A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime | Hacker News Reader

A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime

ventscape.life

284 pointspunkspider138 comments

This is great. It fills the same role as Twitter, but people's posts disappear after a few seconds, making it better than Twitter.

I'm serious here. Twitter's a cesspool filled with people venting about random crap. So is Ventscape. We all need to vent sometimes, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But the problem with Twitter is that it preserves and amplifies your venting until the end of time, which is the absolute worst thing to do with venting.

Similar to the advice that when you're angry at someone you should write them an email, pour it all out and then delete that email instead of sending it.

Sometimes we need to get stuff off of our chest but the insanity of the modern world is that once we do, it's archived and mined and maybe even used against us 15 years later.

Ventscape solves that problem (conditional on its privacy and data retention policies I suppose...)

Is that your only experience with Twitter? Twitter fills about a million more roles than venting. I don’t see any “cesspool” on my feed in fact.

It's a personalized echo chamber. YMMV

Following stuff that interests you is not an echo chamber.

A machine learning algorithm then uses that stuff to recommend content which is similar. If one engages with opinionated stuff, then they'll only get recommended stuff that conforms to their original opinion, forming an echo chamber.

You need to change the viewing setting to "latest first"

And, as far as I can understand, it will disengage itself from "latest first" as soon as it detects you are not addicted enough to not miss every new update with it engaged, thus having zero echo-cancelling powers.

It did that for a while, but in the last months it stopped doing that. I'm not even using it very frequently but it remains at "sort by date"

Imagine following some people who talk about houseplants. Maybe you like some tweets with the kind of information you consider of above-average usefulness for you. Maybe you praise someone for a beautiful pic of their monstera variegata.

The algorithm decides to show you more high-quality tweets and prettier photos.

If you consider that an echo chamber then all right, but I don't think it's a useful definition. Is going to a scifi-focused bookshop an echo chamber?

Maybe it’s because houseplants aren’t a controversial topic. Take any topic where people hold strong opinions (politics, religion, ...) and start following people you agree with. I guarantee you’ll have to very deliberately look for people on the other end of the spectrum at some point because your feed and your follow recommendations will indeed be an echo chamber.

I agree, that's exactly my point — online communities might be (for sure often are) an echo chamber, but that depends on what content you subscribe to. Specifically on how opinionated-ness-y and on-topic that content is.

If it only were that well. In reality, when I follow people who posts on various niche subjects, it turns out the algorithm believes I'm mostly interested in American Politics because quite a few of those posters are into that and that overshadows all the niche subjects.

Looking at the list of things Twitter believes I'm interested in is quite enlightening about the limits of recommendation engines.

I think the proper analogy is a bookstore whose titles rearrange themselves on the shelves based on your liminal reactions to the covers.

My direct experience with Twitter is I have one dude's account bookmarked and I check it almost daily because he's a great source of local news. I have a profile but I haven't logged in or used it for a long time. My experience is fine.

There sure seem to be a lot of people, though, who have the cesspool experience I mentioned. It's great that you and I don't have this experience with Twitter. It's also anecdotal and not really relevant to my comment which was about people who aren't you and me.

I really think that people need to have an AI shield or body guard that monitors and controls ones access to media, to protect them from harmful concepts and behaviors. This might sound fantastical, and I understand the vastness of implications, but it will be viewed as no different than wearing sunglasses or mittens. We wear clothing and protect ourselves from the environment, the mental environment out there is unlike anything humans have ever come across.

At some point, the weatherman will tell us about rates of state sponsored AI powered psyops campaigns across social media sites for the day.

I forsee some problems with people being able to literally lock themselves in different realities in real life depending on their personal views

We have that already, and we also have people that don't participate because it is too dangerous psychologically.

At the lowest level, I am talking about even being able to watch a movie on Netflix and not be exposed to the most grotesque violence. Just black out the 36 frames of someone taking a hook through the eye. Or doing sentiment analysis on a thread and recommending that you not partake.

