Are you building these things on ATProtocol (Bluesky) or where are you building it right now? I feel like there’s quite a nice movement happening there with some specific tools for this sort of thing. (I’m curious because I’m also trying to build some stuff more on the deeper programming level but I’m currently focusing on open-source bridging and recommendation algorithms like pol.is but for science and it would be interesting to know where other people are building things.)
I don’t think atproto is really a well designed protocol
No private records yet, so can’t really build anything you’d wanna live in on it.
Would an agenty person respond to this situation by taking atproto and inventing their own private record extension for it and then waiting for atproto to catch up with them? Maybe. But also:
The use of dns instead of content-addressing for record names is really ugly, since they’re already using content-addressing elsewhere, so using dns is just making it hard to make schema resolution resilient, and it prohibits people who aren’t sysadmins from publishing schemas. (currently only sysadmin types could need a schema published, but it’s lame that that’s the case. Anyone should be able to publish data. Anyone can define a type.) In theory you can still do this stuff (provide a special domain that’s an ipfs gateway or something and treat records that use that as having content-addressed specs), but at that point it seems like you’re admitting that atproto was mostly just a mistake?
The schema system isn’t a good type system (lacks generics). They probably don’t think of it as a type system (but it is, and should be).
And the ecosystem currently has nothing to offer, not really
Would anyone benefit from integrating closely with bsky?
There are people who’ve set up their blogs so that bsky replies to links to their post show up in the comments, for instance, but I’d guess most actual bloggers should (and perhaps already do) actively not want to display the replies from character limited forums, because, you know, they tend to be dismissive, not cite sources, not really be looking for genuine conversation, etc.
You could use a person’s bsky following as a general purpose seed list for comment moderation I guess. But with a transitive allow list this isn’t really needed.
I don’t expect meaningful amounts of algorithmic choice to just happen. I’d guess that training good sequential recommender systems is expensive in multiple ways? So if users don’t have a means (or a culture) of paying for recommenders there wont be an ecosystem, so it’ll just be bsky’s (last I checked, bad) algorithm and maybe one or two others.
An aside, I looked at margin.at, which is doing the annotations everywhere thing. But it seems to have no moderation system, doesn’t allow replies to annotations, doesn’t even allow editing or deleting your annotations right now. Why is this being built as a separate system with its own half-baked comment component instead of embedding an existing high quality discussion system from elsewhere in the atmosphere? Because atproto isn’t the kind of protocol that even aspires that level of composability and also because nothing in the ecosystem as it stands has a good discussion system.
The ‘community notes everywhere’ proposal seems easy enough to build (I’ve been hacking away at a Chrome extension version of it). I’m not sure it makes sense to wait for personal computing to change fundamentally before trying to attempt this.
I agree that distribution is an issue, which I’m not sure how to solve. One approach might be to have a core group of users onboarded who annotate a specific subset of pages—like the top 20 posts on Hacker News—so that there’s some chance of your notes being seen if you’re a contributor. But I suppose this relies on getting that rather large core group of users (e.g. HN readers) to start using the product.
Alternatively you build the thing and hope that it gets adopted in some larger way, say it gets acquired by X if they want to roll out community notes to the whole web.
Yes. But this ocean has actually been boiled many times before. Each of facebook, gmail, discord, X, had an opportunity to remake the internet, and they needlessly blew it or declined to attempt it. In China it’s already happened (mini-apps on wechat).
The ‘community notes everywhere’ proposal seems easy enough to build (I’ve been hacking away at a Chrome extension version of it). I’m not sure it makes sense to wait for personal computing to change fundamentally before trying to attempt this.
Well, it’s been built many times. Hypothes.is was the last one I tried.
One of the reasons I don’t want to build that yet is that I foresee moderation issues. Comment sections with no moderation will be annoying, people might end up deciding not to read them. Reddit style moderation isn’t particularly good either, it requires a spam-prevention approach and it requires larger crowds, to converge, which you’ll basically never have. I don’t think there are any conventional moderation systems that work here?
I wanted to use a web of trust approach, where you only see highlights prominently if they’re from your network (the people who are accountable or relevant to you). And building a web of trust isn’t necessarily easy. It benefits a lot from being integrated with other systems.
And in general the need for integration just keeps arising.
But does any of this mean you shouldn’t go ahead and do it? Probably not. I wont make the perfect the enemy of the good, though I ask that if a perfect thing is born please make sure the good wont end up being its enemy either.
One approach might be to have a core group of users onboarded who annotate a specific subset of pages—like the top 20 posts on Hacker News—so that there’s some chance of your notes being seen if you’re a contributor
The post here for me implied an approach of having LLM-generated comments there first. Presumably if it ever became popular enough to garner human comments (or human-curated comments) the prominence of the initial LLM comments could decrease naturally.
A generalization of this occurs to me; it’d be useful to show users a measure of how many other extension users have viewed particular pages, which is to say, how many people could have helped if someone had made a correction.
But yeah I think it also makes sense to start with a campaign/​mass commitment with a specific demographic.
