Hypothes.is: An Open Annotations Platform
web.hypothes.is
web.hypothes.is
UPD: there is not a single issue open on the main repo wrt W3C standard implementation: https://github.com/hypothesis/h/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aope.... The post I took as a promise: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar...
It's just not really clear to me how a user should find out that there are annotations about a page available somewhere.
(I work with Solid.)
I check up on it every few months, and it seems like nothing has really happened since the announcement years ago.
The spec is mostly a stub , with no activity on Github.
There still seems to be only the node-solid-server implementation, which also sees almost no work.
Inrupt seems to have tried linking with/appropriating the project for the company brand for a while, which also felt weird.
In terms of servers: there has indeed not been too much activity there recently, which relates to efforts having mostly focused on stabilising the spec (as far as I've seen, at least) rather than new things having been added.
It's undeniable that Inrupt and the project are very intertwined, given how many of the original project members are working for/with Inrupt, and it being founded by TimBL. I think both the community and Inrupt are still figuring out the best way to work together. And I think we've had the reverse problem as well to some extent, where the community might be making themselves a bit too dependent on Inrupt. I think the project can grow in two (complimentary) ways: top-down, with large organisations getting the project adopted at scale in big bangs, and bottom-up, where early adopters encourage additional adoption and it spreading from there. Inrupt is probably best positioned to support the former, but we haven't seen too much from the latter yet. That said, there are a number of community projects that aim to make a dent there, and the best way to keep up with those is through the This Month in Solid newsletter [3].
(Note: these are my personal views.)
[1] https://github.com/solid/process/blob/master/panels.md
Otherwise popular pages may get annotation overload and have a poor news-to-noise ratio.
If you use a saas, unless it's open source and you can self host, you are at the mercy of it.
If the service is good enough and the team behind it seems in good faith, it can give you confidence for the switch.
But promising to adopt a standard then not doing it doesn't inspire confidence.
The system being closed source (no open API can change that), they need to build trust with some users. Particularly the tech saavy ones that have been burnt in the past and hold data that is precious to them.
If it's open source, and it's just a matter of following a standard, I don't think it's a reason for not giving it a try.
Or is this something different from what you have in mind?
Hypothes.is is great for prototyping curation workflows to explore what is possible before spending time implementing yet another tool. It also hits the sweet spot for having a UI that is just accessible enough for non-technical users that can display annotations made by bots. We have been using hypothes.is as the backend to crawl [0] research resource identifiers from the scientific literature for 4 years, and it has been solid the whole time.
I see some questions/concerns about the w3c compliance of the API. I'm pretty sure that there is just a switch the needs to be flipped, and that it has been implemented. Yep, it has [1]. Also as others have suggested it is fairly straight forward to set up your own annotation store, though it is not simple to replicate the Hypothes.is setup.
I hope that the pivot to education continues to go well so that it can fund the infrastructure, because Hypothes.is provides a very valuable (if hard to capture the value of) service.
0. https://github.com/SciCrunch/scibot 1. https://github.com/hypothesis/h/blob/master/h/presenters/ann...
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danwhaley
Dan built and sold an Internet travel app in the 90s, and then became involved in climate work. He's been committed to it for many years.
Hypothes.is was created in order to address the problem of disinformation on the Internet, especially related to climate change; e.g. the Wall Street Journal publishes an Op-Ed from Charles Koch denying that human activity is contributing to global warming, and an annotation channel run by climate scientists can dissect it point by point.
I respect and admire that vision, and I think it's trying to get to one of the root causes of climate change denialism.
(Obviously, Hypothes.is has many other great uses!)
I think the dynamic is similar: while a normal annotation is a comment on a fragment of text, a Twitter reply is (or at least can be) a comment on a single portion of a longer thread.
Two notable differences:
- While a typical annotation platform takes a freely-written text and allows any segment to be annotated, Twitter forces the author of a thread to compose their text with the segment boundaries in mind.
- While a normal annotation system doesn’t allow you to annotate the annotations, any given “annotation” on Twitter may itself be a thread which allows for annotation. It’s recursive!
Maybe the above is a stretch, but personally I think it’s an interesting way to think about Twitter.
Annotation should have been part of the browser from day one. It should have evolved with it when things moved on to the mobile world. It never happened.
Draw a graph of all web pages ordered by how many times they are visited. You get a power law distribution. On the left are things like CNN's front page, on the right things like a text file containing a cheesecake recipe someone posted in 1995 that is technically still online but nobody has visited in years.
On the left side are pages that are visited too often, and public annotations inevitably descend into madness and chaos, even worse than comment sections which have the courtesy to at least be isolated on the page to a certain area. On these pages, trying to use the annotation software is worse than not using it at all.
On the right are the pages that nobody visits, so when you visit them, there is no chance of any annotations being on the page, nor any chance that if you leave any annotations anybody will ever see them, or care if they do (i.e., just giving people a directory of "rarely annotated pages" doesn't solve the problem, the problem is that nobody cares about these pages anyhow). Annotation software doesn't harm these pages technically, but the user experience is at best that the user will just forget about their annotation software, and at worst, they'll feel alone on the page, a concept not previously in their mental model and one that is not contributing to a positive assessment of the annotation software.