My experience is that there's a ton of value there, but the trending tab is like a siren call I can't resist even though I regret it almost every time. Usually I can't imagine why something is trending, click on it and lose ever more faith in humanity.

> I don’t see any “cesspool” on my feed in fact.

You should file a bug report. Your feed should make you equal parts angry, sad, and horny.

It's mined by the same agencies that monitor everything. So your venting is deleted for yourself, but preserved eternally for the people with power over you. I rather like it.

> So your venting is deleted for yourself, but preserved eternally for the people with power over you. I rather like it.

I love the phrasing. It instantly made me imagine those words being spoken by Lord Demiurge [0] (as voiced by Jeff Johnson [1]).

[0] https://overlordmaruyama.fandom.com/wiki/Demiurge

[1] https://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/tv-shows/Overlord/Demiu....

Thanks! I was going to say 'preserved forever for' but the double-'for' was awkward. Phrasing credit goes to fantasy author David Eddings, attitude to a C.S. Friedman character, Tarrant. Lord Demiurge has some interesting similarities!

Searches show interesting Gnostic ideas about Demiurge being a lion-faced-serpent. How appropriate. I have trouble finding a sample of Jeff Johnson as Demiurge, though.

The specific clip I had in mind can be found in "Overlord" (English dub), season 3, episode 9, 20m25s - 20m50s ([0] and [1]).

[0] https://www.hulu.com/watch/1657b4d2-49dd-450d-9a0f-aa2e1d45d... (requires subscription or free trial)

[1] https://www.funimation.com/shows/overlord/war-of-words/uncut... (requires subscription)

Found it! Perfect :D

The majority of individuals are at danger of their old tweets being brought to light years later by other people not three letter agencies. If you remove the ability for people to go back 5 years looking for dirt on someone they dislike you prevent a lot of the drama that drives twitter.

Doesn't the fact that Twitter posts (mostly) stay incentivize conscientiousness, precisely because it doesn't take away the reality that words have consequences? It's still not an excellent representation of how forgiveness and personal development exists in the real world (i.e. we can forget about the details of what's been done in the past, but what we post stays in some database), but without the longevity of Twitter/FB posts, people just wouldn't think twice about what they're saying and this is a time when we do need more critical thinking.

Does it really seem to you that Twitter incentivizes conscientiousness?

> without the longevity of Twitter/FB posts, people just wouldn't think twice about what they're saying

You clearly have not yet witnessed the bad parts of Facebook and Twitter. I've seen people calling for genocide on Facebook under their real name and that's not even remotely the worst.

Facebook's content moderation teams are basically getting PTSD[0] by default as they enforce rules that specify under what circumstances photos of things like animal abuse or decapitation are acceptable(!).

The assumption that people behave normally on the internet when they're not anonymous is provably false. You might think that intuitively, but that's because you're a decent person.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/19/facebook-content-moderators-...

I mean, I didn’t sleep through 2016 onwards but people threatening violence still get banned, people with bigoted views still get called out or damage their real-world offline relationships, and it’s possible that there’d be even less people who’d be mindful of what they say without those feedback mechanisms.

Many of those people facing real-life consequences don't identify themselves, though. I agree that it helps to some extent, but that kind of individual often doesn't care about a possible backlash or just avoids platforms without anonymity in the first place.

The only real solution I see is to keep such online platforms small or segmented enough that they can be effectively moderated. Troublemakers will not go away no matter what rules are in place; but if those rules are properly enforced they can be kicked out before causing too much damage.

Why does Facebook need to moderate the populations talking points?

The us government literally drops bombs on people's homes.

Humanity is full of all kinds of bullshit. I wish people would stop trying to make everything online a fucking safe space.

>Why does Facebook need to moderate the populations talking points?

Why do you think?

>The us government literally drops bombs on people's homes.

Ok.

>Humanity is full of all kinds of bullshit. I wish people would stop trying to make everything online a fucking safe space.

