Show HN: Anonymous Discussion Platform For Any Topic (think Reddit meets Slack) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Anonymous Discussion Platform For Any Topic (think Reddit meets Slack)

hashtags.chat

72 points_aaya57 comments

This was an unfortunate experience despite having potential. Great example of the 2-sided nature of mass-anonymity.

Yeah the main channel is pretty chaotic. You can filter links, gifs, emojis, and any words you don't want to see by using the settings.

If you try other tags and play with the settings, it shouldn't be as bad.

I think you're doing it in reverse, and that doing so is likely to scare off a vast number of potential users.

You should have some initial filters in place, that the user can then optionally remove as they gradually dip their toes in the water.

There will be no meaningful content created until you do that, because the chat will just always be initially flooded for everyone with the worst kind of vile trash. The first impression will be very bad, and that'll be that.

Hmm maybe.

I don't think content will be an issue if sharing is handled through linking to specific tags (hashtags.chat/NotReallyPrivate instead of hashtags.chat) because of the built in lack of discoverability.

I think I see the points that both @_aaya & @adventured are trying to make.(Either of you guys please correct my recapitulations if I misunderstood.)

I think @_aaya is saying that: while the initial landing may be intimidating for any given visitor, those who are able to take control of the chaos via his/her features will have a rich experience.

I think @adventured is talking about the "customer-lifecycle"(to use a fun buzzword.) since "customer lifecycle" is measured in seconds/milliseconds on the internet, the already important nature of first-impressions get magnified due to the smaller volume of opinions that can be garnered before people just leave.

My opinion: First impressions are critical, especially on the internet. This site clearly has a lot of promise, but may catch on better/faster if there were some tweaks to the beginning of the user-experience.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Maybe it's due to lack of experience, but I guess I didn't consider adoption from a business perspective when designing the initial experience.

Do you think a separate landing page or series of blog posts on Medium could lead to a better first impression? That way I could direct new users to specific tags and bypass the default channel altogether.

So one thing I do like about the landing page is how it shows the constant activity on the website. But oh how treacherous & subtle an art it is catering to the lizard-brain! Imagine blackjack, but where 17, 18, 19, & 20 are all busts (in addition to anything over 21.)

Maybe you could create an overlay that pops up on the users 1st visit (that said everyone hated Clippy...overlays can be really annoying depending on how cumbersome they are.

Or maybe you could divide the landing page in half? One side being the constant stream, the other being...something more high-level? Like maybe buttons to take you to different tag-channels? a list of top tags & real-time post counts for each? Not really sure here; all subjective opinions of mine & liable to be bad.

Thank you--you've given me a lot to think about over the next few days before I decide what tradeoffs to make.

I really appreciate your feedback because you're approaching this from a perspective I hadn't considered.

If you're interested in my thought process going into this project, I've gathered my thoughts in a short Medium post:

https://medium.com/@hashtags_chat/online-communication-and-t...

Really good read; I especially like:

"With written content, we instinctively frame our engagement in terms of the individual behind the content rather than the content itself. And I think this is the reason behind much of the undesirable behavior we find on platforms where we use words to express our ideas."

Excited to see where you take the platform!

Given how short most posts are, I wanted to see how it would work out if they were inline boxes instead of flex layout and got this:

https://matracas.org/tmp/hashtags.chat.jpeg

Wow that looks pretty cool

Yeah, and useful! Maybe an alternative view?

Yep, I'll experiment with it this weekend!

Soo..IRC?

Nope. On IRC you get to choose your nickname.

I think it's a little different in the sense that identities are tied to individual messages instead of individual people.

When there's a conversation going, you can't tell how many people you're talking to, so the experience is a bit different in an important way.

If you don't mind sharing - what kind of equipment/stack is it deployed on, and how is it keeping up with the HN load?

From what I can tell, the stack is based on node with express and react.

react and firebase~

I don't know if anonymity is supposed to be the differentiator here, but true anonymity is not delivered by an end product -- it's essentially a "client side" concern.

The concept I was going for is discussion without identities. Maybe anonymity wasn't the right word.

Pseudonymity is probably the better term.

"Anonymous" is the right word, imo. "Pseudonymity" implies having a nickname (a pseudonym), which is not required to participate.

It is unusable on mobile

Yeah, sorry about that. For now it's only for desktop, but if there's interest, I'll look into making mobile apps.

Just give the ability to hide side bar, that should be enough for the beginning :)

You can click the icons on the side to show/hide the sidebar - sorry I haven't published all the features and how to use them.

That's handy, now much better. Thank you!

This is really fun. Suggestion: make it more obvious when someone tags me in a message. Since my tag is always changing, it's hard to tell when someone is talking to specifically _me_. Maybe you could make messages tagged with any of your past tags a different color or highlight or something?

Thanks!

Thanks! Glad you find it fun~

I'll look into different highlight colors and other ways to improve the UX.

Hungs for everybody when people start sending quick messages (and everybody copies)

I think this was due to keeping all loaded messages in the DOM.

I've made it so that only the most recent messages are kept if you're scrolled to the bottom, so it should be better now.

What does "anonymous" mean in this context? Simply because I get to post a message without registering a nickname, it doesn't mean I'm anonymous...

Anonymous to other users, I guess.

Does anything on the internet?

I'm not trying to defend them, I'm more curious what your definition of anonymous would be? Eg, they could say anonymous and not store any data either, but potentially you can still be identified through an oversight - meaning even if they attempt to be anonymous, you might still not be anonymous. If taken far enough, only the most rigid, hardened and secured communication seems well vetted to keep you anonymous - but then we can't even trust them running it either.

So yea, I'm just curious what's reasonable here. What would make you feel good when associated with the word anonymous?

If they advertise a software as an "Anonymous Discussion Platform", the minimum standard that I think of is a P2P network built on top of GNUnet, Tor, or other similar networks.

Too awkward to filter out the junk. There needs to be a point and click way of telling the program to filter out words and users.

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm still experimenting with finding the right balance between convenience and making users conscious of the decision to censor others. For now you can use the settings in the sidebar to filter words and message IDs.

cool concept. I actually wrote basically the exact same thing in PHP as my final project for CS50X (nowhere near as polished as this of course). guess I can scrap plans for ever updating it :)

one thing that would be nice: a built-in profanity filter library. I see you have the ability to add words to a blacklist, but it'd be nice to just flick a switch and get rid of the garbage.

Thanks! And yeah, I definitely need to look more into filters.

Looks solid. Did you use any existing frameworks for building a chat platform, or did you write it from scratch?

Thanks!

I used firebase for the back end which made the implementation pretty straightforward.

need to implement basic rate limiting... it's a spamfest in there

It all started with the simple question of, "I wonder if there is any spam protection?".

Yeah I need to look into that lol.

Yahoo chat rooms

Anonymity kills. See Yik Yak.

Didn't Yik Yak die when they started eliminating anonymity?

Yep

In my memory they were dying before that but that might just have been my area.

4chan seems to be doing fine

I disagree. Growing up I've had plenty of positive experiences with various anonymous communities online.

I do think that giving IDs to individual messages (instead of individual people) and not having an upvote/like system will go a long way in reducing the kind of toxic behavior you have in mind though.

so....AOL chatrooms?

No private rooms?

Everything is public, but tag discovery is limited to the default list, specifically searching for a tag, or directly linking to it.

I'm planning to replace the default section with a trending list though.

Why not let everyone moderate or delete it's temporary, but one should be able to delete too.

I decided not to include editing or deleting to encourage users to think a little bit before sending a message.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com