Show HN: Netvyne – a Chrome extension to leave and read comments on any URL
netvyne.com
netvyne.com
I’d like to introduce Netvyne, a tool which at its core is a Chrome extension that empowers you (the consumer) to leave and read comments on any URL.
There are many challenges with the current state of commenting on the Internet. Not every website has a comment section. Sites that do have a comment section sometimes close it for new comments. Even sites that go as far as to moderate the comments sometimes do so with noticeable bias. While comments can help consumers make informed decisions, our goal at Netvyne is to also address the emotional need to share and witness authentic reactions.
I was first introduced to this Chrome extension idea by a friend a couple years ago in college, and worked on it on-and-off as a side project (in Python+JS). At the start of last year, I picked it up as a serious undertaking and re-wrote the tool in Golang+React with a tightly-knit team of 5 fulltime people. A bunch of premature optimization and feature creep later, we're ready to launch with what I believe has a modicum of utility.
The idea is not particularly new, in fact I remember reading a HN comment that said this idea gets tried every two years or so. What differentiates us is that we’re building content moderation from the very start, which is more of an operations problem than a technical problem. We’re committed to civility of discussion over all else; if that means sacrificing “free” speech, or taking the site down temporarily while we scale up moderation, so be it. Timing-wise, people are increasingly familiar with the idea of Chrome extensions, and have also recognized the value of comments due in large part to the popularity of Reddit in recent years.
If you have a moment, try out our extension and please let us know what you think! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/netvyne-extension/...
To make this interesting, we’ll donate $100 to Wikipedia if you can make us take the site down for more than 50% of any given 24 hour period (the site is considered down if there is no way for you to leave a comment).
On the flip side, if abusive/spam comments make up less than 10% of all comments AND there are more than 5,000 comments by the end of the week, I’ll open-source the client-side parts of the tool (web, iOS app & extension).
You can track these stats for yourself: https://netvyne.com/status. We’ll post updates on Twitter (@netvyne) as we go!
Khalil & The Netvyne Team
A lot.
I think the first one was called web tribes or something, in the late 90s, I had someone pitch the idea to me since.
I get a sense that there are some good reasons why the idea doesn't take off, I'm sure someone smarter and more savvy could enumerate them.
Discord, Reddit, HN, Twitter are all successful variations around a similar concept. HN in particular is url based (comments are attached to a url for the most part).
I don't know why the "pure comments" version always fail, but it certainly does; it may have something to do with community building... Maybe we're not interested in anybody's comment, but only in comments from specific people with specific interests...?
1. https://genius.com/web-annotator
2. https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11505454/news-genius-anno...
Ah yes community is also another reason! It is tricky to build a community, at least I wasn't sure what community to start with. That's why I chose to create a private sphere where its just you and your friends discussing and sharing links privately in. a chronological feed, and was hoping that could create enough pull for a public community to develop.
It's just presentation-wise they've gone for academia and also not put much effort into aggregation
I think the fact that the idea has been tried so many times though, its doomed to succeed one day ;) There's no doubt of the value it would it would bring if it did take off; usually though after a spectacular release it just dies.
Moderation, timing, and marketing/presentation are the main ones that I can think of based on the predecessors that I have seen (Dissenter, Relay Chat, hypothes.is, etc). I'd love to hear your takes on what other reasons could be or what the biggest ones are.
I actually haven't heard of web tribes though, so I'll read up on it.
Actually the Netvyne extension can be used in conjunction with FB (and other social media platforms, for that matter. Netvyne is a tool/utility). The native screenshot capability of the extension is particularly useful when discussing what you see on Facebook with friends that might not otherwise have those items in their feed.
Personally, I find that the FB feed doesn't have much value. There's really not much that you have that is worth sharing with your entire friends list; sharing with specifically selected sets of friends leads to a higher quality experience in my opinion. The fact that FB still by default has you post to your entire friends list indicates that they are most likely going for maximal engagement at the cost of relevance. With regard to URL sharing specifically, most people I know would just send those links via Messenger. My hunch is that this is because there is no alternative, and that the chronological feed format for sharing URLs is superior.
Thing is, if people wanted you to leave comments, they would add comments. Every CMS worth its salt has this feature out of the box, and even static websites can add the likes of Disqus in seconds.
This "solution" is already here in the form of traditional social media like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit if people want to provide any additional context or commentary.
