from Hacker News

Show HN: a Chrome extension to see other users browsing the same websites as you

by halftheopposite on 8/31/23, 6:31 PM with 12 comments

I was once reading some comments on HN, and someone was talking about a Chrome extension they had made for themselves to write memos/notes on any website they browsed. I thought this was brilliant!

This idea immediately clicked in me, and my first thought was: "Why not make it so others can see your notes as well?". And soon it transformed into something much more complex where users could not only write notes, but also interact directly with other users of the extension through chat, gis, and cursors!

It took me a few weeks, but I was able to read through docs, work on the extension itself (content script and service worker), socket.io, node, build up a website, publish it in the Chrome store.

I've introduced it to my coworkers and a few other devs, and so far, each one of them came up with a different usage for the extension, but loved the idea of adding a social aspect to browsing.

I thought it would be great sharing it with everyone around here and gather feedback from the HN crowd!

  • by ajhai on 8/31/23, 8:14 PM

    Congrats on shipping. Looks pretty great! A few years ago I was chatting with a friend of mine about a similar idea. I remember there were a lot of discussions around content moderation and biased nature of comments section of certain news websites around that time. The idea was to come up with a decentralized way to maintain comments indexed by the urls and anyone with a certain chrome extension can participate in these comments section completely unmoderated by the site owners.

    Eventually there ought to be some community moderation but the goal was to keep it unbiased. If your project takes off, first thing you will have to deal with is going to be spam.

  • by Kuzutsukake on 9/3/23, 4:45 AM

    I love the idea and it stimulated a few more ideas:

    1. For a site with many people active on it, what if you could filter by the link / website that brought them there (eg, there's a popular wikipedia page or article, but somebody might rather talk to the people who came from newsletter or forum X as opposed to newsletter Y)

    2. What if you could see where people had been over time? Have a page develop wear over time showcasing the hot spots

  • by dperalta on 9/1/23, 5:57 AM

    Well done! I've been planning to build something like this for a while but never had the time.

  • by klntsky on 8/31/23, 6:50 PM

    How are you planning to scale it? How are you going to acquire a critical mass of users?

  • by ellis0n on 9/1/23, 2:31 AM

    Cool ext. Two critical notes:

    - edit or delete note

    - long text looks like 'text bla-bl...'