8 ms·

Google Sidewiki

134 points by r721 3y ago

hospitalJail 3y ago
This sounds great. Although, we basically have the same thing when people share links and people comment on them. Classic Google though. Gosh Google was the chosen one, how far they have fallen.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  This is an example of how Google valued shipping new products but put little emphasis on keeping those products active. Someone would get a project like this approved, push through a delivery, collect their bonus and/or promotion and then move on to a new product. My understanding is that these services shutdown because the team behind them has also moved on.
- xnx 3y ago
  > Although, we basically have the same thing when people share links and people comment on them. True, but having the comments appear naturally in context makes all the difference. Imagine seeing comments/corrections on a New York Times article that aren't moderated by the paper, or comments on a real estate listing that list all the problems that the listing omits, or reviews of a show on Netflix, etc.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    > real estate listing that list all the problems that the listing omits For rental properties, or for houses for sale you mean?
    - xnx 3y ago
      Both! I see a lot of real estate listings where I'm sure the average browser is unaware that a large construction project is about to begin on an adjacent property and ruin their views. For rental listings, prospective tenants might not know about excessive noise from a nearby road.
- jasfi 3y ago
  The tool was discontinued because site owners didn't like people creating sideways content without anything they could do about it. E.g. moderation.
hexage1814 3y ago
I remember this, I always found the concept fascinating. But looking back, looking at what the web has become, there was no chance this could have ever worked. At best, it being centralized, it would have become essentially a Google controled social-media-ish space where all the "inconvenient" comments would be removed anyway. Probably Google would even disable the comments on some pages, like disabling sidewiki comments on the pages of some big newspaper that demanded Google to do it because people were criticizing that giving media outlet. Let alone the sheer problem of dealing with spam, which, specially now with LLMs will get much harder to filter. All these things could have been solved and dealt with it one way or the other, if we REALLY wanted. But ultimately, I think there was no interest on the people who maintain the internet, the people who create the tools that most use to access the internet: there is no reason why they would keep a tool that would allow people to voice their opinions. On the contrary, what we have been seeing on the internet is precisely the oppose happening. They removed the dislikes, they removed comments in many videos. Hell, Netflix used to have an option where people could leave reviews on the movies they watched. The internet of 2020 is clean and "family-friendly" and "politically correct" and it fits the narrative and the current thing, and they knee before the big corporations and anything that could hurt their brand must be eliminated. In the 2020s internet there is no space for a service like Google Sidewiki, and even if someone build this as an open standard, and even if the spam issue wasn't a problem... Google, Apple and Microsoft would never implement and built this feature on their browsers, and most people using the internet are too noobs to sideload an extension themselves that enables this feature to a point of it gaining enough of a userbase to matter and actually be useful. In short, this whole product is a child of a more naive internet where people still believe that services could actually be better. Funnily enough, Gab launched a similar extension called "Dissenter" some years later and it got banned from Chrome and Mozilla extension stores.
- alexghr 3y ago
  Just raising this since people might not know about it, but this is a Web standard now https://www.w3.org/annotation/ https://www.w3.org/annotation/. There are a couple of companies which have created browser plugins for this.
  - 3y ago
rzzzt 3y ago
Didn't a version of this exist where you could collaboratively draw over any website using its contents as the background? (You can also guess the end result.)
- pmlamotte 3y ago
  I remember this as well from the mid-late 2000s, it was like drawing on the bathroom wall but for the internet.
ankitrgadiya 3y ago
A similar tool is https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/
- captn3m0 3y ago
  They also did a historical survey of various such efforts: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f86L7vgHUW9wSLNNSunhjmtxtg6KlCOVpHGKbqUzW-Y/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f86L7vgHUW9wSLNNSunh.... 72 entries.
- olav 3y ago
  I use Hypothesis a lot. It works on arbitrary sites by just invoking their javascript bookmarklet which I keep in my bookmarks. It is also very easy to integrate with static sites which is nice.
rinze 3y ago
I was going to say "what is this new thing, will they close it soon?" But I was wrong, it isn't new.
operator-name 3y ago
Some small part of this lives on in spirit with https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/
- jjzhuo 3y ago
  This looks great. I wonder why is it not more popular.
  - cxr 3y ago
    I use Hypothesis a lot, and it's underrated, but it's pretty buggy, though. The experience is often not smooth and requires technical understanding to work around roadblocks. E.g. without installing the extension (which is Chrome-only and not available for Firefox) try annotating HN comments.
seliopou 3y ago