In between is the sweet spot, where participation is adequate that the annotation software brings some sort of value, but it isn't just overwhelming chaos.
I submit to you that viewed through the power law lens, that sweet spot is actually fairly narrow. Moreover, if you slice through a single user's browser history looking for when they hit pages in that sweet spot, it'll still be the minority of pages that they viewed, so basically by statistical necessity, the pages where the software added value must be a tiny minority of the pages you visit. The majority of pages they visit, the annotation software experience ranges from extremely net negative to at best neutral, and it's hard for the positive experiences to make up for that.
Moreover, this sweet spot is moving. As more of the general public tries out your software, the sweet spot moves to the right, which also has the effect when viewed from a single user's point of view of making the pages where it is useful become more rare. When you're just starting out and you've got a 100 users, the useful pages are things like "the front page of CNN" and "the hot wikipedia article about $CURRENT_EVENT", but as your user count increases it moves down to specific articles on CNN and only the linked content from the $CURRENT_EVENT, then only to archival content on CNN and random Wikipedia pages, and just in general into stuff that becomes increasingly difficult for it to be any significant percentage of the pages you visit.
I think this is why A: They can't get popular B: the ones that I know about that have been around for a while and are therefore presumably successful enough for someone to consider them worthwhile can only stay so provided they don't get more popular and C: there's no chance you can make money in this space because you get an anti-network effect... the more users you get, the less valuable the service becomes to every existing user!
I think this is also why it seems like such an appealing idea. You create a prototype, get a couple of friends on it, it seems like fun and to be useful. You annotate some popular pages, you have some similar interests and you annotate, I dunno, the latest game console announcement or something, and it seems like fun. The problem is, rather than this being the worst the experience will ever be as it just gets better and better as more people come online, this is the best it will ever be.
Also, I can tell you from the first couple of times around that if this did become popular, the content producers of the Internet would fight you tooth and nail. They did the first couple of times when the math sort of worked to at least get to the point that these things could get in the news. With the web so much larger and power-law-y and the anti-network effect correspondingly so much more powerful, now this sort of thing can't even be successful enough to so much as get noticed by anyone before it has already collapsed.
(I specifically said "generalized" annotation at the top, because specialized use cases can get around some of these issues. But it's going to be hard to make any money on the size of user base you can support, because while you can mitigate the anti-network effect, it's always going to be looming over you if you try to get large enough.)
The main value of annotations is as a personal knowledge system anchored on top of public knowledge. As one's private knowledge grows it eventually reaches a point where it needs to be summarized. A good annotation system helps with this summarization process (which mostly comes down to having a good search and navigation system).
I think annotations can be made to work but the starting point has to be about personal use and not public use.
In fact, Coda and Notion.so are very successful products and they're basically personal/private annotation systems (modulo storing everything in the cloud). I can imagine extending Coda and Notion.so with programmatic capabilities and adding offline storage and turning them into pretty successful personal annotation systems with premium features for supporting organizational work and collaboration.
There is plenty of money in this market when viewed from the right angle.
This is causing me to realize that the value of Wikipedia is not the fact that the pages are editable by the public; it's that there exists a process (as flawed and controversial as it is) for debating over the various contributions and edits that leads to a single, unified version of any given page. More than anything else, that consolidation process is Wikipedia. A successful consolidation process has to be present in order for any system of public contributions (annotations or otherwise) to produce a coherent result.
is it a UX issue? discoverability? small market/need? monetization? tragedy of the commons? community-building?
Before changing HTML link semantics though, HTML should really consider allowing placing href on any element rather than using the dedicated <a href=...> element though (with the expectation that this acts equivalently to an anchor link), like MathML does.
In general, I'm not sure hosting discussions on third-party aggregators such as discus.com is really a win for privacy, though.
That's why everyone is doing it themself. They don't wanna make it to easy for people to find their dirt, also make it harder for trolls and spammer to harm them. Protecting yourself from others is a legit problem with this.
But besides that, aren't sites like hackernews and reddit basically like that? All you need is an extension which querys them for the active url or domain and shows the results on the side.
1. The comments aspect of this doesn't really jump out at me from the landing page.
2. The words "knowledge base" scare most people.
3. "You will be our customer and we promise to treat you the way we’d like to be treated too… with respect" is much more ominous with ellipsis than it would be with an em dash or a colon.
Why would I ever give you my data? Because you promise not to sell it? Sorry that's not going to fly.
I'm not an anonymous person. I've been a Hacker News user since the very beginning. I share my contact info in my profile. My reputation is my livelihood. I've never done anything shady and don't intend to start now :-) So I'd like to believe that people see that judge for themselves whether to trust me or not.
