Show HN: Every Twitter and/or Facebook user has a public message board here | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Every Twitter and/or Facebook user has a public message board here

corkpage.com

37 pointsrchr37 comments

Hi there. Please delete my data from your "service". As a European, my data is subject to the EU's data protection directive as long as I'm acting as "Consumer".

You can chose to stay in Canada and I can't do anything but get a useless default judgement. Until you choose to travel to Europe, or to any country that has an extradition treaty with the EU, or CETA is implemented. But meanwhile I do get better-than-average interest :)

Exactly this. Sadly, this is not the first time that somebody is immorally trying to profit off of public profiles.

Wow, this looks like a great way to harass people. Now you can publicly post bad shit about people on their public page that they don't even know about, but anyone else who knows about it can now see it.

One can already harass people on other sites. I could post to 4chan saying bad shit about a person. Or create a page with bad shit about a person.

Sure, but none of that stuff is associated with the person. You badmouthing someone on a forum is simply you badmouthing someone on a forum. But what we're talking about here is a public page that is explicitly associated with a given person, and yet not under that person's control or even necessarily known to that person. It's a very different context and will be interpreted differently by people viewing it.

If you want to harass people, there are already a ton of (public) ways to do it. I'm sure you could find one website the person doesn't know about if that's your goal.

What is the expected use case? Generally people set their social media to private for a reason. Maybe I'm just being negative, but I feel like the most common use case would be to say bad things about someone where they haven't thought to block it yet or don't know about it.

So this is ask.fm with twitter login support.

opens ask.fm to make sure. realizes that they added twitter login

So this is an ask.fm clone?

realizes this sounds more negative than intended

What would make me prefer corkpage over ask.fm and other similar services?

In addition, why limit this to Facebook and Twitter handles, rather than accepting any URI?

> What would make me prefer corkpage over ask.fm and other similar services?

I haven't heard of either of these services before, but I just spent 30 seconds on each.

With corkpage: I told FB to accept the request and I was logged in straight away.

With ask.fm: I told FB to accept the request, and then ask.fm asked me a bunch of information to register. Quite annoying.

Isn't twitter basically a public message board for every twitter user?

So now the public message board app has a public message board?

This is like explaining that Lyft is Uber for rides.

Unless I am missing something (which, I concede, is entirely possible).

This gives me a neat idea though: curated corkpages. Basically, I tag people in from twitter and facebook, and they can only post on certain pages.

It's very meta, I like it. It's a good demonstration that that people's social networking accounts (or any username or identity) are real-world phenomena and aren't just applicable within the walled garden itself, but can be used to label, target, and identify.

The concept is not new. Back in the myspace days, people would have these crush pages for confessions and rants, etc. This is the same kind of thing. But it's interesting that we've come far enough (technologically) that you can actually log in using your $socialnetwork account and claim your own page. This gives it a new dimension that we haven't had before.

how do I opt out?

Close your page(s) from Settings (need to log in): https://corkpage.com/help#close-page https://corkpage.com/settings

So I have to login to your page (that I never signed up for in the first place) which means I'm giving you access to my Twitter/Facebook account just to prevent people from posting to my "public message board"?

That's messed up!

How else would you suggest they verify it?

Without you proving you're the account owner; you could close down random peoples message board.

There's a proven way to do this: opt-in instead of just assuming everyone wants this and can opt-out otherwise

While you're correct you won't gain adoption nearly as fast with opt-in. If the OP wants this to take off without major changes then it's going to be opt-out.

Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted; it's true. If someone has to opt into using your product you're starting out with friction from the gate which is difficult to overcome.

And that is what is inherently wrong with stuff like this. Sacrificing person's wishes for stuff like "growth", "adoption" or "conversion".

That's called capitalism. Until the added friction of respecting a person's privacy is profitable it'll always be the lesser of the options available should you want to grow a company or product.

Morally it's questionable but trying to create a grow a product it certainly shouldn't be surprising. Gitter does this and the HN crowed seemed to really like it last I saw it posted.

Again, you perfectly pinpoint the problem. I don't want a profile on this page. I am perfectly capable of setting up accounts on the platforms I want to monitor and I want to allow people to give me feedback on.

I don't want anybody to make those decisions for me. Just because I set up a public profile on one page, does not mean, that I want others to scrape data from it and use this for their purpose. Of course, stuff like this happens all the time, but it doesn't make it right.

For sure and I'm not saying it's right I'm just saying with how our businesses work it's impossible to avoid.

Haha, that's the reasoning google when they rolled out g+ and that worked out great for them.

Opt-out is legally dubious in most of Europe

This corkpage thing is probably as tone-deaf as that startup that wanted to rate people [1].

Wait for the backlash... People typically do not like choices being made for them (once they are made aware of said actions).

[1] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251284

I suggest they follow laws about obtaining permission to use my data before they use it.

No thanks. I am not giving you access to my FB/TWTR account (so you can scrape it for more poor souls to harass) just to stop you from using my name and likeness to make money.

Better idea: you stop yourself or get sued. :)

I've actually been worried about a more malicious version of that with complete disregard for privacy, scraping terms and what not. Sort of a personal Wikileaks on everyone. Somebody could host the real thing on TOR and just have proxies accessible from the general Internet.

Here's mine if you want to try it out: https://corkpage.com/f/505938970063

Just to clarify, Corkpage does not have everyone's data. Facebook and Twitter do. They give out basic profile information to other apps via their APIs, which any developer can use within limits. Say, if someone downloads a third-party Twitter app, they can look you up from within that app. The app will request your info from Twitter via the API, and will get it, even if you have never installed the app yourself.

Please do not freak out. This was just an idea. We thought it would be cool to turn profile URLs into something like an email address. So you could write to anyone, from Facebook to Twitter, and back. We were building a back-end framework and a JS library at the time. It was more fun to work on a project that used both rather than do it in the abstract.

We were/are worried about abuse as well. There is a way to report abuse, and we are monitoring the reports. Except there aren't a whole lot of posts anyway. We don't have a good idea of what the best use for Corkpage would be either (if you figure it out, let us know), but we were never going to let it be anything negative.

As someone said, you post only on pages of others, but can reply, delete and premod on yours. It works like a guestbook, or Ask.fm.

Thank you for the feedback. Peace.

Not quite. Every Twitter and/or Facebook user potentially has a public message board here. The page is only created if someone accesses it. They don't have Facebook's user list. But if this becomes popular, they will, over time, acquire it by scraping.

Anyone remember Third Voice?

Seems like a waste of storage space/bandwidth/resources/etc. I very well may be wrong, but I don't really see much point in it. It could become a fad, but those aren't very useful.

So like your pointless and negative post then?

After short time, this whole idea seems pointless.

Maybe if there is something that you see in here but fail to describe, please try again.

The commenting is not even anonymous, so... no...value..

So I can't post something to my own corkpage? Or is it by design in order to ....

Please tell me what I should replace the ellipses with. :)

I actually like this. This definitely will come in handy for expressing gratitude towards others, and I can see a potential use case as like a memorial guest book to commemorate people who have passed away.

But, how is this any different than using Facebook and setting the privacy on your wall to be public or changing the privacy setting for individual posts?

They get to take ad revenue from Facebook :) I seriously wonder if Facebook will allow this to continue (to use their login) don't most services have clauses about offering competing services?

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