Back when The Screen Savers was on ZDTV--and ZDTV existed for that matter--they used to host a chat room for the show that would appear at the bottom of the screen during live broadcasts, kindof like a ticker tape. You accessed the chat room by using a web browser that would turn every URL into a chat room. I don't remember if it was standalone browser or a plugin. I highly doubt it was a plugin but my memory fails me here.
INTPenis 3y ago
Didn't Firefox do something similar for a while? In effect it's not that much different from Reddit, being a link aggregator where people can comment on the links. The main difference would be that it works on any website and it doesn't have to be posted to reddit to spark a thread. I've read people's comments on here but I still think this is a great idea. As long as it's properly executed, meaning there should be no centralized ownership and control. And yes I know that's a catch 22 because there would be no moderation, but let's put that technical detail aside for a moment and focus on the fact that this would allow users to help other users with any website. Whether that be criticism, warnings, or praise, depends on the website!
- xnx 3y ago
  It's more of a challenge than centralized moderation, but spam and other junk comments could be managed through personalized reputation/trust systems, or subscription/collaborative filtering systems.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Maybe a federated wiki? (Since the 'verse is cool right now) Bad actors would probably ruin it :(
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    > federated Make a browser plug-in that searches the URL of the currently shown page on all Kbin and Lemmy instances (federated alternatives to Reddit). Show the comments in a sidebar. That’s a modern federated “Sidewiki” right there :D
    - basch 3y ago
      How about all discussions occurring in major communities. Why ignore places like metafilter and Fark and slashdot.
      - codetrotter 3y ago
xnx 3y ago
I desperately want some annotation service/standard to succeed. The idea goes as at least far back as 1993! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation) Discussion is too important to be subject to the editorial whims to the host of the content it is discussing. I'd love to take the insight of the Hacker News community (for example) everywhere I go on the web.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  There's a chrome extension for that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-says/khgegkjchclhgpglloficdmdannlpmoi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-s...
  - hx2a 3y ago
    Also available for Firefox! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/what-hacker-news-says/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/what-hacker-n... Source code: https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext
- mindslight 3y ago
  I don't think it's for lack of trying. From my understanding, bidirectional links / annotations are the big thing the web is missing compared to Project Xanadu. It seems to be an idea that lots of people get bitten by, never quite goes anywhere in the general sphere, and they end up pivoting to a narrow implementation wholly contained on one website.
- snerbles 3y ago
  Dissenter was one such service, and it caused enough of a stir that its extension was banned by both Google and Mozilla.
  - catgirlinspace 3y ago
    dissenter is made by a far-right social media platform (gab).
RobotToaster 3y ago
IIRC the last time someone tried something like this was dissenter, and that got censored by google and mozilla.
- mistermann 3y ago
  I wanted what the sentiment was in those threads if it was discussed on HN at the time...
Vermeulen 3y ago
Problem with this idea is moderation - Google is not going to moderate a discussion that is happening in the side bar of your site. What is love to see, and tried to make once, is something like this but just shows discussions about a URL from Hacker News/Reddit. Sites that are moderated and people have actual quality discussions (usually). I tried this a long time ago (2014) with a extension project: http://www.3delement.com/?p=394 http://www.3delement.com/?p=394 Searches for discussions and backlinks to your current URL on used. I gave the project up pretty quick but it's still something I'd love to see as a Chrome extension (though might not actually be possible now after the Reddit API changes)
dhosek 3y ago
I’ve wanted a general annotation tool for websites (and email messages) that would be private. It would be nice to be able to attach a note to a message in my inbox about why I’m holding onto it, or to be able to have persistent highlights and annotations on webpages. I guess I’ll just keep dreaming.
- cxr 3y ago
  Hypothesis can be used for private annotations.
mska 3y ago
I had created a browser extension that does the same thing: https://everycomment.top https://everycomment.top The biggest reason why I built it was to be able to get insight from a community on every site. Most web sites don't have comments and some filter a lot so I wanted to have a platform where the website owner can't modify or change the comments from people. I didn't work on finding users though and it has about 10 people using it.
hlandau 3y ago
I remember an extension like this for Firefox called Outfoxed.
- xnx 3y ago
  Indeed! http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell
crazygringo 3y ago
