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I'd love for one to take off. You might be right that they wouldn't take off even if they would work really well. But I'd like to think they could :) With a

I'd love for one to take off. You might be right that they wouldn't take off even if they would work really well. But I'd like to think they could :) With a good UI, a frictionless login, clear personal data separation and a sufficiently widespread browser extension platform available on mobile, this would be awesome... Maybe Safari would be a good first target with their WebExtension support. There is of course also the technical problem of dynamic rendering and unpredictable DOM structure. And the whole problem of reaching a social media user base and providing valuable interaction tools to them. Especially when considering ads, the main question is how to locate these DOM elements — for example, the filter lists shipped with uBlock origin do a great job here. I'm wondering if maybe having more flexible locators available could help identify DOM subtrees by their content instead of a CSS selector. Similar to the ones available in e2e testing frameworks, but maybe even more powerful things could be conceived, or matching snapshots etc... Could certainly imagine this taking off, but imagination is not reality :)

roywiggins 3y ago
I will posit that the main problem with the idea is that when I'm browsing some page I probably don't want to see comments from all the people that have been banned from that page, or who couldn't be bothered to make an account. If I like a page I probably agree with their moderation decisions more than not, and being able to browse a big pile of rejected comments doesn't interest me at all. And even if there are people there commenting just because it's easier than making an account, that's going to facilitate very low-effort drive-by comments from people who are coming from somewhere else on the web. And if people want to talk about some page that doesn't have comments, that's what Twitter and Reddit, historically, are for. The hard parts are not technical, they're social.

roywiggins 3y ago

I will posit that the main problem with the idea is that when I'm browsing some page I probably don't want to see comments from all the people that have been banned from that page, or who couldn't be bothered to make an account. If I like a page I probably agree with their moderation decisions more than not, and being able to browse a big pile of rejected comments doesn't interest me at all. And even if there are people there commenting just because it's easier than making an account, that's going to facilitate very low-effort drive-by comments from people who are coming from somewhere else on the web. And if people want to talk about some page that doesn't have comments, that's what Twitter and Reddit, historically, are for. The hard parts are not technical, they're social.