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Comment by kalado | Hacker News Reader

I had that thought for months. I'll give you my business Idea for free for the next big social network, since I'd rather work on my game development:

Chats based on hashtags. Are you watching the newest Game of Thrones ? Just search for #gameofthrones and enter the chat to talk with others. Chats go bad once too many people participate, so you split chats into channels of ~50. You can upvote messages and once they reach a threshold they will be broadcasted to all channels. Broadcasted messages can be saved in an archive and reread later by everyone.

Monitization can be done by allowing people to pay for broadcasts.

Everyone can start their own chatroom of course but names are unique.

Please, someone do it, I want this. Discord is to cumbersome because you need to find an interesting server first and you have to commit to much.

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I think part of the allure of private chats is that it's you & a small group of people who actually know each other - having a free-for-all and just splitting rooms up doesn't engender a feeling of togetherness any more than going to a random gathering of people with a single 'banner' topic. Twitter almost has the hashtag thing down.

Human social groups have a purported manageable upper limit of around 150 people, so super mass networks like insta, facebook, twitter etc also get to 'broadcast' level interactions rather than intimate discussions - it seems as though private group chats are a way to have a digital campfire, with less pressure & more shared experience.

There's so much behind building a social network that it takes a perfect mix of luck, timing, skill & marketing. But they will continue to come, won't they.

Oh I agree.

But I see this as an opportunity where you would split of the main chats by creating a more obscure named chat. Like you have a nice conversation with a few people and you can send them a private message "hey, lets continue this in #got-indepth" and then you invite others that you like.

You can have general conversations with a lot of people and break up into like minded groups naturally.

Moderation is a problem I don't know how to approach. Being able to ban people on a majority vote could be alienating.

Groupme is big for this at my university.

>Just search for #gameofthrones and enter the chat to talk with others.

I invoke Poe's law:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2811#section-2.1

"Channels names are strings (beginning with a '&', '#', '+' or '!' character) of length up to fifty (50) characters. Channel names are case insensitive."

Traditionally, people use channel names like #foobar.

(if you wanna know what the other prefixes are for:

& = local to server + = no ops, no modes ! = "safe channels", a rather esoteric concept related to protecting against special forms of netsplit abuse. Barely anyone uses these or knows that this feature even exists. I hope they don't throw it out with IRCv3, and instead just make it less... idiosyncratic.

I honestly don't know what you are trying to say?

I didn't mean using IRC (although you might of course).

He's trying to say that your "groundbreaking" hashtag idea is so similar to IRC that some people will be thinking you're being ironic.

That makes sense I guess. IRC channels are spread over thousands of servers though and not really discoverable or, in general, mainstream user friendly

And obviously it doesn't have to be a # character.

Thousands of servers that are federated together into a few networks. I shouldn't have to explain the benefits of a federated chat service vs a corporate monolith like you're describing. Is "/list" and sorting by members or searching for keywords really not discoverable?

All that aside, parent is right, you're basically re-inventing IRC. A more user-friendly client may be a good idea, but it's something that's really hard to make money on, so it's unlikely anyone would bother working on it.

It's discoverable by me and you, not by the average joe. When I was in school I created an IRC channel for us, I had to make a youtube video explaining how to install a client, connect to the server, reserve a username. I still got questions how to connect.

Anyway, as someone else let me now, kik intruduced exactly this feature with the exact same limit on users in one chat already.

A large issue I see with this is that of moderation. Discord, Slack, Reddit, and so on, all have appointed moderators for every community that keep users in-check according to community standards. With this idea, there are no 'owners' of any of these chatrooms, so are you going to moderate it centrally? That is a lot of work and requires a lot of people, just think about how much work it is to moderate a single twitch chatroom for spam, let alone an unlimited amount of them.

Would love to hear if you have any ideas on solving that. Besides that, I like the idea.

Yeah, that is a big problem. The only thing I can think of is to allow vote-kicks/bans. Account creation can only happen with mobile numbers to discourage spam and other violations and people just creating another account with a new mail.

You could also use this as an opportunity for another monetization system which allows people to pay for a reserved channel and moderation rights. The owners would be incentivized to behave in a reasonable manner because people could just move to an umoderated channel if they don't like the administration.

I see the chats in a semi persistent state between reddit/discord and kik/jodel etc.

Not persistent over weeks or months but also not as short lived as a one day discussion that gets lost in new posts.

Most similar online services go with the "first person who creates the channel gets mod privs, and can appoint further mods after"... you know, exactly like IRC.

Most people don't want to just chat with random strangers, they come back to a channel if it's interesting and aligned with a topic they're interested in.

I think Jodel is a little similar to this. There's hashtags, but it's location based. Living in a larger town, it's quite interesting to read and follow along with others nearby.

Yes, but it's mostly about asking questions or making jokes. I think this fills a different niche.

It seems like reddit, with a subreddit being analogous to a hashtag

> Chats based on hashtags.

> you split chats into channels of ~50

You are describing Kik

wow, haha I really am, the exact same number of people even. Just redownloaded it, last time I checked it out this didn't exist.

I'll try it out.

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