[HN Gopher] Show HN: Kontxt - Social web layer with CMS and soci...
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Show HN: Kontxt - Social web layer with CMS and social network
Hey, I'm Dave, the founder of Kontxt.io (https://www.kontxt.io).
Engage directly on the web and save, organize, and share highlights
and notes. Follow people. Join groups. And search content. Here's a
2-minute demo (https://youtu.be/Th4vaOzuGnU). It works on desktop
and mobile. The web layer is like Google-Doc collaboration on the
entire web, and it's connected to a web app that's like a combo of
DropBox to save and organize your findings, and Twitter/Reddit to
share and discover bite-sized article highlights with other people.
1.) The Social Web Layer has rich collaboration features with
privacy and share controls: Inline highlights, tags, polls,
comments, @mentions, deep-links to anything you add to the page,
and navigation between parts. The web layer can be added to any
site or PDF with a single line of javascript. This is done with a
browser extension, bookmarklet, or added to a page directly by the
site owner with the word-press plugin or hard-coded javascript.
2.) The CMS and Social Network lets you organize with folders that
have privacy and share controls, a profile with your public
highlights, a feed of highlights from people you follow, groups
with feeds around topics, and the ability to search your content
and what others share publicly. For years, I had a long commute,
so I read online a lot-from HN, of course. There's too much to read
everything, and you only know if an article is "worth-it" after you
read it. Then it hit me. Highlights! 1.) On the page with
navigation, 2.) visible before you open the link, and 3.) to
increase quality and relevance, follow and search highlights by
trusted people like friends, co-workers, university peers, and
industry leaders. There's too much information and not enough
time. Highlights are short, useful, and fast to read. Kontxt.io
lets you direct attention to what matters. First, it lets you find
quality sources from trusted people, then it lets you focus on the
important parts of them. Kontxt basically turns the web into an
interactive workspace so you can have rich web interactions with
other Kontxt users. Or you can extract highlights into a shareable
link and post it anywhere on the web-with analytics for what you
share. Highlights are automatically saved to the CMS and based on
their privacy settings, may be published to feeds in the social
network for others to see. Naturally, you may want to discuss the
same site with different people for disparate reasons, so you can
create multiple highlight layers on a single site, each with
Google-Doc-like sharing, privacy, and authorization controls. It's
now evolved into a general communication and engagement platform
for the web. Here's how Kontxt has been used or where people
expressed interest: social news aggregator, productivity, research
& planning (generally, and specifically for sales, law, & finance),
knowledge-base, training & education, publisher inline-engagement
system, etc. Kontxt gets to the point fast. It brings
collaboration directly to the web itself and is already part of
your natural workflow since it's always with you every click of the
way. The social network is unique since it uses highlights to seed
discussions. This has many benefits. Highlights mean people have
actually read the article, the source is cited, and parts can't be
misconstrued because you have context. It's also a human filter of
the internet. A site is likely worthwhile if someone took the time
to highlight it, and if someone found it useful, then someone
"like" them probably will, too. Similarly, if someone's not willing
to highlight a site before they send it to you, it's probably not
worth your time. And highlights will increase how many people
actually read what you send them because they're short, useful, and
fast to read. I'm excited to share this with all of you. Thanks
for your time. Please leave any feedback or questions in the
comments. If you try it out, be sure to join the "Hacker News"
group.
Author : dbodin11
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-05-02 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kontxt.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kontxt.io)
| BillSaysThis wrote:
| My response is the same as any other third party commenting
| system. If you want to show annotations or comments directly
| layered on my website, forget about it. Or maybe pay me. Twitter,
| Facebook, et al, don't show this layered on my site but
| separately, on their own site.
| dbodin11 wrote:
| Thanks for your thoughts. I have worked with publishers who
| have added Kontxt to their site that have millions of views per
| month. To your point of "Pay me," what if every comment opened
| from a highlight also showed a donation or micro payment option
| directly to you? Kontxt can also make your site more shareable
| and increase traffic since people can highlight and share a
| deep-link to the specific parts that are relevant to others.
