html https://shinglyu.com/web/2017/08/07/porting-chrome-extension... - https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/porting-a-google-chrome-extension/ https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/porting-...
- fiatjaf 6y ago
  It's so insulting they have an open issue and said they're working on it for more than 2 years when Firefox extensions framework is 99% compatible with Chrome extensions. Probably just have to repackage and publish, but apparently they can't be bothered.
  - nikisweeting 6y ago
    It's open source, either do it yourself or quit complaining.
mjayhn 6y ago
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 basically a poor mans onboarding tool, I'd love and happily spend some money (not onboarding tool money, those seem to be $1k+/month) on the ability to edit urls, share these, etc. What I envisioned this as letting me do was creating versioned annotations that let me share them to anyone and they can superimpose those annotations on top of any URL that has the same basic structure behind it amazon.com/$myuser/$mycluster$/$myportal etc. I thought it'd be a really killer tool to use for helping new devs learn AWS more easily than digging constantly digging through AWS documentation, ie: "What is lamba? click button 10 quick bullet points on Lambda" sort of thing. A lot of these users will be using localhost, their IP, digitalocean IPs, etc instead of a concrete domain name. It'd be great if we could regex the url strings or something like that. Thanks for your work!
- tedmiston 6y ago
  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.
vonnik 6y ago
Quick background. Hypothes.is was founded by Dan Whaley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danwhaley https://www.linkedin.com/in/danwhaley Dan built and sold an Internet travel app in the 90s, and then became involved in climate work. He's been committed to it for many years. Hypothes.is was created in order to address the problem of disinformation on the Internet, especially related to climate change; e.g. the Wall Street Journal publishes an Op-Ed from Charles Koch denying that human activity is contributing to global warming, and an annotation channel run by climate scientists can dissect it point by point. I respect and admire that vision, and I think it's trying to get to one of the root causes of climate change denialism. (Obviously, Hypothes.is has many other great uses!)
- mjayhn 6y ago
  Wow that's interesting. This makes total sense as to why you can't change URLs then (which I just posted my use case needs), I suppose to maintain provenance on the original documentation. I hadn't considered that.
nkingsy 6y ago
I interviewed with this little company back in 2014 trying to land my first dev gig. Didn’t get the job but I would’ve taken it for less money if they’d offered. Impressed they’re still going! I’ve worked for two failed startups since.
hliyan 6y ago
Privacy question: is this typical wording? "By giving us this information, you agree to it being collected, used, disclosed, transferred to the USA and stored by us." Does "USA" here mean the geographical USA, the legal jurisdiction, citizens of the USA or the government of the USA?
- throwaway744678 6y ago
  It probably means their servers are hosted in the USA (geographical) under it's jurisdiction. Not sure what "citizens of the USA" means in this context, but you can assume the US government may access the data if needed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vannevar 6y ago
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?
- clairity 6y ago
  yes, it would be interesting to dig into the reasons for why it didn't/doesn't catch on. is it a UX issue? discoverability? small market/need? monetization? tragedy of the commons? community-building?
- jerf 6y ago
  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 often, and public annotations inevitably descend into madness and chaos, even worse than comment sections which have the courtesy to at least be isolated on the page to a certain area. On these pages, trying to use the annotation software is worse than not using it at all. On the right are the pages that nobody visits, so when you visit them, there is no chance of any annotations being on the page, nor any chance that if you leave any annotations anybody will ever see them, or care if they do (i.e., just giving people a directory of "rarely annotated pages" doesn't solve the problem, the problem is that nobody cares about these pages anyhow). Annotation software doesn't harm these pages technically, but the user experience is at best that the user will just forget about their annotation software, and at worst, they'll feel alone on the page, a concept not previously in their mental model and one that is not contributing to a positive assessment of the annotation software. In between is the sweet spot, where participation is adequate that the annotation software brings some sort of value, but it isn't just overwhelming chaos. I submit to you that viewed through the power law lens, that sweet spot is actually fairly narrow. Moreover, if you slice through a single user's browser history looking for when they hit pages in that sweet spot, it'll still be the minority of pages that they viewed, so basically by statistical necessity, the pages where the software added value must be a tiny minority of the pages you visit. The majority of pages they visit, the annotation software experience ranges from extremely net negative to at best neutral, and it's hard for the positive experiences to make up for that. Moreover, this sweet spot is moving. As more of the general public tries out your software, the sweet spot moves to the right, which also has the effect when viewed from a single user's point of view of making the pages where it is useful become more rare. When you're just starting out and you've got a 100 users, the useful pages are things like "the front page of CNN" and "the hot wikipedia article about $CURRENT_EVENT", but as your user count increases it moves down to specific articles on CNN and only the linked content from the $CURRENT_EVENT, then only to archival content on CNN and random Wikipedia pages, and just in