Does anyone remember Third Voice? You could graffiti any website and only people who had plugin installed could see it. Why isn't there a modern alternative?
Third Voice - Wikipedia
I think the answer to why there isn't a modern alternative is under the History tab on that Wiki page.
Fun idea though, I had never heard of that one.
I assume it's the same reason CS got rid of tags.
The smoke bomb clears and there's suddenly a giant vagina or gay sex filling your screen, and you have to stand up to block the screen because you were on the family computer in the living room.
Easy to police now with AI, if someone gets rich send me some bitcoin im poor (:
If it was "easy to police now with AI," then companies wouldn't still regularly have issues with all kinds of code injection on their websites, since literally any security vendor would have implemented bulletproof AI protection for it already.
An AI model designed for moderation could probably block some things, but it would be no better than traditional mechanisms employed by large organizations who's job it is to keep things secure, that still regularly fall victim to these kinds of vulnerabilities. Many of these organizations already use AI-powered tools to police their systems, and they know they're not anywhere close to even being a full replacement, let alone foolproof.
Have you ever done any technical work with "AI"?
A plugin that just checks to see if Lemmy has any posts pointing to the current URL would be pretty nice. So I can go and get secondary opinions if I want.
Not sure how much stress that would put on servers though. I guess probably not that much if searches can just be exact matches on URLs.
wouldn't be much stress really.
I'm currently building something with fediverse integration so this is a great idea and something i'll look into. Basically you would be logged into an instance (lemmy.world) and if you're navigating a to a site or even an RSS feed you could see if there's any relevant links to said article/story/whatever back to lemmy.
right now I have a feed built that allows you to log into all your instances (mastodon, lemmy, peertube, etc) and displays all the content you're subscribed to in a single feed. So adding in what you've suggested would be a great feature.
Haha, sick. Count me in if you want a beta tester :)
I'd love this. Maybe a filter for subscribed communitied but otherwise sounds like a great way to interact with a community around articles
I use an extension that replaces YouTube comments with Reddit comments, if the video was posted anywhere on Reddit.
Would be nice to have a Lemmy version.
Years ago https://web.hypothes.is/ used to let one annotate any website, but it appears now they are focused on only student/educational usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothes.is
There was a plugin that allowed highlighting text on any web page, adding comments, and having threaded conversations based on groups.. it was kind of cool, too bad it didn't take off.
https://ucatt.arizona.edu/news/using-free-version-hypothesis
EDIT 1: I'll be darned, the Chrome extension still exists.. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hypothesis-web-pdf-annota/bjfhmglciegochdpefhhlphglcehbmek
EDIT 2: I found my old account and the test annotations I'd done (and group definitions) still work! Guess this is still a working thing, worth exploring more.
It still works and I still use it. Every so often I even run into other people's public comments in the wild.
This is awesome.
I recommend pasting this into TamperMonkey to have the Hypothesis controls display on every page.
Is it OSS?
I just browsed a few of the component projects on github and it seems they're BSD-licensed...
Honestly, I know it's not the same, but that's why I have always gravitated towards "news aggregators", basically the sites that bore progeny like Reddit and Lemmy, where you're presented with links to news or random websites and people have their say about it in the comments.
I never heard of Third Voice and truthfully anything that is 100% reliant on a third party app or plugin / extension / mod / etc probably isn't my bag of tea, but still a cool idea.
One of the best thing about old reddit was how often you'd see a post for a news article about some scientific research, and if you went in the comments you'd find something like, "I'm a graduate student who helped work on this research and the reporter completely misunderstood it and their conclusion in the article is all wrong. Here's a link to the original paper, and I'll give a brief explanation of what our research actually found..."
The internet got way more complicated since then with all the dynamically loaded and generated content. I don't think the plugin would work very well these days.
I could probably make this as a firefox/chromium extension pretty easily. Simple UI similar to ad-blockers, but instead of the number of ads blocked, the number of annotations, and click it to show them (to avoid the giant drawings you don't want popping up by default).
The problem in today's world isn't building it, it's moderating it.
There used to be a really niche version of this idea back in the day created by _why the lucky stiff in the ruby programming community. It was called hoodwink'd, at the time it felt like the way of the future, like a mobile underground peanut gallery. _why was doxxed and nuked his online presence before it ever took off
Did they ever ask why they got doxxed?
Edit: wooooosh
His identity was sort of an open secret in the community, he was a whimsical creative brilliant madman that was very well known, people were curious. Check out Why's Poignant guide to Ruby for a glimpse and some foxes
there's a more or less unspeakable amount of money riding on businesses' ability to control the narrative around themselves. this applies to small businesses and big ones alike, and a service like this would be a target for corporations all over the world. a dox isn't a large lift.
The product soon received much criticism by website owners claiming they were trying to externalize discussion. The White House website was annotated with topical jokes. Further issues arose when spammers began to leverage the product, and increased issues arose when cross-site scripting security vulnerabilities were exploited in the product.
The "say no to third voice" campaign website is hilarious. It's very obviously just cyber boomers who couldn't handle people talking about their "internet properties" outside their control
Cyber Trespassing We believe that Third Voice software cyber trespasses on the paid for property of commercial sites, private organizations, and private individuals.
Web pages are publicly accessible surfaces that are attached to privately owned domain names, located on server space that is rented or paid for.
According to Webster's Dictionary, vandalism is "willful or malicious destruction or defacement of public or private property ".
Defacement is defined as "to mar the external appearance of"
Third Voice notes are graffiti and vandalism.
Okay cyber boomer...
Pretty sure all these problems can be solved now.
I remember Yahoo Chat used to let you go to a website and then chat with other users currently on that website. It was kinda cool.
But idk about Third Voice.
Privacy, cost, moderation
How would it work, technically, on a dynamic website? Any given url may load different content.
The content of the graffiti/comments isn't being hosted on the server of the location you're ending at. You just tie it to the url, same as it worked before. Ignore search strings and tracking tags and that's it. Nothing has changed on that end.
But if I'm on example.com/feed and I see posts [1,2,3] based on my user and whatever algorithm is there, and you're on example.com/feed and you see posts [4,5,6], how would it know? Same url, completely different content.
I guess it would work on pages that have a fixed url, like news articles.
Good question, this is not an issue I dont think these days. people can correct like wiki
I fear after asking the question, could this be used as a weaponized bubble machine?
I got the wiki data extension to try and have this effect, but that didn't really work for the case. Still use to categorize stuff though.
Or do they still exist?
Stumbleupon was kind of like that. Along with being an early type of link aggregator, any website would have its own comment section that was only visible to other stumbleupon users.
I used to enjoy it, and it looks like it may still be alive in some form. But I'm not brave enough to see how shitty it's become. I'll keep my rose tinted glasses on.
I loved stumbleupon, but with its moderation policy, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that it went down hard.
What happened there? I must have wandered off before the drama happened.