Show HN: ClapChat – Instant messaging for HN users | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ClapChat – Instant messaging for HN users

clap.chat

120 pointstodd383462 comments

Hey everyone, todd3834 and I have been wanting this for awhile and decided to just start building it ourselves :-) The hope is it makes HN an even greater place to find people with similar ambitions so that we can build great things. This isn't meant to be the next coming of Facebook, it's just a super useful tool we like and want others to use with us.

Main features we think you'll like: - frictionless signup. You don't need to manage another login combo. Works kind of like Medium's signup, but with less steps - simple. Button next to comments, easy lookup. We wanted you to not have to think about it to use it - backwords compatible. It works with people that haven't signed up yet

Details on the tech stack: We are using React and friends for the front end and Programmable Chat by Twilio on the BE (https://www.twilio.com/chat)

Happy to go further into details on any of that if interested. We are considering open sourcing the entire project, is that something people would be interested in?

Will there be stickers? An SDK for apps to run inside your chat? Social graph widgets to invite my friends to chat? A pair of glasses that I can use for hands free HN chat? An Alexa skill for chat? :-P

All kidding aside congrats on your launch!

Look forward to your blog posts (and maybe source) with more detail as this has been a topic of interest for me off and on over recent years.

I made basically the opposite; integrate HN comments into your website: https://comments.network/

You can add this HN conversation on the bottom of your landing page easily to show what people is saying about your project in context. Still in development though.

How does this differ from hnchat that was posted back in September, especially around user auth?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12431724

Very cool! I hadn't heard of HNChat but the authentication process is very similar. I like the idea of letting user's manually add the id if they want to. I think we may make it optional to automatically handle it for you or let you do it manually.

Biggest difference from my first impression of hnchat is that we built ours as a chrome extension and you participate directly on HackerNews instead of an external domain.

The main difference is that this enables private messaging between users, regardless if they are signed up or not. Next time you're in a thread, you'll see a button to send a message next to their username. Click, and it will start a message without you having to leave the page. HNChat on the other hand seems to be more of a separate place to have conversations as a group. I feel like there is a place for both, they just solve different problems

Just a thought on the auto-login functionality...

If I run an intercepting proxy and alter all instances of my username in the HTML response from HN servers to appear in every way to be logged in as 'dang'.... How would your extension detect the forgery?

Glad you asked! So here is a teaser on how it works: 1. ClapChat gives you a unique id, the extension posts the id in your profile, ClapChat independently verifies that your profile contains the correct ID so that we know you really do own the account, then we double check the ID vs the session that we gave the id to and we can validate the authorization.

I'm working on a blog post that goes into much further detail and will post soon.

In a way, it's kind of like validating a domain name using a TXT record.

Btw, we also plan on open sourcing all this. So everyone will be able to give feedback and contribute. The hope is it becomes a really useful tool for the community

Neat. I remember my days on Something Awful Forums and many did the same thing for various integrations. Ten years later the technique still works.

You should offer HN Auth As a Service/Platform so that others can easily build around it and users can easily auth into others services.

Here is an early diagram I made when we were exploring the idea. It's not the complete story but hopefully it communicates the general idea https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www.clap.chat/assets/HN-a...

What happens if I want to PM someone but they're still not signed up for ClauChat?

You should probably also answer this on your page.

Most people that want to be available on HN have a form of contact in their about profile, we use that to connect you out of band until they sign up, if they choose to sign up

We are considering a few things. Our first pass is to use mechanical turk so that we get the email address from the profile page and send an email with the message. We want to be sure not to bother people who truly don't want to participate so we are working on a solution to make sure this doesn't turn into a way to spam HN users.

Please don't do this I really would want this opt in . If I were you I would disregard the message .

I'm very sensitive to this issue as a long time HN user I don't want to get spammed. However, as I was brainstorming this I came to this conclusion: If you put your email address in your HN profile you are opting in to people being able to reach you. ClapChat will just be a client for doing that easily and we will do everything to make sure a bot can't abuse this. For starters, you have to be authenticated to send a message so we can tell if someone is abusing the system and spamming people. Secondly, you can unsubscribe from ClapChat emails so that it will never bother you.

This is something I feel we can strike a balance with, open to any feedback and ideas people have.

I reiterate your parent: please don't do this. Scraping a resource for email addresses and sending unsolicited email would be understood by a lot of people as spam. This would be different if they put something like the following in their profile:

  clap.chat: myemail@example.com

Edit: spelling

> Scrapping a resource for email addresses and sending unsolicited email would be understood by a lot of people as spam

We don't even want to dance the line with spam. Thanks for the feedback.

What if when you try to message a user who hasn't signed up and it opens their profile page and the user can type in the email address manually if it is available. Then we don't have to pay for mechanical turk and the user is just using ClapChat as their email client in a way. I'm convinced we can crack this nut in a way that works and doesn't bother people :)

I appreciate the dilemma: you understandably want to limit the friction in connecting HN members, and one of the means by which you're considering doing so has historically been abused so people are sensitive to it. I think 'zitterbewegung still has the right idea: it needs to be opt-in.

