[HN Gopher] Greenwich: an experiment in collaborative links
___________________________________________________________________
Greenwich: an experiment in collaborative links
Author : onlyfootnotes
Score : 133 points
Date : 2024-09-27 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (readpolymathematics.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (readpolymathematics.substack.com)
| welcome_dragon wrote:
| So webrings?
| tootie wrote:
| Exactly my thought. Maybe an idea worth dusting off. Web rings
| were a thing when search barely worked.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
| camtarn wrote:
| Sort of, but webrings needed the site owner's involvement and
| couldn't have new links added by people just viewing the
| website.
| jerf wrote:
| No, those have very different characteristics. This is a
| variant on annotation.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Everything old is new. The poor child thinks he's invented
| webrings.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Webrings were an alternative discovery solution to search,
| right? They died because there weren't needed when search got
| incredibly good. Now that search kind of is... not good, maybe
| they could be tried again.
| disturbed_devil wrote:
| Thanks for the condescending comment dad
| junto wrote:
| Strongly feels like decentralized trackbacks and pingbacks which
| died because they turned into spam monsters.
|
| This turns it into a centralized problem, but a problem
| nevertheless?
| photonthug wrote:
| Honest question, is blog spam still a huge problem today if
| you're not running a buggy old Wordpress stack, or better yet,
| not using Wordpress at all?
|
| I would think scammers and spammers would just focus on
| lucrative targets like instafacetok and yelpazon reviews in
| 2024. And is seo hacking based on _comment threads_ really
| still a viable business, or we are mainly worried about links
| to malware?
|
| I get that new platforms of any kind are certainly likely to be
| targets of vandalism, but it's surprising that everyone seems
| to be suggesting that every new/unpopular/niche platform will
| immediately be targeted by what amounts to organized crime.
| Even if I had evil intentions and an army of thousands to craft
| malware and scams, I wouldn't task even one of them to poke
| around on platforms with less than like 10% of the market,
| because why bother?
| tingletech wrote:
| How is this different from the public annotations in
| https://web.hypothes.is ?
| photonthug wrote:
| Well, one difference I notice is there are no links inviting me
| to "contact the sales team" or "join our webinar training
| partners".
| ay wrote:
| Reminds me of https://ruby-talk.ruby-
| lang.narkive.com/buiXXTZh/what-is-hoo... :-)
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Yes totally! The framing of "web graffiti" was something I
| played with, but didn't like the association with spam or
| purely artistic purpose.
| eykanal wrote:
| This seems like a great idea designed for well-intentioned
| people. Unfortunately, the internet is running a bit short on
| well-intentioned people.
|
| The potential for abuse here is enormous. I have a difficult time
| seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads,
| 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This seems like maybe a good use for some federated social
| media or web of trust methods?
|
| Like I don't trust the internet in general to curate these
| links. But one could surely find networks where the average
| voter could be trustworthy...
| eykanal wrote:
| Was thinking that when I wrote the comment. Unfortunately,
| spammers have gotten very good at gaming web of trust
| techniques (see amazon product reviews). This is a Hard
| Problem(tm).
| arkh wrote:
| Invite only networks were you're responsible for the people
| you invite a la what.cd : your invitee does something
| against the rules? They get banned and you get banned.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| like this idea too!
| ansible wrote:
| That is basically the idea behind https://lobste.rs/ .
| There's approximately zero spam or other bad behavior.
|
| You can look at the full user tree
| (https://lobste.rs/users) and see if there's anyone you
| know who might be willing to invite you to join.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Very little spam, but also very little engagement. The
| same post on hn might have 100 comments and on lobsters
| it has four.
| bee_rider wrote:
| As long as the growth rate is positive and it isn't too
| expensive to host, a small stable growing site could be
| fine.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think we need to stop using "engagement" as a
| measurement of anything related to quality and
| usefulness.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Quantity has a quality all of its own.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Sure. But the odds of finding an insightful comment on HN
| is much higher than finding one on lobsters, merely
| because there is more content.
| realo wrote:
| Hey!
|
| I have been a good citizen of Hacker News for fourteen
| years now...
|
| Anyone here would want to throw me an invite to
| lobste.rs?
