Show HN: VentScape – Minimalistic site to vent, chat and see others do the same | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: VentScape – Minimalistic site to vent, chat and see others do the same

ventscape.life

102 pointsGabeK050 comments

VentScape is a large, anonymous, chat room where all messages fade away and disappear after a few seconds, an idea born out of my deepest loneliness during the height of the pandemic.

The anonymity, ephemerality, and other features work together to provide the quickest, easiest way to have fun conversations online — the kind of social interaction I personally wished I had more of throughout the many lonely months of 2020.

Originally imagined as a minimalistic space to vent anonymously and see others doing the same in real-time (something I personally wanted, believed had psychological benefits, and was disappointed didn't already exist), after the site got posted on HN and Reddit I slowly realized that the real magic was oftentimes in the fun, spontaneous conversations people would have on it. I then began rehashing the idea and working on a new and refined version in React Native with a friend.

This new React Native version of VentScape got to a good spot so I posted it to HN a few weeks ago. It didn't receive much attention, I think in large part due to it being a TestFlight download link instead of just an immediately useable web app. I worked on refurbishing the web app after this experience, (essentially realizing that it's far easier to use a web app than downloading a TestFlight app) which is what I'm here today to Show HN.

I'd love to hear any feedback you may have on the site, or to discuss anything about the engineering or the idea itself (whether that be its philosophy, psychology, or anything else). Thank you so much, and cheers.

Links:

First HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25923301

Reddit r/InternetIsBeautiful Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/l5h3zz...

Second HN Thread w/ TestFlight link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541185

How is one supposed to vent there? I don’t understand. Venting is talking to someone who may listen, but this is more like standing on a corner with a non-directed rant and strangers just passing by. Isn’t it better to just go to any /b?

Great question, I could speak at quite some length about this.

My thinking has been that anonymity + knowing that your messages will disappear in a few seconds creates the lowest pressure possible environment to say something that you might not normally want to talk about (IE, venting about something that bugged you, for example.)

/b/ is indeed anonymous, but on the other hand, you know your post is going to stay there for a while. People can read it and respond to it for some time after it's been posted. On VentScape, you know that after a few seconds it will disappear, thereby being lower pressure.

You bring up a good point, that you aren't talking to anyone directly here, which is true I think. But I also believe, personally, that a lot of the benefit of "venting" is attained even just by getting the words to come out of your mouth. Your vent doesn't necessarily need to be critically discussed with another person to benefit.

Is VentScape the world's greatest venting platform? I do not think so. But I do think it allows for a certain kind of pressure free communication that's hard to come by elsewhere, whether that be friendly banter, random chatting, or yes, venting.

I could write a lot more about this if you (or anyone else) is curious, but those are some initial thoughts (without being too wordy, hopefully.)

I guess eventually someone will start publicly logging the messages, I wonder if that will change the dynamic you describe.

Its getting really sluggish over time (does it mine optical bitcoins?)

Also, stores literally a shitload of google spying information.

Can't agree with minimalistic epithet because of above

Hmmm, slowness might be caused by minimizing / tabbing out and a bunch of messages building up. I can definitely fix this though. If it gets slow during normal usage, that's another story that I'll have to look into.

And regarding the other comment, I'm guessing you're referring to Google Recaptcha. Yeah, I see what you mean. Of course, I would prefer to not have that in there either but was forced to add it in to curtail people spamming the site with scripts / bots. If you have another solution to prevent that, I'm all ears!

Rate limit each unique source IP address would suffice?

This is already done! But then the spammers would just slow their spam bots down under or near the rate limit, and it would get very annoying seeing random max length messages appear over and over again every few seconds. You could make the rate limit even more restrictive, but then you ruin the experience for normal users. It's a tough problem

Do some comment uniqueness detection grouped by the source IP? If the same IP sends a bunch of messages that are Too Similar, blacklist them

After actually trying the site, this feels more tricky than useful

Have you experienced spammers or your website or is this preemptive?

Also, couldn't you generate a random six digit number and ask a user to write it as a workaround for using Google? Or use a self-hosted service?

Oh goodness have I experienced spammers.

The first version that I made ~6 months ago had basically zero protection against spammers/trolls/etc, and it's been a non-stop arms race since then. I could rant for long hours about the numerous types of attacks and what I've had to do to prevent them.

I like the random code idea. But you'd have to ask more than once, otherwise spammers could go through the code once and then turn on their script. So it again becomes a tradeoff of how much to worsen the experience for normal users

This gives me an idea of building a type of web application firewall that would be used for chat related sites like this that would automatically block bots/spammers/trolls.

Light hearted and fun. Would be interesting to see some data on keyword trends. The chat has been stuck on "Chris" for the last ~15 minutes because someone posted "Chris what is this?"

I kind of liked that. It was like an evolving art piece/drama where Chris was one of the characters, together with Eth man.

"chris" has passed on through generations users, he's still being discussed about ~9 hours later.

Up until now I have only used Xbox live chatrooms(6 years ago) and have not tried your site yet(checking it out on a Friends recommendation) and I am a novice on what it takes to code or script(?) a site, but could you have a room or page proxy vote button next to each persons chat name that say anyone in the chat could hit and once a majority(enough people "hit" the button) has been reached a troll gets kicked out of their chat? Sort of a "your a Assranger" and we were enjoying the Convo. before you showed up type of thing.? Oh and if the future leader of the known Galaxy is one of the programmers Hello from the Pac N West...you know who you are and you will be someday

This shit always turns into people typing racist shock-garbage. I'm about 95% convinced anonymous online chats are a net negative for human-kind.

