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Allow Possiblity for Signup-Free URL

Feature Requests

For mitsoul.org / MIT OCW, we wanted the entire world to publicly build a sort of a message board on other people’s comments on PDFs of class notes — it would make sense for us to share everyone a memex link so they can comment and see comments!

For this, we’d want memex.social/new?url=<pdf url> to let folks view a preview without signing in to view. We expect 80% of viewers to be lurkers, but just want them to have the ability to see memex comments if they want, without signup dropoff before they know what memex is. When they take an action like comment or like, then the signup screen can pop up.

I get the tension with wanting user retention/signup, but i think requesting signup before the person who gets a link not even knowing what memex is, might increase dropoff quite a bit for our site so we wouldn't be down to do that. I'd be down to test drive like, a memex.social/public/new?url= style url or something!

Posted by An Anonymous User ·
Status: Outdated3 comments

Comments3

  • Oliver Sauter

    Team•

    Feb 2, 2024

    There may be a misunderstanding on how the sharing works.
    That ...new? url is just there to create a new page from any url, its not the one for sharing with other people.
    The link this process creates (format https://memex.social/c/1/p/2) is the one you want to share. That one can be viewed without having to login, see an example here.
    The only people that have to sign up are the ones that want to add their own highlights or replies.

    Also for us its not about the retention issue, we're definitely considering the work to enable anonymous annotations/replies but its not an easy task.

    • Anonymous User

      •

      Feb 5, 2024

      I see -- yes, that functionality seems correct! But it seems like a user has to share it manually no? I have a service that wants to hit an API to make a memex comment board for a URL that every future person who hits it can share, how might I do that? These /c/ links seem to have a pseudorandom set of characters on the end that require manual user actions, vs the new? url is a nice syntax by which to generate a new annotation space for users (and is the kind of API I would prefer).

      Btw in this comment
      > the thermionic tube.

      | interesting

      When I hit the 'thermionic tube' URL in the sidebar, instead of routing me to a preview, that point in the text, or the Wikipedia page for thermionic tubes, I just go in a loop and end up at the top of the same memex page.

      • Oliver Sauter

        Team•

        Feb 8, 2024

        We don't have an API for that flow yet but I'll take it in as a feature request for the write api we wanna add.

        Oh thats an interesting bug will investigate and fix!