Show HN: Postmodern. – Ephemeral, one-on-one, anonymous conversations
postmodern.app
postmodern.app
Postmodern is a mobile app designed for ephemeral, one-on-one, anonymous conversations. Here’s how it works:
* Create an account with just a phone number. (Needed to manage abuse.)
* Respond to a Prompt or create your own. Prompts are topics of conversation. Each Prompt is active for 24 hours.
* When you respond to a Prompt, you immediately get dropped in a private conversation with the Prompt author
* Conversations are timed and last between 5 and 60 minutes (depending on how long the Prompt author chooses)
* When time expires, the conversation is locked forever
* If you stumble on an insight during a conversation, you can create a Snippet — a shareable chunk of conversation visible to the community
It’s critical that we have the ability to intellectually explore without fear of social ramifications. Whether we seek to explore our own minds, or the structures of our society, we need communication tools that allow us to peel away the pollutants to our thought.
There is certainly occasional utility in aligning our online personas with our offline person. (I worked on the team that built Google+ and supported the push to use Real Names.) But the early experimentation and incubation of ideas is incompatible with public engagement. The aim of Postmodern is to offer an environment stripped clean of the baggage that can make it hard to think clearly.
No pictures, no profiles (even pseudonyms), no status, no crowds. Just two brains bouncing off of each other exploring the void.
And for the literary among you…
Don DeLillo is one of my favorite authors; his novels inspired this double entendre project. Pinning down the nature of postmodernism is like trying to use language to describe the divine. For me, DeLillo’s words come the closest to capturing the postmodern essence. The intent of this project is to explore the nature of postmodernism in a remarkably postmodern way. I hope you enjoy.