It looks like An IndieWeb Webring project.
You can check it out here: https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/
"This proof-of-concept webring is a way for folks adding IndieWeb building blocks to their personal websites to find (and be found by) other folks with IndieWeb building blocks on their sites!"
Don’t let the negative comments get to you. The idea is interesting, and there are plenty of ways to curb spammers (just look at Stack Overflow). Also, this isn't the same concept as webrings.
I think this is an interesting concept! Please don't let the negative comments get to you.
One suggestion is to maybe allow users/community to have a walled garden in regards to writing rights. This would help with moderation, and allow users to subscribe to the walled gardens/bubbles they are most interested in.
Thanks! All good, I think some people are interpreting this as 1) me thinking this is some sort of groundbreaking novel idea and 2) that I am trying to scale this in a venture scale sort of way haha. Neither are true. The walled garden idea came up elsewhere too, really like it and considered it. Just have to think through details and add the user management side.
Would you consider incorporating the AT protocol into it? It would be nice if every reader had their own moderation filter, like a web of links, but-bluesky-ified.
This has been done a lot. Marc Andreessen was going to put it in Mosaic. Hypothes.is is the most semi-well-implemented modern incarnation I am aware of.
Recently, I came across this paper which describes an implementation called "Weblinks" (terrible name) that focuses on just the links. Haven't used it, but it's thoughtfully designed:
I've wanted a distributed annotation system for a while, probably it will end up having some sort of advanced block list and follow list and follow me for my block list approach, potentially an activity pub-based system might work, but in the meantime I want to try this one because I've missed the sidewiki boat and want to try it.
Yeah definitely. Going to build out a first version of block lists / reporting this weekend. Someone else wants a firefox version too so might start there in terms of additional browser support. Thanks!
The title feels pretty clickbaity. I might be missing something, but this feels like another distributed annotation system for the web, an idea that's been tried and retried for what feels like decades a this point. Why will this one work when the other attempts didn't? Is it just about this being more restricted than those past systems?
Also there’s really not that many systems on the page, some were not actually launched, or were proprietary. So old idea or not, it kinda looks like any contributions in this area would be worthwhile.
To answer your question “why will this one work when the other attempts didn’t?” - from my perspective, this one got my attention enough that I’m going to try it. I’ve seen lots of ‘annotate the web’ things and none has piqued my interest.
So I guess “clickbaity title” maybe actually means “clear vision to attract people” and “good storytelling to engage users”.
It does seem a variant on annotation. I'd commend to the poster my analysis of the network utility of such systems I developed after pondering on them for quite a few years (I was interacting with them in the 1990s): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23576213
I commend that to the author in the spirit of learning about the space and thinking through the implications, because I believe people are more likely to solve problems when they understand what they are, and think through them, and don't just try to blunder past them with hope and moxie.
That post was written about generalized text annotation and I stand by it in that context.
However, as you deviate from the system being analyzed, the analysis becomes less appropriate. One of the problems generalized annotation systems have is that there are an arbitrary amount of textual comments that can be added to a page. That is what turns the popular pages into a unpleasant cacophony. The range of links is somewhat more restrained. Plus, links are just... links. Textual comments are arguing and flames and generally tiring on any popular page. (Though I'd watch out for people learning how to turn "links" into arguments.)
It is possible that a shared cross-linking system might work, but I'd strenuously suggest thinking very very hard before adding in any sort of inline "conversation" system. It is very, very obvious and very, very tempting... and it immediately puts you back into the generalized web annotation space, which is strewn with corpses, many of them very very well funded. You can have a "community forum" where people can talk, and perhaps even should, but putting it inline on the page is basically a known-fail. If you think you've got a solution to that I'd try to be very sure that you've got a very strong proposition on exactly how yours is different than the previous attempts.
Anyhow, I would just generally suggest to the author that this is one of those "obvious ideas" that hasn't happened because in general they flame out so quickly that you don't even find out they existed before they've already collapsed, not because nobody has ever tried it. Be sure to consider what has happened in the past.