Are you building these things on ATProtocol (Bluesky) or where are you building it right now? I feel like there’s quite a nice movement happening there with some specific tools for this sort of thing. (I’m curious because I’m also trying to build some stuff more on the deeper programming level but I’m currently focusing on open-source bridging and recommendation algorithms like pol.is but for science and it would be interesting to know where other people are building things.)
If you don’t know about the ATProtocol gang, some things I enjoy here are:
- https://​​semble.so/​​
- Paper Skygest: https://​​bsky.app/​​profile/​​paper-feed.bsky.social/​​feed/​​preprintdigest
- (Feed on bluesky): https://​​bsky.app/​​profile/​​paper-feed.bsky.social/​​feed/​​preprintdigest
- AT Protocol: https://​​docs.bsky.app/​​docs/​​advanced-guides/​​atproto
I don’t think atproto is really a well designed protocol
No private records yet, so can’t really build anything you’d wanna live in on it.
Would an agenty person respond to this situation by taking atproto and inventing their own private record extension for it and then waiting for atproto to catch up with them? Maybe. But also:
The use of dns instead of content-addressing for record names is really ugly, since they’re already using content-addressing elsewhere, so using dns is just making it hard to make schema resolution resilient, and it prohibits people who aren’t sysadmins from publishing schemas. (currently only sysadmin types could need a schema published, but it’s lame that that’s the case. Anyone should be able to publish data. Anyone can define a type.) In theory you can still do this stuff (provide a special domain that’s an ipfs gateway or something and treat records that use that as having content-addressed specs), but at that point it seems like you’re admitting that atproto was mostly just a mistake?
The schema system isn’t a good type system (lacks generics). They probably don’t think of it as a type system (but it is, and should be).
And the ecosystem currently has nothing to offer, not really
Would anyone benefit from integrating closely with bsky?
There are people who’ve set up their blogs so that bsky replies to links to their post show up in the comments, for instance, but I’d guess most actual bloggers should (and perhaps already do) actively not want to display the replies from character limited forums, because, you know, they tend to be dismissive, not cite sources, not really be looking for genuine conversation, etc.
You could use a person’s bsky following as a general purpose seed list for comment moderation I guess. But with a transitive allow list this isn’t really needed.
I don’t expect meaningful amounts of algorithmic choice to just happen. I’d guess that training good sequential recommender systems is expensive in multiple ways? So if users don’t have a means (or a culture) of paying for recommenders there wont be an ecosystem, so it’ll just be bsky’s (last I checked, bad) algorithm and maybe one or two others.
An aside, I looked at margin.at, which is doing the annotations everywhere thing. But it seems to have no moderation system, doesn’t allow replies to annotations, doesn’t even allow editing or deleting your annotations right now. Why is this being built as a separate system with its own half-baked comment component instead of embedding an existing high quality discussion system from elsewhere in the atmosphere? Because atproto isn’t the kind of protocol that even aspires that level of composability and also because nothing in the ecosystem as it stands has a good discussion system.
Is there a risk of boiling the ocean here?
The ‘community notes everywhere’ proposal seems easy enough to build (I’ve been hacking away at a Chrome extension version of it). I’m not sure it makes sense to wait for personal computing to change fundamentally before trying to attempt this.
I agree that distribution is an issue, which I’m not sure how to solve. One approach might be to have a core group of users onboarded who annotate a specific subset of pages—like the top 20 posts on Hacker News—so that there’s some chance of your notes being seen if you’re a contributor. But I suppose this relies on getting that rather large core group of users (e.g. HN readers) to start using the product.
Alternatively you build the thing and hope that it gets adopted in some larger way, say it gets acquired by X if they want to roll out community notes to the whole web.
Yes. But this ocean has actually been boiled many times before. Each of facebook, gmail, discord, X, had an opportunity to remake the internet, and they needlessly blew it or declined to attempt it. In China it’s already happened (mini-apps on wechat).
Well, it’s been built many times. Hypothes.is was the last one I tried.
One of the reasons I don’t want to build that yet is that I foresee moderation issues. Comment sections with no moderation will be annoying, people might end up deciding not to read them. Reddit style moderation isn’t particularly good either, it requires a spam-prevention approach and it requires larger crowds, to converge, which you’ll basically never have. I don’t think there are any conventional moderation systems that work here?
I wanted to use a web of trust approach, where you only see highlights prominently if they’re from your network (the people who are accountable or relevant to you). And building a web of trust isn’t necessarily easy. It benefits a lot from being integrated with other systems.
And in general the need for integration just keeps arising.
But does any of this mean you shouldn’t go ahead and do it? Probably not. I wont make the perfect the enemy of the good, though I ask that if a perfect thing is born please make sure the good wont end up being its enemy either.
The post here for me implied an approach of having LLM-generated comments there first. Presumably if it ever became popular enough to garner human comments (or human-curated comments) the prominence of the initial LLM comments could decrease naturally.
A generalization of this occurs to me; it’d be useful to show users a measure of how many other extension users have viewed particular pages, which is to say, how many people could have helped if someone had made a correction.
But yeah I think it also makes sense to start with a campaign/​mass commitment with a specific demographic.