Volunteers wanted to build More Human Internet | Hacker News Reader

Volunteers wanted to build More Human Internet

morehumaninternet.org

1 pointwweiss12304 comments

So... first of all, I shouldn't have to download a PDF to understand what you're building.

Second... I downloaded the PDF, and still don't understand what you're building. My best guess is a helpdesk for the Internet?

Thanks for the feedback ocdtrekkie, I agree that this should be clearer. We'll work to provide a clearer picture of what the platform would do. In general, we're building a public issue tracker for the internet.

I feel like the "More Human Internet" brand made me feel like you were trying to build... that, particularly when the manifesto on the page talks about surveillance capitalism and corporate overreach. Like that HBO Silicon Valley style, you were building a new Internet, and that any sort of collaboration tools prior to that were to design that.

I do feel like a public issue tracker will have a hard time addressing those issues, because the mass surveillance platforms like Google and Facebook obviously aren't going to participate... and people are still very attached to such platforms, despite their hostility towards ordinary users.

But I like the idea in general: When I'm visiting things that are on GitHub Pages or have a GitHub linked, I'm likely to drive-by leave feedback or point out minor bugs, because the difficulty of doing so is very low. Something like that for ordinary websites would be nice too.

Related to that, I might suggest that if a site already has people reporting feedback/bugs to GitHub issues, you should incorporate support for that, such that your platform feels like a universal way of feeding feedback to site owners, regardless of what they themselves use to manage it. (Similar to how GitHub Sponsors both operates their own sponsor system, but also provides the ability to configure it to link to PayPal or Patreon or whatever.)

Great points and thanks for the encouragement.

Certainly the internet would be a lot better if larger tech platforms were more responsive to the feedback of their users, but you're right that there are entrenched interests that might work against that. We do plan on opening the platform up so that the public can report issues directly to morehumaninternet.org even for websites who have not signed up. At that point, if many other websites are having success in engaging directly with the public and if there's enough demand for certain issues to be looked at, maybe those larger platforms will see that it's in their best interest to respond.

As for integration with Github issues, I definitely like the idea of having the platform feel like a universal way of feeding feedback to site owners, but of course those site owners may use any number of tools internally to track issues (Github issues, JIRA, Trello, etc.) so we'll want to integrate with those platforms. We are planning on allowing users to upvote other users' issues to make it easier for site owners to know which issues are higher priority. To support that, we'll need a publicly accessible link to the issue at morehumaninternet.org but that same issue can be kept in sync with a corresponding card/issue/ticket in some other system.

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