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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of disaggregating content production from moderation, they are very different competencies, and these annotate everything approaches are a great way to follow that philosophy. Google Sidewiki was one of my favorite shut down projects, this one looks even cleaner.

I think moderation and community are hard to tack on, though those might be necessary to make these projects as popular and usable as social networks, to get the network effects rolling. Without them this risks becoming either "4chan everywhere," or "your one comment no one ever reads everywhere."

Genius had an annotate everywhere feature that ran into the moderation issue: observer.com/2016/03/genius-web-annotator-emma-dawson-alana-massey

Probably out of scope for you, just think those are interesting untackled problems in this space.

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It could be interesting if you tap into the resource of an existing website (Something like hn or reddit). It already has a community build around it and moderation in place.

For example, if you are on an article and click on the extension you could see the corresponding page on hn. If the article hasn't been added then it could be added.

I really like this idea.

HN is too curated to cover literally every site or article (and that's a good thing), but you could have a sidebar that federates multiple comment outlets... "Here's what people are saying online..." Like pingbacks, but less opt in.

If nothing is found, the sidebar could push new comments to a special purpose subreddit, or some other default backstop.

Yeah, really like the idea as well... maybe another little project... :)

Yeah, you're right. Apparently many news sites that discontinued their comment sections did so, because moderation was too resource intensive and they argued that more and more discussion takes place on social networks. I don't really have the moderation issue for the extension right now, as I'm using FB comments. So, it's FB's responsibility; you can just use their regular report function. Another advantage with FB is, I think, their real-name-policy (if they still have that?); so comments shouldn't tend to get that out of hand - I hope. :D

> as I'm using FB comments

[Smacks forehead.] That definitely explains why it looked so much like FB comments. That's a neat approach. FB moderation handles spam and blatant trolls.

Next layer moderation - promoting insightful content / burying lazy content - was more what I was thinking of originally. But that is such a tough problem here. Maybe unsolvable with comments on something so sparse as, well, literally everything online. Wikipedia has a whole (sometimes hyper vigilant) army of volunteers, and that's a tiny subset of this problem.

Hmm, yeah, I think you're probably at least at the local optimum with FB stopping spam and trolls. Good stuff.

> [Smacks forehead.] That definitely explains why it looked so much like FB comments. That's a neat approach. FB moderation handles spam and blatant trolls.

I'm always hopeful, that users can take over this kind of moderation by up-/down-voting (only up-voting in the case of FB, I guess).

But yeah, the sparseness is a real problem. I'm trying to approach it by promoting to specific communities. But might be a tough road ahead.. :D (As many have pointed out here with approaches that have been tried before.)

People are allowed to use pseudonyms on Facebook, if it is the name you are typically referred to as.

Also, it’s trivial to make fake Facebook accounts. Or purchase them for about a dime a dozen.

Makes sense, but I feel FB has more spam measures in place then, say, Disqus.

Just sharing my observations. IMO the FB report button is often used to silence legitimate critics.

As someone who cared for my family’s ecommerce efforts, and having been targeted by fake reviews by competitors on Amazon, my concern is that type of abuse. Probably not something of concern for your project at this stage. Perhaps down the road if you achieve good traction, which I wish you well in achieving. Sorry if my feedback sounds very critical, perhaps you can relate, I map out problem spaces to help me make solutions.

Yeah, definitely see the FB reporting as a threat as well. Coming from Germany, we just made them censor stuff by law, which is scary, I think.

No worries, didn't really take it critical. :)

> observer.com/2016/03/genius-web-annotator-emma-dawson-alana-massey

She is uncomfortable with cis, straight, white people annotating on her blogs?

It would be nice addition to OP's service if they can let content authors choose what "kinds" of people are allowed to post comments. Perhaps that could be figured out commentators previous history or even self declaration?

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