Ask HN: Upvote/Downvote any page on the internet? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Upvote/Downvote any page on the internet?

I'm implementing a browser extension allowing us to upvote/downvote any page on the Internet.

The concept is the following:

1. When browsing, you can hover over any link and see what people think about the page. 2. After you visit a page, you can express your opinion about it - upvote if it's high-quality content, or downvote if it is clickbait or just a poor-quality piece of content.

I would appreciate any feedback on the idea and/or answers to the following questions: 1. Have you ever found yourself in a situation when the page you visited is a clear waste of time (SEO scam, article-like ad) but there's nowhere to hit that dislike/downvote button? 2. Would you use such an extension to filter the pages you're visiting? 3. Would you spend a couple of seconds upvoting/downvoting a page after visiting it? Would you consider leaving a comment?

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The earliest version of this that I am aware of was called ThirdVoice [1][2]. There have been many iterations since. They do not last long because of the free form comments. People fill them with spam, links to illegal content, threats, defamation and worse. There is also the issue of scalability. Hosting comments for "all the things" gets big really fast. The voting would get gamed almost immediately. There is also the issue of privacy if your addon reacts real time with sites that people visit vs. having to push a button to fetch comments/stats. This same issue crops up with OCSP and DoH.

Less of a problem today is DDoS. You could probably get Cloudflare to absorb some of the vitriol from your enemies. It's also easier today to build a legal team for internet companies now vs early 00's.

If you are doing this I would be curious to see the stats on comments total, comments on average per domain and how much time either you or automation have to spend removing comments and adjusting votes that were submitted by bots. Are you planning on building a public stats page?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice

[2] - https://www.wired.com/2001/04/third-voice-trails-off/

Than you for your reply! I'm starting reconsidering the relevance of this idea after receiving some feedback here and on Reddit.

> Are you planning on building a public stats page?

I thought of having a "Hot" (per day/week/month) page.

I feel like "upvotes" and "downvotes" are sorta useless these days because both are prone to manipulation and often are just that. Just like "user reviews" which can be purchased. Same deal. It's a big part of why I quit using Reddit. The manipulation on the platform is so painfully obvious that it makes the entire system useless for anyone having an honest conversation that isn't hell bent on keeping to an approved narrative, topic, opinion, thought process etc. It seems to inherently encourage group think. I also wouldn't be willing to hand some random 3rd party extension my browsing history. I doubt I am the only one who feels that way in this era of people attempting to be more privacy centric.

For commenting, see http://hypothes.is/ There are others too.

A few observations of hypothes.is include

* Despite it being around a while, not a lot of people seem to generally, outside of let's all comment on this article/set of articles, use it. Notably, some seminal papers of social annotation are uncommented, by anybody! I remember more people using ICQ's long forgotten chat with others also browsing this page feature despite that being synchronous vs asynchronous comments.

* It has a 'group' function. You can filter by a group you're in. This is useful given the social constructivism that comments can give - it's constructed by a group after all, and different groups may lead to different results.

Kinda leading on from that, assigning a point is simply a numerical indicator. What does it mean? Aside from different voting types (only up? up/down? % up? what about neutral/not voted vs views? etc.), a vote's kinda positivist. So.. a badge of trust? From whom and why (the qualitative aspect)? Do you want social groupings for votes? Are all votes equal? Why not measure backlinks, or citations and do you trust these?

That's all ignoring stuff like bots, gaming, and there possibly being agreement from the entire internet whether something's good.

I visit HN because I trust the filter that's the community, a social filter self selected by choosing to be part of the HN community. As well as the front page, I also often browse new where a headline may take my interest almost as much as the front page; new is, after all, already community filtered by people that care enough about a link to submit (minus the spam). I'd actually quite like a Slashdot 'friend'/'friend of friend' follow option here - do any of the HN apps that that?

1. Often. It's often from search results.

2. No, I probably wouldn't use such an extension.

3. Despite looking into them, I don't regularly use any such tools that already exist.

Edit: Something I feel may be important that I've not really looked into: Where's the agency of the author? People directly commenting, as it would appear to a viewer, on their work. Would some authors oppose that and argue it's a derivative work [in the case of annotation]?

> Would you use such an extension to filter the pages you're visiting?

No.

> Would you spend a couple of seconds upvoting/downvoting a page after visiting it?

No.

> Would you consider leaving a comment?

No.

It'd easily get abused, and the comments would just be insults, racial slurs and other things because this is the internet.

will not work. Companies just can't allow dissenting voices they cant moderate. It's too dangerous

Some years ago there was a browser extension called "dissenter" that was exactly what you suggested and a bit more. It was shot down. Hard.

It's good, as soon as the commenter needs to solve a PhD problem for filtering purpose.

I’d give it a try, if you told me where to download it.

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