|
| :)
| Multicomp wrote:
| Haha that's my line! I would guess that those people who
| are already on the seafood website know other technical
| people in their day-to-day workspaces like silicon valley
| or Palo Alto or wherever, so it's easy for them to get a
| link. Meanwhile for those of us on the opposite side of
| the US or, barely in the Anglo-Sphere at all, we are on
| the outside looking in and are not likely to get a link
| just by being mostly lurkers and occasional contributors.
|
| At least for me, I'm the only HN user I know except my
| dad who doesn't even post, he just got lurk links from
| his knee if the woods like hackaday.
| ansible wrote:
| I requested an invite from a guy I have only known via
| Reddit, we've never met IRL.
| riffraff wrote:
| I can't actually remember who is the person who I
| requested the invite from, I think they were given out
| somewhat freely by some users.
| ansible wrote:
| You can look on your user page, or search for your
| username on the user tree page.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Maybe some percentage of invitees? I can definitely see
| the need to disincentivize imprudent inviting, but one
| mistake is pretty rough. Surely you've met somebody in
| real life who's revealed themselves as a jerk after
| initially appearing ok.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Yep it's quite easy for a moderately talented spammer to
| undo the good work of a million people if they have a fast
| connection and mission to sew chaos and try to make $5
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Yeah this is definitely a fear.. hopefully we can attract the
| well-intentioned people and put some nice automations in place
| for keeping spam to a minimum. Let me know if you've seen any
| similar projects do this well.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Maybe you could apply the web of trust concept? Tag
| submissions with a key, and then let people only see links
| that from keys they've trusted, or from keys that have been
| trusted by (some number of) keys that they've trusted.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Yeah I was considering that idea too, like a trusted circle
| feature. But haven't done any user management yet as this
| is purely an experiment. Agree automation can only go so
| far, but at least that can catch the low hanging fruit.
| Ragnarork wrote:
| I want to love this idea but I'm extremely skeptical you can
| automate "keeping the bad stuff out of it".
|
| It's basically moderation, or a subdomain if you will, and
| I'm not sure there any place or product that currently has
| fully automated moderation that works. There's always a human
| involved if you want to do it properly.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is it actually moderation?
|
| Moderation of, say, a comment section has some problems
| that seem (to me at least, I don't actually work in this
| area, so maybe this is a naive take) to make it much
| harder.
|
| * There's a desire to preserve continuity of conversation
|
| * People have different expectations of the types of
| content they find to be outside the domain of
| reasonableness
|
| * People have different expectations of what the job of
| moderation is (curating productive discussion or just
| banning truly odious stuff?)
|
| Like if I say I'm going to only host technical discussions,
| we will get a spiraling argument about where exactly the
| line is between tech and political policy around tech.
|
| The easy solution is for users to just mute people that
| they don't like, but them you have a conversation where
| some participants can't see eachother, they managing back-
| and-forth a between people with different muted subsets.
|
| And there's still the issue of managing the general vibe,
| if it becomes conventional to throw around unpleasant or
| hyperbolic language, that could ruin the discussion for
| everyone, even those who've blocked the main perpetrators.
| Or the vibe could become toxic to new users who haven't
| curated a blocklist yet.
|
| In this case, there's no need to preserve the continuity of
| conversation. And the users have less ability to
| continuously change the vibe, since it is just a collection
| of links. And the entry point could be trusting a single
| user, so the overall vibe is less relevant.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Can't you let the market decide though? Sometimes
| automated moderation only has to be "good enough". It's
| probably best to err on the side of caution and be pretty
| aggressive with bans/deletion of posts. If commenters
| don't like the degree of that they can complain and have
| it revised if overly aggressive or simply move on. You
| are much more likely to weed out the trolls that way than
| lose "the best commenters".
| bee_rider wrote:
| I dunno. People often say moderation is hard, I think I
| summarized some reasons why. But my point was that I
| don't think they apply in this case. It is possible
| moderation isn't hard, or that it is hard for reasons I
| missed.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Yeah, this whole genre of products is an example of the Happy
| Path fallacy.
|
| There are studies showing that comments on articles erode the
| trust readers have in these articles. Given the quality of the
| average comment, it's likely that comment systems on most sites
| make people both dumber and angrier.
|
| So I think the idea of forcing comments (or user-contributed
| links) on sites that don't want comments is fundamentally
| problematic.
