[ClayFerguson]

I think both HackerNews and Reddit are great for both the consumers of content, and the creators too. Without sites like these it would be a lot harder to get the word out about a new site or service. For example, i'm promoting my own creation, meta64.com, and I can do it here without being smacked down and censored.

For example, Youtube won't even let people post links. That is ridiculous. Why not just give people an option called "Hide comments from me that contain links". Why try to censor the entire world? While I'm ranting about Youtube censorship... when people disable commenting, shouldn't there be a defaco to known site people can go to and comment on each video. Somebody needs to create "youtube-uncensored.com", and have a parallel commenting system, and links to videos. Then disabling comments would not allow someone to shutdown all communications about the video.

[Pxtl]

There used to be an IM application in the '90s called Odigo that was tied to your browser window - it would create a sort of ad-hoc chat-room based on your browsing. The problem was that it didn't intelligently parse URL paramaters so you had only "this exact URL that nobody else sees because of some hyper-specific stuff in the URL" and "everybody on the same domain" which was worthless for, say, Geocities.

I'm sure somebody is working on a modern web-ish version. You'd want to properly hack it for popular sites to parse URL parameters so that it would create rooms at the correct granularity.