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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

I've long felt that annotation was one of the greatest missed opportunities of the web. Every major content website implements commenting differently and often poorly. I'd much prefer to have comments come from a third party system where I can: own my own comments, not be subject to removal by the author of the content, and choose the group of people I want to discuss with. Imagine if hackernews discussions appeared right along the content instead of being hidden away where no reader of the content could find them.

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HTML hyperlinks as they are - unidirectional - are a very long standing design decision the last futile revision of which was in 1099 or so with XLink. You probably have it seen in action with SVG-in-HTML (and SVG fragment inclusion in SVG itself) where it kindof rears its ugly head in that, for the longest time, you had to use xlink:href (with xlink bound to the XLink XML namespace). XLink itself is based on SGML/HyTime concepts from 1990s. I believe Sun back then patent-encumbered XPointer (which is the part of XLink for addressing fragments), and especially claimed IP rights on its representation of range addressing, which didn't help to make it popular I guess.

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.

Edit: 1999 lol

> not be subject to removal by the author of the content

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.

This is a good idea actually. Figuring out a way to make HN comments visible next to the content that is being commented on would be very useful.

Hey I'm working on exactly this with https://histre.com/

Nice idea! Some cheapshots:

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.

Thank you. Great points. I'll fix that.

We've had enough problems stemming from the powerful parasitic middlemen that have ruined the Internet, we don't need more of them.

Why would I ever give you my data? Because you promise not to sell it? Sorry that's not going to fly.

I understand. Thanks for the feedback. I think about this too.

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.

The problem is the change with success. Page and Brin where once idealistic hackers and even came up with a catch phrase of "Don't be evil", fast forward and it did not work and the reality is it probably had very little to do with them. Success and size whittle away at idealistic visions. You need to put together a framework before you are successful, on how you are going to enforce that your core values reflect with success and size and it has to have teeth. I am confident you are a good person and you are idealistic. The problem is, that you won't always be steering the ship.

Yes, that's a great point. Is a strong privacy policy the solution? I do have one in place. I'm happy to put in stronger commitments.

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.

I would say a legal poison pill, something that builds a framework that the company is dissolved if the core tenants are violated, or that all digital assets are forfeited to a no-profit privacy group.

I know very little about this kind of stuff, but is there anything that would prevent a controlling party from striking the poison pill provisions from the bylaws?

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.

Your target audience might not care, but I don't think that's strong enough.

- 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?

Thanks, good points, I'll think about them.

Re exporting data: I'm working on that. There will be org-mode export first. Then json.

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