Show HN: Birdy Comments – comments for people, not websites | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Birdy Comments – comments for people, not websites

birdycomments.com

5 pointscorrys12 comments

This looks great. I have seen this idea implemented several times and each time it was an uninviting / non-modern UI.

I always wanted something like this to become popular and gain a user-base because it might lead to a more community-feeling web.

Here's hoping you accomplished it. Cheers.

Thanks! I, too, value consistent and simple UI. Ideally when distributed web takes off Birdy should become completely distributed and encrypted.

What's your plan to avoid the issues of not enough users making the extension pretty much worthless? There have been numerous attempts of this exact thing before.

There are so many unique urls that finding another user who have commented on that specific one will be more or less impossible.

Good point but I think it goes without saying that all social apps are worthless without a user base. I hope the convenience and advantages of this approach will attract future users.

I am not handling all unique URLs as truly unique - they are normalised. So actual pages where you would want to leave comments - say some business' home page or a Twitter user's feed - will have a unique URL and will allow multiple users to discuss content. Something like https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts and https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts?t=899 are kept as aliases in my DB and will have the same comment tree.

> I hope the convenience and advantages of this approach will attract future users.

But as far as I know, it hasn't worked for the others. And as far as I know, they are not only similar things - but identical. What distinguishes your implementation? What actually is the advantage of this approach?

I haven't seen the iOS integration before, but honestly - I would never use that, what is the chance of finding comments? 0.0000001%?

I am curious to know which other apps you refer to. You answered you question yourself actually - mobile integration is key. iOS and Android extensions allow users to add comments not only to any page in the browser, but to all URLs that other apps share. Like Tumblr posts shared from Tumblr app. On another note - public comments do not necessarily mean that you need an active instant discussion. You can leave a review, for example.

Honestly it was quite hard to actually find them, weather that means I over-estimated the amount or that they have simply failed I don't know. I think a bit of both.

Maybe this [0] and this [1] fits the bill, both of them have very few users.

I still don't see how mobile will make it work, you will still have no idea if there is something going into the button and as I said if you go there to read something you will never ever find another comment because of the massiveness of the web. Even if you write a review, who is it for? The chance of someone reading this review, on this app, on the specific page for a product they want is so small it is not even funny. And writing a review usually means you do it for either the "stats" of writing reviews which you now don't get, or for others to read, which they just won't.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for something like this to succeed and thrive. I just don't see it happening right now.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dropchat/eaejhpdja...

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/retort/ianfcbdiagd...

Thank you for your thoughts - I appreciate this discussion. I think in the beginning it will best work on bigger websites with popular commenting sections and strict editorial policies. Take The Guardian for example. They disable comments very often, moderate them aggressively - I would love to be able to discuss their content on their website without their control. Another user case is reviews on websites that more savvy users find not trustworthy. Scam websites etc. Being able to read actual user reviews there could be invaluable.

That's a good use-case I guess.

I had an idea that you could have a feed where peoples comments are showing up. So when you'd press the extension or open the app you'd see "oh people are using this app and this is where they are commenting".

Then Birdy itself becomes the "network" and each comment made is more likely to be seen by other Birdy members.

Thanks for the suggestion. In the future I would like to add a dashboard where users would be able to see comments from all sources they are interested in. Just a single feed for all comments in the system might be overwhelming.

That is nice, but why not Hypothesis?

Hypothesis is a great idea but in my opinion is overly complicated for most users. I was very excited about Google Wave as well and that didn't didn't turn out very well. Birdy is very different - it works on most modern devices and is very intuitive. Everyone used comments before - now you just can comment on any page instead of relying on website owners to provide you with a platform.

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