I also desperately want something like this to succeed. I want to be able to see others' reactions on all NYTimes articles, for example, not just the handful each day they enable comments on, or the occasional one submitted to HN. And I want it to have all of the standard functionality -- hierarchical comments (like HN and Reddit), upvoting and downvoting, auto-collapsing tangential threads with less votes (like Reddit), giving more weight to users who are consistently upvoted, etc. But also, I'm not sure if URL's are exactly the right pieces of content to associate with. Not only do you have the problem of determining canonical URL's when sites themselves don't provide them as metadata, but there's a lot of content out there that isn't a webpage: TV episodes, TV series, movies, podcast episodes, podcasts, music tracks, music albums, and so forth. Right now the closest thing there is for some of those (some TV episodes, some podcast episodes) are official posts in dedicated subreddits. It almost makes me wonder if it would need some kind of dedicated URL scheme that could be managed by Wikipedia or MediaWiki or something, like tv://startrek-strangenewworlds.us.2022/s02/e03#tomorrow_and_tomorrow_and_tomorrow.
- paradaux 3y ago
  Your url comment reminds me of the concept of the semantic web [0] Whereby we can have a structured machine readable and pure URL structure backed by ontology and linked data. There's a project that is working on this for Wikipedia called Dbpedia. [1] [0] Unfortunately this concept has been completely bastardized by random research groups shoehorning the technology for EU grants, from my experience working in one such group. [1] https://www.dbpedia.org/ https://www.dbpedia.org/
  - _def 3y ago
    That reminds me of Wikidata[0], which aims to be a general purpose semantic knowledge graph, which runs on Wikibase[1], a MediaWiki extension set that you can run yourself for any collection of data. [0] https://wikidata.org/ https://wikidata.org/ [1] https://wikiba.se/ https://wikiba.se/
- TillE 3y ago
  Funny, I've always hated scrolling down and accidentally seeing comments on news articles, which are almost uniformly garbage. I think it's a terrible way to present any kind of serious story, it makes for a worse experience. If I want to discuss an article, there's Twitter, Reddit, etc. The NYT used to have a good public editor (Margaret Sullivan) you could complain to, but she's long gone. I will say that The Verge has a good approach, where there's a comment section on every story but it's hidden behind a button at the bottom you have to actively click. That's a fine compromise.
albertzeyer 3y ago
There are browser extensions like Reddit Check or What Hacker News Says which will show Reddit and/or HN comments on any website you visit. So it's very similar in functionality. Sometimes it can be useful. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-check/mllceaiaedaingchlgolnfiibippgkmj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-check/mllce... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-says/khgegkjchclhgpglloficdmdannlpmoi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-s... There are more variants of these extensions.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  Piggybacking on existing communities for this feels very practical vs trying to bootstrap something from scratch. (Particularly as it pertains to moderation, spam control, and so on)
- raybb 3y ago
  Hope someone makes a Lemmy version soon!
- udkl 3y ago
  See also : https://hypothes.is https://hypothes.is A lesser known but great tool
  - ListenLinda 3y ago
    Where is the self-hosted variant?
    - type0 3y ago
      https://github.com/hypothesis/h https://github.com/hypothesis/h https://github.com/hypothesis/client https://github.com/hypothesis/client
ihaveajob 3y ago
Didn't one of the most recent versions of Explorer integrate something like this natively? I remember thinking it's neat, but it's hard to reach critical mass, and without reaching it, it's not very useful.
generalpf 3y ago
This is what RapGenius (now called Genius) was trying to do. They gave it up though. https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/08/annotate-this/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/08/annotate-this/amp/
nlawalker 3y ago
I was just thinking about how I wanted something like this the other day - like a lot of other PM-type people at my work, quite a bit of my output is "docs and decks", which I have found carry around a strong "work in progress" vibe. Whether you're sharing one out on your screen in a video call or sending it to someone so they can open it themselves, it's impossible to make a piece of work feel like a finished product, it always feels like a workspace. I'd love to start publishing stuff in the form of static websites or another similar medium, but Word's ability to add annotations to specific runs of text and allow for conversations on them is a must-have.
- nlawalker 3y ago
  Too late to edit, but wanted to ask the question directly: can anyone recommend a static site generator or CMS plugin that adds this functionality to a content-driven site? Anything/any generator or CMS is fine, I'm in the "poking around" phase of getting ideas. It would be for small-scale usage, on the order of a team annotating and discussing simple web content with basic text.
nologic01 3y ago
Maybe there should be a proper wiki for this. A sort of wikipedia but not for abstract knowledge but for url's (that fit a certain profile: blog posts and the like). A browser extension could pull the wiki data when visiting a url that has been commented on. The possibilities for abuse and gaming would be there of-course. As with wikipedia and any multi-user online platforms it would be down to policies, moderator tools and enforcing accountability to try to keep negative patterns spiral out of control. But fundamentally, once a url is permanent published resource it makes sense to think how we document public reactions to it.
streptomycin 3y ago
Today, something like this would not be allowed by any of the major browser vendors without heavy moderation, which probably makes it infeasible. See https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to-support-gabs-dissenter-extension-for-violating-acceptable-use-policy/ https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to...

