HN-comments-drawer: one line HN comments integration into sites | Hacker News Reader

HN-comments-drawer: one line HN comments integration into sites

github.com

66 pointsprakhar89738 comments

I did this exact same thing, called it Comments Network, around 8 years ago (img+discussion here, project doesn't exist anymore):

https://imgur.com/a/98fpLs6

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12898366

In the end I was contacted by HN and was told to shut it down, and so I did since I didn't want to get into a fight. Wonder if you'll receive a similar message or they'll allow it now. There were 3 very important points that I don't see in your project:

1. I moved from "story ID" to "story URL" in the end, since a single URL can have multiple HN threads and I'd be interested in them.

2. The time of comment is _very_ important, not sure why you are not showing it?

3. I had to add some mechanism to block individual comments, while rare there _is_ SPAM and ad-hominem in HN and if you are showing the comments in your project, you might want to do a bit of comment moderation. How much, then it's to the person sharing it, with Comments Network you could also show a single individual comment

I guess you made it before hacker news released their API?

I'm not that familiar with the topic, but it's one thing for HN to provide an API and quite another thing for them to be Ok with being used as a "comments section" or forum for someone else's site, blog etc.?

I'd be very interested in someone pointing the TOS to see if this is explicitly blocked.

IMO: If Hacker News doesn't want this kind of thing, it should be explicitly called out in the TOS. Otherwise, they don't have much of a leg to stand on. (Except by blocking these kinds of things server-side.)

I feel like HN is small enough/ small townish enough to not have everything in the TOS and I like it that way.

Absolutely it is not. No interactive site is too small for a clear terms of service, otherwise it's rule by arbitrary judgement

That's pretty extreme: I don't think random bloggers that host comment sections need to be laying out terms of service. Instead, they can handle things as they come up, and the community is small enough, and stakes are low enough, that this is fine.

HN is bigger than a blog, but it's still small enough that it can be fully moderated with 1-2 people, and I think similar tradeoffs apply here.

if we always demand to be told how to behave, no one will actually understand how to behave in isolation.

you wouldn’t download a car.

No TOS needed, there's already international copyright law that explicitly disallows this. With a system like this, you are _embedding copyrighted content into your website without consent_. If it was a single quote, a comment, or maybe even a screenshot it might be exempted, but you cannot just copy/paste someone's full content into your website without permission.

PS, Hacker News might not even be in the position to officially allow this, similarly to how a generic OSS dev cannot just relicense a project without getting consent from all contributors (or a previous CLA).

A Terms-Of-Service document enumerates your rights and the rights of the owners of the property under the terms of service, anything that isn't explicitly named you can assume to be disallowed unless you have a document to prove that you have an exemption.

i wonder why they wanted it shut down.

there are a few alternate frontends to hackernews. technically this would be no different.

likewise linking to hackernews discussions should also be ok.

maybe an issue with load on the site if this becomes to popular?

Because it doesn't scale.

But I thought we were meant to do things that don't scale?

Hacker news is meant to be a news discussion site focused at a particular crowd, not a bastardized website comment section.

It actively ruins the experience here by allowing content that doesn’t originate from this website.

A changed UI and making the site a “feature” of another site are not the same thing.

Great work, however noticed this:

id="hn-comments-drawer storyId-38300167 maxDepth-3"

Please use data-attributes or another more suitable alternative than id for settings.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Howto/Us...

Looks good, I've added this project to my growing list of ways to include comments on static websites [1].

[1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

Only on HN does a kind soul already have a list being curated for the exact thing posted. Haha. I love it.

That's a good resource, thank you for compiling it and sharing it here. Do you happen to know if there's any that allows for one user to comment with service A, and another user to comment with service B?

With all the tools that I've gathered, I don't recall a single one that would support multiple providers. Sounds like a gap in the market ;) Enabling multiple comment providers shouldn't be a problem, e.g. by adding "Comment with X" and "Comment with Y" buttons that load the respective service. But displaying aggregated comments from both providers is a bigger challenge.

