[HN Gopher] Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into...
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Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every
documentation
Hi, I'm Ritinkar and I'm building metadocs, which is kind of like
reddit built into every documentation ever. It's a chrome
extension that allows discussion on any webpage to happen there
itself. Currently I have built threaded comments, and a
upvote/downvote system. Plus I've built this cool feature called
Highlights, which lets you discuss specific lines in any
documentation. As well as a feature called Top Hightlights, which
shows the most interesting hightlights on any webpage. Hope you
guys will try it out. And if you have any questions, feel free to
ask me here. Thanks.
Author : ritinkar
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-11-08 13:43 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (metadocs8.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (metadocs8.com)
| esperent wrote:
| I've dreamed of something like this for a long time.
|
| However, the actual tool is only a tiny part of the problem. The
| bigger part is moderation and spam.
|
| While this is niche with a tiny user base that's not a big deal.
|
| But, what if it does take of? How will you handle
| spam/astroturfing/hate/illegal comments?
| hkxer wrote:
| This is pretty cool, nice job!
| wtf77 wrote:
| which problem are you trying to solve?
| ritinkar wrote:
| It's hard to articulate the problem like that.
|
| So I was going through a documentation of an ORM library for
| another project of mine, and it was kinda poorly written. And I
| didn't feel like going through the effort required to go to
| another website and ask questions there. I thought I wish I
| could ask questions right here.
|
| So I took that feeling and turned it into something tangible.
| qprofyeh wrote:
| Hope this works out!
|
| I used to read the comments on PHP.net to learn more about
| certain features or to find example usages. This made the PHP
| community seem very approachable and helpful.
| camtarn wrote:
| Similarly! You always wanted to read the comments, because the
| docs would not necessarily tell you that such-and-such a
| function had tricky edge cases, or had been replaced by a
| better version, or was a massive security risk.
|
| Of course all of that should have been in the docs to start
| with, but the comments really saved that site.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| this looks super cool and I would love to try it! any hope for
| Firefox one day?
| o_____________o wrote:
| Cool!
|
| How does it identify elements to anchor to, and what happens when
| the original text changes?
| ritinkar wrote:
| If you're asking how the "Highlights" feature works, its using
| something called text fragments.
|
| When the original text changes then the highlight is dead.
| Meaning you can still discuss it, but it will no longer be
| highlighted in the window.
|
| You can read more about text fragments here -
| https://web.dev/text-fragments/
| mcone wrote:
| Genius was working on something similar for a while, but I don't
| think it ever took off: https://genius.com/web-annotator
| tsol wrote:
| There was a cool link curator service called StumbleUpon. You
| click a button, and it takes you to a random interesting web
| page. One of my favorite things about this is you can comment on
| these pages as well. It was fun to see other peoples reactions to
| random pages, flash videos, memes, art, essay, etc. Eventually I
| realized that you can click the 'discussion' button even on pages
| that StumbleUpon didn't bring me to, and there was still a
| discussion much of the time(The link must already be in the
| database, of course).
|
| Anyways, I've always wanted to find something like this again.
| This sounds similar. I'm gonna try this out and take a look. The
| big thing that makes it work, IMO, is having enough people
| participating and having comments be moderated. Unique, sincere
| comments make the experience fun. Spammy, trolling comments make
| it just every other boring corner of the internet.
|
| I loved this, I could go anywhere on the web and have a comment
| section. The important thing about this, though, was that the
| comments were usually pretty relevant. Rarely did I see trolling
| or off topic comments(Ie politics). It'd usually just be maybe a
| one line impression of the site. It was perfect.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Yeah immediately thought of StumbleUpon.
|
| Incidentally, this is one of several things I've thought FF
| should have integrated into the browser to differentiate
| themselves and maybe retain or, if you can imagine it, grow
| their userbase. It'd be an outstanding core of a distributed
| social network, if they wanted to take it that direction, and a
| decade or so ago FF was uniquely positioned to make such a
| thing happen by integrating it directly with the browser so the
| best way to experience it was in FF. These days, I'm not sure
| they've got enough users left to make such a play, but they did
| at one time.
| ritinkar wrote:
| Yeah, cold start and moderation are two problems I need to
| solve.
|
| I'm focusing on documentation pages at first hoping to build a
| commpunity that is helpful. Like pointing out pitfalls and
| better solutions to existing problems.
|
| Also I used to be a stumbleupon user too. I don't remember the
| discuss feature, but I remember using it to find hidden gems of
| the web.
