
Ask HN: feedback on my idea? Pull HN comment thread onto target blog post. - andrewstuart
Like disqus, but collaborative sort of. Somehow pull the data from the HN comment thread onto the page of the post that it links to. Can&#x27;t some JavaScript whiz whip up a demo in about 19 minutes? ;-)<p>EDIT expansion of idea:<p>Who knows, maybe even a service like disqus which provides embedded discussion, but instead it shows a curated list of back links to the page so people can go to check out where this is being discussed.<p>Maybe disqus could invert and provide an HN style page integrating all the discussions it is hosting round the web.
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Mz
The discussion is here because the community is here. Most websites do not
have the ability to produce sufficient content to draw sufficient audience as
to have it's own large community and the commenting that goes with it. Some of
the current benefits of posting it to HN is that provides traffic. I find that
I occasionally get comments directly on my blog when something posts to HN but
the comments there are a bit different from the discussion here. So I think of
them as being fundamentally different.

Managing a community is a job in itself and is fundamentally different from
producing good content. I don't see this as a bug. It's a feature. Though I
have started wondering if I should start putting a link to the HN discussion
in the blog post. For now, I did recently add a page listing FPP-Worthy posts
that generated real discussion and putting the HN links there. I am still
trying to figure out what the hell I am doing and largely figuring it out
alone since I have no mentor or similar.

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ColinWright
How would you have people comment? Would they need to log in to HN? If so,
would you do all the cross-site authentication?

I'd be interested to see a sketch of all the things that need to happen to
make this a genuinely useful thing. Simply pulling the HN discussion and
plonking it on the page seems a bit too minimal, and a waste of an
opportunity.

To the OP - how do you see it working? Have you thought about it at all, or
was t an idle whim?

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andrewstuart
Just an idle whim. Whilst jumping from HN to blog post again and again and
again etc etc it occurred to me that the content lives one place, the
discussion of that content another place. Maybe it's a commercial opportunity
somehow for someone to reconnect distributed discussion around the net back to
the page containing the content being discussed.

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Turing_Machine
The low-rent way of doing it would be to just iframe the HN thread, but a
quick experiment in JSFiddle indicates that HN denies framing.

I don't think there's an RSS feed for the comments, so doing this would
probably require some type of scraping.

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krapp
Scraping HN and building, say, a JSON blob out of a thread page wouldn't be
difficult - if I can do it with curl and PHP then anybody can do it. My
biggest concern though would be how HN itself would react to that - and of
course if you want it to be more than read-only and completely seamless you
have to do what essentially amounts to cross-site request forgery to make it
appear the login and posting is being done on your site and not the other -
and it looks like HN uses a csrf token in the form.

So probably the least painful way of doing it (apart from an official JSON
API) would be to scrape the site periodically (not so quickly as to be banned,
obviously) or use one of the existing services which acts as a proxy api, save
locally to your own backend and then do whatever.

Personally though, I think it's slightly unethical, unless you're going to
clearly mention that the content is coming from HN and you have their
permission. What do they get out of you using their resources to lead readers
away from their site, after all?

~~~
Turing_Machine
There might also be some copyright issues. When you post a comment on HN
you're implicitly giving HN permission to display the comment on HN, but not
necessarily granting permission to redisplay the comment on other sites of
which you might not even be aware.

Godwinized example: most of us wouldn't want our names and comments displayed
on, say, a Nazi site, especially if it looked like the comments were being
posted directly on that site rather than being copied from somewhere else.

