Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on

https://ampie.app

by posobin • 5 years ago

194 81 5 years ago

ampie.app

vort3• 5 years ago

Why does it require sign up though?…

camhart2• 5 years ago

Plus connecting twitter account

rememberlenny• 5 years ago

It uses your user's Twitter account to make queries to avoid rate limits. Very normal. Also works really nicely.

posobin24• 5 years ago

That is needed to see the tweets mentioning the page, but it is not required to use Ampie. This is done because twitter api is very limiting otherwise.

floatingatoll3• 5 years ago

Why is it free at all? This should be charging money for the service from day one. Maintaining addons isn’t a charity.

0x0082• 5 years ago

I'd rather they be transparent with the data they collect.

whywhywhywhy• 5 years ago

First, please sign up at ampie.app

I installed your extension, which is a pretty big investment in your product as a user. Uninstalled it at this point.

posobin24• 5 years ago

Sorry about that =( This is done in part to prevent abuse of the api, since all the requests are processed on my server and not offloaded to e.g. algolia.

posobin24• 5 years ago

Hi HN! Ampie is an extension that lets you discover backlinks to the page you are reading: either from HN, tweets, or blog posts that ampie scraped. It's been unexpectedly useful for myself: finding alternatives to libraries or apps I was going to use, see reviews for books, discover related blog posts or talks. I think of it as an assistant that helps you find connections you wouldn't have found otherwise.

Here is a 2min demo video of what it can do right now: https://twitter.com/posobin/status/1443269542323658753

I've been working on it for the past 1.5 years now, and there have been a bunch of features over that time, but now I am trying to simplify it and see if people like it if it is condensed to its essence. Give it a try and tell me what you think =)

valarauko2• 5 years ago

Odd... it doesn't seem to show me HN links for the current page, at all. I tried it on a few top HN linked articles, and Ampie shows me only other pages on the domain, but not for the page in question. I had tweets show up for a few pages, but never the HN discussion (the 'other pages on the domain' do have tweets & HN links as expected)

posobin24• 5 years ago

Yeah there is some lag in the indexing, I do scrape all the HN submissions but like once a week (it's in plans to make this immediate but haven't gotten around to it yet). Just to make sure, if you go to one of those other pages on the same domain, do you see the the HN threads/comments in the sidebar on that page?

valarauko2• 5 years ago

if you go to one of those other pages on the same domain, do you see the the HN threads/comments in the sidebar on that page?

yes

Retr0id• 5 years ago

Did anyone else find the layout of the landing page visually overwhelming, and hard to follow?

lancesells2• 5 years ago

It was a little hard to follow but I thought it had a lot more charm than a lot of sites I see.

posobin24• 5 years ago

Thanks! My intent definitely was to make it a little bit chaotic =) I will try to figure out how to make it a bit easier to follow, heard some advice to space it out a bit possibly.

soheil• 5 years ago

This is great, it'd be amazing if there was a place to comment on directly about the page using this extension or otherwise a central database where all discussion about a URL exists beyond the control of the page itself.

posobin24• 5 years ago

You actually can amplify the page and add a comment! Other ampie users will see that you've been there and the comment, and you can see the list of amplified links of other people, e.g. mine: https://ampie.app/posobin Though you can't respond to others comments for now, but thank you for voicing the interest in that!

There are other extensions that provide just the commenting part (e.g. https://web.hypothes.is/, https://curius.app/, https://glasp.co/), but I find that they suffer from the cold start problem, i.e. it's rare to stumble upon comments for a page you go to.

wizzwizz4• 5 years ago

You could add those to Ampie. (I say, as if that isn't something you haven't thought of.)

ernopp2• 5 years ago

Awesome! I've always wanted something like this to exist. Thanks for building it <3

ernopp2• 5 years ago

I just hope there won't be too much of a performance impact on my browser or the page load times

posobin24• 5 years ago

IIUC the content scripts that extensions use load after the page is loaded, so this shouldn't affect page load times. But please reach out if you feel like it does!

i_like_waiting• 5 years ago

It's amazing, first I wasn't sure why I need to register, but very well worth it! Good job

yagudin• 5 years ago

I amplified >500 links, am a huge fun. An undocumented use case is keeping up with that posobin is reading by following https://ampie.app/posobin :P

siddish• 5 years ago

500!? Wow! Can you share your profile, so I can find cool links across internet?