Waheoo, I know you deliberately caught the coronavirus to spread it as part of your Jihad. I shared your address on my Facebook wall. I'm sure you don't mind; you don't need a fucking safe space.

You're welcome to do whatever you like, don't complain to me when you end up in jail.

I'm not claiming laws are bad, I'm claiming Facebook isn't the fucking police.

Why would I end up in jail? Freedom of speech.

My mentally ill brother-in-law and his militia may go to jail, but by then it will be way too late for you.

It's not about making everything a safe space, it's making sure kids on social media don't get sent gory pictures, radical extremists aren't able to incite violence on a massive scale, shooters don't get to livestream their mass murders and school kids don't commit suicide due to cyber bullying.

This issue isn't black or white and your edgy worldview doesn't improve the situation. Just so you know, even 4chan is heavily moderated and so are many other places the average person would usually avoid.

Freedom of speech isn't an edgy world view.

> This is great. It fills the same role as Twitter, but people's posts disappear after a few seconds, making it better than Twitter.

Also like Jodel it is anonymous[1], which is a good thing whenever possible as has become obvious lately.

[1]: wrt other users. Random nutjobs of all shapes cannot easily find you and nobody can verify if Jodel have really banned someone so they can to a larger degree do what they think is correct instead of what the mob demands. Threaten someone however and police will have your adress shortly, - Jodel is not an alternative to Signal or Matrix.

Somehow similar to HN isn’t it?

Was gonna say that's what I use HN for, I got disenfranchised with the industry and everyone in it a few years ago, now I just troll and call it how it is. If I don't get downvotes I something is wrong.

Pedant's note: ITYM 'disenchanted'. To be disenfranchised is to be rendered unable to vote, or more broadly to be stripped of some otherwise customary access to a measure of power or agency. To be disenchanted is to lose a fascination with something, in typical usage as a response to some event or sequence of events that places the object of disenchantment in a new and less favorable light.

Kind of, but anonymous instead of pseudonymous and also (kind of) ephemeral.

> Threaten someone however and police will have your adress shortly.

Impugn someone who’s well lawyered-up, and your contact info may be demanded by a order pursuant to a lawsuit for defamation, yes?

You're warned:

    const messageText = inputTextBox.value.replace(/<\/?[^>]+(>|$)/g, "");

    var $newdiv = $('<div class="' + messageDivClass + '"><p>' + messageText + '<p/><div/>').css({
        'opacity': '0.95'
    });

The safe, proper way to do this is both shorter and more readable!

Both with jQuery:

    const $newdiv = $('<div>')
      .addClass(messageDivClass)
      .text(inputTextBox.value)
      .css({'opacity': '0.95'});

and without:

    const newdiv = document.createElement('div');
    newdiv.classList.add(messageDivClass);
    newdiv.innerText = inputTextBox.value;
    newdiv.style.opacity = '0.95';

Hey, creator of the site here, thank you so much for the tip!

Unfortunately I'm quite new to full stack. ~1.5 months ago I didn't know a lick of HTML (let alone CSS, JS, any backend framework, AWS, etc), and I'm making lots of mistakes along the way. Currently trying to figure out how to improve my DB performance as Spring's default pagination seems to be quite slow and my site is getting hugged to death at the moment. If anyone has any tips for that especially I'm all ears.

At any rate, your suggestion seems easy enough to put in, so I'll put it in ASAP! Thanks again

Congratulations on getting to the front page of HN and Reddit / mostly surviving the hug of death!

Sounds like you're using offset for pagination.

https://use-the-index-luke.com/no-offset

A bit more explanation for you or any other helpful people reading, I'm using Spring's PagingAndSortingRepository.findAll(Pageable) function, and then passing in sort=id,desc&size=10 via the API request params (but no explicit offset AFAIK).

Found one potentially good stackoverflow to dig into so far https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44021665/why-is-a-pagina...

Reduce the refresh rate drastically, augment the number of messages fetched at once (let's say 200), and display them slowly. Should reduce 20 times the load on DB while making no sensible difference for end users anyway.

