I love the idea of "annotating everything" / the web.
A browser extension or something would liberate people from these walled social media gardens of interacting. Just not attractive and a hard sell.
I remember seeing a cringy interview of the founders. Candidly, I'm not surprised they couldn't convert their idea and make it happen with something bigger. Who knows though they did raise the cash.
Google created Sidewiki [0] in 2009 and killed it two years later. It was based on a browser extension.
There have been many other initiatives, some listed here [1]; Wikalong was interesting but riddled with spam. Maybe a personal system (not shared) would help prevent content abuse? But then it would probably offer too little value to really take off.
Hypothesis is going strong. They have smart people working on it, it's fully open source with open APIs and data available over anonymous RSS, the culture is nothing like rap/bro culture, and the founder is independently wealthy from winning the startup lottery in a past life and seems to be running the thing as a passion project no matter how much it makes. (Their main commercial play right now is selling higher ed. on the idea of using Hypothes.is for scholarly criticism.)
A browser extension or something would liberate people from these walled social media gardens of interacting. Just not attractive and a hard sell.
I remember seeing a cringy interview of the founders. Candidly, I'm not surprised they couldn't convert their idea and make it happen with something bigger. Who knows though they did raise the cash.
I still think there is room here though.