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Show HN: Social Drop

socialdrop.net

5 pointsrobinduckett13 comments

I would love to see the actual implementation, otherwise you're asking people for feedback on sentence fragments and a sign-up page. How far along are you?

The system is being built with node.js, Amazon EC2 and S3, I've got accounts management in place, and file uploading and obviously chat. I'm still working on integrating everything. It is very early days indeed but if the overwhelming response here is negative then my views will be to just bin it and work on something better.

I believe most of the time, for any given idea, you'll get a number of negative reactions very fast - especially if there is no actual demo to see yet. If we take your landing page as an elevator pitch, the feedback you get will mostly consist of obvious concerns, such as:

Won't that devolve into piratebay with a chatroom? How will you pay for the huge bandwidth and storage required? Will people want to chat ad-hoc with strangers while they're downloading? Do people want others to know what they're downloading? How can you make this legal AND interesting?

But those concerns are largely shots in the dark. We don't know what you got planned. So I guess the question is more: Do you believe in the idea? Do you believe you can make this work? If so, you shouldn't give the reins to naysayers, show what you can do; go ahead and try it out, by all means! But if the concerns above are similar to your own doubts, move away from the keyboard and develop another idea.

> Won't that devolve into piratebay with a chatroom?

Possibly, but this is why reporting and copyright infringment DCMA procedures ala youtube will be key.

> How will you pay for the huge bandwidth and storage required?

Self funded to start, everyone will get a limited amount of space to start off with. I don't want to go the premium account route to start off with so nonintrusive advertising will be used to help cover costs. I'm more interested in creating a community based on easy filesharing rather than making millions of dollars (pounds in my case).

> Do people want others to know what they're downloading?

If it's all legal then sure, why not? I'm trying to make it easy to create natural communites based on the type of file uploaded (Categorisation and tagging of files once uploaded will be important here)

I believe in the idea. I've been thinking about it for a long time and I'm certainly up for any ideas.

My own doubts are on the lines of "No one will want to use it". I'm not a huge idea man, and I'm not sure how to go about leading people to the project. If I can build this and only say, one group of artists ever use it, I will keep it running for the reason that at least someone is using it. It may not make me any money but if it makes people's lives easier in any way then I'm interested in making it happen.

> My own doubts are on the lines of "No one will want to use it"

Statistically, this is always a good bet, as it is with every other idea. That makes being a negative person so rewarding ;-)

> I'm not sure how to go about leading people to the project.

Featuring on HN is a start. Seriously, if you believe this thing can work, finish your prototype and get it online. Personally, I believe in stripping the idea down to the simplest implementation that could possibly work. Build it quick and dirty, see how it goes. If you don't know any of the "movers and shakers", prepare for a lengthy take-off period. Distinguishing between a long runway and utter failure can be the hardest part. But other than that, go. Do it, now.

Please let me know any feedback, I realise there is not much to go on as yet but I'm hoping to generate as much interest as I can :)

OK, I'll be that guy.

I don't get it. What's the use case? Can you give me an example of a typical user, and what they'd be doing?

Upload a file, the download page is a chat room, where people who are downloading the file can chat, in the simplest terms.

Other people can then be selected to upload more files which can be shared with other users in the chat.

Very interesting concept, almost reminds me of a community -- sharing files and talking about them between users.

I think the biggest trouble you will run into is that unless a file is very popular, you may not have any people at all in most chatrooms, which would make it seem like the community was pretty empty. You also have to think about how people download files -- are they coming to your site to download files, or are they coming for the community? On forums, people will chat with other users, and then share files. But when people are looking to upload/download files, I don't know how often they are looking for a community.

> Very interesting concept, almost reminds me of a community -- sharing files and talking about them between users.

Exactly what I'm going for.

> I think the biggest trouble you will run into is that unless a file is very popular, you may not have any people at all in most chatrooms, which would make it seem like the community was pretty empty.

I think the way to solve this issue would to have notifications for anyone who has downloaded the file that there's been activity in the room. The system I've will save all activity forever, so it's not going to be an IRC type situation where all logs are lost unless a third party saves it.

> You also have to think about how people download files -- are they coming to your site to download files, or are they coming for the community? On forums, people will chat with other users, and then share files. But when people are looking to upload/download files, I don't know how often they are looking for a community.

I admit, when I'm downloading a file, I get annoyed by the "please wait 30 seconds to look at our advertising and whilst we pop up crap in the background", and I never want it to become the kind of situation here.

I'm thinking of people who are uploading a group of files, say a collection of pixel art, and want feedback on what they've done. I realise this can be easily achieved by a forum but I think this idea is novel enough to not replace the forum, but become an alternate method of communicating in-situ with the subject matter.

Sorry, but that's still too abstract for me.

Let's say I'm a college kid, and I decide to upload a picture from the party last night. How do people know that the file is there? Do I get a URL, that I give to them?

OK, now the file is uploaded. Will it stay there forever, or is this just temporary?

Let's say some people want to download it. The download page is a chatroom, but what are the odds that more than one person would be downloading at a time? Do you have any metrics from other file-sharing sites about this?

I'm still not picturing who this is aimed at.

Well I'm curious as to how the idea came about. Way I see it I think you may have gotten the idea by looking at conversations that might tend to flow on a forum like warez bb. But actual downloading for most people would work like this. Person sees link. Waits for 30 seconds for it to be available and then sets it to download and continues with whatever they might be supposed to be doing.

So here come the questions 1) are you solving a problem? Or is this a novel idea you think might be cool? If it's the former then what is the problem? If it is the latter the next question will be even more relevant 2) typical file share downloads won't last more than 15 minutes. Minimum a minute. Average somewhere around 4 minutes. Why would people want to chat for that time? 3) given that people set stuff to download and move along you have to be adding value to what peoples time if you expect them to devote time to chatting instead. What's the value you add?

I will never shoot down an idea outright so go ahead and answer without worrying that I'll cream over you. But you do need to be able to answer those questions to anyone to say why your idea is actually something that would be worth using.

Cheers. More questions after your answers :)

The idea came about from looking at things like the various file sharing sites around and it formed in my head that if I were downloading song tabs for classical music, then the thousands of other people downloading the same thing would probably share some interests with myself. I then continued to think that if there was some way I could communicate with those people then we could share more files relevant to our interests.

I don't think I'm solving a problem, and I'm fairly certain collaberative chat with file sharing already exists (I'm thinking Campfire / Basecamp but I could be mistaken). I believe that this kind of thing would generate natural communities around files being shared.

People would be able to chat anonymously and register their own account (reddit / HN style i.e. very quick registration) and manage their uploaded files.

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