Recently removed extension, it was occupying quite a bit of screen and am not discovering new pages anymore so

Btw here's mine: https://ampie.app/siddish

devgoldm• 5 years ago

Just to offset the negative comments on here, I think what you did is great! I don't think people appreciate the 1.5 years of individual effort you put into this and the demo looks like something I would find genuinely very useful. This clearly has lots of potential!

I would honestly prefer paying for it, perhaps with a cut-down free version (perhaps using cached data only?) without sign-up to try it out, so one day you can work on it comfortably and doesn't require commitment for me to try out.

However I'm sure you'll refine it in the years to come considering how well you've done so far. Keep up the good work!

posobin24• 5 years ago

Thank you for the kind words! Yeah, I haven't thought about a no-sign-up version, might do something like that.

metabeard2• 5 years ago

With additional controls/customizations in place I'd gladly pay to keep it ad-free and not have the data sold.

posobin24• 5 years ago

What kind of controls/customizations would you like?

mikkel1252• 5 years ago

I don't use twitter, but would love to see related reddit threads.

hbn• 5 years ago

Years ago I had found an extension that did this. Can't remember the name, but I loved it until a reddit API change broke it, and the dev had seemingly disappeared.

Guillaume86• 5 years ago

Kiwi Conversations is an extension that does it, I use it all the time.

smusamashah2• 5 years ago

https://epiverse.co/ shows HN and Reddit discussions for the page you are on.

xojoc2• 5 years ago

Hey! I built https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ just for that. It also has a bookmarklet to search for Reddit threads for the page you're visiting.

smusamashah2• 5 years ago

I use https://epiverse.co/ to see HN and Reddit discussions for the page I am on. This is a great addition to that.

willhinsa2• 5 years ago

I love the idea. I like the concept of the name, a fun shortening/nickname for "Ampersand", which in this function also makes me think of the "Yes, And" concept from improv comedy. For me as a user, the drawback to the name "Ampie" is that it also makes me think of Google AMP, which certainly isn't my favorite thing lol :)

I didn't love that the plugin is automatically active on every page I open; I was expecting that it would be a button in the toolbar that I could click at my leisure to see what discussion of a particularly interesting article was. I really do love the Twitter integration with people who you follow, but again, I wish it was kind of an on-demand plugin, or maybe just a site I could go to at my leisure and input a URL to see a nice big display of all the discussions about something specific.

I'll be turning it off for now as I'm already prone to too many distractions, but I might toggle it on sometime if I want to deep dive on something and see others' comments about it.

posobin24• 5 years ago

It pops up the first two times you go to a domain or a URL that has mentions, so it should stop bothering you after a little bit of usage. I do hear you though, several people brought this up. The problem with making it a button is that people forget to click it (me included), and most of the interesting connections go unnoticed this way. If you have ideas how to make this better, please tell me!

metabeard2• 5 years ago

How about opt-out instead. A button to disable it on a domain. Its very non-intrusive otherwise but I'd still like the option to disable thing. (I also sent this suggestion as a note from the bottom of the extension)

Thanks for building Ampie!

willhinsa2• 5 years ago

One thing that comes to mind is an option to toggle it to operate either in "always-on sidebar" or "on-demand plugin button" mode.

To riff on what metabeard suggested, another configuration option that could be presented to the user might be something like "domain-specific preferences for always-on or on-demand" so that certain websites are always excluded/always excluded.

-Will

posobin24• 5 years ago

To use it as a button, you can try the bookmarklet: https://ampie.app/url-context

Would love to hear about your experience if you do use it!

mkishi• 5 years ago

Have you thought about a separate extension that just has a toolbar button that is mostly in a dull inactive state with a grayscale badge, but when there's enough discussion on a page, it both lights up and has an obnoxiously colorful number?

