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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.

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.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  That is super interesting, but looking at the diagram[1] my first gripe is with the nature of their decentralization. It's not a bad idea, it's a good first step, but they're proposing that any group or private person can host an annotation service. This will cause first of all competition, because which service has the most annotations? Using my annotation service hosted on my minecraft server might be useless because it only has my own annotations. So obviously users will want to use a larger service, and here comes all the standard issues of a user-driven internet, trust, donations, groups forming and such. Also you might end up in a bubble, seeing annotations only from one particular side of the political spectrum. Of course this model does not have the same issues as the fediverse where annotation services can de-federate from each other, the user is free to pick and choose whichever they want. There might even be a helpful counter in the UI that shows how many annotations a particular service has for this website. The only real solution to all this is some sort of global database, like IPFS perhaps, where we can store the annotations. And then we can all individually host gateway servers to this database that the end user connects through. But that has its own problems of course, you can't just magically make a distributed database without heavy bandwidth consumption and its own hosting requirements. 1. https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation-architecture.svg https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation-architectu...
- impissedoff1 3y ago
  Wow that page is mobile unfriendly.. From the w3 none the less
- tannhaeuser 3y ago
  There's also a competing W3C standard named Webmention [1] based on WordPress' pingback/linkback protocols [2] which in turn were based on XML-RPC and exploited for DDoS attacks, like most things WordPress (it's one of the reasons your http access logs are chock full of 404s for xmlrpc.php). AFAICS, pingback remains the most used method though, or the only one that ever went mainstream before web commenting consolidated onto a couple news aggregators, HN and reddit among them. The Web annotations protocol has been published as W3C spec in 2016 already (so not "now"), and, as a child of its time, uses god-awful JSON-LD, just like previous W3C specs chased XML whether it was a good fit or not when exchange of text data is one of the actual use cases for markup languages. Is there an English word for always getting it wrong and blindly promoting formats? In German, there's the term Schlaglochsuchmaschine (pot hole search engine) as a metaphor borrowed from the automotive domain. [1|: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
halflings 3y ago
> Hell, Netflix used to have an option where people could leave reviews on the movies they watched There's a very specific reason Netflix removed reviews / star ratings in favour of a simple thumbs up & down system: those were mostly used to recommend content, and they found that ratings are uninformative (something true for most recommender system applications) and even harmful because giving a precise score keeps many people from giving feedback -> lowering the quality of recommendations. See this article [1]. The same train of thought would go for something like Google Sidewiki: it likely just didn't get enough traction (vs digg, reddit, etc.) [1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-netflix-removed-its-5-star-ratings/ https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-netflix-removed-it...

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.

INTPenis 3y ago
That is super interesting, but looking at the diagram[1] my first gripe is with the nature of their decentralization. It's not a bad idea, it's a good first step, but they're proposing that any group or private person can host an annotation service. This will cause first of all competition, because which service has the most annotations? Using my annotation service hosted on my minecraft server might be useless because it only has my own annotations. So obviously users will want to use a larger service, and here comes all the standard issues of a user-driven internet, trust, donations, groups forming and such. Also you might end up in a bubble, seeing annotations only from one particular side of the political spectrum. Of course this model does not have the same issues as the fediverse where annotation services can de-federate from each other, the user is free to pick and choose whichever they want. There might even be a helpful counter in the UI that shows how many annotations a particular service has for this website. The only real solution to all this is some sort of global database, like IPFS perhaps, where we can store the annotations. And then we can all individually host gateway servers to this database that the end user connects through. But that has its own problems of course, you can't just magically make a distributed database without heavy bandwidth consumption and its own hosting requirements. 1. https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation-architecture.svg https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation-architectu...
impissedoff1 3y ago
Wow that page is mobile unfriendly.. From the w3 none the less
tannhaeuser 3y ago
There's also a competing W3C standard named Webmention [1] based on WordPress' pingback/linkback protocols [2] which in turn were based on XML-RPC and exploited for DDoS attacks, like most things WordPress (it's one of the reasons your http access logs are chock full of 404s for xmlrpc.php). AFAICS, pingback remains the most used method though, or the only one that ever went mainstream before web commenting consolidated onto a couple news aggregators, HN and reddit among them. The Web annotations protocol has been published as W3C spec in 2016 already (so not "now"), and, as a child of its time, uses god-awful JSON-LD, just like previous W3C specs chased XML whether it was a good fit or not when exchange of text data is one of the actual use cases for markup languages. Is there an English word for always getting it wrong and blindly promoting formats? In German, there's the term Schlaglochsuchmaschine (pot hole search engine) as a metaphor borrowed from the automotive domain. [1|: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback

deleted 3y ago

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halflings 3y ago

> Hell, Netflix used to have an option where people could leave reviews on the movies they watched There's a very specific reason Netflix removed reviews / star ratings in favour of a simple thumbs up & down system: those were mostly used to recommend content, and they found that ratings are uninformative (something true for most recommender system applications) and even harmful because giving a precise score keeps many people from giving feedback -> lowering the quality of recommendations. See this article [1]. The same train of thought would go for something like Google Sidewiki: it likely just didn't get enough traction (vs digg, reddit, etc.) [1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-netflix-removed-its-5-star-ratings/ https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-netflix-removed-it...