[chatmasta]

This is really well done. As I'm sure is the case with many others, I've had this idea before. It certainly seems like an ideal way to browse comments on the web.

The trick is obviously going to be filling it with content. Have you considered scraping link aggregators for their comments, and syndicating them in the extension? So for example if I'm reading an article that has been posted to both HN and reddit, I open Epiverse and can see all the comments in one place.

I think that would be a cool way to bootstrap the user generated content.

[MelSchlemming]

Thanks. Yeah you're absolutely right about content, that has come up in discussion. Basically AlienTube for the entire internet, sourcing multiple comment systems, with my own on top too. If I can't get enough users organically I might have to turn to that. I'd prefer not to because it might be a pretty big undertaking, and I'd prefer to have users in my own ecosystem.

So tough getting early users!

[chatmasta]

I would highly recommend seeding the ecosystem with comments from other platforms. Sure, those won't be "users in your ecosystem," but you won't have any users in your ecosystem if there are no comments to read. You need content for people to consume first, so they use the extension for that. You don't need to make them look like fake comments -- you can attribute them to reddit/HN or put them into their own section of the extension. But the point is that you want users to use your extension for READING the comments, because ONLY THEN will they begin to post. Nobody wants to spend their time writing a comment in an empty feed that nobody will see.

(You could even go the other direction, for comments posted in the extension, e.g. build a reddit bot that syndicates comments from Epiverse to reddit like "Someone commented on this in Epiverse, <link>".)

I understand it's a large undertaking, but so was making the extension. All that effort will be wasted if you don't get users!

To reduce the workload, you could consider modularizing the "comment syndication" system, and making the scrapers open source. Then you could get contributors to help you. i.e. a repo for scraping reddit comments on an article, a repo for scraping HN comments on an article, etc... Each repo would take in the URL of an article, find any posts on reddit/HN/etc, and push their comments into the epiverse system. Honestly, it wouldn't even be that much work... there are well-maintained APIs for reddit and HN, and probably many other link aggregators as well. But if you open source the design of syndication, then imagination is the only limit of where you can syndicate comments from (think: news sites, blogs, twitter... anywhere people write about the article and link to it).

It's a really well done extension and I want to see it work. But you gotta believe me, man, you NEED a growth hack to make this work. It will fizzle out otherwise.

Also, I really like the +N indicator icon that represents new comments. I have the extension installed now, and when I start to see that number growing, I'll know the extension is working. :)

Good luck!! It's a great idea and well executed. Now you just gotta grow it.

[MelSchlemming]

Hmm. Alright, you might have just talked me into it.

I'll do a rewrite first since it's getting scrappy, and then add a couple of important features (e.g. reply notifications). I'll start sourcing from reddit comments, since that's going to be the easiest to scrape, has a significant amount of content and is probably enough to start with.

Open source syndication is an interesting idea and not one I'd thought of.

Thanks for the suggestions, really helpful.