Also, as a hint from previous efforts: It looks like you may be trying to bind links to specific text on the page. As you've probably already discovered, that's harder than it looks, and however much code you've written for it, I guarantee you it's even harder than that. I'd strongly suggest considering just binding links to pages and not trying to bind it to text at all.
Thanks for linking to your comment on the Hypothes.is post! Will check it out. I by no means think this (or related ideas) have not been built / attempted. This is an experiment, not meant to be well-funded or even large. But, I take your feedback in good spirits, appreciate the thoughts!
This is cool. One way of solving spam problems might to only show links of people you explicitly follow / trust in some way, although that means associating identity to the posts. You could have a setting to toggle between only showing links from people you trust or from everyone, to get around the bootstrapping problem at first.
"The way we discover interesting websites needs innovating, why not let anyone contribute to any webpage?"
I remember there was a website that did this in 1999, using frames to allow people to post comments on any website. The courts shot this down as an illegal infringement of trademark. Does anyone remember the name of that website that did this?
This seems like a great idea designed for well-intentioned people. Unfortunately, the internet is running a bit short on well-intentioned people.
The potential for abuse here is enormous. I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity.
Was thinking that when I wrote the comment. Unfortunately, spammers have gotten very good at gaming web of trust techniques (see amazon product reviews). This is a Hard Problem™.
Invite only networks were you're responsible for the people you invite à la what.cd : your invitee does something against the rules? They get banned and you get banned.
Maybe some percentage of invitees? I can definitely see the need to disincentivize imprudent inviting, but one mistake is pretty rough. Surely you’ve met somebody in real life who’s revealed themselves as a jerk after initially appearing ok.
Haha that's my line! I would guess that those people who are already on the seafood website know other technical people in their day-to-day workspaces like silicon valley or Palo Alto or wherever, so it's easy for them to get a link. Meanwhile for those of us on the opposite side of the US or, barely in the Anglo-Sphere at all, we are on the outside looking in and are not likely to get a link just by being mostly lurkers and occasional contributors.
At least for me, I'm the only HN user I know except my dad who doesn't even post, he just got lurk links from his knee if the woods like hackaday.
Yep it’s quite easy for a moderately talented spammer to undo the good work of a million people if they have a fast connection and mission to sew chaos and try to make $5
> I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity.
IMO this is the kind of content which made early 2000 internet fun. Not the bland, moderated to hell and back social media sites are. Just compare what happened with the million checkbox experience which got a secret ARG made by users having fun and reddit place which is... meh.
I completely agree. Yesterday I stumbled on a backup I had made of an old Internet forum (2002) I was on. Just the amount of trolling and shooting the shit in every comment was awesome. The internet was the place to get away from the seriousness of life. Now it’s as bland as all the rest of it. I realize I’m doing the same in this comment , pontificating on the merits of humor. But I’m not like the rest, I swear! I remember when it was fun!
Yeah this is definitely a fear.. hopefully we can attract the well-intentioned people and put some nice automations in place for keeping spam to a minimum. Let me know if you've seen any similar projects do this well.
I want to love this idea but I'm extremely skeptical you can automate "keeping the bad stuff out of it".
It's basically moderation, or a subdomain if you will, and I'm not sure there any place or product that currently has fully automated moderation that works. There's always a human involved if you want to do it properly.
Moderation of, say, a comment section has some problems that seem (to me at least, I don’t actually work in this area, so maybe this is a naive take) to make it much harder.
* There’s a desire to preserve continuity of conversation
* People have different expectations of the types of content they find to be outside the domain of reasonableness
* People have different expectations of what the job of moderation is (curating productive discussion or just banning truly odious stuff?)
Like if I say I’m going to only host technical discussions, we will get a spiraling argument about where exactly the line is between tech and political policy around tech.
The easy solution is for users to just mute people that they don’t like, but them you have a conversation where some participants can’t see eachother, they managing back-and-forth a between people with different muted subsets.
