Greasy Fork

Script that would connect news articles with external discussion platforms

This is what I would like to be able to do as a consumer of news:


1) I read an interesting news article and feel that I want to comment on it.

2) While I am on the web page of the article, I click on an icon which is named "Comment on this article". The icon belongs to the extension that I am wishing would exist.

3) Then a drop-down menu shows a few icons for social media sites on which I have an account on (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus.... or maybe a site that is created especially for this commenting system).

4) After clicking on one of the icons I arrive at a web page which is dedicated to the article that I was reading.

5) I start a conversation on that page, or there may already be a conversation which was started by somebody else.

6) When somebody who also has the extension installed is visiting the page of the news article (not the discussion page), the extension checks if there already exists an external discussion page for the article and then informs the article reader about it, probably visually.

7) Optionally the extension shows the discussion page inserted in the lower part of the page of the article, or in a separate window - automatically or after a click.


A thing like this would be great for...

1) small or local news paper distributors who can't afford a discussion platform of their own.

2) those readers who can't stand the bad design of some discussion platforms.

3) freedom of speech, which seems to be hard to get in some countries, and annoyingly enough there can be problems also in civilized countries where moderators with strange behavior or policies may rule.

4) competition, generally speaking, so that the best solution would be chosen by the users.


This service could be connected also to other things than news articles but it would be best suited for services where the need for bidirectional communication between the readers and the information provider is small or nonexistent.


Am I starting a revolution in communication logistics :-) or does this thing already exist? I know that IT people were talking about systems for commenting on web content, already in the 1990s, but at that time very few of us knew what a plug-in or a userscript was. The time has come?

If you compare what you envision with the ordinary social network sharing buttons that can be found on most sites these days, what do you see as the key differences? I think there might be a problem at #4, "a web page which is dedicated to the article that I was reading." If the social platform doesn't current have that kind of page, you would have to convince them to add one.

I don't know in detail how every single social media platform works but it seems that when you read a news article somewhere else and you click on one of those small like/share buttons (for Facebook, Twitter, Google+...) your account/profile/stream will be connected to the page that contains the news article and your friends and other followers will be informed about your liking, and can then discuss the article. When somebody else reads the original article it can look at a number near one of those buttons to see how many people has recommended the page, but as far as I know they can't click anywhere on that page to get to an external discussion page. The difference is that in my solution you could also reach the actual discussion from there.

"If the social platform doesn't current have that kind of page, you would have to convince them to add one."

That is true. Even if the page (or stream) would be created dynamically (when the first person clicks the "discuss button") the social media platform would have to be technically compatible and prepared with a dedicated URL space that would be used when the web browser extension would hand over the URL of the news article page. But I'm quite sure that they would jump on the bandwagon if they knew they could "steal discussions" from other sites, but first the extension would have to get some popularity in one or several smaller communities.

A simple, dedicated discussion board connected to the extension would have several advantages over a commercial one, thou. It would probably be easier to give the users a better privacy, without any tracking (no web beacons). And it would probably also be better to centralize the discussion related to a certain news article, instead of spreading them out across several social media platforms.

Another difference is that today the news providers decide by themselves if they want to participate in the social media world, by putting those like buttons on their web pages. My solution gives the power to the users to decide if there should exist a possibility to comment on the page content. I'm not sure thou if the news providers would change the URL for an article to destroy the connection to the external discussion. It depends on how much they would benefit or lose from doing that. Maybe there would be a workaround for that, if it would happen?

Let's say hypothetically you created a News Commentators' Blog that doesn't have any of its own content initially, but which automatically generates a new article when a user of the extension or userscript chooses to comment, and uses, say, the WordPress engine for gathering (and de-spamming) comments. (It wouldn't surprise me if there was already a WordPress plugin to auto-summarize any page into a brief blog post.) If a second person wanted to comment on the same article, they would end up on the same blog post comment page. Users then could share that comment page on their social networks. Doesn't seem like a huge technical challenge, but who would want to host that blog?

I think you have understood me correctly.

Doesn't seem like a huge technical challenge, but who would want to host that blog?

To be honest, I'm not sure who that could be. I wrote my first post here just a few minutes after I got struck by this idea so I don't have all the answers, yet. :)

Actually you are now touching something that I consider to be the core of innovation problematics - the selling of an idea so that the right people who believe in the idea would get involved. I have learned that those who can see the potentiality in something new and abstract that yet doesn't exist are very few, at least outside the programming community. Normally there need to be at least some kind of small scale, working prototype to show what it is all about. After the first implementation the resources hopefully grows side by side with the user base. It's like the chicken-and-egg problem. But I will not get deeper into that now. There are thousands of books and web pages about selling ideas.

I think it's easier to imagine a potential host if we think of all the platforms that are created through the need of freedom of speech, anticommercialization, pure excitement and other motives, even through advertising.

As I was suspecting, this kind of thing already exists, so I am not the one who can get the credits for the idea. :angry:

It is called web annotation.

You can watch this short video to get an idea of what it all is about (duration: 2:38).

An interesting article about the problems and the benefits can be found here.

I was surprised by how much work WC3 already has done. They are developing a standard for web annotation - a standard that hopefully will eliminate as many as possible of all the problems that so far have been associated with web annotation.

More info here (Wikipedia).