How to Foster Richer Discussions on Your Site with Hypothesis

Embedding Hypothesis over your site’s content helps increase user engagement with your content, brings more viewers to the page, and can offer valuable commentary and feedback. When you embed Hypothesis, we now have a variety of options you can use to customize your users’ experiences on your site.

Choose if your readers are creating Annotations or Comments

Annotations let your readers create detailed critiques and analysis, anchoring each note to a specific passage of text. It’s easy for the note’s author to signal very precisely to their audience what’s worth discussing in the text. However, for less experienced writers, it can be intimidating to have to signal the specifics of which part of the text you’re talking about. This can lead to excessive highlighting and can make the page very busy.

On the other hand, Comments can provide a cleaner reading experience, though one that is better for quick feedback that’s more general. Many web users are more used to commenting than they are annotating, and want the ease of use commenting provides. Unfortunately, it can be more difficult to generate in-depth discussions with comments, and heavily-commented pages can make it difficult to locate the comment threads that are about the topic in which you’re most interested.

Can anyone write on your site, or just select users?

Our Publisher Groups let everyone read the conversations created on your site, but it’s you who chooses who can add to those conversations.

Hypothesis Open groups allow anyone, at any time, to create notes and replies. Website owners have control over moderation in their group, making sure the comments in that group remain on topic for the site. Alternately, our Restricted groups allow site owners to select a small group of users to create content in notes that will then be visible to everyone, with most users being blocked from adding their own notes to the group. 

Moderation, now with more control

Group owners always have access to Moderation controls in their groups, allowing them to hide annotations that violate the guidelines of that group. Anyone viewing the group can also flag annotations, which sends a notification to the moderators so they can decide whether the annotation should be hidden.

In addition, group owners can enable Pre-Moderation if they choose. When enabled, this marks new notes as hidden until the group’s Moderators approve or decline those annotations, ensuring that the annotations visible to site visitors are always approved.

Featured groups in the Hypothesis Sidebar

By default Publisher groups take precedence over our own Public group, but site owners embedding Hypothesis get additional controls, allowing them to choose which groups get displayed in the embedded Hypothesis Sidebar. This helps your users focus on the content you’re curating over your site