And there’s still the issue of managing the general vibe, if it becomes conventional to throw around unpleasant or hyperbolic language, that could ruin the discussion for everyone, even those who’ve blocked the main perpetrators. Or the vibe could become toxic to new users who haven’t curated a blocklist yet.
In this case, there’s no need to preserve the continuity of conversation. And the users have less ability to continuously change the vibe, since it is just a collection of links. And the entry point could be trusting a single user, so the overall vibe is less relevant.
Can’t you let the market decide though? Sometimes automated moderation only has to be “good enough”. It’s probably best to err on the side of caution and be pretty aggressive with bans/deletion of posts. If commenters don’t like the degree of that they can complain and have it revised if overly aggressive or simply move on. You are much more likely to weed out the trolls that way than lose “the best commenters”.
I dunno. People often say moderation is hard, I think I summarized some reasons why. But my point was that I don’t think they apply in this case. It is possible moderation isn’t hard, or that it is hard for reasons I missed.
Maybe you could apply the web of trust concept? Tag submissions with a key, and then let people only see links that from keys they’ve trusted, or from keys that have been trusted by (some number of) keys that they’ve trusted.
Yeah I was considering that idea too, like a trusted circle feature. But haven't done any user management yet as this is purely an experiment. Agree automation can only go so far, but at least that can catch the low hanging fruit.
Just let the community downvote inanity. Why does everything need moderators? Honestly moderators would kill an idea like this. Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations.
Unfortunately scammers have an interest in automating down votes for anything that shows them bad, and automating increasing their own ranking. Note that otherwise legitimate companies often become scammers against their competition.
> Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations.
How many users will take the thing for a test drive and then patiently click through and downvote every goatse link they find versus simply uninstalling it when they get goatse'd?
Yeah, this whole genre of products is an example of the Happy Path fallacy.
There are studies showing that comments on articles erode the trust readers have in these articles. Given the quality of the average comment, it's likely that comment systems on most sites make people both dumber and angrier.
So I think the idea of forcing comments (or user-contributed links) on sites that don't want comments is fundamentally problematic.
Personally, I don't want random people on the Internet putting links on my articles. If you want to discuss what I write, or provider additional context, or disagree, then do it on your own site, or in a public place like Hacker News, not on my site.
Most of the comment sections I’ve seen on news sites(for example) are filled with vitriol and are virtually useless except for trolls who demand to be heard. I always block them with ublock
> Unfortunately, the internet is running a bit short on well-intentioned people
The haters on this thread including you are not "well-intentioned" so I guess you have a point. Nobody makes you act this way though. It's largely regional/age-based too. There are many millions of people who don't act like the typical Reddit/HN armchair expert and aren't drawing swastikas in YouTube live chats. And there are easy ways of filtering out genuine spam.
HN/Reddit "spam filters" goes far beyond filtering spam to restrict any opinion they don't like. An approach I think is far worse for the internet than whatever you're referring to.
Webrings were an alternative discovery solution to search, right? They died because there weren’t needed when search got incredibly good. Now that search kind of is… not good, maybe they could be tried again.
Honest question, is blog spam still a huge problem today if you’re not running a buggy old Wordpress stack, or better yet, not using Wordpress at all?
I would think scammers and spammers would just focus on lucrative targets like instafacetok and yelpazon reviews in 2024. And is seo hacking based on comment threads really still a viable business, or we are mainly worried about links to malware?
I get that new platforms of any kind are certainly likely to be targets of vandalism, but it’s surprising that everyone seems to be suggesting that every new/unpopular/niche platform will immediately be targeted by what amounts to organized crime. Even if I had evil intentions and an army of thousands to craft malware and scams, I wouldn’t task even one of them to poke around on platforms with less than like 10% of the market, because why bother?
> Honest question, is blog spam still a huge problem today if you’re not running a buggy old Wordpress stack, or better yet, not using Wordpress at all?
Yes, the most basic ones just go by form fields, easy to see if you expose some sort of comment form and add a hidden "first_name" field users don't see, but the bots are stupid enough to fill out all fields no matter their visibility.
