I think moderation and community are hard to tack on, though those might be necessary to make these projects as popular and usable as social networks, to get the network effects rolling. Without them this risks becoming either "4chan everywhere," or "your one comment no one ever reads everywhere."
Genius had an annotate everywhere feature that ran into the moderation issue: observer.com/2016/03/genius-web-annotator-emma-dawson-alana-massey
Probably out of scope for you, just think those are interesting untackled problems in this space.
For example, if you are on an article and click on the extension you could see the corresponding page on hn. If the article hasn't been added then it could be added.
HN is too curated to cover literally every site or article (and that's a good thing), but you could have a sidebar that federates multiple comment outlets... "Here's what people are saying online..." Like pingbacks, but less opt in.
If nothing is found, the sidebar could push new comments to a special purpose subreddit, or some other default backstop.
[Smacks forehead.] That definitely explains why it looked so much like FB comments. That's a neat approach. FB moderation handles spam and blatant trolls.
Next layer moderation - promoting insightful content / burying lazy content - was more what I was thinking of originally. But that is such a tough problem here. Maybe unsolvable with comments on something so sparse as, well, literally everything online. Wikipedia has a whole (sometimes hyper vigilant) army of volunteers, and that's a tiny subset of this problem.
Hmm, yeah, I think you're probably at least at the local optimum with FB stopping spam and trolls. Good stuff.
Also, it’s trivial to make fake Facebook accounts. Or purchase them for about a dime a dozen.
She is uncomfortable with cis, straight, white people annotating on her blogs?
It would be nice addition to OP's service if they can let content authors choose what "kinds" of people are allowed to post comments. Perhaps that could be figured out commentators previous history or even self declaration?
However HN asked me to put it down and cancel it so it's discontinued now.
I can't find it on google now but I'm sure this happened.
I actually thought it was good to be "forced" upon every Firefox user. Unfortunately it came during mass migrations to Chrome.
Because if it's an extention you won't have the same impact. If it's forced then you can be sure to connect with every other user of that browser and see what they've said about the website you're browsing.
Of course I fear the security issues in such a feature. One XSS vuln and EVERYONE is affected.
Edit: I misunderstood. My memory was that it was a built-in feature of Firefox that worked on every site. But Mozilla Talk requires a server infrastructure. Of course, makes sense now that I think about it. Where else would your messages be stored.
Perhaps some sort of p2p thing but I don't think Mozilla would go that route yet. It's not mature enough.
Microsoft's web notes: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17221/windows-10-wr...
Both different approaches, but may be of interest.
Basically rank higher on keywords searchers actually use by letting them use their own words on your site.
Disclaimer: I run Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com)
If another user has posted a comment on an article you are currently viewing, perhaps you can change the extension icon to indicate so. That could be a trigger to open the comment section.
Otherwise, I'll probably keep being disappointed upon opening the section in websites that don't have comments in them.
Note : I haven't actually installed/checked the extension out. Sorry if this feature's already there!
Who is going to moderate comments? I'm afraid people who say evil angry things to other will dominate a discussion system like this, as is usually the case, when there is no strict moderation, right. Well maybe as long as you use Facebook Comments, it has moderation features already?
Re moderation: Yeah, it has the usual FB comments features, i.e. you can report to Facebook and I could also assign moderators I guess (which I don't really plan to do; don't know if that would work site-wide - I guess only for the whole extension, so any site). I'm thinking Facebook comments shouldn't get as out-of-hand as other systems, where it's easier to just create fake/anonymous/throw-away accounts...
I guess there must be something similar to display Reddit comments in a sidebar.
I run some sites that are used in China, where FBcomments/disqus are blocked. As a site owner I'm also responsible for policing my comments section. But a separately hosted solution could be an interesting way around that.