Even though I never mess with it, I find I'm generally aware when there's a badge on my adblocker. I believe that'd be enough to remind people to click it. The heuristics should be strict enough not to light up all the time, or maybe even support user-defined filters for advanced users.

After a while it's possible they'll subconsciously think about Ampie — and the dull badge will still convey "yeah, there's some discussion, check it out."

ps. I say separate extension because I'd be wary of giving it access to all sites and data, which I guess would be required if that was only a setting?

modeless3• 5 years ago

I love the idea. I just wish the extension didn't require permission to "read and change all your data on all websites". I severely restrict the number of extensions I install with that permission. If any one of them is sold to unscrupulous people, or has a vulnerability, or just has their developer account hijacked, the extension can be silently updated to do anything, including for example stealing all of my money, or taking over any online account I use. It's a really scary permission when combined with silent automatic background updates.

It seems like it ought to be possible to do some or most of this functionality with more restrictive permissions.

sillysaurusx3• 5 years ago

I gave up this fight back when I realized Twitch Now requires this permission, and that there are no other good extensions to show your twitch feed. https://i.imgur.com/d92BWVW.png

It's basically "too good": an extension so convenient that I can't imagine living without it.

One idea is to install the extension, unpack it, change the permission manifest, then "install unpacked." I did this when I fixed the netflix auto-skip extension (always skips intros and outros; saved me hours of Star Trek outro pain): https://github.com/shawwn/netflix-skip

But I suspect that if you turn off those permissions for this extension, you'll just see it break, since it does need the ability to read data on the current site to then pull up twitter conversations about the site.

It's a shame that "examine current url" isn't a separate permission from "modify all data on the site" though. And that read/write permissions aren't separate. I'd be much more inclined to let extensions read all sites I visit.

modeless3• 5 years ago

I believe that the "tabs" permission does allow you to read the current URL without granting the ability to modify the page. It's also possible that some of the functionality could be built with the chrome.declarativeContent API or other alternatives. I'm sure there are features that would be impacted, and I doubt that most users would understand or care about the reduced permissions. But I would.

posobin24• 5 years ago

For ampie you can just get its source, modify the manifest file, and build it yourself, no need to bother with repackaging: https://github.com/posobin/ampie

You can see the actual permissions that ampie needs here: https://github.com/posobin/ampie/blob/master/build/manifest....

webNavigation together with tabs is needed to detect page URL changes correctly and update the sidebar (I don't remember exactly, but I think the main problem were pages that use history api to update the URL), storage is for localStorage to store extension settings, cookies to read/change cookies (limited to "https://ampie.s3.amazonaws.com/", "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/", "https://*.ampie.app/", to be able to get your auth token for ampie not to log in twice), unlimitedStorage was used previously because the caches of links stored were much more than the 5mb that is the default indexedDB limit. The caches are not used anymore, but I kept the permission so far because I am thinking of adding functionality for storing and visualizing your browsing history.

I am not sure what you would want to disable here.

If an extension includes content script that runs on all websites, then it can't avoid having the "read and change all your data on all websites": content script is JS code from an extension that runs on web pages, it can access the DOM and send requests. Ampie needs to run the content script on all pages to be able to add the sidebar. The other option is to run the content script on clicking the extension icon: as I mentioned elsewhere, while this approach might sound appealing in theory, the extension turns out to be much less useful this way as you simply forget/don't bother to click it and miss out on some interesting discussions.

_dain_• 5 years ago

saved me hours of Star Trek outro pain

This is weird to me, I always listen to credits music. It gives me a calm moment to reflect on what I just watched. I don't like the modern trend of smushing everything together into "binges".

seanwilson• 5 years ago

A tip: In Chrome, you can create a new Chrome user profile and install extensions into there that will be isolated from your regular browsing e.g. do your email and banking with one profile, and do your web development work in another profile with tens of developer extensions installed there.

I just wish the extension didn't require permission to "read and change all your data on all websites".