|
| Personally, I don't want random people on the Internet putting
| links on my articles. If you want to discuss what I write, or
| provider additional context, or disagree, then do it on your
| own site, or in a public place like Hacker News, not on my
| site.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Most of the comment sections I've seen on news sites(for
| example) are filled with vitriol and are virtually useless
| except for trolls who demand to be heard. I always block them
| with ublock
| dcow wrote:
| Just let the community downvote inanity. Why does everything
| need moderators? Honestly moderators would kill an idea like
| this. Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations.
| bluGill wrote:
| Unfortunately scammers have an interest in automating down
| votes for anything that shows them bad, and automating
| increasing their own ranking. Note that otherwise legitimate
| companies often become scammers against their competition.
| chucksmash wrote:
| > Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations.
|
| How many users will take the thing for a test drive and then
| patiently click through and downvote every goatse link they
| find versus simply uninstalling it when they get goatse'd?
| arkh wrote:
| > I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other
| than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general
| inanity.
|
| IMO this is the kind of content which made early 2000 internet
| fun. Not the bland, moderated to hell and back social media
| sites are. Just compare what happened with the million checkbox
| experience which got a secret ARG made by users having fun and
| reddit place which is... meh.
| ClaraForm wrote:
| I completely agree. Yesterday I stumbled on a backup I had
| made of an old Internet forum (2002) I was on. Just the
| amount of trolling and shooting the shit in every comment was
| awesome. The internet was the place to get away from the
| seriousness of life. Now it's as bland as all the rest of it.
| I realize I'm doing the same in this comment , pontificating
| on the merits of humor. But I'm not like the rest, I swear! I
| remember when it was fun!
| bloopernova wrote:
| That anarchic mosh pit of silliness is unfortunately very
| vulnerable to manipulation by extremist groups or nation
| states.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the internet is running a bit short on well-
| intentioned people
|
| The haters on this thread including you are not "well-
| intentioned" so I guess you have a point. Nobody _makes_ you
| act this way though. It 's largely regional/age-based too.
| There are many millions of people who don't act like the
| typical Reddit/HN armchair expert and aren't drawing swastikas
| in YouTube live chats. And there are easy ways of filtering out
| genuine spam.
|
| HN/Reddit "spam filters" goes far beyond filtering spam to
| restrict any opinion they don't like. An approach I think is
| far worse for the internet than whatever you're referring to.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > why not let anyone contribute to any webpage?
|
| I can think of a few reasons.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| haha true, I think the thing I am most after with this
| experiment is a more collaborative "alive" feeling outside of
| social networks. but of course we don't want to grant everyone
| write access to every part of every page.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I still like it. Even if it is flawed I totally agree that
| the web could be so much more than social networks. Where to
| start?
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| Unfortunately, if this succeeds, you'll need to figure out a
| way to prevent (or mitigate) spam and other abuse. It's an
| awful problem, and I'm not sure if there's any way to really
| deal with it. A PGP-style web-of-trust might work, but that
| has its own downsides.
| jsnell wrote:
| The title feels pretty clickbaity. I might be missing something,
| but this feels like another distributed annotation system for the
| web, an idea that's been tried and retried for what feels like
| decades a this point. Why will this one work when the other
| attempts didn't? Is it just about this being more restricted than
| those past systems?
|
| (The example that came to mind first was Google Sidewiki, but it
| looks like there's a bunch of these listed in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation)
| camtarn wrote:
| I guess the focus in this one is on adding links rather than
| discussion, which from a look at that Wikipedia page, seems
| unique.
|
| But yes, it seems a bit like a small twist on an extremely old
| idea.
| photonthug wrote:
| Also there's really not that many systems on the page, some
| were not actually launched, or were proprietary. So old idea
| or not, it kinda looks like any contributions in this area
| would be worthwhile.
| jerf wrote:
| It does seem a variant on annotation. I'd commend to the poster
| my analysis of the network utility of such systems I developed
| after pondering on them for quite a few years (I was
| interacting with them in the 1990s):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23576213
|
| I commend that to the author in the spirit of learning about
| the space and thinking through the implications, because I
| believe people are more likely to solve problems when they
| understand what they are, and think through them, and don't
| just try to blunder past them with hope and moxie.