The problem with solutions like these is the potential for abuse, and somebody needing to moderate it ultimately if it ever does catch on in any meaningful way. At that point, you may as well just use an on-site comment section and let people deal with their own problems, and it's already decentralized, and a choice that people can make for themselves rather than having what's effectively graffiti showing up via a browser extension when people land on their site.
Its true that there are ways to add comments to your site (Disqus being a pretty big one), but you still need to make the time to set it up (and maintain it). There's also the perspective of the one consuming the website content to consider.
Regarding traditional social media, Netvyne at least is not a replacement but rather a tool that can be used in conjunction. It offers reduced friction in the sense that the comment section is there from the start, rather than having to wait for someone to share the page.
The potential for abuse is indeed a big problem, that's why we've built in content moderation from the start. Based on the activity so far, it seems we've got it covered, and we'll be focusing on the other issues as mentioned in this thread, namely marketing and community. If you have any thoughts on how to approach these, I'd love to hear it!
Graffiti is not permitted and will be removed as part of the moderation insofar as it does not contribute to a civil discussion. I am aware of what happened with Dissenter, and I believe that civility is integral to the value that comments bring.
There's also an automated component that will be scaled up as time goes on; while moderation will not be fully automated in the near future, the realistic target is for a AI-assisted system that will greatly increase not only throughput but consistency/correctness as well.
There is a lot of uncertainty here that we'll have to manage moving forward. My background is in deep learning (mostly CV), and there are some parallels between these challenges. Because of this, I do believe these problems can be solved over time.
Curating civil discussion is our goal. Personally, I found the quote on dang's profile quite beautiful in putting into words a noble target that we ourselves will be working towards with our content moderation.
I run a problem validation platform & 'YouTube like public chat for ecommerce websites'[1] a need-gap being tracked there.
Although Netvyne isn't a chat, It seems to address the core problem of that need-gap i.e. A way for consumers to interact with each other on a website without using the website's own interaction system.
You're welcomed to comment about Netvyne in [1] explaining how it addresses that problem.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/141-youtube-like-public-chat-fo...
I do think Netvyne addresses the need to interact with others on a website as mentioned. In fact, this particular need-gap was something we've thought about, and we do already have a live chat section built into the extension itself in order to address it.
Thanks for the invitation, I'll go a head and post a comment there!
It was somewhat controversial at the time.
I think there is indeed a controversial aspect to this idea, which we aim to address with better moderation (for civility).
It would be as simple as something like https://www.netvyne.com/?url=%s which would create and redirect you to the comment page for that URL and a simple bookmarklet to generate that URL for the current page.
I also use Firefox so your extension isn't available anyways.
Using a bookmarklet is a much better idea since users can control where they run.
I also think that there is something to be said for being able to see the comments in the site itself, though perhaps that can be done as well.
I'm actually not too familiar with bookmarklets, I'll have to read some more. I appreciate the tips!
You could display the comments in-site but then you are bringing back all of the security and privacy concerns. (I guess you could have some middle-ground if the code to add the iframe is trivially simple?)
Let me know if I'm mistaken though; I want to make sure that all such concerns are addressed!
I also think the badge could be dropped, but in initial stages when traffic is low I think it would really help with engagement.
It is nice, but if I am not getting a comment indicator anyways I would rather just not trust your extension at all.
> Chrome's option to disable unless clicked?
This is pretty good. But I would still prefer a 1-line auditable bookmarklet rather than a large extension.
> I also think the badge could be dropped, but in initial stages when traffic is low I think it would really help with engagement.
Yeah, I can see that. It would be interesting if you could get it just with URL access. You could still check for comments and open the discussion page but you wouldn't need full site access permission. Due to how the permission model works this would probably need to be a separate extension but it would be interesting to have a "Netvyne Lite" version with much less permissions.
...that being said logging every visited site is still a lot of access. But I can see how the comment count is a valuable feature for some users even if it isn't worth the cost for me.
Also for comment count checks are you protecting the URL in any way? For example checking for `sha3("netvyne-" + url)` instead of the raw URL. This way you aren't sending the URL of my URL-accessible Google Docs (for example) to your server.
We did try to reduce the permissions as much as possible, but I believe at this time every permission is required by some feature. I get your point though, and I'll try to see what else we can do in this regard.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, just to be clear we don't log every visited site (or log browsing in general); the only time data is added to the database is when the user actively adds a comment/creates content.