134 points by r721 3y ago

This sounds great. Although, we basically have the same thing when people share links and people comment on them. Classic Google though. Gosh Google was the chosen one, how far they have fallen.

grepfru_it 3y ago
This is an example of how Google valued shipping new products but put little emphasis on keeping those products active. Someone would get a project like this approved, push through a delivery, collect their bonus and/or promotion and then move on to a new product. My understanding is that these services shutdown because the team behind them has also moved on.
xnx 3y ago
> Although, we basically have the same thing when people share links and people comment on them. True, but having the comments appear naturally in context makes all the difference. Imagine seeing comments/corrections on a New York Times article that aren't moderated by the paper, or comments on a real estate listing that list all the problems that the listing omits, or reviews of a show on Netflix, etc.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  > real estate listing that list all the problems that the listing omits For rental properties, or for houses for sale you mean?
  - xnx 3y ago
    Both! I see a lot of real estate listings where I'm sure the average browser is unaware that a large construction project is about to begin on an adjacent property and ruin their views. For rental listings, prospective tenants might not know about excessive noise from a nearby road.
jasfi 3y ago
The tool was discontinued because site owners didn't like people creating sideways content without anything they could do about it. E.g. moderation.

hexage1814 3y ago

I remember this, I always found the concept fascinating. But looking back, looking at what the web has become, there was no chance this could have ever worked. At best, it being centralized, it would have become essentially a Google controled social-media-ish space where all the "inconvenient" comments would be removed anyway. Probably Google would even disable the comments on some pages, like disabling sidewiki comments on the pages of some big newspaper that demanded Google to do it because people were criticizing that giving media outlet. Let alone the sheer problem of dealing with spam, which, specially now with LLMs will get much harder to filter. All these things could have been solved and dealt with it one way or the other, if we REALLY wanted. But ultimately, I think there was no interest on the people who maintain the internet, the people who create the tools that most use to access the internet: there is no reason why they would keep a tool that would allow people to voice their opinions. On the contrary, what we have been seeing on the internet is precisely the oppose happening. They removed the dislikes, they removed comments in many videos. Hell, Netflix used to have an option where people could leave reviews on the movies they watched. The internet of 2020 is clean and "family-friendly" and "politically correct" and it fits the narrative and the current thing, and they knee before the big corporations and anything that could hurt their brand must be eliminated. In the 2020s internet there is no space for a service like Google Sidewiki, and even if someone build this as an open standard, and even if the spam issue wasn't a problem... Google, Apple and Microsoft would never implement and built this feature on their browsers, and most people using the internet are too noobs to sideload an extension themselves that enables this feature to a point of it gaining enough of a userbase to matter and actually be useful. In short, this whole product is a child of a more naive internet where people still believe that services could actually be better. Funnily enough, Gab launched a similar extension called "Dissenter" some years later and it got banned from Chrome and Mozilla extension stores.

