CompassionPit.com, Share your feelings without fear of judgment | Hacker News Reader

CompassionPit.com, Share your feelings without fear of judgment

compassionpit.com

49 pointszackattack33 comments

Looks like a good place to go to pick/prey on vulnerable people.

Edit: I'm not saying that because that's my idea of fun. But someone's going to think that.

My first impression was "how are they going to filter out the jerks?" My next impression was "how are they going to also filter out the spammers?"

I'd love to hear the creator's answers to those questions. If they solve that, it could be an interesting experience to visit and interact or just watch.

Here's another one: what happens when you get someone who is suicidal or otherwise should get real help right away?

You know, they can always put in filters i.e. phrases like 'I want to kill myself' etc. get automatically tagged and a helpline number gets shown. A bit like what google has, but the troll problem will still remain.

This site seems to face a similar problem, (hopefully) solved by a static link to a guidance hotline.

http://www.myuntoldsecrets.com/View.aspx?secret=102&topi...

(incidentally, I found that site originally via some spamming of the site in the picture, when I was reading the craigslist "best of" linked in it. I see the relevant drop.io page is pointing to another site. :\ )

I agree, it's a shame. What will they do when the 4chan crowd inevitably turn up?

From a business perspective, if it's so popular that there are people abusing/spammers/etc. it means it's a success.

It's like if the gmail creators refused to continue their work because there might be spammer.. I think it is an opportunity to turn "There could be vulnerable.." to "We will find the best match for you", etc.

However, on the financial part, I'd feel bad taking money of vulnerable people coming for help..

Even the smallest and emptiest of internet forums have their trolls; this one seems like a magnet for them.

With chatroulette I'm sure the penises came before the popularity.

Filtering out the abuse would have to be absolutely top priority for something like this.

This looks kind of similar to my site, http://www.cheermeup.info/ (or http://cheermeup.dlo.me/), except with the addition of the chat component. Seems cool.

A pit doesn't sound very compassionate...

"Throw the prisoner into the Compassion Pit!"

Sounds like a Monty Python sketch in the making.

"NO! Not the compassion pit!"

"Right you, get in there"

Guessing it’s a pun on well known band Passion Pit? http://www.passionpitmusic.com/

Or a reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_Despair

Pretty cool.

Criticisms: (Just my opinions.)

* The chat font should be sans-serif.

* The chat input line should be below the chat view.

There is another problem. I was having an awesome conversation with a computer linguist#, and I got disconnected in the middle. It failed to send the message, and I couldn't reconnect with him after that. Imagine if that happened when someone was in distress.

On the other hand, there might be a way out of your troll problem. You could make a community of the listeners. Although, it would be quite complicated. (how can you create accountability if the sessions are private? What about abuse of the said accountability?) It should be worth it.

By the way have you ever thought of contacting existing crisis intervention hotlines and pitching this? TREVOR would certainly be interested.

# If you ever do read this contact me on yesthisisananonymousid [at] gmail. Thank you.

By the way, attach a numerical session id to people so that someone can search them out after getting disconnected.

That was me! Email will be dispatched tomorrow. Good luck. PS. Hopefully there will be no 'auxillary problems'.

I really love your site design, very inviting and bright. Probably exactly what's needed when you're in the mood to use your site.

I noticed the favicon looks like the default one used for the Pylons framework. I'm curious, why did you choose Pylons over Django?

I'm a huge fan of Pylons for the flexibility it offers, and am generally more comfortable with it -- I've built up a huge framework on top of it, over the last 2 years or so of using it, so development goes really quickly. Not to mention that this project really didn't need anything that Django offers; it's database-free and, using Cogen, is totally async. Pretty simple and sweet.

Yup, seems to be a lot of listeners eager and not a lot of complainers. I did my best to complain for a while, but eventually got sick of it. Actually, might go back and complain about that.

Interesting - PostSecret meets Omegle.

I tried being a listener and never got a complainer to chat with. So I tried being a complainer and I was just connected to endless AFK listeners.

I guess the ADD folks who switch tabs after a few seconds are clogging up the listener queue. I think you will have to tweak the social interface to make this work.

Chatting in a web browser is an abomination of an idea, and only serves to illustrate the limitations and inanity of the "web" as some kind of universal platform.

If this is ever to occur, then at the very least the browser as an application must disappear, leaving "web applications" as first-class citizens.

Of course this is impossible when "web developers" target the browser as if it were an unchallengeable precondition rather than thinking about how people are actually using their computers. As long as JavaScript interpreted/JIT'd by a web browser is the language de jure, you will forever be second-class citizens.

Omegle animates the title text, so you notice the tab "bouncing" when someone types something to you.

The listener should be required to click a button at a certain period of time to confirm that they are paying attention. This would remove the idlers.

That looks really sweet! I've had a concept like this for years for the dutch market: Moeilijkedag.nl (tough day) but haven't had the time and or interest to built it. How did you implement it? Newfangled nodejs chat or something like it? :)

Off-topic: "master of none" type-a-guy from .nl here, also a webdev wannabe.

Sounds like an interesting idea - just in case you'll be open-sourcing, I'd love to see what the real-life dev process looks like.

who knows! You should add your contact info to your profile, btw.

1) Weird placement for input. 2) Not much different from omegle, which attracted lot's of spammers. 3) Bit slow.

My chat partner got disconnected. Perhaps it should play a tone when you are the listener...

how is this different from any generic random-user chat app, other than the "compassion" theme? is there anything technologically unique? not trying to be harsh, just honest.

Is the name a reference to Passion Pit, the indie rock band?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com