general into stuff that becomes increasingly difficult for it to be any significant percentage of the pages you visit. I think this is why A: They can't get popular B: the ones that I know about that have been around for a while and are therefore presumably successful enough for someone to consider them worthwhile can only stay so provided they don't get more popular and C: there's no chance you can make money in this space because you get an anti-network effect... the more users you get, the less valuable the service becomes to every existing user! I think this is also why it seems like such an appealing idea. You create a prototype, get a couple of friends on it, it seems like fun and to be useful. You annotate some popular pages, you have some similar interests and you annotate, I dunno, the latest game console announcement or something, and it seems like fun. The problem is, rather than this being the worst the experience will ever be as it just gets better and better as more people come online, this is the best it will ever be. Also, I can tell you from the first couple of times around that if this did become popular, the content producers of the Internet would fight you tooth and nail. They did the first couple of times when the math sort of worked to at least get to the point that these things could get in the news. With the web so much larger and power-law-y and the anti-network effect correspondingly so much more powerful, now this sort of thing can't even be successful enough to so much as get noticed by anyone before it has already collapsed. (I specifically said "generalized" annotation at the top, because specialized use cases can get around some of these issues. But it's going to be hard to make any money on the size of user base you can support, because while you can mitigate the anti-network effect, it's always going to be looming over you if you try to get large enough.)
jborichevskiy 6y ago
Love this project. I definitely have some long-term concerns around filtering out spammers and being able to grok a heavily annotated page with resolved/unresolved conversations but I have faith they'll figure them out. In the meantime, I've embedded the sidebar into my site [0] and hope more people do the same! Original idea from this [1] post. 0 - https://jborichevskiy.com/about-blog https://jborichevskiy.com/about-blog 1 - https://blog.cjeller.site/annotate-this-post https://blog.cjeller.site/annotate-this-post
kebman 6y ago
I tried to see myself out, but all that happened was that the wall behind the door became blue. In all seriousness, I was just curious if he had some cool "see-yourself-out" site that he'd send you to, like some people do, but no such luck this time. So I guess I'm stuck with linear regression, then. It's a pretty interesting topic anyway. :)
genericone 6y ago
Like dissenter but instead of a comments section you can annotate anywhere?
hinkley 6y ago
A little-known feature of NCSA Mosaic for Windows was a sort of annotation system built into it. So little-known, in fact, that by the time Netscape Navigator 1.0 shipped, nobody on the Mosaic team claimed any knowledge of how the damned thing worked. That information left with the original team. Every so often over the years I have recalled that feature and wished it had survived, especially when some organization desperately needs a watchdog group calling them on their bullshit. Comment systems carved out a piece of that problem domain, but I’ve always wished for comments curated by an independent party. Which I am sure is how we got Digg, Reddit, and HN.
holler 6y ago
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.
- tedmiston 6y ago
  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.
kontxt 6y ago
I'm the founder of a new service in this space: https://www.kontxt.io 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.
tgbugs 6y ago
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 https://github.com/SciCrunch/scibot 1. https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/master/h/presenters/annotation_jsonld.py https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/master/h/presenters/ann...
- antman 6y ago
  Did you guys use your own setup?
  - tgbugs 6y ago
    No, we retain a local copy of the annotations, but that's about it. Last time I checked the hypothes.is client didn't have the ability to use an arbitrary backend. We did at one point create a fork of the web extension that could point to an arbitrary backend but the maintenance overhead ended up not being worth it.
robertlagrant 6y ago
Web Graffiti as a Service! Seriously though, I always wondered why something like this didn't exist. Very cool.
jordic 6y ago
It's so amazing to see them on HN, I learned a ton about python, pyramid, sqlalchemy and elastic on it's repos. So happy to see traction on open source projects! Thank you!
yumraj 6y ago
Just last year I was looking at annotations in general and potentially using Hypothesis as the initial MVP implementation to solve a problem in a very different, well different from research, market. Unfortunately I got distracted, but I still believe in it and may come back to it again.
zem 6y ago
i wonder if they have any concrete plans to prevent abuse of their platform, a la https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/news-genius-wants-to-annotate-the-entire-web-at-what-cost.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/news-genius-wants-t...
aeontech 6y ago
I wonder if anyone else remembers hoodwink.d by _why For those that don't, it was a locally running proxy service that would inject its own annotation UI into any site you wanted. Basically your own pocket comment/discussion board where you could discuss whatever URL you were on with other users of hoodwink. https://github.com/whymirror/hoodwinkd https://github.com/whymirror/hoodwinkd Also, wow, I can't believe that was 14 years ago. I miss _why.
JohnL4 6y ago
Hypothes.is is great, but: annotations and living documents don't mix. I learned angular 3 years ago by annotating angular.io. Mistake. Now most of my annotations point to deep space because the text is gone or altered beyond recognition. I should have made my annotations stand by themselves.