Ok interesting idea. My one fret here would be that it would decrease interactivity on the site. Sometimes people send messages in response to each other, right? But nonetheless I'll experiment with increasing the refresh rate and maybe strike a nicer balance

I agree with you. Realtime is the key intrigue after the site itself, people will go off it when they realise it's not live.

second this, I managed a brief conversation with someone when trying this out and it was great, a few other messages seemed to chime in as well. perf/eff can be improved as mentioned above but would lose the fun, imo

You could also benefit from using websockets instead of sending the message to a DB and fetching it from there. This way, you'd have instant communication between the users and there's no need to store anything.

Hi, is there any way to contact you privately?

I would like to use this idea on a project of mine.

Sure. Feel free to DM me on Reddit (u/VentScape). Eventually I'll set up some @ventscape.life emails to use but I haven't gone through the effort yet

Sorry, would you mind explaining what this will do?

Improper input sanitation, you can potentially add raw html to other people's pages (XSS).

Doesn't the regex sanitize it before display?

Yes but it's pretty easily bypassed

How is it easily bypassed?

I asked earlier because I'm genuinely curious, but do you have a payload that would bypass this particular regex?

What are you warning about?

XSS vulnerabilities

Holy hell, OP.

What prevents me from just calling "postMessage" directly myself, which does nothing to prevent the "sanitation" that the replace function call there is supposed to do?

Please sanitize messages on the server instead.

The fact that it's also called when its added to the stack for display. OP should definitely still sanitize on the server, but it's not as bad as it sounds at first glance.

As an exercise I'd love it someone actually posted a payload to exploit that regex.

That's terrible. OP should take the site down and fix those issues.

Yeah, go ahead and down vote without explaining yourself. It's so educational!

My guess is that you were downvoted because you sound like you are talking about a very important system with a huge number of users that could have catastrophic consequences if the vulnerability is not fixed. It's just a project from a novice programmer having fun. Hence, no need to take the site down.

So it's not a principled decision? How many users does the site have? 10000, 100000? To me, that's a lot. Thanks for answering.

You should sanitize the messages on the server side, not the client. It's possible to inject images/scripts/links on the page.

Before I did anything the message "I coded a honeypot for the FBI and I have a bad conscience" appeared on screen. I don't know who you are, but you made me laugh!

Looks like you can query the database directly via their REST API: https://api.ventspace.life/api/v1/ventpost?sort=id,desc&size...

I wonder what the most common word will be? I'd guess between "covid" and "Maddie"

Who is Maddie?

I think Maddie McCann, she was a young girl who disappeared in Portugal sometime a few years ago. She's been in the news recently I believe.

Oooof I was assuming it was a different Maddie. But yes that's the most famous Maddie in the UK. Might be a coincidence though. It feels like it was over ten years the Maddie you're thinking of disappeared while on holiday

(Edit: looked it up) Maddie McCann disappeared in may 2007

A guy was on talking about his ex-gf Maddie, and then it carried on.

over the last ~20hrs, the most common words and their frequencies are "the": 12263, "i": 12212, "fuck": 9015, "you": 8940. with stopwords removed, these become "fuck": 9015, "guess": 4084, "nums": 4062, "cunny": 3728. out of interest "maddie": 857, "covid": 231

I wondered too

Looks like it caps off at 2,000, and we're currently at 130K+ messages

what does this mean?

The API returns at most 2000 messages at a time (this might have changed since I last tried), and last I looked the message IDs were around 130K, meaning that's how messages there have been.

I'm not sure why there is a database at all, if you want messages to just appear and not stick around you could do this over websockets and never need to touch a database

I'm brand new to full stack so I have no idea what I'm doing. Kind of figuring it out as I go along. Decided to start with short polling since I was having trouble getting websockets working and just wanted to get a v1.0 out in the wild.

