Greenwich: an experiment in collaborative links

pikseladam

It looks like An IndieWeb Webring project. You can check it out here: https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ "This proof-of-concept webring is a way for folks adding IndieWeb building blocks to their personal websites to find (and be found by) other folks with IndieWeb building blocks on their sites!"

juancroldan

Don’t let the negative comments get to you. The idea is interesting, and there are plenty of ways to curb spammers (just look at Stack Overflow). Also, this isn't the same concept as webrings.

saylisteins

I think this is an interesting concept! Please don't let the negative comments get to you.

One suggestion is to maybe allow users/community to have a walled garden in regards to writing rights. This would help with moderation, and allow users to subscribe to the walled gardens/bubbles they are most interested in.

cxr

This has been done a lot. Marc Andreessen was going to put it in Mosaic. Hypothes.is is the most semi-well-implemented modern incarnation I am aware of.

Recently, I came across this paper which describes an implementation called "Weblinks" (terrible name) that focuses on just the links. Haven't used it, but it's thoughtfully designed:

<https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3465336.3475123>

Multicomp

I've wanted a distributed annotation system for a while, probably it will end up having some sort of advanced block list and follow list and follow me for my block list approach, potentially an activity pub-based system might work, but in the meantime I want to try this one because I've missed the sidewiki boat and want to try it.

Once it can be on Firefox at least, I can try it.

jsnell

The title feels pretty clickbaity. I might be missing something, but this feels like another distributed annotation system for the web, an idea that's been tried and retried for what feels like decades a this point. Why will this one work when the other attempts didn't? Is it just about this being more restricted than those past systems?

(The example that came to mind first was Google Sidewiki, but it looks like there's a bunch of these listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation)

namuol

If this is interesting/novel to you, you might be surprised to learn there’s a W3C standard for annotating the web which never really caught on.

https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/

It deserves more attention, particularly from browser vendors and social media platforms, but the incentives have never been in place.

One commercial application built on the standard is hypothes.is, but I’ve lost track of their efforts years ago.

ay

Reminds me of https://ruby-talk.ruby-lang.narkive.com/buiXXTZh/what-is-hoo... :-)

tingletech

How is this different from the public annotations in https://web.hypothes.is ?

ergl

This is cool. One way of solving spam problems might to only show links of people you explicitly follow / trust in some way, although that means associating identity to the posts. You could have a setting to toggle between only showing links from people you trust or from everyone, to get around the bootstrapping problem at first.

lkrubner

"The way we discover interesting websites needs innovating, why not let anyone contribute to any webpage?"

I remember there was a website that did this in 1999, using frames to allow people to post comments on any website. The courts shot this down as an illegal infringement of trademark. Does anyone remember the name of that website that did this?

eykanal

This seems like a great idea designed for well-intentioned people. Unfortunately, the internet is running a bit short on well-intentioned people.

The potential for abuse here is enormous. I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity.

BugsJustFindMe

Everything old is new. The poor child thinks he's invented webrings.

bargle0

Client side webrings.

What is the plan for fighting bitrot and bad-faith actors?

junto

Strongly feels like decentralized trackbacks and pingbacks which died because they turned into spam monsters.

This turns it into a centralized problem, but a problem nevertheless?

shark1

Similar to https://web.hypothes.is/

dcow

Please add a mobile safari extension. I wouldn’t see myself using this in any other context.

welcome_dragon

So webrings?

sva_

This sort of thing seems to be doomed to fail from the start as the web is so large that any attempt of building a user base will spread itself too thin to really take off imo.

beowulfey

I love this idea and agree you need a form of curation. Is there a mechanism for "ranking" links? Or reporting? I think a simple UI that lets you up or downvote (after clicking) could be pretty effective at reducing spam.

surfingdino

If it doesn't have a Cutty Sark pub it's not Greenwich.

shadytrees

reminds me of why the lucky stiff's hoodwink.d project, in a good way

ghusto

Don't want to be that guy throwing word-turds at someone's actual work, but both ideas (making any webpage editable, and trusted err, well I guess webrings) have tried and died more than once.

I can see how webrings died when social media took over — not that I believe social media to be superior in any way — but I never understood why making webpages editable never took off. There were a few attempts, most requiring extensions.

EDIT: Chrome-only extension? Now I don't feel so bad about those thrown word-turds ;)

2OEH8eoCRo0

> why not let anyone contribute to any webpage?

I can think of a few reasons.

Werewolf255

Oh yeah, I remember the old StumbleUpon browser extension from the early 2000s myself! Good times.

bschmidt1

So many haters in here hahah I think it's a cool project and was a creative blog post. Reminds me of the early days of the web.

Ignore these insufferable know-it-all haters on Hacker News. These people are the worst! Some aren't even real people.

The ones that are bots are probably HN itself because https://greenwich-for-chrome.replit.app/ is a threat. This is the coolest part IMO, has Twitter or HN like potential.