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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

People don't want this. It was tried endless times during the web2 craze (when tech like AJAX and WebSockets picked up steam). At best it's a cute gimmick, at worst it's distracting and annoying.

There have been browser extensions, website plugins, and many, many startups that tried to make this a thing. It's not a thing. Social elements have moved from the comments section to Slack or Discord or WhatsApp or Twitter.

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Interesting — do you happen to remember any names? I was just a wee lad, so this is new to me. Wouldn’t make a great startup, but I thought it was a pretty smart blog feature!

IIRC, the lyrics site Genius started life as one in the long line of “hey let’s let people share annotations on arbitrary web pages around the world” projects that went nowhere. They pivoted to using their annotations to let people provide extensive footnotes on song lyrics.

“_why the lucky stiff” had one of these for a while too, I can’t remember the name.

Annotating other websites was a side quest along the way for Genius, but its original creation was focused on annotating rap lyrics. It took them 5 years to drop "Rap" from the name "Rap Genius". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_(company)#History

I am incorrect!

Though Wikipedia makes it sound like there was a lot of pressure from investors to pivot into that side quest:

In 2012, the company received an additional $15 million investment from Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z),[1][3][11] prompted in part by partner Marc Andreessen's own past effort to build a group annotation feature into a web browser.[1] Ben Horowitz described Genius as "one of the most important things we've ever funded"

The web has a different audience now, old things can be new again.

Just because you don't want this doesn't mean people in general don't want this. Plenty of people both in this commentary section and the older ones about this web page dig it.

I agree. This is such an old and beaten idea that used to be present on every other webpage back in the day. I'm surprised by the comments here praising it as something novel.

Yeah, I hate this. I don't want websites to stream my cursor position in real time for any reason to use for who knows what besides the advertised gimmick.

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