Switching over to websockets eventually is 100% on my mind, but I have a near infinite amount of work to do on all fronts so we'll see when I have time!

Good on you. Learning about DB structure is far more important than websockets when starting out full-stack. You’d need to run your own websocket server anyway or pay through the nose for a service like Pusher (or stay on the free tier and not learn a single thing about either).

You choose well! Nice job, keep at it :)

I agree absolutely - just want to add that learning when not to use a db, which db to use when you need one, and which network protocols to use for an application, is also important

Congrats for the little project, pls opensource the db!

Not sure what your backend is, but websockets are pretty straightforward with socket.io! Happy to help get you up to speed - don't hesitate to reach out (@maxverse on twitter, email in profile)

Great job figuring things out as you go, and I love the experience. Keep up the good work!

Most of my requests are failing with

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://api.ventspace.life/api/v1/ventpost. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing).

Me too :( Seems to be broken now!

I haven't looked, but I'm guessing that it will be filled with ethnic slurs and bitcoin spam soon, if it isn't already.

Well, we already have ascii penises so we're well on our way.

You should look. It's actually been pretty clean so far!

Yeah, you definitely called that one. It's like a smouldering cornucopia of antisemitism, "Buy GME", penises, "Death to America", more penises, more GME... if an alien race were using this as a tool to profile us and decide our fate, we'd be toast. Props to the author for creating something entertaining, but it just goes to show you can't control what people post.

I've been wanting to do a tech trash talk site for a while.

Sometimes I've got nothing but hate and vitriol for something and it'd be great to have a designated anonymous space where people can brood and lament.

You can do things like sort by most capital letters and profanity density or incoherency and spelling errors.

Now that I actually typed this out, it sounds really easy to code.

>Sometimes I've got nothing but hate and vitriol for something and it'd be great to have a designated anonymous space where people can brood and lament.

This is me with like 90% of tech, but instead of sometimes it's all the time.

Spewing vitriol can be quite the art.

I've always been fond of the British variety.

A site dedicated to the fine art of bile could be entertaining.

I started https://dotdot.im as a random chat place sort of for this, or for nothing, don't really know...

Nothing's stored at this point, chat's only live in memory while at least 1 user is there, and cleared after. Still trying to figure out what I'll do with it

i'm thinking about something that uses pip npm and apt to autogenerate lists of software so there's "topics" and "people" who can either be cowardly anonymous or have a psuedonym.

The author can use version numbers if they'd like and also browse from the command line. You can follow either topics or people, it's very microblogging, I know.

it's not meant to be productive, it's meant to be cathartic for those times where you inherit a project that's using a terrible tool that's 4 versions behind with no upgrade path and you don't have the time or resources to rewrite the code so instead you have to painfully maintain it.

It's for those things you simply disagree with. The gtk-3 filechooser, firefox still having ctrl+q that could essentially be renamed "kill -9" or other things that you need to work around and everyone's gotten the idea that there's no intention whatsoever of accepting one of the many pull requests to fix it that are just hanging out collecting dust.

It's not for the good stuff, it's for the bad stuff that because we live in a world bound by material reality we also have to use.

The banned stuff would be quite different than other places. No proper names might be appropriate - for instance, no witch-hunting or bullying specific people behind the software.

It's an interesting line.

  "God damn it, SimpleAcme must honestly be written by intoxicated people who just pass out on their keyboards and roll their head around in dreams smashing code in to their IDE"

is acceptable. But replace "SimpleAcme" with "Jonathan Q. Coder" and then it's maybe over the line? I dunno ... I should try it out and see what happens

Please hesitate to stop by my little hangout. :)

Blind is like that, if you haven't seen it already. It's customary apparently to list your TC (total compensation) in every post you make.

Congrats it's a very fun idea! I haven't been this excited about a website in a while. I hope it's going to stay up for a long time. Good job OP!

Pretty cool! I saw this on Reddit a min ago, vented something, saw people asking if everyone had come from Reddit, thought ooh I'll post this to hn and saw this post lol

Did you catch the part about Maddie? It started some hours ago, I think.