Currently we send the URL as is; its only stored though if you are writing a comment or sharing the site with friends. I do like the hashing idea but ultimately when someone does leave a comment or share it, we do store it without hashing so later users can filer it and so on. Please let me know if I misunderstood your question!
I appreciate that. And I guess it is partly the fault of the browser that you can't ask for just permissions that the user wants to use. From my point of view the set of features you chose isn't worth giving you the permissions. However I can see that for other users they do want these features. It seems that there isn't a perfect option with one extension here.
> but ultimately when someone does leave a comment or share it...
Yes, but there is a huge difference from "site I left a comment on" and "every page I visit". For example if I have a secret document that is protected by an unguessable URL I am not going to leave comments on it, so it would be great if it wasn't sent to your service. Of course once I do leave a comment it makes sense to send it to your service so that you can fetch metadata and other features. (Although it would be cool if there was an option to never reveal the URL as well.)
API + bookmarklet is an interesting idea though, kind of more like hypothes.is/Disqus/Relay Chat (discontinued). Perhaps we can add it in the future!
Also, the Firefox extension is in the works! You can sign up for the waitlist here if you'd like: https://forms.gle/Ksq3LuEBNSvNT5Br6
I was aware of the toolbar extension scams that used to take place, but not of this particular pattern you are mentioning of hand-offs.
Credibility is indeed a hard problem, with respect to both consumers and producers. I am reminded of the VLC story [0], and based on my experiences I think you can gain trust over time by your actions (hopefully this story is a valid one).
Regarding least privilege, we have minimized the requested permissions to the best of our ability (please let me know if that's not the case). I'll be looking more into the bookmarklet idea too as another approach while trying to maintain the usability.
"* The notice you see about having access to your history and website data is automatically generated because this extension runs on every tab. But it does NOT actually monitor your browsing history or require your personal information to work properly."
The world is correctly nervous about extensions that run on every page.
Regarding extensions that run on every page, I totally understand the concern. That's why we already built in the option to make it manually run network requests (right click on the extension icon, then click on the options tab). It does make the comment count badge not work though if you choose to do this.
It will be accessible at this link: https://github.com/netvyne/ext
Just a heads up, this will be as-is ;) so please excuse the commit messages and disorganization.
From a quick look, it seems to just request access to all pages? I am not sure if chrome really has a elegant way to handle per-website requests (as compared to per-tab).
https://robwu.nl/crxviewer/?crx=https%3A%2F%2Fchrome.google....
How are you intending to fix that? Especially since you have a lot of extra overhead because you have to handle an API call for every page a user loads in their browser?
Please publish a privacy policy and disclose what data you collect/retain, and when. Otherwise, I'm assuming your plugin is collecting extensive client-side data including every URL I visit, my IP, etc.
Also, why haven't you done more of a quiet roll-out before announcing it on HN? Your status page says you've got ~100 comments. I really don't understand why you wouldn't have rolled this out via an invite system, starting with trusted friends, your professional network, etc.
Our privacy policy is here: https://netvyne.com/privacy-policy
A TL;DR is we only collect information when you actively post a comment/content, which includes the IP address of the request. We don't collect data on pages you are just visiting.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you can also disable the extension from running on every site you visit, either via Chrome or from our very own options menu (it may result in the comment count badge no longer working).
Its already been cycled with trusted friends, and now I believe its ready for the virtuous cycle that comes with a broader audience. The value of the tool becomes more noticeable with a broader consumer base.
I'm glad you share the sentiment that its worth exploring; if you do get a chance to try it out, let us know what you think/would like to see!
What about websites/comments in other languages?
How do you moderate content you don't understand?
What are your rules for what's allowed and not allowed?
Also, people often comment when they are displeased with something. As a website owner, why would I want negative comments on my own website? Or comments I have no control of? What if users are just spreading misinformation about my website on my website? Can I request this tool not to work within my web pages?
2.) It will be based on best effort, and improve over time with feedback :)
3.) Content policy is here: https://www.netvyne.com/content-policy Civility is main priority; if a comment/website falls under civil discourse and was removed, the author will be able to submit an appeal. For grey areas, again it will be best effort. Mistakes will be made, we'll do our best to learn and correct ourselves fast.
4.) a/b.) The consumer has the right to discuss your website, and give feedback. Comments do not belong to the site. c) If you find misinformation, please report it using the flag button and we will promptly override it with a fact-check for the consumers to see. d) Netvyne makes no exceptions.
