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Comment by nyellin | Hacker News Reader

I founded a startup with dsebrow and jsebrow to try and address this issue. We let users have private and anonymous conversations with their friends and colleagues, with a twist: you can see who is part of a conversation, but you can't see who made individual comments. In other words, you can have anonymous conversations with people who you respect. The trolls can't comment, because participation is invite-only.

There is a demo at http://freeversation.com/about/ but please don't excessively promote it or repost it to HN yet. We're not quite ready to go live. (Until this discussion hit the homepage, we weren't planning on allowing the public to access Freeversation.com until later this week.)

We will be applying for YCombinator.

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Well that might lead to awkward situations.

Donny, Steven, Eric, and Bob have joined the Freeversation

Anon: "Hey guys how's it going."

Anon2: "Donny cheated with Mary."

Anon: "Okay, who said that?"

Anon: "Eric it was you wasn't it?"

Anon2: "Donny also stole booze from last nights party."

Anon: "I will find out who this is."

Full disclosure: I don't know how bros talk, but I can see Freeversations leading to confessions or straight out bashing. Best to lay down some etiquette for new users.

We're planning on adding some moderation options, but we also trust our users. You get to decide who to invite to a conversation, so presumably you won't invite someone who is going to make a joke out of a serious discussion.

If people don't live up to our expectations, we do have some creative solutions for encouraging people to behave.

Have you actually tried this with a couple of friends? I'd expect to be able to pick out who's who fairly quickly...

I do think it's a nice idea; but I would still be very careful saying anything serious on there.

Partly for that reason, we envision the site as being most useful for groups above 20 and below 200. That way you have less of a risk of identifying specific users, while still developing a sense of community and relevance.

Ah ok, that makes more sense.

Will you assign the same alias to the same user every time, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon? That'd allow some kind of reputation system, at the cost of making it even easier to de-anonymize users.

As of now, users do not have persistent identities. Depending on how Freeversation develops, we may eventually let users opt-in for such aliases.

Were you thinking of Plato's Republic when you wrote this?

No, do you mind explaining? Sorry if I am missing the obvious. It is late and I am tired.

I'm referring to his idea that a perfect legislature could be formed if there was a way to make the representatives forget who they were while they were debating and voting. Then they'd have no choice but to vote for the common interest and not their own.

What would happen if Senate votes weren't made public? It would decrease accountability of senators to constituents, sure, but would it also decrease the power of special interest groups?

Another way to fix this would be to make legalized bribery (the current US lobby system)... illegal.

That sounds like John Rawls 'veil of ignorance'. Are you sure it was in Plato?

No, it was not Plato. They are mentioned together in so many places, I had them mixed up. Plato is not about Democracy. It's Rawls.

But Plato is, actually, relevant to our site. The cave analogy is a perfect description of how we see current social discussion- people understand themselves and others by interacting with mere "shadows" that are not very substantive. Facebook lets you know who you're talking to, but profiles are often more about what that person wants to be seen as than about who he actually is. Our goal, conversely, is to let people strip away the superficial and discuss their real opinions in an unadulterated form.

Good luck buddy.

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