Comment by willhinsa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willhinsa | Hacker News Reader

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I love the idea. I like the concept of the name, a fun shortening/nickname for "Ampersand", which in this function also makes me think of the "Yes, And" concept from improv comedy. For me as a user, the drawback to the name "Ampie" is that it also makes me think of Google AMP, which certainly isn't my favorite thing lol :)

I didn't love that the plugin is automatically active on every page I open; I was expecting that it would be a button in the toolbar that I could click at my leisure to see what discussion of a particularly interesting article was. I really do love the Twitter integration with people who you follow, but again, I wish it was kind of an on-demand plugin, or maybe just a site I could go to at my leisure and input a URL to see a nice big display of all the discussions about something specific.

I'll be turning it off for now as I'm already prone to too many distractions, but I might toggle it on sometime if I want to deep dive on something and see others' comments about it.

It pops up the first two times you go to a domain or a URL that has mentions, so it should stop bothering you after a little bit of usage. I do hear you though, several people brought this up. The problem with making it a button is that people forget to click it (me included), and most of the interesting connections go unnoticed this way. If you have ideas how to make this better, please tell me!

How about opt-out instead. A button to disable it on a domain. Its very non-intrusive otherwise but I'd still like the option to disable thing. (I also sent this suggestion as a note from the bottom of the extension)

Thanks for building Ampie!

As I said in email, you only see the sidebar two times per domain (unless there are mentions of the particular URL you are on, then two times on that URL). You can also disable ampie on a domain completely by going into settings: click on the ampie icon in the extension toolbar, and you can add blocked domains there. URLs from those domains won't get sent to the server to be checked, and the sidebar won't pop up.

Thank you for trying it out and sharing feedback!

One thing that comes to mind is an option to toggle it to operate either in "always-on sidebar" or "on-demand plugin button" mode.

To riff on what metabeard suggested, another configuration option that could be presented to the user might be something like "domain-specific preferences for always-on or on-demand" so that certain websites are always excluded/always excluded.

-Will

To use it as a button, you can try the bookmarklet: https://ampie.app/url-context

Would love to hear about your experience if you do use it!

Have you thought about a separate extension that just has a toolbar button that is mostly in a dull inactive state with a grayscale badge, but when there's enough discussion on a page, it both lights up and has an obnoxiously colorful number?

Even though I never mess with it, I find I'm generally aware when there's a badge on my adblocker. I believe that'd be enough to remind people to click it. The heuristics should be strict enough not to light up all the time, or maybe even support user-defined filters for advanced users.

After a while it's possible they'll subconsciously think about Ampie — and the dull badge will still convey "yeah, there's some discussion, check it out."

ps. I say separate extension because I'd be wary of giving it access to all sites and data, which I guess would be required if that was only a setting?

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