It's a chrome extension that allows discussion on any webpage to happen there itself.
Currently I have built threaded comments, and a upvote/downvote system.
Plus I've built this cool feature called Highlights, which lets you discuss specific lines in any documentation. As well as a feature called Top Hightlights, which shows the most interesting hightlights on any webpage.
Hope you guys will try it out. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask me here.
Thanks.
Anyways, I've always wanted to find something like this again. This sounds similar. I'm gonna try this out and take a look. The big thing that makes it work, IMO, is having enough people participating and having comments be moderated. Unique, sincere comments make the experience fun. Spammy, trolling comments make it just every other boring corner of the internet.
I loved this, I could go anywhere on the web and have a comment section. The important thing about this, though, was that the comments were usually pretty relevant. Rarely did I see trolling or off topic comments(Ie politics). It'd usually just be maybe a one line impression of the site. It was perfect.
(The public stream is here: <https://hypothes.is/search>. Also supports parameterized RSS <https://web.hypothes.is/help/atom-rss-feeds-for-annotations/> and has a developer API—info available on the Developer tab in your account settings.)
> Rarely did I see trolling or off topic comments(Ie politics).
I wonder if this is due to the format or strictly because of the time?
Incidentally, this is one of several things I've thought FF should have integrated into the browser to differentiate themselves and maybe retain or, if you can imagine it, grow their userbase. It'd be an outstanding core of a distributed social network, if they wanted to take it that direction, and a decade or so ago FF was uniquely positioned to make such a thing happen by integrating it directly with the browser so the best way to experience it was in FF. These days, I'm not sure they've got enough users left to make such a play, but they did at one time.
I'm focusing on documentation pages at first hoping to build a commpunity that is helpful. Like pointing out pitfalls and better solutions to existing problems.
Also I used to be a stumbleupon user too. I don't remember the discuss feature, but I remember using it to find hidden gems of the web.
p.s. I could ramble about moderation for a while. I'm in favor of suspending rather than banning users in most cases, and I've been toying with an idea that suspensions could be based on the amount of content and crap someone generates. You want content, and you want to keep the level of crap in that content low enough your moderation can keep up with it. If someone generates a lot of content and a little crap, you can just remove the crap and only give them a small suspension. If the proportion of crap to content someone generates is over whatever threshold you think is manageable for your platform, give them increasing-duration suspensions so they're generating less content and less crap - keeping your sitewide crap threshold down. If their crap-to-content ratio goes back below the threshold, or your sitewide crap load has gone down, you can start cutting down the duration on the suspensions. An algorithm could surely be devised for this and then you just set a 'crap threshold' platform wide and moderators don't have to do anything other than remove a post and the suspension is automatically applied. There are exceptions, of course. Illegal content? Removal and warning if it's not too serious - ban if they do it a second time. Removal and ban if it's serious. Harassing other users? Ban. Crap of a type that will drive away your userbase? Warning, ban. You could probably devise a more strict algorithm for this, but when it comes to people who make a community worse by being there, being lenient with them is something you're doing for their benefit, not yours. Whether you choose to be lenient is up to you, but if you get it wrong they'll drive away the people who generate content and you'll be left with people who generate crap.
However, the actual tool is only a tiny part of the problem. The bigger part is moderation and spam.
While this is niche that's not a big deal, but it's also nothing like reddit in that case.
What if it does take of? How will you handle spam/astroturfing/hate/illegal comments?
99% of the struggle for any social network is getting people to use it at all. Those problems you list would actually be great to have to deal with, because it means the network is taking off.
I'll initially start by moderating comments myself, (need to create a policy first) and see what to do from there.
But I'll only know the correct solution once I start tackling it.
I used to read the comments on PHP.net to learn more about certain features or to find example usages. This made the PHP community seem very approachable and helpful.
Of course all of that should have been in the docs to start with, but the comments really saved that site.
Back in 2010, I also ran my own project in this space called "Goggles." https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/goggles It was a bookmarklet that turned any webpage into multiplayer MS Paint; viewers with the bookmarklet active could see others painting on the webpage in real-time, before websockets made this kind of interaction commonplace. The entire thing ran on a single-threaded nodejs instance, serving something like 1k simultaneous connections at peak. Every half-hour or so it would crash from memory leaks. Good times.
Moderation was the thing that killed my project. Some users became victims of targeted harassment campaigns; bullies would draw dicks, swastikas, nooses, racial epithets etc on their personal tumblrs or homepages. There's something insidious about knowing that folks could be graffiti-ing your own webpage behind your back unless you're constantly checking goggles, so it didn't feel right to keep the project running knowing I didn't have the motivation to add proper moderation tools and didn't want to build user accounts or any sort of reputation system to keep the UX simple.
Some folks made absolutely stunning pieces of art on corners of the web that nobody saw. I probably still have the shapefile database archived somewhere... maybe we could reunite artists with their work someday.
Metadocs is pretty young, so I'll think about it.
However, the actual tool is only a tiny part of the problem. The bigger part is moderation and spam.
While this is niche with a tiny user base that's not a big deal.
But, what if it does take of? How will you handle spam/astroturfing/hate/illegal comments?
How does it identify elements to anchor to, and what happens when the original text changes?
When the original text changes then the highlight is dead. Meaning you can still discuss it, but it will no longer be highlighted in the window.
You can read more about text fragments here - https://web.dev/text-fragments/
That could eliminate the need for platform specific extensions.
You can browse as guest.
The comments are stored in metadocs servers.
I wish I could remember the name of it, I played with it for a few weeks but then they put up a paywall.
That spirit of communal being-on-the-internet I only saw breifly recaptured again by the Beaker Browser, which unfortuantely seems also to be going the way of all things. There you could fork and remix any website you were on, could in principle afford a much more mucking-in stle of what you are trying to do here.
I think this could be great! Keep at it!
So I was going through a documentation of an ORM library for another project of mine, and it was kinda poorly written. And I didn't feel like going through the effort required to go to another website and ask questions there. I thought I wish I could ask questions right here.
So I took that feeling and turned it into something tangible.