285 points by karlicoss 6y ago

I tried them a while ago. Really liked it but put it aside till they implement https://www.w3.org/annotation/ https://www.w3.org/annotation/ as promised. Just checked https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/ 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%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc+w3c https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aope.... The post I took as a promise: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar...

smarx007 6y ago
Slightly on a tangent, but https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues/777 https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues/777 could be a good target for https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ to address. The Web Annotation Vocabulary is defined in RDF, so there should be zero overhead.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  I'm not entirely up-to-date on the annotation spec, but if all that's needed is to host the annotations somewhere, then Solid should already support that. It's just not really clear to me how a user should find out that there are annotations about a page available somewhere. (I work with Solid.)
  - jchook 6y ago
    This seems pretty critical. I imagine the concept of annotations would benefit from "communities" of annotators who have a common interest. Otherwise popular pages may get annotation overload and have a poor news-to-noise ratio.
  - the_duke 6y ago
    Do you have views on the state and direction of Solid? I check up on it every few months, and it seems like nothing has really happened since the announcement years ago. The spec is mostly a stub , with no activity on Github. There still seems to be only the node-solid-server implementation, which also sees almost no work. Inrupt seems to have tried linking with/appropriating the project for the company brand for a while, which also felt weird.
    - Vinnl 6y ago
      There is quite a bit of activity happening around the spec, I believe (though I'm not following it too closely), but lots is spread around a number of different repositories [1], and it's not immediately clear which are active. (People are discussing how to improve that [2].) In terms of servers: there has indeed not been too much activity there recently, which relates to efforts having mostly focused on stabilising the spec (as far as I've seen, at least) rather than new things having been added. It's undeniable that Inrupt and the project are very intertwined, given how many of the original project members are working for/with Inrupt, and it being founded by TimBL. I think both the community and Inrupt are still figuring out the best way to work together. And I think we've had the reverse problem as well to some extent, where the community might be making themselves a bit too dependent on Inrupt. I think the project can grow in two (complimentary) ways: top-down, with large organisations getting the project adopted at scale in big bangs, and bottom-up, where early adopters encourage additional adoption and it spreading from there. Inrupt is probably best positioned to support the former, but we haven't seen too much from the latter yet. That said, there are a number of community projects that aim to make a dent there, and the best way to keep up with those is through the This Month in Solid newsletter [3]. (Note: these are my personal views.) [1] https://github.com/solid/process/blob/master/panels.md https://github.com/solid/process/blob/master/panels.md [2] https://github.com/solid/process/issues/202 https://github.com/solid/process/issues/202 [3] https://solidproject.org/newsletter https://solidproject.org/newsletter
woah 6y ago
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
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  Rather, OP is probably already using one and don't see the point of migrating to yet another closed system.
  - tedmiston 6y ago
    Hypothesis has an open API - https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/ https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/
    - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
      It's not the matter. If you use a saas, unless it's open source and you can self host, you are at the mercy of it. If the service is good enough and the team behind it seems in good faith, it can give you confidence for the switch. But promising to adopt a standard then not doing it doesn't inspire confidence. The system being closed source (no open API can change that), they need to build trust with some users. Particularly the tech saavy ones that have been burnt in the past and hold data that is precious to them.
      - the_duke 6y ago
        Both the frontend and server seem to be open source. https://github.com/hypothesis/h https://github.com/hypothesis/h https://github.com/hypothesis/client https://github.com/hypothesis/client
        BiteCode_dev 6y ago
        Then I stand corrected. If it's open source, and it's just a matter of following a standard, I don't think it's a reason for not giving it a try.
aeontech 6y ago
A sibling comment points out that it seems to be implemented here: https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/master/h/presenters/annotation_jsonld.py https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/master/h/presenters/ann... Or is this something different from what you have in mind?