The more advanced ones won't get caught in that, but there are tons of general tools for automatically spamming even hand made forms/fields on the fly.
This sort of thing seems to be doomed to fail from the start as the web is so large that any attempt of building a user base will spread itself too thin to really take off imo.
haha true, I think the thing I am most after with this experiment is a more collaborative "alive" feeling outside of social networks. but of course we don't want to grant everyone write access to every part of every page.
Unfortunately, if this succeeds, you'll need to figure out a way to prevent (or mitigate) spam and other abuse. It's an awful problem, and I'm not sure if there's any way to really deal with it. A PGP-style web-of-trust might work, but that has its own downsides.
I love this idea and agree you need a form of curation. Is there a mechanism for "ranking" links? Or reporting? I think a simple UI that lets you up or downvote (after clicking) could be pretty effective at reducing spam.
totally, this is a feature I am working on. might even just do a report feature and remove anything that has been reported too many times by different people before doing true ranking.
Don't want to be that guy throwing word-turds at someone's actual work, but both ideas (making any webpage editable, and trusted err, well I guess webrings) have tried and died more than once.
I can see how webrings died when social media took over — not that I believe social media to be superior in any way — but I never understood why making webpages editable never took off. There were a few attempts, most requiring extensions.
EDIT: Chrome-only extension? Now I don't feel so bad about those thrown word-turds ;)
Thanks for checking it out ghusto! No need to apologize. What other solution would you expect outside of the Chrome Extension? You just mean you want a different browser supported?
The early days of StumbleUpon were great! I think it might also be a perfect example of why a lot of the comments here are pessimistic about content quality staying high over time.
So many haters in here hahah I think it's a cool project and was a creative blog post. Reminds me of the early days of the web.
Ignore these insufferable know-it-all haters on Hacker News. These people are the worst! Some aren't even real people.
The ones that are bots are probably HN itself because https://greenwich-for-chrome.replit.app/ is a threat. This is the coolest part IMO, has Twitter or HN like potential.
It looks like An IndieWeb Webring project. You can check it out here: https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ "This proof-of-concept webring is a way for folks adding IndieWeb building blocks to their personal websites to find (and be found by) other folks with IndieWeb building blocks on their sites!"
Don’t let the negative comments get to you. The idea is interesting, and there are plenty of ways to curb spammers (just look at Stack Overflow). Also, this isn't the same concept as webrings.
I think this is an interesting concept! Please don't let the negative comments get to you.
One suggestion is to maybe allow users/community to have a walled garden in regards to writing rights. This would help with moderation, and allow users to subscribe to the walled gardens/bubbles they are most interested in.
Thanks! All good, I think some people are interpreting this as 1) me thinking this is some sort of groundbreaking novel idea and 2) that I am trying to scale this in a venture scale sort of way haha. Neither are true. The walled garden idea came up elsewhere too, really like it and considered it. Just have to think through details and add the user management side.
Would you consider incorporating the AT protocol into it? It would be nice if every reader had their own moderation filter, like a web of links, but-bluesky-ified.
ooh interesting, will investigate that
This has been done a lot. Marc Andreessen was going to put it in Mosaic. Hypothes.is is the most semi-well-implemented modern incarnation I am aware of.
Recently, I came across this paper which describes an implementation called "Weblinks" (terrible name) that focuses on just the links. Haven't used it, but it's thoughtfully designed:
<https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3465336.3475123>
Thanks! Yeah I recall Marc talking about related ideas with Mosaic actually now that you mention it.
I've wanted a distributed annotation system for a while, probably it will end up having some sort of advanced block list and follow list and follow me for my block list approach, potentially an activity pub-based system might work, but in the meantime I want to try this one because I've missed the sidewiki boat and want to try it.
Once it can be on Firefox at least, I can try it.
Yeah definitely. Going to build out a first version of block lists / reporting this weekend. Someone else wants a firefox version too so might start there in terms of additional browser support. Thanks!
