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Comment by andrewthebold | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN! Gentle is an app where you write requests about your worries and get (gentle) replies back from strangers. It’s cute, anonymous, and moderated.

I was inspired by:

* My disappointment in how most social media today incentivizes outrage over empathy.

* The growing trend of feel-good experiences like Kind Words, Animal Crossing, Slowly, and more.

I'm interested in getting more people testing it out. Eager to take feedback and/or talk about it. :)

Direct testflight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/tXMfOfOl

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I would like to have a small way to react to a message I receive. Not reply to it, but maybe an emoji reaction or some other “thank you” to the sender.

Hey! That's one of the main features I want to add before actually launching the app. Expect to see something like that soon if you stick around in the beta!

Happy to listen to other feedback or suggestions you might have~

Hey I love your landing page! Did you design it or used a template? And how is moderation done? I assume they're very private so no person is moderating them... so a machine is doing it? Are you using some sort of off the shelf stuff?

The landing page is custom designed! So using tools like paper and Figma, and then translating into a next.js site.

Moderation is based on two things:

1. A spam/bad word filter. It's pretty aggressive and inspired by a variety of OSS tools, but definitely could be better. 2. An easy reporting tool available for any user-generated content. It could be more prominent for requests, so that's something I'll fix shortly.

I hacked together a small dashboard to surface whatever's caught by those two things. For the beta test, it's been working pretty well.

Feel free to ask any followups!

You know one thing you can do w/ content moderation is go all the way to the source, if you make it more "expensive" (by some measure, not necessarily w/ money) to send a message, then it would discourage a lot of trolls who wouldn't even bother to make the effort.

Yeah! Lots of potential in this idea. Right now it's a free-for-all, but limiting the number of things you can do in a given session might also incentivize more quality messages.

Other possibilities too. I'm trying to avoid gamification mechanics (like maintaining a request-reply ratio, like counts, etc), so that's a consideration.

Hey Andrew I just downloaded your app and it's very tastefully done! The UI just puts me at ease and is a "living breathing character" in itself, may sound silly but I definitely get the vibe. Could I reach out to you and give you some feedbacks? And I have tons of ideas about automated content moderation, etc.

Yeah! My main email for gentle-related stuff is andrew@gentle.app

Feel free to reach out and connect.

Ok sent!

For anybody who comes into this thread in the future, I've closed off public signups for the iOS beta. I've hit a critical mass of testers and want to make sure the app isn't overrun by trolls and predators. Reach out to me if you really want in [0]!

To know what's on the roadmap, checkout my public trello board [1] for more info.

[0] Email beta@gentle.app

[1] https://trello.com/b/65BxuxBa/gentle

That’s cute and I’ll definitely try it out. I can see it failing to hit the mark for, say, minorities with particular concerns, though, simply due to sympathy versus empathy.

Agreed! It's not a silver bullet or anything like that. More like a quiet place to go to if you're inclined.

I will say one of the "rules" you agree to when you first start is "I know I can’t fix other’s problems, but I can share kindness". I know that's not enough, so it'll be something to keep working on.

Thank you for making a beautiful and thoughtful product in a vain and thoughtless age. They are few and far between these days. Also, .app domains rule.

Is the app meant to really only work on iPhone or is there a way to turn off mandatory 90° screen rotation on an iPad other than assistive touch?

Hey! For now I have it locked to portrait orientation and no official support for iPad. Very sorry for the trouble with this — it does sound annoying. I'll look into enabling iPad-specific rotation.

Uhm. why is the website requesting access to my webVR?

That's... unusual and concerning. You're talking about the gentle.app site, not the testflight link, right?

The only thing I could think of to cause that is the embedded vimeo iframe. But why? If you're open to share, I'd love to know what browser you're using.

Not the person you are replying to, but on Firefox 75 player.vimeo.com is requesting WebVR permissions on gentle.app upon first load.

Also just quickly I want to say I love the idea and intentions behind Gentle! I haven't had a chance to play around with it too much yet but it really is a pretty app too.

Thanks for the info! I guess it also only happens if you have some VR device setup. Sorry for the trouble with that. I'll swap out the vimeo embed soon since that sounds like annoying and unnerving behavior.

Also, thank you for the praise!

Yep. we site itself. An as burk96 said, it's the current Firefox. I'm assuming the vimeo player asks for VR access just in case it's a 360 video. I took a quick look at their API and help site and it doesn't look like you can turn that off. In fact, even their own support site is riddled with it :/ Seems a glaring issue on their end!

How long did this take to develop? It’s absolutely delightful

Hey! The project started in early February, so it's been around 2-1/2 months. The time was split ~50/50 between design and development.

Happy to elaborate if you have followup q's!

That is seriously impressive for that short amount of time, fantastic work!

I did comment elsewhere in this thread, but have since deleted, but I just had another question:

Can you say a bit more about the OSS libraries I’m always looking for tools to help with comments in my projects!

Thank you! I'm a bit wary of giving big hints to how the filters work, but I was inspired by:

- npm packages like redact-pii, bad-words (and numerous other "bad word" lists)

- askismet's open source spam code

- regex unicode categories

I also wrote a variety of checks for word counts, combinations of words, known "bad patterns", etc. You may not realize it, but the text input forms block a lot of potential inputs.

It's not perfect, but that's why I'm manually handling things that surface. Happy to answer any follow-ups.

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