heyoo 6y ago

Clever domain!

xnx 6y ago

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 right along the content instead of being hidden away where no reader of the content could find them.

kirubakaran 6y ago
Hey I'm working on exactly this with https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/
- shigeo 6y ago
  Nice idea! Some cheapshots: 1. The comments aspect of this doesn't really jump out at me from the landing page. 2. The words "knowledge base" scare most people. 3. "You will be our customer and we promise to treat you the way we’d like to be treated too… with respect" is much more ominous with ellipsis than it would be with an em dash or a colon.
  - kirubakaran 6y ago
    Thank you. Great points. I'll fix that.
- armitron 6y ago
  We've had enough problems stemming from the powerful parasitic middlemen that have ruined the Internet, we don't need more of them. Why would I ever give you my data? Because you promise not to sell it? Sorry that's not going to fly.
  - kirubakaran 6y ago
    I understand. Thanks for the feedback. I think about this too. I'm not an anonymous person. I've been a Hacker News user since the very beginning. I share my contact info in my profile. My reputation is my livelihood. I've never done anything shady and don't intend to start now :-) So I'd like to believe that people see that judge for themselves whether to trust me or not. Knowing who is behind a product, at least for me personally, makes a difference. Just a couple of days ago I started a Youtube channel to openly talk about my thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHkgOonAQd5haT8HHJhpg6g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHkgOonAQd5haT8HHJhpg6g But yeah I hear your concerns, and I respect your decision to not use my app.

erikig 6y ago

It seems like annotation is coming into its own. In addition to the W3 standard, there are a lot of interesting UI/UX ideas in the space for instance this UI/UX that was posted by Azlen Elza (in Twitter) that would be perfect for annotation. https://twitter.com/azlenelza/status/1272600877493137408 https://twitter.com/azlenelza/status/1272600877493137408

pivic 6y ago

I've used Hypothesis for years. Very good blog support (plugin for WordPress) and built with WC3 in mind. Very fast support. Great tool.

ncr100 6y ago

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 Internet enables.

deleted 6y ago
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tedmiston 6y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJyqfRcyYIQ

onyva 6y ago

My biggest problem with it was the lack of support for frames. Many sites I use serve documents in frames making hypothes.is unable to see them. Also, why not work with NextCloud and create an app to annotate documents there. NextCloud over public or private share?

karlicoss 6y ago
In a way, Nextcloud is a silo (even though it's open source and can be selfhosted). If you annotate documents there, you'd have to snapshot the page and move it into the app which kills the social function? In contrast, Hypothesis only keeps track of the metadata and uses fuzzy anchoring to make it resilient to the markup changes.

godzillabrennus 6y ago

These guys have been working on this problem for years and have a cool solution if you have a budget: http://www.myire.com http://www.myire.com

mempko 6y ago

Love this but please for the love of everything holy make a firefox extension. The bookmarklet works but you only see annotations if I click on the link. It's sad and clear chrome is the new IE and mozilla is again the underdog.

weswpg 6y ago
Unofficial versions exist https://github.com/Abdillah/hypothesis-firefox https://github.com/Abdillah/hypothesis-firefox The one I use works fine
nikisweeting 6y ago
It's pretty easy to do yourself: - https://github.com/nt1m/convert-crx-to-xpi https://github.com/nt1m/convert-crx-to-xpi - https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/23/install-google-chrome-extensions-firefox/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/23/install-google-chrome-exte... - https://shinglyu.com/web/2017/08/07/porting-chrome-extension-to-firefox.html https://shinglyu.com/web/2017/08/07/porting-chrome-extension... - https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/porting-a-google-chrome-extension/ https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/porting-...
fiatjaf 6y ago
It's so insulting they have an open issue and said they're working on it for more than 2 years when Firefox extensions framework is 99% compatible with Chrome extensions. Probably just have to repackage and publish, but apparently they can't be bothered.
- nikisweeting 6y ago
  It's open source, either do it yourself or quit complaining.