The title feels pretty clickbaity. I might be missing something, but this feels like another distributed annotation system for the web, an idea that's been tried and retried for what feels like decades a this point. Why will this one work when the other attempts didn't? Is it just about this being more restricted than those past systems?
(The example that came to mind first was Google Sidewiki, but it looks like there's a bunch of these listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation)
Ok, let's switch to the subtitle instead.
I guess the focus in this one is on adding links rather than discussion, which from a look at that Wikipedia page, seems unique.
But yes, it seems a bit like a small twist on an extremely old idea.
Also there’s really not that many systems on the page, some were not actually launched, or were proprietary. So old idea or not, it kinda looks like any contributions in this area would be worthwhile.
To answer your question “why will this one work when the other attempts didn’t?” - from my perspective, this one got my attention enough that I’m going to try it. I’ve seen lots of ‘annotate the web’ things and none has piqued my interest.
So I guess “clickbaity title” maybe actually means “clear vision to attract people” and “good storytelling to engage users”.
It does seem a variant on annotation. I'd commend to the poster my analysis of the network utility of such systems I developed after pondering on them for quite a few years (I was interacting with them in the 1990s): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23576213
I commend that to the author in the spirit of learning about the space and thinking through the implications, because I believe people are more likely to solve problems when they understand what they are, and think through them, and don't just try to blunder past them with hope and moxie.
That post was written about generalized text annotation and I stand by it in that context.
However, as you deviate from the system being analyzed, the analysis becomes less appropriate. One of the problems generalized annotation systems have is that there are an arbitrary amount of textual comments that can be added to a page. That is what turns the popular pages into a unpleasant cacophony. The range of links is somewhat more restrained. Plus, links are just... links. Textual comments are arguing and flames and generally tiring on any popular page. (Though I'd watch out for people learning how to turn "links" into arguments.)
It is possible that a shared cross-linking system might work, but I'd strenuously suggest thinking very very hard before adding in any sort of inline "conversation" system. It is very, very obvious and very, very tempting... and it immediately puts you back into the generalized web annotation space, which is strewn with corpses, many of them very very well funded. You can have a "community forum" where people can talk, and perhaps even should, but putting it inline on the page is basically a known-fail. If you think you've got a solution to that I'd try to be very sure that you've got a very strong proposition on exactly how yours is different than the previous attempts.
Anyhow, I would just generally suggest to the author that this is one of those "obvious ideas" that hasn't happened because in general they flame out so quickly that you don't even find out they existed before they've already collapsed, not because nobody has ever tried it. Be sure to consider what has happened in the past.
Also, as a hint from previous efforts: It looks like you may be trying to bind links to specific text on the page. As you've probably already discovered, that's harder than it looks, and however much code you've written for it, I guarantee you it's even harder than that. I'd strongly suggest considering just binding links to pages and not trying to bind it to text at all.
Thanks for linking to your comment on the Hypothes.is post! Will check it out. I by no means think this (or related ideas) have not been built / attempted. This is an experiment, not meant to be well-funded or even large. But, I take your feedback in good spirits, appreciate the thoughts!
If this is interesting/novel to you, you might be surprised to learn there’s a W3C standard for annotating the web which never really caught on.
https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/
It deserves more attention, particularly from browser vendors and social media platforms, but the incentives have never been in place.
One commercial application built on the standard is hypothes.is, but I’ve lost track of their efforts years ago.
Reminds me of https://ruby-talk.ruby-lang.narkive.com/buiXXTZh/what-is-hoo... :-)
Yes totally! The framing of "web graffiti" was something I played with, but didn't like the association with spam or purely artistic purpose.
How is this different from the public annotations in https://web.hypothes.is ?
Well, one difference I notice is there are no links inviting me to “contact the sales team” or “join our webinar training partners”.
This is cool. One way of solving spam problems might to only show links of people you explicitly follow / trust in some way, although that means associating identity to the posts. You could have a setting to toggle between only showing links from people you trust or from everyone, to get around the bootstrapping problem at first.
Thanks! Yeah I think this is likely the direction I will take things.