Yeah, aggregating seems technically challenging, but doable. But I wonder if ActivityPub or some other "open social" protocol would suffice. I'm torn between "support open protocols in particular" versus "support as many things as possible".

This is cool. I think small websites need to make a comeback and interacting with an audience is an important ingredient to that.

I shared last week a commenting system that accepts comment submissions via email https://r3ply.com

Here's my version of this (no deps, js has good html fallback), as posted on my blog.

Note that it's a share button that also works as a link to the latest comments section, so you get the best of all worlds IMO

[1] https://taylor.town/hn-discuss

    <a id="hn-discuss" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink">
      Discuss this page on HackerNews.
    </a>
    const hn = document.getElementById('hn-discuss');

    // Set href to "share current URL and title".
    hn.setAttribute(
      'href',
      `https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink`
        + `?u=${encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)}`
        + `&t=${encodeURIComponent(document.title)}`
    );

    setTimeout(
      () => {
        // Replace href with most popular HN link from the past 4 months.
        fetch(
          `https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search`
            + `?tags=story`
            + `&restrictSearchableAttributes=url`
            + `&numericFilters=created_at_i>`
              + Math.round(new Date().getTime()/1000 - 4*30*86400)
            + `&query=${encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)}`
        )
          .then(res => res.json())
          .then(data => {
            const id = data?.hits?.[0]?.objectID;
            if (id)
              hn.setAttribute(
                'href',
                `https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=${id}`
              );
          })
          .catch(err => console.error(err));
      },
      // Wait 10 seconds before hitting Algolia!
      10*1000
    );

Love it! I was procrastinating on a uni assignment so I rewrote the fetch logic to improve performance.

Live demo: https://hn-comments-drawer.vercel.app/examples

Code: https://github.com/giesf/hn-comments-drawer/

> Love it! I was procrastinating on a uni assignment so I rewrote the fetch logic to improve performance.

> Live demo: https://hn-comments-drawer.vercel.app/examples

> Code: https://github.com/giesf/hn-comments-drawer/

Dramatic. Not OP but thanks for doing this.

Looks cool.

I wondered about something like this before, and wasn't sure HN would be happy being a comment provider.

Sure, many blog posts end up with a good discussion on HN, but it's not a given that any blog post deserves a HN posting. Especially with self-promotion (not marked as such) being frowned upon.

> wasn't sure HN would be happy being a comment provider.

Likely it isn’t.

I always go back and forth on adding comments to my site. Do I really want the negativity, especially places like HN, can provide? I think it's fairly common now for people to not add comment systems, of any kind, to their blogs.

The comments make the website feel alive though. I remember many Aaron Swartz blogposts would have a comments section many times longer than the original post

Yeah but do you want the HN typical-smarter-than-thou comments on your site? It sounds exhausting to need to worry about moderating that, for your mental health.

Well my blog is on github gists so I can have comments available. My opinions are founded on ground principles and facts, and if someone tells me that a fact is wrong then I'm more than happy to evolve my opinion.

I went back and forth but tried it, and looked at the comments I got. I decided I really liked the comments I was getting. Some asked questions. Some offered additional information. Some pointed out mistakes. It's been great!

Very cool idea and implementation.

I had considered offering something similar for https://kulli.sh which also aggregates comments on posts from a whole bunch of other sources too, but after reaching out to a number of people whose shared posts actually get comments here on HN and other places, I quickly realized there is not much desire for something like this from people whose writing is actually discussed.

When I integrated something similar into my site I did the fetching server side, which dramatically reduces the load on HN. You might want to do something similar?

(I'm a big fan of pulling comments back to the original post, as long as you can do it without causing trouble for the discussion site!)

checked the live demo here - https://prakgupta.com/blog/moving_away_from_substack

looks quite sweet!

The JavaScript makes query to https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/ But who is maintaining that?

That’s the official API for HN: https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Smart! I especially like how the styling is customisable. It would be nice to also include timestamps which act as permalinks to each comment, and also the usernames could link to their HN profiles?

HN is not meant for this. If you want an external comments section please use an appropriate vehicle.

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