Shameless plug. I've built something similar at https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ It returns the discussions on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobsters. In the future I'll also add Lambda The Ultimate and Less Wrong. But intead of an extension you can use a bookmarklet.
I love the idea. I like the concept of the name, a fun shortening/nickname for "Ampersand", which in this function also makes me think of the "Yes, And" concept from improv comedy. For me as a user, the drawback to the name "Ampie" is that it also makes me think of Google AMP, which certainly isn't my favorite thing lol :)
I didn't love that the plugin is automatically active on every page I open; I was expecting that it would be a button in the toolbar that I could click at my leisure to see what discussion of a particularly interesting article was. I really do love the Twitter integration with people who you follow, but again, I wish it was kind of an on-demand plugin, or maybe just a site I could go to at my leisure and input a URL to see a nice big display of all the discussions about something specific.
I'll be turning it off for now as I'm already prone to too many distractions, but I might toggle it on sometime if I want to deep dive on something and see others' comments about it.
I don't use twitter, but would love to see related reddit threads.
Cool app. Installed and been using today.
Feedback: I’ve already added meet.google.com, calendar.google.com and a few other web apps. And I foresee having to add a LOT more of these to the disable list.
From UX perspective I’d suggest fleshing this list out. And if possible, find an automated way to generate a list of web app subdomains/urls and disabling them all.
I can see this list getting very long, very quick.
Just to offset the negative comments on here, I think what you did is great! I don't think people appreciate the 1.5 years of individual effort you put into this and the demo looks like something I would find genuinely very useful. This clearly has lots of potential!
I would honestly prefer paying for it, perhaps with a cut-down free version (perhaps using cached data only?) without sign-up to try it out, so one day you can work on it comfortably and doesn't require commitment for me to try out.
However I'm sure you'll refine it in the years to come considering how well you've done so far. Keep up the good work!
Hey, I think it is a fantastic idea! And I am really excited which blogs I will discover with this.
HOWEVER,
3 things I noticed:
- Why do I need to register?
- Why cannot I disable twitter? I don't want to see twitter recommendations.
- It is incompatible with dark mode extensions because the css is somehow not inverted correctly (not sure how much you can do about that).
I love the idea. I just wish the extension didn't require permission to "read and change all your data on all websites". I severely restrict the number of extensions I install with that permission. If any one of them is sold to unscrupulous people, or has a vulnerability, or just has their developer account hijacked, the extension can be silently updated to do anything, including for example stealing all of my money, or taking over any online account I use. It's a really scary permission when combined with silent automatic background updates.
It seems like it ought to be possible to do some or most of this functionality with more restrictive permissions.
I use https://epiverse.co/ to see HN and Reddit discussions for the page I am on. This is a great addition to that.
Great extension and idea, but I had to remove the moment I saw you needed to sign up. Hopefully there will be an anon version in the future. Happy to donate if it's about $.
Did anyone else find the layout of the landing page visually overwhelming, and hard to follow?
Awesome! I've always wanted something like this to exist. Thanks for building it <3
I was using Ampie last year when it first came up and was more or less enjoying it.
However, it was a bit of a annoyance because (I cannot remember exactly) usually I would find some really generic links at the top and the UI scrolling was not very pleasant. In general I felt like finding new discussions/ content that I would like required a couple of clicks/ interactions. I wished it was more effortless and kinda passive to stumble upon interesting stuff.
I disabled the extension when it started asking for new permissions, thinking I need to configure it so that it is never activated on sensitive pages like my bank's site.
I am going to give it another try now. Wishing all the best to Ampie's development.
This is great, it'd be amazing if there was a place to comment on directly about the page using this extension or otherwise a central database where all discussion about a URL exists beyond the control of the page itself.
It's funny how every now and then an extension like this comes up on HN. Nice execution, I like your homepage too. I wrote a comparable extension with a similar vision about 5 years ago (with Clojurescript): https://jazzytomato.com/hnlookup-chrome-extension-clojurescr...
Odd... it doesn't seem to show me HN links for the current page, at all. I tried it on a few top HN linked articles, and Ampie shows me only other pages on the domain, but not for the page in question. I had tweets show up for a few pages, but never the HN discussion (the 'other pages on the domain' do have tweets & HN links as expected)
Similar extension for Hacker News discussions - https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext
Beautiful! I have a soft spot for meta stuff like this, a vine climbing up a tree. I'm not a fan of browser extensions though, shit gets clogged up.
I'm quite interested in seeing this extension limited to HN and Twitter and with Reddit and Facebook.
Why does it require sign up though?…
I amplified >500 links, am a huge fun. An undocumented use case is keeping up with that posobin is reading by following https://ampie.app/posobin :P
How does it work ? Are you just scraping ?
innovative! well done.
It's amazing, first I wasn't sure why I need to register, but very well worth it! Good job
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Hi HN! Ampie is an extension that lets you discover backlinks to the page you are reading: either from HN, tweets, or blog posts that ampie scraped. It's been unexpectedly useful for myself: finding alternatives to libraries or apps I was going to use, see reviews for books, discover related blog posts or talks. I think of it as an assistant that helps you find connections you wouldn't have found otherwise.
Here is a 2min demo video of what it can do right now: https://twitter.com/posobin/status/1443269542323658753
I've been working on it for the past 1.5 years now, and there have been a bunch of features over that time, but now I am trying to simplify it and see if people like it if it is condensed to its essence. Give it a try and tell me what you think =)