Comment by jcromartie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcromartie | Hacker News Reader

I find it fascinating that people feel entitled to comment sections. There is genuine outrage when sites remove their comments sections.

When anybody can publish a URL commenting on another URL, the web is working exactly as it should. The missing piece is a meta-comment system (maybe some microformat) that lets you know when someone else is explicitly commenting on your URL.

Let's say I post a YouTube video (and there is no comment section), and someone else writes about it on their Tumblr using a format using an anchor tag with a rel=comment or something. Then the meta-comment service (where I have registered my YouTube channel and the Tumblr user has registered their blog) notifies me that this person has commented on my video. I could publish a reply on Tumblr to their original Tumblr post, and they would similarly be notified.

A page on the meta-comment service or a little JS widget could even show the comment reply tree across sites.

I remember encountering something like this when playing around with my Wordpress blog:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback

Any idea why it didn't find adoption on a wider scale?

I think that a protocol or standard is part of the solution, but it really needs a service (or any number of them) to track the whole graph of replies.

The kind of aggressive court interference talked about in the article, will (or at least should) be the catalyst to make that happen.

Anonymous comments really ought to be hosted anonymously and in a distributed fashion, preventing them from being taken down or "used against you." The "fire in a crowded theater" supposed exception, is simply not relevant wrt internet comments.

Two reasons come to mind, one historical and one practical:

First, the pingback implementation in WordPress was one of the more common vectors of WordPress' endless parade of security vulnerabilities. I remember years ago it was common practice to disable pingbacks (or even rip out the code) as a security precaution.

Second, pingbacks direct readers away from the site. This is good for readers and the online community as a whole, but bad for online publications which want to use comments as an "engagement" tool.

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