|
| That post was written about _generalized_ text annotation and I
| stand by it in that context.
|
| However, as you deviate from the system being analyzed, the
| analysis becomes less appropriate. One of the problems
| generalized annotation systems have is that there are an
| arbitrary amount of textual comments that can be added to a
| page. That is what turns the popular pages into a unpleasant
| cacophony. The range of links is somewhat more restrained.
| Plus, links are just... links. Textual comments are arguing and
| flames and generally tiring on any popular page. (Though I'd
| watch out for people learning how to turn "links" into
| arguments.)
|
| It is possible that a shared cross-linking system might work,
| but I'd strenuously suggest thinking _very very_ hard before
| adding in any sort of _inline_ "conversation" system. It is
| very, very obvious and very, very tempting... and it
| immediately puts you back into the generalized web annotation
| space, which is strewn with corpses, many of them very very
| well funded. You _can_ have a "community forum" where people
| can talk, and perhaps even should, but putting it _inline on
| the page_ is basically a known-fail. If you think you 've got a
| solution to that I'd try to be very sure that you've got a very
| strong proposition on exactly how yours is different than the
| previous attempts.
|
| Anyhow, I would just generally suggest to the author that this
| is one of those "obvious ideas" that hasn't happened because in
| general they flame out so quickly that you don't even find out
| they existed before they've already collapsed, not because
| nobody has ever tried it. Be sure to consider what has happened
| in the past.
|
| Also, as a hint from previous efforts: It looks like you may be
| trying to bind links to specific text on the page. As you've
| probably already discovered, that's harder than it looks, and
| however much code you've written for it, I guarantee you it's
| even harder than that. I'd strongly suggest considering just
| binding links to pages and not trying to bind it to text at
| all.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Thanks for linking to your comment on the Hypothes.is post!
| Will check it out. I by no means think this (or related
| ideas) have not been built / attempted. This is an
| _experiment_ , not meant to be well-funded or even large.
| But, I take your feedback in good spirits, appreciate the
| thoughts!
| dang wrote:
| Ok, let's switch to the subtitle instead.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| To answer your question "why will this one work when the other
| attempts didn't?" - from my perspective, this one got my
| attention enough that I'm going to try it. I've seen lots of
| 'annotate the web' things and none has piqued my interest.
|
| So I guess "clickbaity title" maybe actually means "clear
| vision to attract people" and "good storytelling to engage
| users".
| cxr wrote:
| This has been done a lot. Marc Andreessen was going to put it in
| Mosaic. Hypothes.is is the most semi-well-implemented modern
| incarnation I am aware of.
|
| Recently, I came across this paper which describes an
| implementation called "Weblinks" (terrible name) that focuses on
| just the links. Haven't used it, but it's thoughtfully designed:
|
| <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3465336.3475123>
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah I recall Marc talking about related ideas with
| Mosaic actually now that you mention it.
| ghusto wrote:
| Don't want to be that guy throwing word-turds at someone's actual
| work, but both ideas (making any webpage editable, and trusted
| err, well I guess webrings) have tried and died more than once.
|
| I can see how webrings died when social media took over -- not
| that I believe social media to be superior in any way -- but I
| never understood why making webpages editable never took off.
| There were a few attempts, most requiring extensions.
|
| EDIT: Chrome-only extension? Now I don't feel so bad about those
| thrown word-turds ;)
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out ghusto! No need to apologize. What
| other solution would you expect outside of the Chrome
| Extension? You just mean you want a different browser
| supported?
| ghusto wrote:
| Yup, Firefox :)
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Cool, thanks!
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| Safari, please. =)
|
| Also, it'd be great if this was an open standard so that
| anyone could write an extension for any browser.
| juancroldan wrote:
| Don't let the negative comments get to you. The idea is
| interesting, and there are plenty of ways to curb spammers (just
| look at Stack Overflow). Also, this isn't the same concept as
| webrings.
| saylisteins wrote:
| I think this is an interesting concept! Please don't let the
| negative comments get to you.
|
| One suggestion is to maybe allow users/community to have a walled
| garden in regards to writing rights. This would help with
| moderation, and allow users to subscribe to the walled
| gardens/bubbles they are most interested in.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Thanks! All good, I think some people are interpreting this as
| 1) me thinking this is some sort of groundbreaking novel idea
| and 2) that I am trying to scale this in a venture scale sort
| of way haha. Neither are true. The walled garden idea came up
| elsewhere too, really like it and considered it. Just have to
| think through details and add the user management side.
