Every time I tried annotation tools (e.g. hypothes.is), I liked the idea, but I felt like I'm alone at the party. Are you using these tools regularly? What are you annotating?<p>How about we start to explicitly annotate articles which are ranked High on HN to strengthen the community?
Annotation is supposed to be a private activity. Personally, I annotate on the web only in the course of specific research activity.<p>When annotation meets comments in the public sphere, (like on hypothes.is or genius.com), there is a potential, theoretically, to makes discussions more focused. But there are practical problems:<p>- Most comment threads work best in short/intense life cycles. As the Ask HN today about Longer Discussions [1] shows, it is difficult to make them last for a few days, let alone make replies stick forever to their sources.<p>- A lot of comments are either only tangentially related to the article or just a general reaction to it. It is an open kind of dialogue. Even if one message uses quotes, its replies will often drift away.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665272" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665272</a>
I generally don't. To me, if it's worth annotating, it's worth just starting a notes page on the topic that I may or may not copy the contents of the article into.<p>I wouldn't generally be interested in articles annotated by someone else. Those annotations are largely personal, based on that particular reader's viewpoint and interests. It doesn't feel like a random person's annotations on an article really add any depth to me. It might be different it was a social annotation system where people could reply, but we already do basically that by quoting the article.<p>The exception to that would be articles annotated by an expert in that field. I would be interested in seeing Fauci's annotations on COVID articles, or a tournament-winning MTG player's annotations on new cards or something like that. At that point it's more about reading into their thought process than it is about the literal annotations, though.