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Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every documentation

96 points| ritinkar | 3 years ago |metadocs8.com

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.

47 comments

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tsol|3 years ago

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.

SketchySeaBeast|3 years ago

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?

yamtaddle|3 years ago

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|3 years ago

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.

esperent|3 years ago

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?

willio58|3 years ago

All of that is valid, but you shouldn't worry about it until it actually becomes a problem.

99% of the struggle for any social network is getting people to use it at all. Those problems you list would actually be great to have to deal with, because it means the network is taking off.

ritinkar|3 years ago

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.

wnoise|3 years ago

How do you handle new releases of the documenation? A bunch of now irrelevant comments, or are they all summarily deleted (or at least restricted to the previous version)?

ritinkar|3 years ago

So this is not a problem I've solved yet. But I think the solution would involve a mix of community voting and good sorting algorithms.

But I'll only know the correct solution once I start tackling it.

qprofyeh|3 years ago

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|3 years ago

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.

gcr|3 years ago

lovely! aaah i have such a soft spot in my heart for ideas like this. reminds me of "hoodwink'd," a similar project by _why the lucky stiff from 2005 that let readers leave comments on webpages tagged by URL. (see http://web.archive.org/web/20080106065546/http://hoodwinkd.h... )

Back in 2010, I also ran my own project in this space called "Goggles." https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/goggles It was a bookmarklet that turned any webpage into multiplayer MS Paint; viewers with the bookmarklet active could see others painting on the webpage in real-time, before websockets made this kind of interaction commonplace. The entire thing ran on a single-threaded nodejs instance, serving something like 1k simultaneous connections at peak. Every half-hour or so it would crash from memory leaks. Good times.

Moderation was the thing that killed my project. Some users became victims of targeted harassment campaigns; bullies would draw dicks, swastikas, nooses, racial epithets etc on their personal tumblrs or homepages. There's something insidious about knowing that folks could be graffiti-ing your own webpage behind your back unless you're constantly checking goggles, so it didn't feel right to keep the project running knowing I didn't have the motivation to add proper moderation tools and didn't want to build user accounts or any sort of reputation system to keep the UX simple.

Some folks made absolutely stunning pieces of art on corners of the web that nobody saw. I probably still have the shapefile database archived somewhere... maybe we could reunite artists with their work someday.

thebeastie|3 years ago

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|3 years ago

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.

esperent|3 years ago

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?

yarg|3 years ago

Totally tangential, but HN should be able to handle duped comments.

o_____________o|3 years ago

Cool!

How does it identify elements to anchor to, and what happens when the original text changes?

ritinkar|3 years ago

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/

snapplebobapple|3 years ago

Didn't gab do this exact thing years ago and it caused a major uproar?

thenipper|3 years ago

This reminds me of the old shadow run rpg books. They had in character comments throughout the books. There were whole subplots and narrative arcs just in the comments. It was great.

yarg|3 years ago

Any plans for Firefox (and does this need to be an extension at all - there are some rather powerful website extensions that load via JS scripts)?

ritinkar|3 years ago

Yup. The code was written with portability in mind. As soon as I get time to test it on Firefox I'll do it.

taubek|3 years ago

This looks very useful. Do you need a user account to use it? Where are the comments stored?

ritinkar|3 years ago

You only need a user account if you want to post a comment or vote on one.

You can browse as guest.

The comments are stored in metadocs servers.

hkxer|3 years ago

This is pretty cool, nice job!

RupertEisenhart|3 years ago

There was something like this going around in ~2008, it was a plugin bar that turned the internet into a game, you could leave mines and portals on websites that would take you to other websites, so people could add their own hyperlink layer on top of the internet.

I wish I could remember the name of it, I played with it for a few weeks but then they put up a paywall.

That spirit of communal being-on-the-internet I only saw breifly recaptured again by the Beaker Browser, which unfortuantely seems also to be going the way of all things. There you could fork and remix any website you were on, could in principle afford a much more mucking-in stle of what you are trying to do here.

I think this could be great! Keep at it!

LesZedCB|3 years ago

this looks super cool and I would love to try it! any hope for Firefox one day?

ritinkar|3 years ago

Yup, there most definitely will be. Hoping to do it within the next few months.

wtf77|3 years ago

which problem are you trying to solve?

ritinkar|3 years ago

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.