alexghr 3y ago
Just raising this since people might not know about it, but this is a Web standard now https://www.w3.org/annotation/ https://www.w3.org/annotation/. There are a couple of companies which have created browser plugins for this.
- 3y ago

rzzzt 3y ago

Didn't a version of this exist where you could collaboratively draw over any website using its contents as the background? (You can also guess the end result.)

pmlamotte 3y ago
I remember this as well from the mid-late 2000s, it was like drawing on the bathroom wall but for the internet.

ankitrgadiya 3y ago

A similar tool is https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/

captn3m0 3y ago
They also did a historical survey of various such efforts: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f86L7vgHUW9wSLNNSunhjmtxtg6KlCOVpHGKbqUzW-Y/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f86L7vgHUW9wSLNNSunh.... 72 entries.
olav 3y ago
I use Hypothesis a lot. It works on arbitrary sites by just invoking their javascript bookmarklet which I keep in my bookmarks. It is also very easy to integrate with static sites which is nice.

rinze 3y ago

I was going to say "what is this new thing, will they close it soon?" But I was wrong, it isn't new.

operator-name 3y ago

Some small part of this lives on in spirit with https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/

jjzhuo 3y ago
This looks great. I wonder why is it not more popular.
- cxr 3y ago
  I use Hypothesis a lot, and it's underrated, but it's pretty buggy, though. The experience is often not smooth and requires technical understanding to work around roadblocks. E.g. without installing the extension (which is Chrome-only and not available for Firefox) try annotating HN comments.

seliopou 3y ago

Back when The Screen Savers was on ZDTV--and ZDTV existed for that matter--they used to host a chat room for the show that would appear at the bottom of the screen during live broadcasts, kindof like a ticker tape. You accessed the chat room by using a web browser that would turn every URL into a chat room. I don't remember if it was standalone browser or a plugin. I highly doubt it was a plugin but my memory fails me here.

INTPenis 3y ago

Didn't Firefox do something similar for a while? In effect it's not that much different from Reddit, being a link aggregator where people can comment on the links. The main difference would be that it works on any website and it doesn't have to be posted to reddit to spark a thread. I've read people's comments on here but I still think this is a great idea. As long as it's properly executed, meaning there should be no centralized ownership and control. And yes I know that's a catch 22 because there would be no moderation, but let's put that technical detail aside for a moment and focus on the fact that this would allow users to help other users with any website. Whether that be criticism, warnings, or praise, depends on the website!

xnx 3y ago
It's more of a challenge than centralized moderation, but spam and other junk comments could be managed through personalized reputation/trust systems, or subscription/collaborative filtering systems.
bloopernova 3y ago
Maybe a federated wiki? (Since the 'verse is cool right now) Bad actors would probably ruin it :(
- codetrotter 3y ago
  > federated Make a browser plug-in that searches the URL of the currently shown page on all Kbin and Lemmy instances (federated alternatives to Reddit). Show the comments in a sidebar. That’s a modern federated “Sidewiki” right there :D
  - basch 3y ago
    How about all discussions occurring in major communities. Why ignore places like metafilter and Fark and slashdot.
    - codetrotter 3y ago