mjayhn 6y ago

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 basically a poor mans onboarding tool, I'd love and happily spend some money (not onboarding tool money, those seem to be $1k+/month) on the ability to edit urls, share these, etc. What I envisioned this as letting me do was creating versioned annotations that let me share them to anyone and they can superimpose those annotations on top of any URL that has the same basic structure behind it amazon.com/$myuser/$mycluster$/$myportal etc. I thought it'd be a really killer tool to use for helping new devs learn AWS more easily than digging constantly digging through AWS documentation, ie: "What is lamba? click button 10 quick bullet points on Lambda" sort of thing. A lot of these users will be using localhost, their IP, digitalocean IPs, etc instead of a concrete domain name. It'd be great if we could regex the url strings or something like that. Thanks for your work!

tedmiston 6y ago
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.

vonnik 6y ago

Quick background. Hypothes.is was founded by Dan Whaley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danwhaley https://www.linkedin.com/in/danwhaley Dan built and sold an Internet travel app in the 90s, and then became involved in climate work. He's been committed to it for many years. Hypothes.is was created in order to address the problem of disinformation on the Internet, especially related to climate change; e.g. the Wall Street Journal publishes an Op-Ed from Charles Koch denying that human activity is contributing to global warming, and an annotation channel run by climate scientists can dissect it point by point. I respect and admire that vision, and I think it's trying to get to one of the root causes of climate change denialism. (Obviously, Hypothes.is has many other great uses!)

mjayhn 6y ago
Wow that's interesting. This makes total sense as to why you can't change URLs then (which I just posted my use case needs), I suppose to maintain provenance on the original documentation. I hadn't considered that.

nkingsy 6y ago

I interviewed with this little company back in 2014 trying to land my first dev gig. Didn’t get the job but I would’ve taken it for less money if they’d offered. Impressed they’re still going! I’ve worked for two failed startups since.

hliyan 6y ago

Privacy question: is this typical wording? "By giving us this information, you agree to it being collected, used, disclosed, transferred to the USA and stored by us." Does "USA" here mean the geographical USA, the legal jurisdiction, citizens of the USA or the government of the USA?

throwaway744678 6y ago
It probably means their servers are hosted in the USA (geographical) under it's jurisdiction. Not sure what "citizens of the USA" means in this context, but you can assume the US government may access the data if needed.

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vannevar 6y ago

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?

clairity 6y ago
yes, it would be interesting to dig into the reasons for why it didn't/doesn't catch on. is it a UX issue? discoverability? small market/need? monetization? tragedy of the commons? community-building?
jerf 6y ago
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 often, and public annotations inevitably descend into madness and chaos, even worse than comment sections which have the courtesy to at least be isolated on the page to a certain area. On these pages, trying to use the annotation software is worse than not using it at all. On the right are the pages that nobody visits, so when you visit them, there is no chance of any annotations being on the page, nor any chance that if you leave any annotations anybody will ever see them, or care if they do (i.e., just giving people a directory of "rarely annotated pages" doesn't solve the problem, the problem is that nobody cares about these pages anyhow). Annotation software doesn't harm these pages technically, but the user experience is at best that the user will just forget about their annotation software, and at worst, they'll feel alone on the page, a concept not previously in their mental model and one that is not contributing to a positive assessment of the annotation software. In between is the sweet spot, where participation is adequate that the annotation software brings some sort of value, but it isn't just overwhelming chaos. I submit to you that viewed through the power law lens, that sweet spot is actually fairly narrow. Moreover, if you slice through a single user's browser history looking for when they hit pages in that sweet spot, it'll still be the minority of pages that they viewed, so basically by statistical necessity, the pages where the software added value must be a tiny minority of the pages you visit. The majority of pages they visit, the annotation software experience ranges from extremely net negative to at best neutral, and it's hard for the positive experiences to make up for that. Moreover, this sweet spot is moving. As more of the general public tries out your software, the sweet spot moves to the right, which also has the effect when viewed from a single user's point of view of making the pages where it is useful become more rare. When you're just starting out and you've got a 100 users, the useful pages are things like "the front page of CNN" and "the hot wikipedia article about $CURRENT_EVENT", but as your user count increases it moves down to specific articles on CNN and only the linked content from the $CURRENT_EVENT, then only to archival content on CNN and random Wikipedia pages, and just in general into stuff that becomes increasingly difficult for it to be any significant percentage of the pages you visit. I think this is why A: They can't get popular B: the ones that I know about that have been around for a while and are therefore presumably successful enough for someone to consider them worthwhile can only stay so provided they don't get more popular and C: there's no chance you can make money in this space because you get an anti-network effect... the more users you get, the less valuable the service becomes to every existing user! I think this is also why it seems like such an appealing idea. You create a prototype, get a couple of friends on it, it seems like fun and to be useful. You annotate some popular pages, you have some similar interests and you annotate, I dunno, the latest game console announcement or something, and it seems like fun. The problem is, rather than this being the worst the experience will ever be as it just gets better and better as more people come online, this is the best it will ever be. Also, I can tell you from the first couple of times around that if this did become popular, the content producers of the Internet would fight you tooth and nail. They did the first couple of times when the math sort of worked to at least get to the point that these things could get in the news. With the web so much larger and power-law-y and the anti-network effect correspondingly so much more powerful, now this sort of thing can't even be successful enough to so much as get noticed by anyone before it has already collapsed. (I specifically said "generalized" annotation at the top, because specialized use cases can get around some of these issues. But it's going to be hard to make any money on the size of user base you can support, because while you can mitigate the anti-network effect, it's always going to be looming over you if you try to get large enough.)