| ClaraForm wrote:
| Would you consider incorporating the AT protocol into it? It
| would be nice if every reader had their own moderation
| filter, like a web of links, but-bluesky-ified.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| ooh interesting, will investigate that
| pikseladam wrote:
| It looks like An IndieWeb Webring project. You can check it out
| here: https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ "This proof-of-concept webring is a
| way for folks adding IndieWeb building blocks to their personal
| websites to find (and be found by) other folks with IndieWeb
| building blocks on their sites!"
| bargle0 wrote:
| Client side webrings.
|
| What is the plan for fighting bitrot and bad-faith actors?
| beowulfey wrote:
| I love this idea and agree you need a form of curation. Is there
| a mechanism for "ranking" links? Or reporting? I think a simple
| UI that lets you up or downvote ( _after_ clicking) could be
| pretty effective at reducing spam.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| totally, this is a feature I am working on. might even just do
| a report feature and remove anything that has been reported too
| many times by different people before doing true ranking.
| dcow wrote:
| Please add a mobile safari extension. I wouldn't see myself using
| this in any other context.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| interesting, thanks for the suggestion!
| sva_ wrote:
| This sort of thing seems to be doomed to fail from the start as
| the web is so large that any attempt of building a user base will
| spread itself too thin to really take off imo.
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| Oh yeah, I remember the old StumbleUpon browser extension from
| the early 2000s myself! Good times.
| robertclaus wrote:
| The early days of StumbleUpon were great! I think it might also
| be a perfect example of why a lot of the comments here are
| pessimistic about content quality staying high over time.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| So many haters in here hahah I think it's a cool project and was
| a creative blog post. Reminds me of the early days of the web.
|
| Ignore these insufferable know-it-all haters on Hacker News.
| These people are the worst! Some aren't even real people.
|
| The ones that are bots are probably HN itself because
| https://greenwich-for-chrome.replit.app/ is a threat. This is the
| coolest part IMO, has Twitter or HN like potential.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Appreciate it!
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Sure thing, just installed the extension and tried a few!
| Kinda like Pinterest + HackerNews I dig
| surfingdino wrote:
| We don't hate it, we just know it's going to be hijacked by SEO
| bros.
| lkrubner wrote:
| "The way we discover interesting websites needs innovating, why
| not let anyone contribute to any webpage?"
|
| I remember there was a website that did this in 1999, using
| frames to allow people to post comments on any website. The
| courts shot this down as an illegal infringement of trademark.
| Does anyone remember the name of that website that did this?
| shark1 wrote:
| Similar to https://web.hypothes.is/
| Multicomp wrote:
| I've wanted a distributed annotation system for a while, probably
| it will end up having some sort of advanced block list and follow
| list and follow me for my block list approach, potentially an
| activity pub-based system might work, but in the meantime I want
| to try this one because I've missed the sidewiki boat and want to
| try it.
|
| Once it can be on Firefox at least, I can try it.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Yeah definitely. Going to build out a first version of block
| lists / reporting this weekend. Someone else wants a firefox
| version too so might start there in terms of additional browser
| support. Thanks!
| ergl wrote:
| This is cool. One way of solving spam problems might to only show
| links of people you explicitly follow / trust in some way,
| although that means associating identity to the posts. You could
| have a setting to toggle between only showing links from people
| you trust or from everyone, to get around the bootstrapping
| problem at first.
| onlyfootnotes wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah I think this is likely the direction I will take
| things.
| shadytrees wrote:
| reminds me of why the lucky stiff's hoodwink.d project, in a good
| way
| surfingdino wrote:
| If it doesn't have a Cutty Sark pub it's not Greenwich.
| namuol wrote:
| If this is interesting/novel to you, you might be surprised to
| learn there's a W3C standard for annotating the web which never
| really caught on.
|
| https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/
|
| It deserves more attention, particularly from browser vendors and
| social media platforms, but the incentives have never been in
| place.
|
| One commercial application built on the standard is hypothes.is,
| but I've lost track of their efforts years ago.
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