xnx 3y ago

I desperately want some annotation service/standard to succeed. The idea goes as at least far back as 1993! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation) Discussion is too important to be subject to the editorial whims to the host of the content it is discussing. I'd love to take the insight of the Hacker News community (for example) everywhere I go on the web.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
There's a chrome extension for that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-says/khgegkjchclhgpglloficdmdannlpmoi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-s...
- hx2a 3y ago
  Also available for Firefox! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/what-hacker-news-says/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/what-hacker-n... Source code: https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext
mindslight 3y ago
I don't think it's for lack of trying. From my understanding, bidirectional links / annotations are the big thing the web is missing compared to Project Xanadu. It seems to be an idea that lots of people get bitten by, never quite goes anywhere in the general sphere, and they end up pivoting to a narrow implementation wholly contained on one website.
snerbles 3y ago
Dissenter was one such service, and it caused enough of a stir that its extension was banned by both Google and Mozilla.
- catgirlinspace 3y ago
  dissenter is made by a far-right social media platform (gab).

RobotToaster 3y ago

IIRC the last time someone tried something like this was dissenter, and that got censored by google and mozilla.

mistermann 3y ago
I wanted what the sentiment was in those threads if it was discussed on HN at the time...

Vermeulen 3y ago

Problem with this idea is moderation - Google is not going to moderate a discussion that is happening in the side bar of your site. What is love to see, and tried to make once, is something like this but just shows discussions about a URL from Hacker News/Reddit. Sites that are moderated and people have actual quality discussions (usually). I tried this a long time ago (2014) with a extension project: http://www.3delement.com/?p=394 http://www.3delement.com/?p=394 Searches for discussions and backlinks to your current URL on used. I gave the project up pretty quick but it's still something I'd love to see as a Chrome extension (though might not actually be possible now after the Reddit API changes)

dhosek 3y ago

I’ve wanted a general annotation tool for websites (and email messages) that would be private. It would be nice to be able to attach a note to a message in my inbox about why I’m holding onto it, or to be able to have persistent highlights and annotations on webpages. I guess I’ll just keep dreaming.

cxr 3y ago
Hypothesis can be used for private annotations.

mska 3y ago

I had created a browser extension that does the same thing: https://everycomment.top https://everycomment.top The biggest reason why I built it was to be able to get insight from a community on every site. Most web sites don't have comments and some filter a lot so I wanted to have a platform where the website owner can't modify or change the comments from people. I didn't work on finding users though and it has about 10 people using it.

hlandau 3y ago

I remember an extension like this for Firefox called Outfoxed.

xnx 3y ago
Indeed! http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell

crazygringo 3y ago

I also desperately want something like this to succeed. I want to be able to see others' reactions on all NYTimes articles, for example, not just the handful each day they enable comments on, or the occasional one submitted to HN. And I want it to have all of the standard functionality -- hierarchical comments (like HN and Reddit), upvoting and downvoting, auto-collapsing tangential threads with less votes (like Reddit), giving more weight to users who are consistently upvoted, etc. But also, I'm not sure if URL's are exactly the right pieces of content to associate with. Not only do you have the problem of determining canonical URL's when sites themselves don't provide them as metadata, but there's a lot of content out there that isn't a webpage: TV episodes, TV series, movies, podcast episodes, podcasts, music tracks, music albums, and so forth. Right now the closest thing there is for some of those (some TV episodes, some podcast episodes) are official posts in dedicated subreddits. It almost makes me wonder if it would need some kind of dedicated URL scheme that could be managed by Wikipedia or MediaWiki or something, like tv://startrek-strangenewworlds.us.2022/s02/e03#tomorrow_and_tomorrow_and_tomorrow.

