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Perhaps this conjures different sentiments from other HN readers, but what instantly pops to mind for me is my childhood web browsing experience where I had the

Perhaps this conjures different sentiments from other HN readers, but what instantly pops to mind for me is my childhood web browsing experience where I had the wrong toolbar or plugin or whatever, and thus every page was filled with automatically generated double-underlined green links that invariably went to a page I regretted visiting. If there is one thing the SEO and LLM crazes have taught us, it is that small curated beats big generated, every single time.

hot_gril 3y ago
That or some Yahoo! sites or random blogs that did this on their own. The links didn't go to malicious sites, just useless ones. I can see this actually being useful if done well, but I didn't like the demo just because of the annoyingly highlighted words. It should only show up if I mouse over.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  The best (worst) were all the ads that were a pop up underneath the cursor. There was absolutely no safe place to park your cursor. The ad of course occulted the page and you couldn't read anything. The bastard sibling of that type of ad was the popup under the cursor when you were just hovering over a link to see where it went.
- pegasus 3y ago
  That was my first reaction too, but on second thought it could be quite useful for spotting one's topics of interest on a page. I often do a cursory scan of the HN front page for discussions which might interest me, for example, and I bet I often miss stuff. It could make it less likely for me to miss comments of interest, too. If this is would be a plugin which could be turned on or off per site, I'd use it.
wlesieutre 3y ago
This garbage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliTXT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliTXT
- cpeterso 3y ago
  Or "smart tags" in IE6 Beta that Microsoft walked back before shipping, fortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_tag_(Microsoft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_tag_(Microsoft)
pegasus 3y ago
I didn't see it like that. It makes perfect sense in the context it's being shown in: a personal wiki system. Even if such a system would be extended to the browser, I imagine the principle of auto-linking based on the user's already-accumulated knowledge would stay. And would be nothing like SEO spam, since it would link back to the user, not to some third party. I would still want to be able to distinguish regular links from generated ones (and the heatmap UI would allow that), and it would make it easy to spot and connect to my topics of interest in a larger body of text.

hot_gril 3y ago

That or some Yahoo! sites or random blogs that did this on their own. The links didn't go to malicious sites, just useless ones. I can see this actually being useful if done well, but I didn't like the demo just because of the annoyingly highlighted words. It should only show up if I mouse over.

giantrobot 3y ago
The best (worst) were all the ads that were a pop up underneath the cursor. There was absolutely no safe place to park your cursor. The ad of course occulted the page and you couldn't read anything. The bastard sibling of that type of ad was the popup under the cursor when you were just hovering over a link to see where it went.
pegasus 3y ago
That was my first reaction too, but on second thought it could be quite useful for spotting one's topics of interest on a page. I often do a cursory scan of the HN front page for discussions which might interest me, for example, and I bet I often miss stuff. It could make it less likely for me to miss comments of interest, too. If this is would be a plugin which could be turned on or off per site, I'd use it.

wlesieutre 3y ago

This garbage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliTXT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliTXT

cpeterso 3y ago
Or "smart tags" in IE6 Beta that Microsoft walked back before shipping, fortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_tag_(Microsoft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_tag_(Microsoft)

pegasus 3y ago

I didn't see it like that. It makes perfect sense in the context it's being shown in: a personal wiki system. Even if such a system would be extended to the browser, I imagine the principle of auto-linking based on the user's already-accumulated knowledge would stay. And would be nothing like SEO spam, since it would link back to the user, not to some third party. I would still want to be able to distinguish regular links from generated ones (and the heatmap UI would allow that), and it would make it easy to spot and connect to my topics of interest in a larger body of text.