Show HN: Birdy Comments – comments for people, not websites

https://www.birdycomments.com/

by corrys • 10 years ago

5 12 10 years ago

fiatjaf• 10 years ago

That is nice, but why not Hypothesis?

corrys6• 10 years ago

Hypothesis is a great idea but in my opinion is overly complicated for most users. I was very excited about Google Wave as well and that didn't didn't turn out very well. Birdy is very different - it works on most modern devices and is very intuitive. Everyone used comments before - now you just can comment on any page instead of relying on website owners to provide you with a platform.

wingerlang4• 10 years ago

What's your plan to avoid the issues of not enough users making the extension pretty much worthless? There have been numerous attempts of this exact thing before.

There are so many unique urls that finding another user who have commented on that specific one will be more or less impossible.

corrys6• 10 years ago

Good point but I think it goes without saying that all social apps are worthless without a user base. I hope the convenience and advantages of this approach will attract future users.

I am not handling all unique URLs as truly unique - they are normalised. So actual pages where you would want to leave comments - say some business' home page or a Twitter user's feed - will have a unique URL and will allow multiple users to discuss content. Something like https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts and https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts?t=899 are kept as aliases in my DB and will have the same comment tree.

wingerlang4• 10 years ago

I hope the convenience and advantages of this approach will attract future users.

But as far as I know, it hasn't worked for the others. And as far as I know, they are not only similar things - but identical. What distinguishes your implementation? What actually is the advantage of this approach?

I haven't seen the iOS integration before, but honestly - I would never use that, what is the chance of finding comments? 0.0000001%?

afaqurk• 10 years ago

This looks great. I have seen this idea implemented several times and each time it was an uninviting / non-modern UI.

I always wanted something like this to become popular and gain a user-base because it might lead to a more community-feeling web.

Here's hoping you accomplished it. Cheers.

corrys6• 10 years ago

Thanks! I, too, value consistent and simple UI. Ideally when distributed web takes off Birdy should become completely distributed and encrypted.

Show HN: Birdy Comments – comments for people, not websites

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