[machiaweliczny]

I would love a web where you can comment with your forum circle on any URI available on internet.

Eg. I open some research paper and I click "comments" in web browsers. And I see comments from /r/machinelearning, hackernews etc. Also real time chat would be awesome to have for each of websites.

Nowadays it work for me like this - found something interesting X - type "X site:myforum" in google to learn more about it

Found a bug, typo, wanna contribute related resource - need to go to github, email author etc. - can't just open "comment" on page without comments and contribute :(

I think such structure of internet as we have right now relies on google/search engines too much when it could be much better organised.

[dosy]

This utopian alternative is probably the internet the search engines fear, so the current consensus that this would make things "too messy" is presumably what the search engines want you to think.

But wouldn't it be the embodiment of the original dream of a decentralized, democratized web? Where loose collectives of people can self-organize their content, discussion and publishing around shared topics of interest, with minimal outside interference?

If I were a big search incumbent, I'd buy the patent/ startup to this, and put it on a shelf someplace no one would ever see. And I'd keep doing this everytime it was independently developed, until I had such a strangle hold on the global internet / the regulation was so locked down, that this sort of upstart decentralized "siloless / nomadic / free ranging" discussion / open hypermedia system could never come to be.

Thank god we don't live in that kind of a world, where just a few internet companies control and determine the majority of the world's interactions with the internet. Oh, wait...

Thinking about it...Somehow I don't think it was the browser's fault. The problem, I think, was that governments were too weak / slow / isolationist to ensure the internet be preserved as a true public resource / global commons. Sad. But I'm sure the story is not over. Not yet.

[skywhopper]

I'm not seeing anything preventing the web from continuing to work like you describe. What is stopping these loose collectives from publishing and discussing among themselves without outside interference? You imply that governmental neglect and bigcorp greed are to blame, but I'm not understanding how you connect those two things.

Self-publishing on the Internet is cheaper and easier than it ever was in the past. So why do people flock to Reddit, Facebook, etc? Because they are even easier and cheaper, are easier to find, and have a built in audience. But none of those facts relate to governmental regulation or lack thereof, that I can see.

[onemoresoop]

> Buried deep down google's search result

The problem with self publishing is that you're practically invisible to the rest of the world and you'd have to join the big players platforms to get some visibility...

[wruza]

That could erase forum-ness of people and turn comments into a big heap of voices. Personally I wouldn’t like my forums if they were just a random people hanging around. Moderators and implicit rules do form what a forum is, what you do on it, but with “just comments on URI” all will be lost. While your wish feels great, it has downsides, since as an entire humanity we’re still not ready to discuss anything.

[wild_preference]

Just seems like a downgrade to posting it on said forum.

For example, now you need a UI that enumerates the articles that have comments on them. Maybe new comments even bump to the top. Starts to sound like a regular forum but with a small gimmick to me. There’s a reason this never caught on.

[machiavelli1024]

You can configure your client to ignore comments unless they’re verified by [authority you trust]. Verification would happen cryptographically; like the GPG web of trust. It’s up to you to choose which moderators you subsrcibe to, if any.

[here-for-karma]

Could maybe try some machine learning for moderation. I'd imagine the non-contributors share some amount of the same communication patterns.

Every time I see a problem that requires a lot of repetitive work that most people would not like to spend a lot of time doing, I always try to think of how it could be automated with computers that don't get tired

[thinkingemote]

There's several browser plugins that work that way, I think the main obstacle is you need everyone on it. also that theres not a lot of activity spread across the whole web, resulting in stale discussions.

Google reader I think had this social thing built into it. It wasn't just an RSS reader.

[Torwald]

> There's several browser plugins that work that way, I think the main obstacle is you need everyone on it.

That was the basic decision of making hyperlinks work one way, instead of two way like it was envisioned by others, eg Ted Nelson's Xanadu.

[Torwald]

> I would love a web where you can comment with your forum circle on any URI available on internet.

This would be automatically available if hyperlinks were two way connections.

All that would be needed is a culture of linking to what you commented about.

Which, I would guess, would have happened in such a web, because it would be a no brainer that any cool tool provides that. Much like the share buttons for SN we have now on every website.