|
| Kontxt is more than just a 3rd party comment system. It's also
| a CMS that lets people save their findings from across the web.
| And it's a social network so people can share the best parts of
| the web with others.
| [deleted]
| gasious_gorilla wrote:
| Hi, this looks a lot like this project:
|
| https://github.com/DanilaFe/matrix-highlight
|
| It that leverages the multiple possibilities of open standards
| like Matrix to make a really cool to highlight web page contents
| and fostering discutions, all from any server you want :D
|
| Also another project, cited in the README of matrix-highlight:
|
| https://github.com/opentower/populus-viewer
| dbodin11 wrote:
| Interesting. I'll take a peek when I have a second. From a
| quick skim, I see one notable difference: Kontxt not only
| enables rich web collaboration, but it helps atomize the web to
| re-use key pieces in secondary contexts like a social network
| or in the future, to create new content.
| egypturnash wrote:
| What are your plans for dealing with people who do not wish to
| have a third-party commenting layer they have no moderation power
| in forced upon them, and for the problem of a "let's find weird
| people and mock them until they are on the verge of suicide"
| community like LJDrama/Something Awful/4Chan/Kiwifarms/etc
| starting to use Kontxt?
|
| This is a problem that every "we made a comments layer for the
| entire web!" project has faced.
| dbodin11 wrote:
| There will always be a delicate line to be addressed between
| free speech and moderation / censorship. There's a web layer,
| but pieces can also be extracted and shared in groups and feed
| in the app.
|
| There is an option for publishers / site owners to natively add
| Kontxt directly to their site with a single line of javascript
| to give them an _initial_ point of control and moderation (view
| only, comment, or user added highlights). However, sites can
| have multiple highlight layers with different privacy controls,
| so users can switch to another layer for discussion for
| something like research.
|
| Privacy controlled layers are only accessible to those they're
| shared with and there's only one public layer per site. Laws
| will always be followed. And cruel behavior on the web will
| likely be addressed as it is elsewhere today. It's too early to
| have developed any firm policies around, but it's definitely
| important and will be watched and addressed as needed.
| squiggy22 wrote:
| I love everything about this idea. If any of you remember
| mybloglog which was acquired by yahoo back in the day, they had
| all the ingredients that were missing from the web back when the
| cool kids were calling in web2.0. I met and interacted with so
| many blog writers who were able to see me land on their website
| and followed my profile back to mine, opening up a whole new
| social experience for those who created on the web. I hope this
| service moves in that direction over time, providing an escape
| from the walled Gardens of social media today and bringing it
| back to the open web where it belongs. Why Google or others
| haven't decided to ship a similar service right in Chrome is
| beyond me .. instead of a me too offering that was Google Plus..
| the open web itself is where those social interactions and
| connections to me make most sense.
| dbodin11 wrote:
| Thanks! I'm glad you like it. And I totally agree. I'm actually
| looking into turning Kontxt into its own browser for the exact
| reasons you mentioned.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Ambitious! Cool idea, but its scope is so broad... I think your
| roadmap will need to include robust support for integration with
| related tools. For example, it's hard to imagine committing to
| creating highlights in an all-in-one service like this, vs
| something like Readwise, which lets me export highlights to my
| Obsidian vault.
| dbodin11 wrote:
| Thanks. Ya, it's a grand vision. Every big journey begins with
| a single step and a lot will depend on how people actually end
| up using it and what they want. And I agree, I can definitely
| see myself adding an export feature in the future.
| beedrillzzzzz wrote:
| Pretty cool, interested to see where you take this. Have you
| checked out Hypothesis? It's a similar tool thats been around for
| a long time: https://web.hypothes.is/
| dbodin11 wrote:
| Thanks. Ya, I actually spoke with the founder of Hypothesis a
| while back, and a former contributor who was looking into using
| Kontxt. Kontxt not only enables rich web collaboration, but it
| helps atomize the web to re-use key pieces in secondary
| contexts like a social network or in the future, to create new
| content. Kontxt takes a social first approach with many ways to
| share and follow with others.
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