"The way we discover interesting websites needs innovating, why not let anyone contribute to any webpage?"
I remember there was a website that did this in 1999, using frames to allow people to post comments on any website. The courts shot this down as an illegal infringement of trademark. Does anyone remember the name of that website that did this?
This seems like a great idea designed for well-intentioned people. Unfortunately, the internet is running a bit short on well-intentioned people.
The potential for abuse here is enormous. I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity.
This seems like maybe a good use for some federated social media or web of trust methods?
Like I don’t trust the internet in general to curate these links. But one could surely find networks where the average voter could be trustworthy…
Was thinking that when I wrote the comment. Unfortunately, spammers have gotten very good at gaming web of trust techniques (see amazon product reviews). This is a Hard Problem™.
Invite only networks were you're responsible for the people you invite à la what.cd : your invitee does something against the rules? They get banned and you get banned.
Maybe some percentage of invitees? I can definitely see the need to disincentivize imprudent inviting, but one mistake is pretty rough. Surely you’ve met somebody in real life who’s revealed themselves as a jerk after initially appearing ok.
That is basically the idea behind https://lobste.rs/ . There's approximately zero spam or other bad behavior.
You can look at the full user tree (https://lobste.rs/users) and see if there's anyone you know who might be willing to invite you to join.
Very little spam, but also very little engagement. The same post on hn might have 100 comments and on lobsters it has four.
I think we need to stop using "engagement" as a measurement of anything related to quality and usefulness.
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
Sure. But the odds of finding an insightful comment on HN is much higher than finding one on lobsters, merely because there is more content.
As long as the growth rate is positive and it isn’t too expensive to host, a small stable growing site could be fine.
Hey!
I have been a good citizen of Hacker News for fourteen years now...
Anyone here would want to throw me an invite to lobste.rs?
:)
Haha that's my line! I would guess that those people who are already on the seafood website know other technical people in their day-to-day workspaces like silicon valley or Palo Alto or wherever, so it's easy for them to get a link. Meanwhile for those of us on the opposite side of the US or, barely in the Anglo-Sphere at all, we are on the outside looking in and are not likely to get a link just by being mostly lurkers and occasional contributors.
At least for me, I'm the only HN user I know except my dad who doesn't even post, he just got lurk links from his knee if the woods like hackaday.
I requested an invite from a guy I have only known via Reddit, we've never met IRL.
I can't actually remember who is the person who I requested the invite from, I think they were given out somewhat freely by some users.
You can look on your user page, or search for your username on the user tree page.
like this idea too!
Yep it’s quite easy for a moderately talented spammer to undo the good work of a million people if they have a fast connection and mission to sew chaos and try to make $5
> I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity.
IMO this is the kind of content which made early 2000 internet fun. Not the bland, moderated to hell and back social media sites are. Just compare what happened with the million checkbox experience which got a secret ARG made by users having fun and reddit place which is... meh.
I completely agree. Yesterday I stumbled on a backup I had made of an old Internet forum (2002) I was on. Just the amount of trolling and shooting the shit in every comment was awesome. The internet was the place to get away from the seriousness of life. Now it’s as bland as all the rest of it. I realize I’m doing the same in this comment , pontificating on the merits of humor. But I’m not like the rest, I swear! I remember when it was fun!
That anarchic mosh pit of silliness is unfortunately very vulnerable to manipulation by extremist groups or nation states.
Worth the risk.
Yeah this is definitely a fear.. hopefully we can attract the well-intentioned people and put some nice automations in place for keeping spam to a minimum. Let me know if you've seen any similar projects do this well.
I want to love this idea but I'm extremely skeptical you can automate "keeping the bad stuff out of it".
It's basically moderation, or a subdomain if you will, and I'm not sure there any place or product that currently has fully automated moderation that works. There's always a human involved if you want to do it properly.
Is it actually moderation?
Moderation of, say, a comment section has some problems that seem (to me at least, I don’t actually work in this area, so maybe this is a naive take) to make it much harder.