| terribleperson wrote:
| I'm not an expert of any kind, but I'm going to give my
| unasked-for advice anyways. 1. Paid moderation as the main
| solution probably isn't feasible. Even if you can find a way
| to monetize your project without annihilating your userbase,
| the amount of text will outpace the manpower you can afford.
| 2. Moderating is a crap job and there are never enough
| volunteers. Because there are never enough volunteers, you
| will feel forced to accept subpar volunteers and tolerate
| ones with annoying proclivities. The solution to these
| problems is the same - you need to make the manpower you have
| go further (cover more text). First, minimize the need for
| moderation. That's a difficult task when your entire project
| is user-submitted text, but if you can prevent people from
| creating multiple accounts and ban or suspend people who
| generate disproportionate amounts of moderation, it'll help.
| Second, you need good moderation tools. Don't be reddit,
| where moderators rely on third-party tools and bots to manage
| their community. You need to provide _good_ tools to detect
| things that need moderation and not bother humans for things
| that don 't. The more you can force-multiply your paid and
| volunteer moderators, the better you'll do.
|
| p.s. I could ramble about moderation for a while. I'm in
| favor of suspending rather than banning users in most cases,
| and I've been toying with an idea that suspensions could be
| based on the amount of content and crap someone generates.
| You want content, and you want to keep the level of crap in
| that content low enough your moderation can keep up with it.
| If someone generates a lot of content and a little crap, you
| can just remove the crap and only give them a small
| suspension. If the proportion of crap to content someone
| generates is over whatever threshold you think is manageable
| for your platform, give them increasing-duration suspensions
| so they're generating less content and less crap - keeping
| your sitewide crap threshold down. If their crap-to-content
| ratio goes back below the threshold, or your sitewide crap
| load has gone down, you can start cutting down the duration
| on the suspensions. An algorithm could surely be devised for
| this and then you just set a 'crap threshold' platform wide
| and moderators don't have to do anything other than remove a
| post and the suspension is automatically applied. There are
| exceptions, of course. Illegal content? Removal and warning
| if it's not too serious - ban if they do it a second time.
| Removal and ban if it's serious. Harassing other users? Ban.
| Crap of a type that will drive away your userbase? Warning,
| ban. You could probably devise a more strict algorithm for
| this, but when it comes to people who make a community worse
| by being there, being lenient with them is something you're
| doing for their benefit, not yours. Whether you choose to be
| lenient is up to you, but if you get it wrong they'll drive
| away the people who generate content and you'll be left with
| people who generate crap.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I too remember StumbleUpon fondly. Now I feel like it's a way
| to get people to go to questionable sites, but back then it was
| a lot of fun.
|
| > Rarely did I see trolling or off topic comments(Ie politics).
|
| I wonder if this is due to the format or strictly because of
| the time?
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| It wasn't completely randomized though if I recall, people
| used to submit sites to it and would tag it in different
| categories and then when you signed up you would select your
| interests and then it would choose things from the possible
| options.
| thebeastie wrote:
| This is very neat. One question, would you consider making a
| version of your service that works like discourse.org? I don't
| mean changing the discussion software to match theirs, I mean
| allowing clients to embed your software in their page. Also, for
| what it's worth, if you had plug-in authentication of users you
| might find some clients in in web3.
| ritinkar wrote:
| I haven't thought about that direction yet, although I am aware
| of discourse and disqus.
|
| Metadocs is pretty young, so I'll think about it.
| ritinkar wrote:
| And if you're looking for a quick walkthrough, it's at:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oln-KdIczOM
| tsol wrote:
| Quick note--
| https://gist.github.com/ritinkar8/4991a0770aa0363598aa7c5795...
| landing page I'm taken to after installing looks incomplete. Just
| a FYI in case you didn't know.
| ritinkar wrote:
| Yeah, I need better onboarding. Will fix.
| esperent wrote:
| I've dreamed of something like this for a long time.
|
| However, the actual tool is only a tiny part of the problem. The
| bigger part is moderation and spam.
|
| While this is niche that's not a big deal, but it's also nothing
| like reddit in that case.
|
| What if it does take of? How will you handle
| spam/astroturfing/hate/illegal comments?
| ritinkar wrote:
| Lots of problems to be solved yet. Moderating 10 comments / day
| is very different from moderating 10k/day which in turn is
| different from millions a day.
|
| I'll initially start by moderating comments myself, (need to
| create a policy first) and see what to do from there.
| oezi wrote:
| Moderation should work peer-to-peer. If somebody wants to
| post they have to first review posts which were flagged by
| users to violate the TOS. If sufficient users agree on the
| flag, the post is taken down.
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(page generated 2022-11-08 23:01 UTC)