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Comment by babs474 | Hacker News Reader

Very cool, I love this approach as it is very similar to how my (now defunct) unedditreddit app worked and how a clever app called socialfixer for facebook works. Two thoughts.

1. You are not unblockable. My app was removed from the chrome app store after reddit complained, no review process, no appeals, good luck even communicating with google. Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-savvy user. I suggest looking at a firefox app, their app story is much more democratic.

2. I think this fight is important because a lot of companies/organizations seem to be trying to establish the precedent that they own their website experience end to end, from database to the pixels on your screen. That idea taken to the extreme will lead to computers become opaque devices ala a TV, rather than the hackable playground they are now.

http://socialfixer.com/blog/2013/10/05/facebook-requires-soc...

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>Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-savvy user.

I would post a video demonstrating step-by-step how to install non-approved apps in Chrome. Download the app. Open chrome://extensions. Tick Developer mode. Drag the app from your Download folder to the extensions page. Enjoy those nicely summarized ratings!

Actually, here are two existing videos on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf9mthhfzpY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVj_FJwI2Rw

Hopefully, if a user is savvy enough to get into Yale, those instructions would suffice.

Just be aware that your instructions may have to change soon; Google is slated to start blocking all local extensions unless users install the Dev or Canary channel builds on Windows [1].

[1] http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/07/google-block-local-c...

Sounds like a matter† for the MSFT legal department. I'm rarely in MSFT's corner, but this would an exception.

†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act

Only to be told that they have to open up their Windows 8 Store App installation model as well? I don't think so.

The no-freedom-to-install-whatever-you-want movement is deeply entrenched in the IT behemoths.

That's fine, I suspect the %age of Windows users at Yale is fairly small.

Finding the instructions when you know what to look for is easy; the hard part is knowing that it's possible and to look for it at all

I believe unedditreddit was removed due to trademark issues, but I could be wrong. As this extension does not have any of Yale's trademarks within and (demonstrably, based on source) does not impact the site, Yale should not have a leg to stand on.

But your point about doing it in Firefox is a very good one. Firefox's extension addons site is much more democratic. And side-loading extensions within Firefox outside of addons.mozilla.org is something even an inexperienced user can accomplish.

That possibility probably didn't help, but eventually somebody from google told me they wouldn't bring the app back even if I changed the name.

You bring up another interesting point about impact to the yale site though. This app does impact the yale site, by having clients issue extra ajax requests. It not an unreasonable load but I wonder if that might muddle the issue again.

For unedditreddit I was able to completely prevent the app from creating extra load by distributing scraping among clients only already visiting the page. I wonder if the same idea could work for the evaluation data?

I'm impressed you even got word one from Google, but out of curiosity, did they ever say why they wouldn't bring back your app, or did they just leave it at "because f you"?

The difference is that in the Yale case, the creators of the data want it to be consumed.

Whereas UER was making a copy of and serving content against its authors' wishes.

It is not that black and white though. So many comments are are deleted by moderators for baloney reasons. Moderators have become the new digg power users and they are really hurting reddit. See the recent standupshots controversy.

What about highly upvoted/downvoted comments that are then edited to reverse or change the sentiment. Other conversation participants have no right to see the original context?

To be fair there are good reasons to have some deleted comments and this is probably not the right place for a debate, but it is not that cut and dry.

As an aside, I've found the whole unedditreddit ride extremely interesting I hope its not the worst thing you had to deal with.

http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1ukgpm/the_moderator...

> What about highly upvoted/downvoted comments that are then edited to reverse or change the sentiment.

This is why it pays to quote context in Internet discussions.

> I am a monkey

As a side note, it would be really useful if there was some way of quoting context that didn't trivially lend itself to forging context... (though admittedly that's a much smaller problem).

Simple solution: store the comment revisions, and when you go to a reply, allow the user to see the revision that was active when the reply was posted.

Simpler solution: Leave things the way they are. It doesn't make sense to dramatically increase your storage costs and UI complexity over a feature 99% of your users don't care about and a substantial number will actually be annoyed by.

You have bigger fish to fry.

Or just disallow edits.

> That idea taken to the extreme will lead to computers become opaque devices ala a TV, rather than the hackable playground they are now.

Which is funny, seeing how Tivo got into the end-to-end experience on TV.

Just because the Extension is removed from the "play store" doesn't mean it's unattainable. You can still distribute Chrome Extensions from a third party site, of course they can take steps to get your take it off of your site, but one would assume that college students who want to use this could simply share it via email or simply on a USB stick.

Nope.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/07/chrome-on-windows-to-start-...

There will be always the alternative of writing a pure desktop application for such things.

Here is a repo I posted a django addon that packages and installs plugins. Only supports chrome right now. https://github.com/jbcurtin/Deployment

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