Some things to consider: Is Netvyne a community? (Like Hacker News or Reddit?) Should we expect a "Netvyne" slant to the comments, like all communities have?
Assuming Netvyne is a community, would Netvyne ever evolve to have some form of content discovery? Specifically, look at how Hacker News is content discovery first. (You don't have to log in to see the list of links, and you don't even have to read the comments.)
Otherwise, moderating all of the external comments for every ^#^@$ website seems like a daunting task. Best of luck, though! IMO, I wish there was a standardize "comments engine" for every website that didn't require making an account, but allowed the web site owner to do their own moderation. I know that's impractical, but I can still wish!
I'd say Netvyne is a tool, and it remains to be seen how exactly it evolves.
I'm not too sure what you mean by slant, are you referring to something like the "culture"?
Content discovery is already there on the main site (or at least content aggregation), is that what you mean? On the site (and the extension), you can see links and even leave comments using the default temporary account.
Moderating is a daunting task indeed, but we're up for the challenge! There is Disqus by the way, which I think addresses what you are saying in terms of allowing the site owner to do their own moderation. Though I think it requires making an account?
The Netvyne extension does have a live chat tab as well by the way; its definitely a different experience with live chat vs comments. For sites that a lot of people are on at once, like when a big platform goes down and people go to the official announcement, there could be quite a buzz.
Would the messages in these chat rooms disappear if you left and rejoined, or would you still see a full history?
Might want to detect that the user doesn't have the plugin and provide a link to install it.
This reminds me I should make it more clear which one is which haha
The point being that you can have a username that is unknown to your friends on the very same platform.
> To this end, omments [sic] that contain one or more of the following themes will be put behind a warning: Gore,Extreme Violence,Sexual Themes,Misinformation,Extreme Obscenity
> Comments that contain one or more of the following are not allowed and will be removed:
> Spam/Scam,Nudity,Bot comment, Abuse/Harassment, Illegal Content
My takeaway: - Bots are essentially banned - Any comment Netvyne's team considers extremely violent, gory, or containing misinformation will be put behind a warning, but not removed - Any comment Netvyne's team considers to be abuse or harassment will be removed - Any comment containing nudity will be removed
Nudity is notoriously difficult to moderate[1], and I suspect drawing the line on misinformation will be similarly challenging. I like the idea overall, though it would be neat to see a federated approach where different standards can be enforced on different instances. I'm not yet convinced one-size-fits-all discussion rules work well at scale.
[0]: https://www.netvyne.com/content-policy [1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211124/15241648004/conte...
Indeed, misinformation is tough and is in my opinion the trickiest one. I actually didn't think nudity would be as difficult to moderate, but still somewhere up there. Thanks for sharing an example, a similar example did come to mind and we'll definitely have to iterate on our policy as time goes on.
Tolerance does vary across people, and I agree one-size-fits-all doesn't exist. That being said, sometimes is a sacrifice one is willing to make in order to participate as part of a broader audience.
With regards to federation, I am a bit familiar with Mastodon, which is what came to mind first. I see the main concept, but it does come at a cost; some things are better (or at least more user-friendly) when they are integrated. But I supposed as time goes on people could be willing to put in more work to customize their experiences.
Also, thanks for catching the typo, its fixed now!
We'll be deleting comments on dead links; I don't think they serve much purpose since they don't show up on the main site's aggregator, nor will people likely be visiting dead links with the extension installed.
There's quite a bit of funky edge cases with URLs actually, and we'll just keep chipping away at them based on the feedback we're getting!
We're trying to address the unmet need to be able to comment on any URL in a civil manner. This is an unmet need that has frustrated us (the Netvyne Team), and our friends circle, for quite some time. Incidentally, the tool works even better as more and more people use it.
Netvyne has more of a focus on the leaving/reading of comments as you browse.
I remember people attaching comments to headlines on cnn.com's homepage, although that page changes frequently. And of course the comments were political. Hey OP, how will you prevent the lunatics from attacking sites like whitehouse.gov?
Edit: the fact that a screenshot of your app shows the page "CNN Facts First: Fact check: Five enduring lies about the Capitol [...]" (showing people they can comment on/criticize/flame war such pages), and that you've mentioned Gab's Dissenter, doesn't inspire me with confidence about your leanings. I sound like a McCarthyist, but well...
We're committed to maintaining civil discussion, and you can get a sense of what we're on watch for by checking out our content policy: https://www.netvyne.com/content-policy
The platform has no favorites, which you'll see for yourself in time.