Annotation is supposed to be a private activity. Personally, I annotate on the web only in the course of specific research activity. When annotation meets comm

Annotation is supposed to be a private activity. Personally, I annotate on the web only in the course of specific research activity. When annotation meets comments in the public sphere, (like on hypothes.is or genius.com), there is a potential, theoretically, to makes discussions more focused. But there are practical problems: - Most comment threads work best in short/intense life cycles. As the Ask HN today about Longer Discussions [1] shows, it is difficult to make them last for a few days, let alone make replies stick forever to their sources. - A lot of comments are either only tangentially related to the article or just a general reaction to it. It is an open kind of dialogue. Even if one message uses quotes, its replies will often drift away. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665272