Knowing who is behind a product, at least for me personally, makes a difference. Just a couple of days ago I started a Youtube channel to openly talk about my thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHkgOonAQd5haT8HHJhpg6g
But yeah I hear your concerns, and I respect your decision to not use my app.
Another thing to highlight here: Histre is a paid product. I'm bootstrapping it. I think that it is the "free" products that go the adtech route. By charging the users, I'm making it clear that it is their money that supports Histre.
- Companies display a willingness to force agreement to new policies in order to continue using the service, even for paid customers, and often on questionable or void legal footing.
- The fact that it's a paid service right now might not be a strong enough signal. Even large device manufacturers (e.g. HTC) have retroactively patched ads into paid-in-full, physical products. What's to say that you won't have to pivot to make Histre succeed?
- What happens if you are bought out or otherwise personally leave the product? Even if success doesn't affect how you act on your commitments, what's to keep others from malicious actions?
- Adding to the above (re-iterating an ancestor comment), if you're successful enough to need employees you won't have a hand in every decision. How then is privacy still protected?
Privacy aside, if Histre goes under what options do customers have for, e.g., exporting their data?
Re exporting data: I'm working on that. There will be org-mode export first. Then json.
Usually poison pills are to trip up parties without controlling interest, so I'm curious what kind of legal framework would making something like that unchangeable.
Every so often over the years I have recalled that feature and wished it had survived, especially when some organization desperately needs a watchdog group calling them on their bullshit.
Comment systems carved out a piece of that problem domain, but I’ve always wished for comments curated by an independent party. Which I am sure is how we got Digg, Reddit, and HN.
In the meantime, I've embedded the sidebar into my site [0] and hope more people do the same! Original idea from this [1] post.
The one I use works fine
Impressed they’re still going! I’ve worked for two failed startups since.
For those that don't, it was a locally running proxy service that would inject its own annotation UI into any site you wanted. Basically your own pocket comment/discussion board where you could discuss whatever URL you were on with other users of hoodwink.
https://github.com/whymirror/hoodwinkd
Also, wow, I can't believe that was 14 years ago. I miss _why.
If the devs are interested in my use case (understood if not) which is basically a poor mans onboarding tool, I'd love and happily spend some money (not onboarding tool money, those seem to be $1k+/month) on the ability to edit urls, share these, etc.
What I envisioned this as letting me do was creating versioned annotations that let me share them to anyone and they can superimpose those annotations on top of any URL that has the same basic structure behind it amazon.com/$myuser/$mycluster$/$myportal etc. I thought it'd be a really killer tool to use for helping new devs learn AWS more easily than digging constantly digging through AWS documentation, ie: "What is lamba? click button 10 quick bullet points on Lambda" sort of thing.
A lot of these users will be using localhost, their IP, digitalocean IPs, etc instead of a concrete domain name. It'd be great if we could regex the url strings or something like that.
Thanks for your work!
I use Hypothesis a lot to highlight e.g., the few important lines of codes, commonly used config values, etc buried in longer dev docs.
This mostly works pretty well. But I do lose my highlights when the URLs change e.g. version 1.0 to 1.1. Sometimes there is a "latest" docs site available to work around this issue but not always.
I imagine that a script could be made with the Hypothesis API to migrate annotations across pages and approximately re-anchor them as much as possible.
Enterprise - It’s Slack, but on top of digital content.
Education - LMS with interactive layer for notes and assignments.
Website - It’s Disqus, but inline with your content.
Personal - It’s Pocket, Genius, and Reddit combined.
In contrast, Hypothesis only keeps track of the metadata and uses fuzzy anchoring to make it resilient to the markup changes.
And does it ensure the integrity of the text, so that no bad actor may modify the text to turn it into "fake news"?
I think that ^^ could help diminish corruption of knowledge / the negative impact of information distribution which the Internet enables.
- The annotations get "anchored" to the text in place at a given URL. There's a video online of Rap Genius [née Genius] discussing fuzzy annotation anchoring [1]. I would guess Hypothesis does something similar. Also, their client code is on GitHub.
- Annotations can be replied to but as far as I know there is no mechanism for voting or any one particular annotation being more trusted than others. The site owner could make an official group for their site I suppose.
- The underlying page can be modified at any time. If something is annotated and that underlying text is significantly changed or removed, the annotation becomes "orphaned" and shows in a separate area. If you really want to, you could archive the page first with e.g., archive.is and then annotation an archived version.
- I do think that Hypothesis maintains an archived version of an annotated page, or at the very least the portion of its text which you've anchored annotations to so that you can view them outside of the context of the page.
Does "USA" here mean the geographical USA, the legal jurisdiction, citizens of the USA or the government of the USA?
Unfortunately I got distracted, but I still believe in it and may come back to it again.
Seriously though, I always wondered why something like this didn't exist. Very cool.
edit: looks like Genius moved away from aiming to annotate the web, and focused instead on their core business of annotating music.
For me Genius's annotations were more of a tool for surfacing authoritative knowledge on a song. I use Hypothesis more for personal notes across the web, but other people use it collaboratively as well.