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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

Collaborative web annotation extensions have been done, they've never taken off. Now that mobile has eaten the web it seems even less likely that the idea could work.

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Facilitating discussion of arbitrary webpages, though, has been stupendously successful, in the form of social media. I think that’s the problem with the extension idea, it’s social media that doesn’t realize it’s social media, so doesn’t pay enough attention to the make-or-breaks of social media like content quality, drawing people good for content quality, spam prevention, moderation, and circles of shared interest. Getting HN-like commentary on every webpage is interesting, what you get if you just turn on WordPress comments then do nothing, isn’t.

Social media is also good for discovering the original content. Like, I would never find half the blogs I read on HN, but they're great.

I think I came up with this idea in the world where you literally browsed the web. Like go to Yahoo, see what new sites there were, and read 'em ;) That is ... not what we do anymore.

The only way I can imagine it working would be an extension that just hunts down pre-existing Reddit (or similar) threads for a particular URL.

Oddly, this idea seems to share some of the same problems of the "Metaverse" idea. Facebook's Metaverse is a videogame that doesn't realize it's a videogame, it's a centralized service that you're trying to layer on top of the internet, and it ends up being totally empty and with no community, because it's for "everyone", which means it's for nobody. Discord and Reddit both understood the problem and partition themselves into user-moderated interest-oriented spaces; Facebook's idea of a metaverse doesn't do this, and a pan-web comment system sort of can't by design.

Why the Lucky Stiff had one for a while. It was fun, but it worked by putting in his server as your DNS, and it (from what I recall) man-in-the-middled the entire web to insert comment blocks on every page. I don’t think that would work anymore, and I imagine it was a nightmare to keep running.

I refuse to believe that Google's pathetic 10+ year old excuse for blocking extensions on mobile (performance) can hold forever.

Mobile users are the ones by far the most in need of agency. Google saying no here is a top existential threat to their dominance. Hopefully now that Firefox is starting to re-allow webextensions on mobile broadly, pressure can mount. Keep trying folks!

Beyond "can mobile run extensions", I think the main thing missing so far in collaborative web extensions is that few are actually interoperable in any significant way. They're all isolated services. That's helpful for content discovery, but I don't think a centralized service is going to cut it for letting a new depth to the web really form.

I also would say that Hypothesis has been a fairly successful fairly great collaborative web extension. I don't often run into other people commenting on sites or articles or comments, but it happens, and the effort in general is well loved. It somewhat uses standard protocols, but is designed for their service. https://web.hypothes.is/

Mobile absolutely can use extensions. I run them on kiwi. A subset of what's on my desktop, but extensions nonetheless. Every time I wind up accidentally opening chrome, it's eye opening just how awful mobile web is, particularly how many ads you see

I'd love for one to take off.

You might be right that they wouldn't take off even if they would work really well.

But I'd like to think they could :)

With a good UI, a frictionless login, clear personal data separation and a sufficiently widespread browser extension platform available on mobile, this would be awesome...

Maybe Safari would be a good first target with their WebExtension support.

There is of course also the technical problem of dynamic rendering and unpredictable DOM structure.

And the whole problem of reaching a social media user base and providing valuable interaction tools to them.

Especially when considering ads, the main question is how to locate these DOM elements — for example, the filter lists shipped with uBlock origin do a great job here.

I'm wondering if maybe having more flexible locators available could help identify DOM subtrees by their content instead of a CSS selector.

Similar to the ones available in e2e testing frameworks, but maybe even more powerful things could be conceived, or matching snapshots etc...

Could certainly imagine this taking off, but imagination is not reality :)

I will posit that the main problem with the idea is that when I'm browsing some page I probably don't want to see comments from all the people that have been banned from that page, or who couldn't be bothered to make an account. If I like a page I probably agree with their moderation decisions more than not, and being able to browse a big pile of rejected comments doesn't interest me at all. And even if there are people there commenting just because it's easier than making an account, that's going to facilitate very low-effort drive-by comments from people who are coming from somewhere else on the web.

And if people want to talk about some page that doesn't have comments, that's what Twitter and Reddit, historically, are for. The hard parts are not technical, they're social.

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