paradaux 3y ago
Your url comment reminds me of the concept of the semantic web [0] Whereby we can have a structured machine readable and pure URL structure backed by ontology and linked data. There's a project that is working on this for Wikipedia called Dbpedia. [1] [0] Unfortunately this concept has been completely bastardized by random research groups shoehorning the technology for EU grants, from my experience working in one such group. [1] https://www.dbpedia.org/ https://www.dbpedia.org/
- _def 3y ago
  That reminds me of Wikidata[0], which aims to be a general purpose semantic knowledge graph, which runs on Wikibase[1], a MediaWiki extension set that you can run yourself for any collection of data. [0] https://wikidata.org/ https://wikidata.org/ [1] https://wikiba.se/ https://wikiba.se/
TillE 3y ago
Funny, I've always hated scrolling down and accidentally seeing comments on news articles, which are almost uniformly garbage. I think it's a terrible way to present any kind of serious story, it makes for a worse experience. If I want to discuss an article, there's Twitter, Reddit, etc. The NYT used to have a good public editor (Margaret Sullivan) you could complain to, but she's long gone. I will say that The Verge has a good approach, where there's a comment section on every story but it's hidden behind a button at the bottom you have to actively click. That's a fine compromise.

albertzeyer 3y ago

There are browser extensions like Reddit Check or What Hacker News Says which will show Reddit and/or HN comments on any website you visit. So it's very similar in functionality. Sometimes it can be useful. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-check/mllceaiaedaingchlgolnfiibippgkmj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-check/mllce... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-says/khgegkjchclhgpglloficdmdannlpmoi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-s... There are more variants of these extensions.

mikepurvis 3y ago
Piggybacking on existing communities for this feels very practical vs trying to bootstrap something from scratch. (Particularly as it pertains to moderation, spam control, and so on)
raybb 3y ago
Hope someone makes a Lemmy version soon!
udkl 3y ago
See also : https://hypothes.is https://hypothes.is A lesser known but great tool
- ListenLinda 3y ago
  Where is the self-hosted variant?
  - type0 3y ago
    https://github.com/hypothesis/h https://github.com/hypothesis/h https://github.com/hypothesis/client https://github.com/hypothesis/client

ihaveajob 3y ago

Didn't one of the most recent versions of Explorer integrate something like this natively? I remember thinking it's neat, but it's hard to reach critical mass, and without reaching it, it's not very useful.

generalpf 3y ago

This is what RapGenius (now called Genius) was trying to do. They gave it up though. https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/08/annotate-this/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/08/annotate-this/amp/

nlawalker 3y ago

I was just thinking about how I wanted something like this the other day - like a lot of other PM-type people at my work, quite a bit of my output is "docs and decks", which I have found carry around a strong "work in progress" vibe. Whether you're sharing one out on your screen in a video call or sending it to someone so they can open it themselves, it's impossible to make a piece of work feel like a finished product, it always feels like a workspace. I'd love to start publishing stuff in the form of static websites or another similar medium, but Word's ability to add annotations to specific runs of text and allow for conversations on them is a must-have.

nlawalker 3y ago
Too late to edit, but wanted to ask the question directly: can anyone recommend a static site generator or CMS plugin that adds this functionality to a content-driven site? Anything/any generator or CMS is fine, I'm in the "poking around" phase of getting ideas. It would be for small-scale usage, on the order of a team annotating and discussing simple web content with basic text.

nologic01 3y ago

Maybe there should be a proper wiki for this. A sort of wikipedia but not for abstract knowledge but for url's (that fit a certain profile: blog posts and the like). A browser extension could pull the wiki data when visiting a url that has been commented on. The possibilities for abuse and gaming would be there of-course. As with wikipedia and any multi-user online platforms it would be down to policies, moderator tools and enforcing accountability to try to keep negative patterns spiral out of control. But fundamentally, once a url is permanent published resource it makes sense to think how we document public reactions to it.

streptomycin 3y ago

Today, something like this would not be allowed by any of the major browser vendors without heavy moderation, which probably makes it infeasible. See https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to-support-gabs-dissenter-extension-for-violating-acceptable-use-policy/ https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to...