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Facilitating discussion of arbitrary webpages, though, has been stupendously successful, in the form of social media. I think that’s the problem with the extens

Facilitating discussion of arbitrary webpages, though, has been stupendously successful, in the form of social media. I think that’s the problem with the extension idea, it’s social media that doesn’t realize it’s social media, so doesn’t pay enough attention to the make-or-breaks of social media like content quality, drawing people good for content quality, spam prevention, moderation, and circles of shared interest. Getting HN-like commentary on every webpage is interesting, what you get if you just turn on WordPress comments then do nothing, isn’t.

roywiggins 3y ago
The only way I can imagine it working would be an extension that just hunts down pre-existing Reddit (or similar) threads for a particular URL. Oddly, this idea seems to share some of the same problems of the "Metaverse" idea. Facebook's Metaverse is a videogame that doesn't realize it's a videogame, it's a centralized service that you're trying to layer on top of the internet, and it ends up being totally empty and with no community, because it's for "everyone", which means it's for nobody. Discord and Reddit both understood the problem and partition themselves into user-moderated interest-oriented spaces; Facebook's idea of a metaverse doesn't do this, and a pan-web comment system sort of can't by design.
- mcphage 3y ago
  Why the Lucky Stiff had one for a while. It was fun, but it worked by putting in his server as your DNS, and it (from what I recall) man-in-the-middled the entire web to insert comment blocks on every page. I don’t think that would work anymore, and I imagine it was a nightmare to keep running.
jrockway 3y ago
Social media is also good for discovering the original content. Like, I would never find half the blogs I read on HN, but they're great. I think I came up with this idea in the world where you literally browsed the web. Like go to Yahoo, see what new sites there were, and read 'em ;) That is ... not what we do anymore.

roywiggins 3y ago

The only way I can imagine it working would be an extension that just hunts down pre-existing Reddit (or similar) threads for a particular URL. Oddly, this idea seems to share some of the same problems of the "Metaverse" idea. Facebook's Metaverse is a videogame that doesn't realize it's a videogame, it's a centralized service that you're trying to layer on top of the internet, and it ends up being totally empty and with no community, because it's for "everyone", which means it's for nobody. Discord and Reddit both understood the problem and partition themselves into user-moderated interest-oriented spaces; Facebook's idea of a metaverse doesn't do this, and a pan-web comment system sort of can't by design.

mcphage 3y ago
Why the Lucky Stiff had one for a while. It was fun, but it worked by putting in his server as your DNS, and it (from what I recall) man-in-the-middled the entire web to insert comment blocks on every page. I don’t think that would work anymore, and I imagine it was a nightmare to keep running.

jrockway 3y ago

Social media is also good for discovering the original content. Like, I would never find half the blogs I read on HN, but they're great. I think I came up with this idea in the world where you literally browsed the web. Like go to Yahoo, see what new sites there were, and read 'em ;) That is ... not what we do anymore.