Show HN: Epiverse – a comment system for all webpages

I would highly recommend seeding the ecosystem with comments from other platforms. Sure, those won't be "users in your ecosystem," but you won't have any users in your ecosystem if there are no comments to read. You need content for people to consume first, so they use the extension for that. You don't need to make them look like fake comments -- you can attribute them to reddit/HN or put them into their own section of the extension. But the point is that you want users to use your extension for READING the comments, because ONLY THEN will they begin to post. Nobody wants to spend their time writing a comment in an empty feed that nobody will see.

(You could even go the other direction, for comments posted in the extension, e.g. build a reddit bot that syndicates comments from Epiverse to reddit like "Someone commented on this in Epiverse, <link>".)

I understand it's a large undertaking, but so was making the extension. All that effort will be wasted if you don't get users!

To reduce the workload, you could consider modularizing the "comment syndication" system, and making the scrapers open source. Then you could get contributors to help you. i.e. a repo for scraping reddit comments on an article, a repo for scraping HN comments on an article, etc... Each repo would take in the URL of an article, find any posts on reddit/HN/etc, and push their comments into the epiverse system. Honestly, it wouldn't even be that much work... there are well-maintained APIs for reddit and HN, and probably many other link aggregators as well. But if you open source the design of syndication, then imagination is the only limit of where you can syndicate comments from (think: news sites, blogs, twitter... anywhere people write about the article and link to it).

It's a really well done extension and I want to see it work. But you gotta believe me, man, you NEED a growth hack to make this work. It will fizzle out otherwise.

Also, I really like the +N indicator icon that represents new comments. I have the extension installed now, and when I start to see that number growing, I'll know the extension is working. :)

Good luck!! It's a great idea and well executed. Now you just gotta grow it.

Nope, first I've heard of hypothesis! However I have seen a few things like it/Epiverse (Genius is doing something very similar to hypothesis). Apparently during the conception of the internet web annotations were planned as a feature. I think we're still a way off web annotations (very ambitious), but a good bridge is a comments system, which I think we are ready for.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll look into it. I am wary of asking permission from host sites because then it's not necessarily user controlled (plus there wouldn't be a huge difference between us and something like Disqus). There are potentially ways I could integrate things like host verification for comments though.