Why did collaborative web annotation never take off?

> netizens comment on anything, anywhere, without the consent of the underlying page or adherence to any of their rules

Outside of advertising, we don't have good business models for discussion/social software with large user bases.

Some vertical sites like HN and forum conglomerations like Reddit have survived with relatively stable audiences. Post-Twitter fragmentation continues. Social media censorship and surveillance have driven some discussion into smaller groups of known participants, including WhatsApp, Telegram and Discord. Genius.com invested millions in music annotation and tried expanding to news, but eventually folded, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_(company)

Subscription and donation-funded newsletters and videos are arguably a form of annotation to "comment on anything, anywhere", but are still subject to the vagaries of algorithmic promotion and discovery. TikTok videos could be considered a form of permissionless annotation, fusing text/audio/video into unique styles and viewpoints, building an audience for commentators.

Related discussion from 2023 (about Google Sidewiki): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36560937

note that with #:~:text= we now have a better way to specify transclusions than back when people were trying this in the 1990s.

(if anyone were to make another attempt, please allow annotating annotations? eg https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jtreat/rs/002/Judaism/talmud.html )

[but beware of the self-annotation, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41739259 ]

I like hypothes.is, but rarely use it. https://pubpeer.com/ is probably the most-used service now, but only for scientific papers.

IIRC Google either did or were going to do something like that years ago (2010 ish?). I suspect the problem is potential litigation by website owners.

IIRC, Rap Genius sought and got investment for this idea but then later retracted back to just music lyrics.