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Comment by md224 | Hacker News Reader

A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.)

I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary occurring across the web. Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented?

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Discourse is fragmented because there are dozens of different communities that like to talk amongst themselves. I think that's fine. I don't always want to be talking on an internet megaphone and I definitely don't want to be listening to one all the time.

Yes, fragmentation is a feature. Otherwise you are re-inventing Facebook, and we aren’t even sure we want the one of those we have.

If the only idea you have for non-fragmented is Facebook, ok, but I can imagine many other things that are useful, far better than Facebook and nothing like it.

There's a standard for that called Webmention, but it's not widely used : https://indieweb.org/Webmention

You can see it in action on this page : https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/

And there's a beautiful little tool named Bridgy that can pull replies/mentions off Twitter and Facebook and turn them into Indieweb-able entities. It's all really quite great, but of course assumes the terrible, terrible inconvenience of running your own website.

Bridgy is only able to see the comments one's social media account, like one's Facebook account, gets notified about, right? If some to me complete strangers start talking on FB about a post I made, I won't get to know about that via Bridgy? But if some friends of mine, whose comments my FB connected Bridgy account gets notified about, start talking about the blog post, Bridgy detects that?

I tried to do this but I was told to stop by HN itself: https://comments.network/

Seriously thinking about giving it a spin, remove the parts that HN was not happy with and relaunch it.

what are the parts that HN was not happy with?

I cross post to medium from my blog. I figure if people want to comment, they can do it there. Here's an example of the original[0] and the copy[1].

[0]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-10-16-es6-mo...

[1]: https://medium.com/@styfle/22969cd360f0/

Medium allows you to import pretty easily and sets the canonical URL so Google (hopefully) won't get confused with duplicate content.

Didn't know Medium supported a canonical url to point somewhere else. Thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, I think a comment system is one of the things Medium does poorly (I actually like Medium a lot in terms of other aspects, unlike most of HN it seems). They seemed to try to re-use their regular post system too much for commenting and each comment is like its own post, making a threaded discussion almost impossible to be had or read.

Yeah, I have a love-hate relationship with Medium.

The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre. Also, comments have become increasingly hidden behind suggested articles and require a click to load.

But I like that you can highlight a word or sentence and comment on that. The clapping thing is kind of interesting because you can give more "internet points" to better articles.

The one thing that Medium is great at is getting an article into the eyes of the people who want to read it, which is something that my personal blog will not do.

Also, there is something nice about consistent look n' feel with the same font when reading blog posts, so someone who is used to medium might be more likely to click on a medium.com link than a ceriously.com link.

>The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre.

And yet right here on Hacker News, submissions and replies are both just "items" and the UX is fantastic. It's not so much about the way they are represented as the way they are presented.

Medium has the worst comment system I have ever used. Click a comment and go back? You lose your place. Try to navigate even a little bit and you get lost and have a hard time even finding the original article. Just completely and utterly unfortunate.

There used to be the Trackback system that would allow someone to write blog post and "ping" the blog post they wrote the response to. I am not sure what happened to that system.

It was massively abused by spammers.

>Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented

Good reason? I don't know, probably only because no single platform has become ubiquitous. Of course, as soon as that happens we'll be seeing a lot of comments here about how it's terrible that online discourse is centralized and that people should abstain from using <platform>.

In thinking some more, I prefer to spend my time here as opposed to reddit because the level of discourse is just much higher. Can you imagine sifting through potentially _millions_ of comments, many of which are of youtube level quality? Maybe fragmentation is ok here.

It’s because no one wants to do the job of moderation.

Reddit uses moderators to police their subreddits basically for free . All of the founders have been admins which police the moderators or do the things that mods can’t do.

It’s not like this phenomena is new. Digg and Slashdot had similar problems . Newsgroups even before that with eternal September. Facebook , LinkedIn and Twitter use paid moderators (but have the pockets to do so) and they still are deluged with issues. Microsoft even has some class action lawsuit over people having PTSD after performing image moderation. 4Chan has had similar problems also.

We haven’t gotten even to advertisements that have conflict of interest. Even worse though is that if you have groups that your site allows in and your advertisers see it they will flee you really fast. Also, the fact that those same brands can just buy social network PR services for a fraction of the cost and all of the upside. Even better that they will be platform agnostic which means when reddit gets replaced they will still be there.

For me on Firefox on macOS that is just a couple of key strokes away:

  cmd-l cmd-c ctrl-a r <space> u r l : <enter> cmd-t cmd-v ctrl-a h n <enter>

I have set up `r` as keyword to search on Reddit and `hn` to search on Hacker News [1]. `url:` is the Reddit keyword to search in the url field of the items. (In Firefox, you can right click any search field and add a keyword bookmark for it.)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com

DDG (from the browser navbar) functions in much the same way.

!hn => hacker news

!se => stack exchange

!w => wikipedia

!r => reddit

(Not all of these are forums, natch.)

It often breaks with different query parameters for example on YouTube videos, but I just created a couple of bookmarklets.

hn:

  javascript:window.location.href='https://hn.algolia.com?query='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)%20+%20'&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story'

reddit:

  javascript:(function()%7Bwindow.location.href%20%3D%20%22https%3A%2F%2Freddit.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Durl%3A%22%20%2B%20encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)%7D)()

There's a W3C Web standard that is supposed to address this (Annotations), but I don't think it has gotten much traction yet: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar...

Part of the problem is the walled garden affect of Facebook, is there a public API that provides you with links to public posts about a piece of content ? I doubt it, although Facebook uses this internally to show me random strangers blathering about various news stories. Twitter might be easier but still not sure if there is something that an API can query to find links to a certain article or piece. I remember back in blogging days there was a ping back functionality that was supposed to do something like this.

Usually if I find something interesting in the tech sphere I just find people commenting about it on Hacker News and it's a tight but broad enough community to get good discussion.

I had a go at building this general idea as a browser extension about 5 years ago, but abandoned it as writing browser extensions is a pretty fragmented, horrible experience. The general idea was take the current page URL, hit Reddit/HN various APIs and coalesce various posts (multiple for Reddit) and single HN instances (perhaps with and without hashes, "?new" and other reposting conventions).

Because the web has devolved into a bunch of walled gardens that try to sell their user bases to advertisers.

I think it's okay that the web has different communities on it. The web has grown in population at a staggering rate, if we had the same system we used to have of public boards that would be full to the brim and people would be seeking quieter spots anyway.

I don't like the idea of walled gardens for advertising at all mind you. But different communities, some of them private, makes total sense for such a large population.

No it hasn't. Those walled gardens still comprise a miniscule amount of the actual content on the web. In fact many are link aggregators and depend the existence of content beyond the walled garden to survive.

Nothing has devolved except the willingness of users to explore to find new content. But that's not because it no longer exists, but because for the most part new content is delivered to them.

> when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so

Surprised no one else has pointed this out, but that was one of the original problems that Disqus was trying to solve. E.g.:

https://www.usv.com/blog/disqus

I just add links to HN/reddit threads at the end of my posts. Simple and elegant solution.

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