[dredmorbius]

A key element of Nelson's Xanadu.

[firasd]

I've been building an app that (among other things) can kind of generate this for Twitter--if people are discussing a link, it finds tweets about that link, quote-tweets of tweets about that link, and replies to tweets about that link (in addition to tracking the number of retweets and likes). (The app is pre-release but it's on social media as https://twitter.com/flockpath)

I've been thinking that I should 'break out' that feature as a Chrome extension. It would open the Twitter discussion for the link you're on, as a sidebar. Here's an image of how the sidebar would look (this is a sample of tweets about a particular article called 'Podcasting's Next Frontier'): https://imgur.com/a/GEcR7b1

And if that Chrome extension becomes popular maybe I would ditch the dependence on Twitter and also spider the rest of the web for discussions about the URL, especially big forums like HN, Reddit. I think https://techmeme.com does something like that.

As an aside, this is the kinda thing I miss about the circa 2005 web--when there was a prominent article published it would get discussed in a variety of forums, blogs, etc. Now the discussion has become centralized to a few aggregators and social media sites.

[monort]

How do you rank tweets? Does Twitter API allows to sort by threads size?

I actually wrote a small extension to collect comments from HN and Reddit using their search API, and it's very useful for me.

https://imgur.com/a/vWy5NaP

[firasd]

Oh, very cool!

My app is actually meant to be like a 'newsfeed for tweets' that shows the top 10 tweets of the day engaged by people you follow, so it vacuums up a bunch of tweets (from tweets engaged--liked, retweeted, etc--by friends of my users) so then it just internally counts which have the most retweets/likes. So what my app thinks is the most retweeted thing might just be reflective of my internal data set rather than what's the actual most-retweeted thing.

[machiaweliczny]

cool extension - is it available in store?

[ComodoHacker]

>I would love a web where you can comment with your forum circle on any URI available on internet.

Well you have it right now. One-way hyperlinks are just enough for that. We have HN, Reddit (Digg, Slashdot etc.) and many others.

[unimpressive]

You want https://hypothes.is

You're going to get a lot of dismissal here because the idea is old and has been tried many times. I wouldn't let that stop you, annotation is very useful. The thing I am skeptical of however is that it makes the most sense 'as a forum'. I don't think it makes a very good forum, it does make an excellent collaborative research tool. More sane would be to have these annotations and import them into a real forum tool.

[hiccuphippo]

Sometimes content creators don't want to see comments from the users. See YouTube for example. Some creators prefer to close the comments section even if it's available.

[sonnhy]

If I'm not mistaken Volunia search engine had this very features, it lets you join community and start discussing with other users on the same URL you're at the moment.

[hiccuphippo]

I remember there used to be a Firefox extension that added comments/wiki per url. The problem is lack of popularity.

Something that integrates the HN/Reddit thread about a url to the side might work and might not need the mass of users since it's using the other platforms for the comments.

[gcb0]

there have been dozen of solutions like this since the 90s that came and went. specially during the "browser toolbar era". and there migth be new one poping up now.

in the end it is a privacy nightmare. see stylish extension privacy problems last months.

[wpietri]

Yup. Circa 2000 I remember talking with one of those entrepreneurs about joining. He was so sure that being able to comment on everything was a the next step forward in the web. At the time I found the idea both intriguing and suspicious, but the guy, a former surgeon, was such an obvious pain in the ass to work with that it ended for me there.

In retrospect, I recognize it as part of a common genre: grand ideas that are necessary only in theory, not in practice. It's easy enough to add commenting to any web page if the owner wants. It's easy enough to discuss any web page elsewhere, like here. And the grand idea treats good discussion as equivalent to global randos posting comments, which is demonstrably false. Real discussions are gardens that require careful tending.

My first defense now against grand ideas is, "That sounds cool, but who needs it enough to pay regularly for it? And why would this be better for that person than whatever they're doing now?" It turns out that many grand ideas only make sense from a 40,000-foot perspective; if you look at it from the point of view of somebody on the ground, it's obviously just a fuzzy cloud.

[kowdermeister]

I think that's how HN works :)

If you try to submit an existing URL it takes you to the latest post about it or a list of submissions.