Hacker News Reader

Comment by MollyR | Hacker News Reader

With all the sites getting rid of comments. I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ?

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> I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ?

... or perhaps for a browser plugin that allows comments on any web page.

Who could forget hoodwink'd[0]! It was such a neat experiment, I miss it. Been thinking of doing something similar in scheme.

[0]: via mousehole http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMouseh... / http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMousehole...

I've been meaning to write a "Dark Souls"-style comment/annotation system for the web, via browser extensions, for some time now. What better use of the web is there than annotating a site like "goatse.cx" with the message "Be wary of but hole"?

Genius is almost there now, but last I checked you had to open a new page (on genius.com) to annotate the page you're on, which ruins the immersion. And you can write freeform, which spoils the fun :-)

> perhaps for a browser plugin that allows comments on any web page.

Genius sort of does this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/genius-web-annotat...

Maybe.

It feels like the quality of online discussion is related to the narrowness of the topic/community.

For example: I find the comments that make it to Reddit's homepage humorous, but not really that helpful/insightful/smart. Most of the subreddits I frequent offer much better discussion, assuming the source topic is interesting. I.e., I don't expect much from r/cats. Although, even r/cats has much better comment that the homepage...

HR is a great aggregator, but still fairly narrow compared to NPR, CNN, HuffPost, Fox News, etc. And most of the commenters on those sites don't have any direct experience or insight to offer to those discussions. Until that problem is solved, the comments aren't valuable.

Communities have some commonality, something shared, something that unites them and then because of that encourages some decency standards. People that live in the same space, people that have the same hobbies, people that work in software related businesses and startups in the case of HN.

So you could build a community out of something and then have a general news discussion, that seems possible. Generally though, the vast vast majority of commenters have nothing original to add and they simply create noise. Perhaps those few nuggets of gold are worth the effort, it's hard to say, at least with HN we all have that common bond and then the actual topics tend to be related to it. Go scan the comments on a couple random foxnews.com articles and a couple random msnbc.com articles and tell me, if the article on foxnews is about the president or a non-white, I will bet you a nickle that you'll see a racist comment in the first batch or two. That's what you'd be working with..

You still need people to moderate the comments (at minimum, to remove spam). That doesn't scale at all without an absurd number of volunteers (e.g Reddit).

Like reddit?

Isn't Reddit trying to get rid of comments, too?

No? That would be absurdly stupid for Reddit in terms of engagement.

In no way and by no stretch of the imagination.

Yeah, it's more insidious than that. I've been a heavy Reddit user for 7 years. The situation on most subreddits is now basically all comments being moderator-approved at a fine level of detail. They just do it after the comments appear, giving the impression that free discussion is still happening. Which comments and threads are allowed to persist is becoming very obviously narrower over time, all over the site. There is daily consternation among users over it.

> The situation on most subreddits is now basically all comments being moderator-approved at a fine level of detail.

Uhh... do you have a source for this?

Agree or disagree with the politics otherwise rampant therein, subreddits like /r/KotakuInAction seem to do a good job of cataloging some instances of this (ex. [1][2] and basically anything else in their [CENSORSHIP] tag/flair). Granted, this is likely not the best source, due to the fairly political nature of such subreddits, as well as that I haven't checked many of these to verify the accuracy of them; I just occasionally like to see what different sides of the debate(s) are up to.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/378smw/a_jo...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/390bni/user...

I think Reddit is what they want to avoid.

So something like a multi-niche thing?

Where each niche gets it own page, with posts and comments?

Might catch on. We can those pages subreddits...

Well I was thinking the hackernews model is better than the reddit model.

I'm still researching how important is it for companies to have control over their own site.

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