Imagine that there was an EA Browser, that acts just like your favorite browser but also has an option of up/downvoting, tagging, and writing comments on any web page.
Imagine all the people in the EA community are using that browser as they go through their day and casually upvote some webpages or write some comments.
(Imagine there’s no spamming.. 🎶)
How would you design a forum feed based on those web annotations then? Probably have some default high bar (or quantity? or perhaps randomly??) on what goes to the main feed, and an option to view all web annotations.
This could be implemented rather easily by building a chrome add-on (or starting with using a private EA group for https://hypothes.is/ and feeding that to the forum).
I imagine that this would be surely useful, if people would use something like this, in that I don’t see major drawbacks. That makes me think that this is a solvable design problem.
What is the function of a private group within hypothes.is? Does that mean you only see annotations from other members of the group(s) you are in?
Given how sparse the Forum’s comments are, I’d be curious to see how many people would actually make annotations. Maybe some people don’t like commenting but would enjoy annotating, because it feels more direct or more private or something.
I suppose you’d want to hook this system to the Forum so that annotations showed up as comments when a post was crossposted here (otherwise, you’d have comments scattered between both places). That sounds like a lot of technical effort, but if it drives engagement, it could be worthwhile.
However, if the system isn’t hooked up, you have the classic competing standards problem, where we’ve now added one more place for people to discuss content, and each lone person trying to start a discussion in their place is a bit less likely to succeed. But annotations might also increase the overall number of people who discuss content, with a net positive effect...
...anyway, if someone creates a concrete plan for this and can get buy-in from a group of people, I’d be interested to see where it goes.
Exactly, a private hypothes.is group is one where you only see annotations from members of the same group, and only annotations that were tagged as annotations for that group.
Definitely agree that doing something like that should be hooked up to the forum, and that it is a bit of a technical challenge.
I am not sure if engagement is the right metric to use here, though. Not sure if it isn’t. I’m also not sure if that’s an important point so I’ll just keep this in the back of my head and maybe something will come up in the future.
I’ve had decent experience with WorldBrain’s Memex, while I haven’t really enjoyed using hypothes.is as much. There are issues I have with Memex, but I’m more optimistic about it. They’re adding collaboration functionality. I’ve talked to the CEO and they might be a good fit to work with; if it were the case that a few community members were bullish on it, I could see them listening to the community when deciding on features.
Daydreaming a little bit.
Imagine that there was an EA Browser, that acts just like your favorite browser but also has an option of up/downvoting, tagging, and writing comments on any web page.
Imagine all the people in the EA community are using that browser as they go through their day and casually upvote some webpages or write some comments.
(Imagine there’s no spamming.. 🎶)
How would you design a forum feed based on those web annotations then? Probably have some default high bar (or quantity? or perhaps randomly??) on what goes to the main feed, and an option to view all web annotations.
This could be implemented rather easily by building a chrome add-on (or starting with using a private EA group for https://hypothes.is/ and feeding that to the forum).
I imagine that this would be surely useful, if people would use something like this, in that I don’t see major drawbacks. That makes me think that this is a solvable design problem.
What is the function of a private group within hypothes.is? Does that mean you only see annotations from other members of the group(s) you are in?
Given how sparse the Forum’s comments are, I’d be curious to see how many people would actually make annotations. Maybe some people don’t like commenting but would enjoy annotating, because it feels more direct or more private or something.
I suppose you’d want to hook this system to the Forum so that annotations showed up as comments when a post was crossposted here (otherwise, you’d have comments scattered between both places). That sounds like a lot of technical effort, but if it drives engagement, it could be worthwhile.
However, if the system isn’t hooked up, you have the classic competing standards problem, where we’ve now added one more place for people to discuss content, and each lone person trying to start a discussion in their place is a bit less likely to succeed. But annotations might also increase the overall number of people who discuss content, with a net positive effect...
...anyway, if someone creates a concrete plan for this and can get buy-in from a group of people, I’d be interested to see where it goes.
Exactly, a private hypothes.is group is one where you only see annotations from members of the same group, and only annotations that were tagged as annotations for that group.
Definitely agree that doing something like that should be hooked up to the forum, and that it is a bit of a technical challenge.
I am not sure if engagement is the right metric to use here, though. Not sure if it isn’t. I’m also not sure if that’s an important point so I’ll just keep this in the back of my head and maybe something will come up in the future.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
I’ve had decent experience with WorldBrain’s Memex, while I haven’t really enjoyed using hypothes.is as much. There are issues I have with Memex, but I’m more optimistic about it. They’re adding collaboration functionality. I’ve talked to the CEO and they might be a good fit to work with; if it were the case that a few community members were bullish on it, I could see them listening to the community when deciding on features.
https://getmemex.com/
It’s all a lot of work though. I’d love for there to be some sort of review site where EAs could review (or just upvote/downvote) everything.
Cool, I’ll check it out