* There’s a desire to preserve continuity of conversation
* People have different expectations of the types of content they find to be outside the domain of reasonableness
* People have different expectations of what the job of moderation is (curating productive discussion or just banning truly odious stuff?)
Like if I say I’m going to only host technical discussions, we will get a spiraling argument about where exactly the line is between tech and political policy around tech.
The easy solution is for users to just mute people that they don’t like, but them you have a conversation where some participants can’t see eachother, they managing back-and-forth a between people with different muted subsets.
And there’s still the issue of managing the general vibe, if it becomes conventional to throw around unpleasant or hyperbolic language, that could ruin the discussion for everyone, even those who’ve blocked the main perpetrators. Or the vibe could become toxic to new users who haven’t curated a blocklist yet.
In this case, there’s no need to preserve the continuity of conversation. And the users have less ability to continuously change the vibe, since it is just a collection of links. And the entry point could be trusting a single user, so the overall vibe is less relevant.
Can’t you let the market decide though? Sometimes automated moderation only has to be “good enough”. It’s probably best to err on the side of caution and be pretty aggressive with bans/deletion of posts. If commenters don’t like the degree of that they can complain and have it revised if overly aggressive or simply move on. You are much more likely to weed out the trolls that way than lose “the best commenters”.
I dunno. People often say moderation is hard, I think I summarized some reasons why. But my point was that I don’t think they apply in this case. It is possible moderation isn’t hard, or that it is hard for reasons I missed.
Maybe you could apply the web of trust concept? Tag submissions with a key, and then let people only see links that from keys they’ve trusted, or from keys that have been trusted by (some number of) keys that they’ve trusted.
Yeah I was considering that idea too, like a trusted circle feature. But haven't done any user management yet as this is purely an experiment. Agree automation can only go so far, but at least that can catch the low hanging fruit.
Just let the community downvote inanity. Why does everything need moderators? Honestly moderators would kill an idea like this. Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations.
Unfortunately scammers have an interest in automating down votes for anything that shows them bad, and automating increasing their own ranking. Note that otherwise legitimate companies often become scammers against their competition.
> Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations.
How many users will take the thing for a test drive and then patiently click through and downvote every goatse link they find versus simply uninstalling it when they get goatse'd?
Yeah, this whole genre of products is an example of the Happy Path fallacy.
There are studies showing that comments on articles erode the trust readers have in these articles. Given the quality of the average comment, it's likely that comment systems on most sites make people both dumber and angrier.
So I think the idea of forcing comments (or user-contributed links) on sites that don't want comments is fundamentally problematic.
Personally, I don't want random people on the Internet putting links on my articles. If you want to discuss what I write, or provider additional context, or disagree, then do it on your own site, or in a public place like Hacker News, not on my site.
Most of the comment sections I’ve seen on news sites(for example) are filled with vitriol and are virtually useless except for trolls who demand to be heard. I always block them with ublock
> Unfortunately, the internet is running a bit short on well-intentioned people
The haters on this thread including you are not "well-intentioned" so I guess you have a point. Nobody makes you act this way though. It's largely regional/age-based too. There are many millions of people who don't act like the typical Reddit/HN armchair expert and aren't drawing swastikas in YouTube live chats. And there are easy ways of filtering out genuine spam.
HN/Reddit "spam filters" goes far beyond filtering spam to restrict any opinion they don't like. An approach I think is far worse for the internet than whatever you're referring to.
Everything old is new. The poor child thinks he's invented webrings.
Webrings were an alternative discovery solution to search, right? They died because there weren’t needed when search got incredibly good. Now that search kind of is… not good, maybe they could be tried again.
Thanks for the condescending comment dad
Client side webrings.
What is the plan for fighting bitrot and bad-faith actors?
Strongly feels like decentralized trackbacks and pingbacks which died because they turned into spam monsters.
This turns it into a centralized problem, but a problem nevertheless?
Honest question, is blog spam still a huge problem today if you’re not running a buggy old Wordpress stack, or better yet, not using Wordpress at all?