jborichevskiy 6y ago

Love this project. I definitely have some long-term concerns around filtering out spammers and being able to grok a heavily annotated page with resolved/unresolved conversations but I have faith they'll figure them out. In the meantime, I've embedded the sidebar into my site [0] and hope more people do the same! Original idea from this [1] post. 0 - https://jborichevskiy.com/about-blog https://jborichevskiy.com/about-blog 1 - https://blog.cjeller.site/annotate-this-post https://blog.cjeller.site/annotate-this-post

kebman 6y ago

I tried to see myself out, but all that happened was that the wall behind the door became blue. In all seriousness, I was just curious if he had some cool "see-yourself-out" site that he'd send you to, like some people do, but no such luck this time. So I guess I'm stuck with linear regression, then. It's a pretty interesting topic anyway. :)

genericone 6y ago

Like dissenter but instead of a comments section you can annotate anywhere?

hinkley 6y ago

A little-known feature of NCSA Mosaic for Windows was a sort of annotation system built into it. So little-known, in fact, that by the time Netscape Navigator 1.0 shipped, nobody on the Mosaic team claimed any knowledge of how the damned thing worked. That information left with the original team. Every so often over the years I have recalled that feature and wished it had survived, especially when some organization desperately needs a watchdog group calling them on their bullshit. Comment systems carved out a piece of that problem domain, but I’ve always wished for comments curated by an independent party. Which I am sure is how we got Digg, Reddit, and HN.

holler 6y ago

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.

tedmiston 6y ago
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.

kontxt 6y ago

I'm the founder of a new service in this space: https://www.kontxt.io 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.

tgbugs 6y ago

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

antman 6y ago
Did you guys use your own setup?
- tgbugs 6y ago
  No, we retain a local copy of the annotations, but that's about it. Last time I checked the hypothes.is client didn't have the ability to use an arbitrary backend. We did at one point create a fork of the web extension that could point to an arbitrary backend but the maintenance overhead ended up not being worth it.

robertlagrant 6y ago

Web Graffiti as a Service! Seriously though, I always wondered why something like this didn't exist. Very cool.

jordic 6y ago

It's so amazing to see them on HN, I learned a ton about python, pyramid, sqlalchemy and elastic on it's repos. So happy to see traction on open source projects! Thank you!

yumraj 6y ago

Just last year I was looking at annotations in general and potentially using Hypothesis as the initial MVP implementation to solve a problem in a very different, well different from research, market. Unfortunately I got distracted, but I still believe in it and may come back to it again.

zem 6y ago

i wonder if they have any concrete plans to prevent abuse of their platform, a la https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/news-genius-wants-to-annotate-the-entire-web-at-what-cost.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/news-genius-wants-t...

aeontech 6y ago

I wonder if anyone else remembers hoodwink.d by _why For those that don't, it was a locally running proxy service that would inject its own annotation UI into any site you wanted. Basically your own pocket comment/discussion board where you could discuss whatever URL you were on with other users of hoodwink. https://github.com/whymirror/hoodwinkd https://github.com/whymirror/hoodwinkd Also, wow, I can't believe that was 14 years ago. I miss _why.

JohnL4 6y ago

Hypothes.is is great, but: annotations and living documents don't mix. I learned angular 3 years ago by annotating angular.io. Mistake. Now most of my annotations point to deep space because the text is gone or altered beyond recognition. I should have made my annotations stand by themselves.