  1. Someone said something about "Maddie"
  2. Somehow someone else started saying things about "Maddie"
  3. Next thing that happens is either people ask who Maddie is, and others keep saying various things about "Maddie"
  4. Someone made /r/MaddieFans after that

Not really something useful, but it's some silly fun.

I'd like it if the project evolves somehow.

I've seen Maddie mentioned a few times now. I'm thinking that'll be a new meme lol.

It's fun how you don't expect to have any kind of conversation through it but there still are some

I've got an idea from it: it would make a cool comments section to go with sports or video game livestream. Could do with some content filtering. Text could be different colours or fonts depending on which team they support

I made r/MaddieFans - wanted to see how long it keeps going. Trying to keep it wholesome. It IS pretty incredible that this thread is going after 12+ hours. I think initially a guy talked about his ex-girlfriend Maddie, that he missed her. Imagine there's a real Maddie out there who has no idea?

This reminds me of what happened when TwitchPlaysPokemon took off and all the lore about Bird Jesus, etc just cropped up spontaneously.

Interesting how the whole thing devolves into 4chan-esque cesspool the moment anonymity is introduced. Humans are interesting creatures.

There is a rendering problem in my browser (firefox with custom larger fonts): the textarea where you are supposed to enter text is half-cropped by the boundary of the window at the center.

Could you post/send me a screenshot? If so I may be able to figure out a fix

https://pasteboard.co/JLyDLRT.png

It's an honest version of Twitter!

Much easier to read in the dev tools console with occasional clear()

Reminds me of Secret. I miss Secret. Why did it have to die? Once the apps were built, I can't imagine it was that expensive to keep the servers up.

Secret was a vector for harassment and innuendo via friend of friend connections and deserved its fate.

This on the other hand feels like early internet, overly personal in a charming way.

some word counts, for fun:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VentScape/comments/l6tvl1/top_50_wo...

"see" is a bit of a stretch here, more like <"read" what others are venting at the same time> is a more accurate description.

If this would add video/pics it will go down the path of omegle real fast.

Chat roulette. Supposed to be a sort of speed-dating inspired conversation system. It quickly descended into random people showing off genitals. Sometimes by first acting normal and then... The sudden reveal.

Being alive is expensive

Doesn't work responsively on latest Android Firefox

This would actually be an awesome art installation. Imagine this on a huge screen in Times Square. Sort of a real-time steam relief valve.

Just to see if its realtime, I asked the users to write potato in the box and submit. Saw many potatoes pop up. Good job dev.

This was briefly interesting and then I quickly started to see blatant racism, threats and rape accusations.

Maybe publishing the IP addresses of those is the real "show HN" that we'll see next week.

Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode

I think I'm going to copy this site, but actually make it real-time. What I've read about how the creator implemented it seems like it would never actually be able to achieve that. It also seemed like quite an expensive approach as far as hosting goes. I like the idea, so I think I'll make something that I can actually keep online forever without maintenance.

That is neat the random fading text, wonder the insights gleaned from this.

Upvote if you're pro-humanity after witnessing this bramble.

Let's try to play Virtual Jesus to see if this faceless demigod that is Humanity has it in itself to accept what it is and act accordingly :p

Posts are probably going to suck for the time being as this just circles around to people who don't really need to use it but only observe. Once it fades out of sites like HN and those similar, hopefully post quality will improve

Just reading the title I thought, "sounds a bit like chat roulette". Then I clicked the link and found that unfortunately, it had a bit in common with just how quickly the posts emerging became crude or worse.

So many people venting about work, it's interesting.

I can DDOS the space by posting large text frequently.

Tetrachroma by Pusha is a perfect soundtrack for this.

They should enable people to vote vents up and down and to have a 'trending vents' feature just like twitter.

Many CORS errors on ff.

Gettting 504 right now

Tetrachroma by Puscha - is a perfect soundtrack for this.

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