Annotation is now a web standard

Re:Annotation is now a web standard by soheil on Sunday February 26, 2017 @06:56PM (#13740789)

A lot of startups/websites exist solely and sometimes to a large extend because there is no standard annotation capability on the web, e.g. Stumbleupon, Reddit, Hackernews! (Medium highlights), comment sections on any page (even NY Times articles!) Sites not having direct control over which comments should stay and surface to the top and which ones should go is going to be huge.

In my opinion this will open up the web immensely and make the web much more democratic, will be interesting to see how major players react.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Annotation is now a web standard by TOMDM on Sunday February 26, 2017 @08:06PM (#13741102)

I would argue that the value provided by hackernews and reddit (and possibly stumbleupon? I'm not familiar with it) are content discovery AND comments, a huge value provided by both sites is in the comments, but being able to annotate web pages alone doesn't cover the dicoverability provided by the sites.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Annotation is now a web standard by soheil on Sunday February 26, 2017 @08:20PM (#13741161)

I think it's mainly because search engines so far have not had access to annotations, therefore the discovery had to rely primarily on what the consensus is from other properties (to a large extend property owners) about what's important as opposed to what other annotators think is important. So a new and relatively simple search engine could solve that problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Annotation is now a web standard by skybrian on Sunday February 26, 2017 @08:03PM (#13741092)

Or maybe 4chan will have fun with it for a while, and then everyone else will decide it's a cesspit and turn it off? I don't see anything in the proposal about how comments get moderated.

In the meantime, we can keep using Hacker News.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Annotation is now a web standard by soheil on Sunday February 26, 2017 @08:10PM (#13741117)

Maybe moderation should be outsourced, e.g, AdBlock lists are crowdsourced, but there are different lists you can subscribe to. Wikipedia, Reddit, HN, FB, Youtube, Twitter, each have their own moderation policy, one could simply opt-in to a policy they choose to not necessarily maintained by a single party or an organization, but possible if desired.

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Re:Annotation is now a web standard by deevolution on Monday February 27, 2017 @02:27AM (#13742511)

Should the author have the privelage of moderating their comments? They could shave off all the comments that threaten the authors argument. Suddenly its become a single sided debate.

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Re:Annotation is now a web standard by skybrian on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @05:43PM (#13758935)

Debates don't have to happen on the original website. We have debates about all sorts of web pages on Hacker News (and Reddit, and Twitter, and so on), and it works out fine. Everyone knows how this works.

Authors can moderate what appears on the same web page (their own site's comments, if any) but not what appears in other places (Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, and so on).

Putting comments from a different community on the same page as the original article is a mashup of sorts; you're mixing content from different places. This can create confusion.

It seems like if such mashups exist, they should have their own URL? Suppose that when following a link from Hacker News, you get a web page with Hacker News annotations.

What URL should that be? Maybe it should go on ycombinator.com, sort of like when you embed a YouTube video.

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Re:Annotation is now a web standard by grzm on Monday February 27, 2017 @02:33AM (#13742541)

It's a complex subject, isn't it? I can see that possibly be an issue, and some might abuse it, just as others may use annotations in an abusive fashion as well. I can sympathize with sites wanting to some level of moderation, at least to remove abuse. How one does that is a challenge.

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Re:Annotation is now a web standard by tikl1 on Monday February 27, 2017 @05:02AM (#13743113)

As said in others answers, there will be multiple annotations sources so each one will have it's own moderation to do and users will have the choice to subscribe to any or all of them.

Therefore the moderation will not have anything to do with the content owner. It's comparable to reddit or HN : would you complain that content owner have no control over discussion about their content on those sites ?

[ Parent | on HN ]