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Most saddening, perhaps, is the way in which the Web constrains the use of links. For example: although the link is the primary form of reference on the Web, underpinning the tangle of connections that make the system so useful, the ability to create new links is a privilege granted only to content producers. The vast majority of those interested in a piece of work are merely readers, unable to contribute, only to consume. The sad part is, we already have the technical infrastructure in place to support those user contributions - it's the Comments section of any blog-shaped site. So called "Web 2.0" was all about readers contributing feedback to whichever content was being published through a channel. But the shape it took was not the original hypermedia vision, but a conversation of loosely related comments that could potentially go off-topic. To support the annotation feature described in the article, it would just require that common web platforms allowed their current comment systems to attach comments to paragraphs in the article, and show these comments as side notes. Current moderation functions could be used to separate the wheat from the chaff. But it would require readers to adapt and learn to tap this resource to its fullest potential. |
I think that's a somewhat view of what a user contribution could look like. Adding feedback is great, but imagine what the web could be if users could do more than just comment. I'd love to see a blog application that supported user contributions like fixing spelling/grammar, adding links, injecting additional paragraphs to explain complex topics, captioning pictures, etc. All those things could be suggested as comments that the author would manually use to improve their article, but I think it'd be better (faster at least) to do it automatically.
Idealistically I'm thinking of something that's the best parts of Medium and Wikipedia.