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Comment by blackeyeblitzar

3 months ago

This reminds me of the browser plugin that adds commenting for any website you visit. Whatever happened to that?

There is Zeeker <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zeeker/>, but there seems to be no new versions recently, and I cannot find a link to the browser add-on on their web site, so they might have abandoned it.

There was also “Dissenter”, still available at <https://github.com/gab-ai-inc/gab-dissenter-extension/releas...>, but the website seems to have pivoted to something else, and the add-on seems to have been removed from the official add-on repositories (possibly due to negative press coverage: <https://archive.fo/sWxAS>). Further discussion: <https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-removal-of-the-dissenter...> and <https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/ptaau2/what_happe...>

I purposely installed a browser plugin that removes comment sections from web sites. I really don’t know why anyone would want to add one.

  • The problem with comment sections on web sites is that the web sites are incentivized to have shitty comments for engagement and ease of moderation. If it's a browser plugin, it's out of the website's hands and as the user I could probably configure it so I only see comments from people I think are good at commenting, like my friends or people I follow on social media.

  • I think it was to be able to discuss things on websites that removed comment sections or that had a lot of heavy moderation that prevented meaningful discussions.

I feel like this existed in the 90's; Basically a web browser where every page was a chat room. Maybe I'm confusing it with ThePalace or WorldsChat.