I don't see an issue with having a user type in an email address from someone's profile. Like the parent says in this case they're basically just using clapchat as their email client. Perhaps they could even set-up an SMTP gateway such that hn users could receive clapchats from emails sent to them @clapchat.io or whatever. Then maybe in the email they send have a tasteful link to also sign-up for clapchat.

Edit: upon thinking about it more, it might be better to randomly generate an address used for each conversation, to prevent a spammer from sending email to someone's @clapchat address

Perhaps it's useful to approach this from the other side.

Say I want to be able to communicate with HN members via email, so I include my email address in my profile. clap.chat makes it easier for clap.chat users to send me email using the email address in my profile, though ideally they want to clap.chat with me. I don't want to use clap.chat. If I don't want to use clap.chat but am getting invitations to use clap.chat, the burden to deal with that is now on me, be it with a filter, or perhaps adding a note to my profile. Perhaps clap.chat includes a record of people who have opted-out.

All of these methods parallel the behavior and handling of spam. Whether or not there's daylight between these types of invites and spam depends on one's perspective.

I think that forwarding them to their profile page, which is under their control and public is totally reasonable. It means less work for you and no less control for the users.

I would adopt this method. Its a really good idea that avoids spam.

But it doesn't have to be like that. I bet a lot of people have a public email somewhere (think public page) so if someone would reach out via one like that what's the harm?

What if I then remove my email? Will clap chat remove it as well?

Good idea, if we do decide to go that route we need to be sure that the email is still in the profile before sending a message.

ClapChat sounds really cool and I can definitely see myself using it. To give my two cents here, I just made an HN account yesterday and my interpretation of HN's policy regarding emails is not that by entering an email you are agreeing to the possibility of being contacted by other users. I don't have an email in my profile now and the banner at the top of my profile page says "Please put a valid address in the email field, or we won't be able to send you a new password if you forget yours. Your address is only visible to you and us. Crawlers and other users can't see it." To me, that means that by entering an email address I'd only ever be contacted for password resets.

That is correct. We cannot see that email. The only email people would see is one you put in your bio section. See my profile for an example

Got it, makes sense. Thanks for the clarification!

Seems to be a lot of dissent around this idea. I think if you send the original message to my email, and make reply-to without your app easy (or transparent or whatever), then you're just making it easier for other users to email me and that's OK.

If I have to sign up to your service to read or reply to the message then it would be spam.

That's how we have it :-) Albeit with a call to action in the footer of the message to sign up. If you, don't though it will continue to work

My suggestion would be that the extension should display a speech bubble icon next to the usernames their service recognizes.

I am not sure I would use this tool on an ongoing / regular basis but for Ask HN: Who's Hiring this would be nice for instant interviews, just a thought ...

...So, unlike HNchat, which was a live chatroom, this is like that PM system that we all want (so we can have PMs, and so people will stop posting HN messages that tell you to email them), but still don't have for a variety of reasons?

I'm sold.

That's the hope. Make it easy to take the conversation offline and help each other out :-)

Shame this is neither FOSS nor standards-based... Matrix-based HN chat would be awesome :) (i work on matrix so am probably biased though :D)

they say further up that they will be open sourcing it. my first thought was the same, but the twillio chat they've used seems super simple, so potentially matrix was just too heavy for their simple needs at the moment

Hi yes! You are correct. We just wanted to go with the most simple backend service with the least amount of maintenance that we could use for starters.

guess we have our work cut out for us on Matrix then :D

I know that I'll be checking it out for more details soon. Thanks for bringing it to my attention :)

> nor standards-based...

Not to be antagonistic but what difference does it make if it's not "standards based" while it works for them and does what they want it to do?

Quite interesting! Any thoughts for an XMPP or IRC bridge (similar to what Slack provides)?

The primary focus is to get something that works well as a browser extension but since we plan to open source it there isn't any reason why the community couldn't add that. If there is demand for it then I'll be happy to work on it as well.

serious question: why is this not open-source? I think serious tools to communicate in this community should as much open-source as possible.

We plan to open source it once it is opened up to everyone.

Out of idle curiosity, why wait? Seems that is only delaying any improvements people might contribute.

To be honest, we'd just rather have more bugs knocked out before we share. We take pride in our code just like most people

I am sure someone said this already. But in case if not. That is basically unreadable with that light gray font

Does it have an API?

The front-end code uses an API, I suppose we could make it public. I'll make note of that, it would be cool to make it completely public.

Is this a refference to claptrap?

It isn't but I wish I could say it was because that would make it much funnier.

I'd reconsider the name - nobody wants to give each other the clap.

Android app yet?

No apps for android or iOS. For right now it's just a browser extension

hit me up if you want help with this. -android dev.

Some typos:

"Full Integration with you (sic) HN Account"

same section, last sentence: "Your (sic) welcome."

Thanks!

Thanks! fixed typos :)

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