
Show HN: Epiverse – a comment system for all webpages - MelSchlemming
https://epiverse.co/
======
chatmasta
This is really well done. As I'm sure is the case with many others, I've had
this idea before. It certainly seems like an ideal way to browse comments on
the web.

The trick is obviously going to be filling it with content. Have you
considered scraping link aggregators for their comments, and syndicating them
in the extension? So for example if I'm reading an article that has been
posted to both HN and reddit, I open Epiverse and can see all the comments in
one place.

I think that would be a cool way to bootstrap the user generated content.

~~~
MelSchlemming
Thanks. Yeah you're absolutely right about content, that has come up in
discussion. Basically AlienTube for the entire internet, sourcing multiple
comment systems, with my own on top too. If I can't get enough users
organically I might have to turn to that. I'd prefer not to because it might
be a pretty big undertaking, and I'd prefer to have users in my own ecosystem.

So tough getting early users!

~~~
chatmasta
I would _highly recommend_ seeding the ecosystem with comments from other
platforms. Sure, those won't be "users in your ecosystem," but you won't
_have_ any users in your ecosystem if there are no comments to read. You need
content for people to consume first, so they use the extension for that. You
don't need to make them look like fake comments -- you can attribute them to
reddit/HN or put them into their own section of the extension. But the point
is that you want users to use your extension for READING the comments, because
ONLY THEN will they begin to post. Nobody wants to spend their time writing a
comment in an empty feed that nobody will see.

(You could even go the other direction, for comments posted in the extension,
e.g. build a reddit bot that syndicates comments from Epiverse to reddit like
"Someone commented on this in Epiverse, <link>".)

I understand it's a large undertaking, but so was making the extension. All
that effort will be wasted if you don't get users!

To reduce the workload, you could consider modularizing the "comment
syndication" system, and making the scrapers open source. Then you could get
contributors to help you. i.e. a repo for scraping reddit comments on an
article, a repo for scraping HN comments on an article, etc... Each repo would
take in the URL of an article, find any posts on reddit/HN/etc, and push their
comments into the epiverse system. Honestly, it wouldn't even be that much
work... there are well-maintained APIs for reddit and HN, and probably many
other link aggregators as well. But if you open source the design of
syndication, then imagination is the only limit of where you can syndicate
comments from (think: news sites, blogs, twitter... anywhere people write
about the article and link to it).

It's a really well done extension and I want to see it work. But you gotta
believe me, man, you NEED a growth hack to make this work. It will fizzle out
otherwise.

Also, I really like the +N indicator icon that represents new comments. I have
the extension installed now, and when I start to see that number growing, I'll
know the extension is working. :)

Good luck!! It's a great idea and well executed. Now you just gotta grow it.

~~~
MelSchlemming
Hmm. Alright, you might have just talked me into it.

I'll do a rewrite first since it's getting scrappy, and then add a couple of
important features (e.g. reply notifications). I'll start sourcing from reddit
comments, since that's going to be the easiest to scrape, has a significant
amount of content and is probably enough to start with.

Open source syndication is an interesting idea and not one I'd thought of.

Thanks for the suggestions, really helpful.

------
MelSchlemming
Hey, this is a project I've been working on. The homepage has a demo of what
the sidebar looks like (which overlays to the right of your browser when you
open the extension). Feedback/questions appreciated!

~~~
svkris_18
Cool! Just curious to know if this is inspired from
[https://hypothes.is/](https://hypothes.is/) . This is indeed a good idea. I
had some feature request for hypothes.is team. Request:
[https://groups.google.com/a/list.hypothes.is/forum/#!topic/d...](https://groups.google.com/a/list.hypothes.is/forum/#!topic/dev/O2vxfz8KHps)

I hope this feature request would be useful to you.

~~~
MelSchlemming
Nope, first I've heard of hypothesis! However I have seen a few things like
it/Epiverse (Genius is doing something very similar to hypothesis). Apparently
during the conception of the internet web annotations were planned as a
feature. I think we're still a way off web annotations (very ambitious), but a
good bridge is a comments system, which I think we are ready for.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll look into it. I am wary of asking permission
from host sites because then it's not necessarily user controlled (plus there
wouldn't be a huge difference between us and something like Disqus). There are
potentially ways I could integrate things like host verification for comments
though.

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brbsix
An embedded option would be nice. I think it would be a great way to drive
adoption. Also not everyone uses Chrome. I visited epiverse.co from my mobile
browser and it just tried to open it in Chrome. At the very least a "comment
with Epiverse" button would go a long way.

~~~
MelSchlemming
Cheers. Sorry, I haven't given mobile use much thought since Chrome extensions
aren't supported and I've only just rolled out the Firefox extension.

