Ask HN: Interested in a hosted chat as a service offering? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Interested in a hosted chat as a service offering?

1 pointploggingdev5 comments

I am looking to start a business and the current idea for an MVP is a hosted chat service. So, if you want to include chat rooms on your website, just copy paste a snippet of code and you have a chat room on your website! Like Disqus, but for chat.

How does including a chat room on a website help the business or website owner?

* Helps build a community around your website/business

* All current chat services are for customer support. It's great, but allowing users to interact with each other can be even more valuable. Users can help each other.

* The cool factor : If you visit two online stores, one which only has product descriptions and the other additionally has a chat room which lets you interact with other users and support staff, which inspires more trust? The second store.

* Another avenue to engage users : engagement == more revenue.

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Continuation :

I want to charge from the start. Proposed plans :

1. Individual plan : $10/month

2. Business plan : $200/month

I know I'll receive flak for the high price, but $200/month is not expensive for a business and considering the value generated, I think it's fair.

Here's what I want to know from you guys :

* What do you think about the idea and proposed plan.

* If you have a business will you try my service and pay if you feel it adds value? (Free 2 week trial)

* Any other suggestions/thoughts?

If there is sufficient interest from the community, I will continue writing these posts to share updates.

Additional details :

* I will use Django (channels)+Postgres for the backend.

* For payments, I'll use Paypal to start with and move to Stripe if this shows any signs of becoming a sustainable business.

If you are interested, please fill out your email address in this https://goo.gl/forms/nVTqKTzQuAfbfr5l1 and given sufficient interest, I will start a mailing list to keep you updated.

If I decide to start this project, I will register a domain and start tomorrow.

Looking forward to your feedback in the comments. Thanks.

There are TON of these types of products already available. It's been a crowded market since the mid-1990s, when I started using the internet. There were free JS snippets you could paste on your site in the early 2000s.

The reason it doesn't work (and almost all sites have removed them) is that they get clogged with trolls almost instantly, and it's literally impossible to sanitize a public chat in real time. Maybe AI can do it someday, but not yet.

How would you plan to moderate these chats?

The moderation will be challenging, but I have a few ideas:

* require an email id during registration with confirmation

* add a reputation system for user profiles. Mods can "upvote" certain profiles that contribute in good faith

* use the reputation system as a basis for community moderation. Users above a certain karma can flag chat messages and/or user accounts.

* Allow banning of IP addresses. This was suggested by another user on reddit, but not sure how effective it is.

Regarding the product itself, I took a look at the current offerings in the "add chat to your website" category and they all

* have a terrible UX and look completely out of place when placed on a website

* not customisable

* are not targeted at businesses

I plan to allow the use of custom templates to allow the chat to fit into the overall website it's used on.

My theory is that businesses and even people with personal blogs will find it valuable.

A lot of these tactics will reduce bad messages by some percentage, but none are 100% effective. Facebook likely has the state-of-the-art moderation infrastructure, and they're still plagued by moderation issues. They don't even have to moderate in real time!

Now imagine that you're not just removing people for trolling. You're also removing them for:

- mentioning rival businesses

- saying bad things about the business

- talking about the special price they received from the business

- sharing private coupon codes

Even one of these messages could cost the business money. Imagine a screenshot of a business's website with a chatter posting about pedophilia. No business would allow their brand to be positioned next to unfiltered comments like that.

It's an enormously complex (and currently unsolved) problem. You'd have to get better at it than Facebook currently is.

And even as a solved problem, I don't really perceive a benefit for the business. As a user, I've never wanted to chat with other visitors to any website. It certainly wouldn't help me purchase a product. If I see that a business has pushed some of its customer service duties to forums, I take that as a red flag and try to find a better product elsewhere.

Maybe I'm an absolute minority, though. YMMV.

>> Now imagine that you're not just removing people for trolling. You're also removing them for: - mentioning rival businesses - saying bad things about the business - talking about the special price they received from the business - sharing private coupon codes

There are no silver bullets to solve the problem of moderating chat messages, but guidelines stating all of the above are not allowed and that users who violate these guidelines will be banned, is a start. As an example of moderation+guidelines working, HN is a decent example. Things like hate speech, attacking people belonging to certain religions still happen once in a while here as well. Since the mods are active and ban such users, trolls are kept under control.

> Imagine a screenshot of a business's website with a chatter posting about pedophilia.

Theoretically possible, just like how a user can post the same message in comments sections or forums and capture a screenshot even if chat was not present. It really sounds more of a sitcom type problem and even if it does happen and someone captures a screenshot, people surely won't take trolls seriously. When was the last time something like this happened?

Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

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