I would think scammers and spammers would just focus on lucrative targets like instafacetok and yelpazon reviews in 2024. And is seo hacking based on comment threads really still a viable business, or we are mainly worried about links to malware?
I get that new platforms of any kind are certainly likely to be targets of vandalism, but it’s surprising that everyone seems to be suggesting that every new/unpopular/niche platform will immediately be targeted by what amounts to organized crime. Even if I had evil intentions and an army of thousands to craft malware and scams, I wouldn’t task even one of them to poke around on platforms with less than like 10% of the market, because why bother?
> Honest question, is blog spam still a huge problem today if you’re not running a buggy old Wordpress stack, or better yet, not using Wordpress at all?
Yes, the most basic ones just go by form fields, easy to see if you expose some sort of comment form and add a hidden "first_name" field users don't see, but the bots are stupid enough to fill out all fields no matter their visibility.
The more advanced ones won't get caught in that, but there are tons of general tools for automatically spamming even hand made forms/fields on the fly.
Similar to https://web.hypothes.is/
Please add a mobile safari extension. I wouldn’t see myself using this in any other context.
interesting, thanks for the suggestion!
So webrings?
Sort of, but webrings needed the site owner's involvement and couldn't have new links added by people just viewing the website.
Exactly my thought. Maybe an idea worth dusting off. Web rings were a thing when search barely worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
No, those have very different characteristics. This is a variant on annotation.
If it doesn't have a Cutty Sark pub it's not Greenwich.
This sort of thing seems to be doomed to fail from the start as the web is so large that any attempt of building a user base will spread itself too thin to really take off imo.
> why not let anyone contribute to any webpage?
I can think of a few reasons.
haha true, I think the thing I am most after with this experiment is a more collaborative "alive" feeling outside of social networks. but of course we don't want to grant everyone write access to every part of every page.
Unfortunately, if this succeeds, you'll need to figure out a way to prevent (or mitigate) spam and other abuse. It's an awful problem, and I'm not sure if there's any way to really deal with it. A PGP-style web-of-trust might work, but that has its own downsides.
I still like it. Even if it is flawed I totally agree that the web could be so much more than social networks. Where to start?
I love this idea and agree you need a form of curation. Is there a mechanism for "ranking" links? Or reporting? I think a simple UI that lets you up or downvote (after clicking) could be pretty effective at reducing spam.
totally, this is a feature I am working on. might even just do a report feature and remove anything that has been reported too many times by different people before doing true ranking.
reminds me of why the lucky stiff's hoodwink.d project, in a good way
Don't want to be that guy throwing word-turds at someone's actual work, but both ideas (making any webpage editable, and trusted err, well I guess webrings) have tried and died more than once.
I can see how webrings died when social media took over — not that I believe social media to be superior in any way — but I never understood why making webpages editable never took off. There were a few attempts, most requiring extensions.
EDIT: Chrome-only extension? Now I don't feel so bad about those thrown word-turds ;)
Thanks for checking it out ghusto! No need to apologize. What other solution would you expect outside of the Chrome Extension? You just mean you want a different browser supported?
Yup, Firefox :)
Cool, thanks!
Safari, please. =)
Also, it'd be great if this was an open standard so that anyone could write an extension for any browser.
Oh yeah, I remember the old StumbleUpon browser extension from the early 2000s myself! Good times.
The early days of StumbleUpon were great! I think it might also be a perfect example of why a lot of the comments here are pessimistic about content quality staying high over time.
So many haters in here hahah I think it's a cool project and was a creative blog post. Reminds me of the early days of the web.
Ignore these insufferable know-it-all haters on Hacker News. These people are the worst! Some aren't even real people.
The ones that are bots are probably HN itself because https://greenwich-for-chrome.replit.app/ is a threat. This is the coolest part IMO, has Twitter or HN like potential.
We don't hate it, we just know it's going to be hijacked by SEO bros.
[flagged]
Appreciate it!
Sure thing, just installed the extension and tried a few! Kinda like Pinterest + HackerNews I dig