There's a real problem with extensions not being able to ask for more granular permissions. I run an extension that's a web crawler that needs to fetch cookie-less arbitrary URLs within its own tab (i.e. it doesn't observe or interact with anything outside of this) and there's no other permission that allows this.

sdwr• 5 years ago

Beautiful! I have a soft spot for meta stuff like this, a vine climbing up a tree. I'm not a fan of browser extensions though, shit gets clogged up.

posobin24• 5 years ago

You can use it as a bookmarklet instead if you go to https://ampie.app/url-context!

RileyJames• 5 years ago

Cool app. Installed and been using today.

Feedback: I’ve already added meet.google.com, calendar.google.com and a few other web apps. And I foresee having to add a LOT more of these to the disable list.

From UX perspective I’d suggest fleshing this list out. And if possible, find an automated way to generate a list of web app subdomains/urls and disabling them all.

I can see this list getting very long, very quick.

posobin24• 5 years ago

Yeah after reading all the comments like this I thought maybe I should just take the top 1000 most popular websites and not show it by default on them.

MoritzWall• 5 years ago

Yea, or the crowdsourced solution where you hide all websites that were hidden by < n users.

0x0082• 5 years ago

Hey, I think it is a fantastic idea! And I am really excited which blogs I will discover with this.

HOWEVER,

3 things I noticed:

- Why do I need to register?

- Why cannot I disable twitter? I don't want to see twitter recommendations.

- It is incompatible with dark mode extensions because the css is somehow not inverted correctly (not sure how much you can do about that).

shinryuu• 5 years ago

Yeah, why do I need to signup. Installed the extension, but thinking of uninstalling it because I can't be bothered to sign up.

posobin24• 5 years ago

You need to sign up to prevent the api abuse.

Thanks for the feedback, disabling twitter is in the plans! Which dark mode extensions are you using?

xojoc2• 5 years ago

Shameless plug. I've built something similar at https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ It returns the discussions on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobsters. In the future I'll also add Lambda The Ultimate and Less Wrong. But intead of an extension you can use a bookmarklet.

Ecto5• 5 years ago

Thanks! I have been looking for something like this, particularly for youtube videos.

Added bonus that this won't track every website I visit.

posobin24• 5 years ago

Actually, ampie also has a bookmarklet that you can add at https://ampie.app/url-context!

But as I said elsewhere, in my experience I rarely use it myself since that requires a bit of effort to click and with an unknown reward it rarely seems worth the click.

kukabynd• 5 years ago

It’s down. Caprover?

rohithkp• 5 years ago

Similar extension for Hacker News discussions - https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext

ekzy• 5 years ago

It's funny how every now and then an extension like this comes up on HN. Nice execution, I like your homepage too. I wrote a comparable extension with a similar vision about 5 years ago (with Clojurescript): https://jazzytomato.com/hnlookup-chrome-extension-clojurescr...

posobin24• 5 years ago

Ampie is written in clojurescript as well! https://github.com/posobin/ampie

I have actually seen your extension when I was trying to figure out how to get started with making one in cljs. I've used shadow-cljs though instead of figwheel.

yewenjie• 5 years ago

I was using Ampie last year when it first came up and was more or less enjoying it.

However, it was a bit of a annoyance because (I cannot remember exactly) usually I would find some really generic links at the top and the UI scrolling was not very pleasant. In general I felt like finding new discussions/ content that I would like required a couple of clicks/ interactions. I wished it was more effortless and kinda passive to stumble upon interesting stuff.

I disabled the extension when it started asking for new permissions, thinking I need to configure it so that it is never activated on sensitive pages like my bank's site.

I am going to give it another try now. Wishing all the best to Ampie's development.

virologist• 5 years ago

innovative! well done.

gvv• 5 years ago

Great extension and idea, but I had to remove the moment I saw you needed to sign up. Hopefully there will be an anon version in the future. Happy to donate if it's about $.

sisjohn• 5 years ago

I'm quite interested in seeing this extension limited to HN and Twitter and with Reddit and Facebook.

brastick• 5 years ago

How does it work ? Are you just scraping ?

Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on

Related Stories