It’s not really a negative actually. In order to create good shock-garbage you need to be aware of what is actually shocking. That means the people posting this know some difference between right and wrong, they just choose the wrong path for the purpose of entertainment because the rest of their life is spent going down the boring right path. There’s so many colorful ways to say wrong things but only a handful of ways to say right things.

It would be more concerning if they actually believed their monstrous opinions in earnest and were not even posting them anonymously.

I moderately agree, but

>It would be more concerning if they actually believed their monstrous opinions in earnest and were not even posting them anonymously.

There are still plenty of people who believe their monstrous opinions in earnest but exclusively post them anonymously because they know they would be direly ostracized if they posted anything akin to it with their real identity, or perhaps even a pseudonymous identity.

There absolutely are many people who fall into the other category that you describe, but on an anonymous website like 4chan, the ratio between the sincere and non-sincere hateful and/or psychotic and/or psychopathic posters unfortunately seems to have started gradually skewing further and further towards the former over time. Especially starting after 2014, once Gamergate etc. signaled (and maybe partly caused) the current wave of ideological polarization we've all been living in since.

As the aphorism goes, "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."

(Commonly misattributed to Descartes but actually coined by an HN poster in 2009, in reference to 4chan /b/: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082)

How can you prove they are sincere though? It’s Poe’s Law in action.

You can't fully prove it, but there are usually context clues.

There are and will always be posts that are totally ambiguous. "Sincerity" false negatives are probably common. But if you have enough experience in a certain community, you start to be able to pick up on subtle things. False positives are probably not that high.

It's a bit difficult to explain, but it's basically like distinguishing actually crazy people from people faking it. (And that's often exactly what you're doing on anonymous sites, too.) If you have a large enough set of writing samples of two ostensibly schizophrenic people, where one is faking it and one is real, there are certain patterns that only the most brilliant and dedicated and seasoned of trolls can authentically mimic. Most trolls tend to not be that masterful.

https://youtu.be/Mwt35SEeR9w is one example of what I'm talking about.

Yup, I've seen that first hand in the early days of the site, which is why a huge proportion of my work on this has gone into moderation :)

Very silly stuff going on here, I love it. You earned a place in the bookmarks bar.

Awesome, so glad you're enjoying it! If you have any issues with site, suggestions or just wanna chat about ventscape, my email is open to you or anyone else reading this: gabe@ventscape.life

Sorry I missed it earlier based on the comments. Just looked at it now and it has already devolved into the typical cesspool of internet trolling.

It comes and fades, esp if peeps don't feed the trolls

Yeah, I think it is in a good place, although if such a thing became popular I'd expect more incentive to troll. Right now they seem to get bored

This is a neat concept. I like the random placement of messages on screen with the fade out. Well done!

Some feedback:

1. Would love to see it as historical scroll back of peoples vents, maybe keep for past 24 hours rolling?

2. Would be cool to go along with 1 to have vote up or down button to self-regulate and also to see vents / rants of day.

Just went to the site and spent 5 mins rooting for the guy trying to finish the q p w thingy from RuneScape. What a legend that was

Edit: He finished - https://i.imgur.com/SxOWD1A.png

Cute, fun and simple. Reminds me of simple anonymous chat rooms back in the day.

It's weird how quickly the "culture" changes. in the span of 5 minutes it went from being light hearted and funny to the usual bickering about identity politcs. I still a good time before that.

My other observation is that kind words feel much stronger and meaningful online if the site has no enforced "niceness" and people are just as free to act as total jerks, yet they choose not to.

I think some rate limiting would help but the app is great

Yes good point. There is some per-user rate limiting. But there can be enough people on simultaneously that the whole screen still gets filled up. Our idea is to eventually split people into separate "rooms" automatically if too many people get on, or something like that

Or queue the messages in order to distribute them at a maximum constant rate?

I just spent way too much time on this website.

Supercool! This was a quick chatbox deja vu for me. Like the chatboxes from around 2000 I mean, and that's a good thing. Very good that you made it immediately usable upon site entrance. I wouldn't have used it otherwise, smart move!

Can’t use due to the pihole on my network, wich is set up for anti-tracking (privacy) mainly. Since it’s supposed to be anonymous I’m a bit surprised. Might check out what it’s blocking on the site, but probably won’t bother. Most sites work fine.

Ah, sorry to hear. My guess would be that it's Google Recaptcha (something that I was forced to add to fend off spammers and very happy to remove if there's a better solution).

Another option is the iOS app version of the site (if you have an iOS device), we put up a version on TestFlight which is mostly feature parallel with the web version: https://testflight.apple.com/join/aCM3SWNY

"Dark Mode" in the settings menu might have a double meaning here

An AR, location based version of this would be pretty epic.

Great thinking. I also want to make it location based eventually, but it's hard enough to get enough people on simultaneously for it to be interesting so I think this could only be done if we somehow get a huge user base.

AR I haven't thought of yet but that sounds really cool too

once this loads its very difficult to go back on safari because tapping on bottom always opens the textbox. is there a trick around this

It’s just stuck at can’t connect

Try hard refreshing and it should connect. I sometimes encounter this if there's a weird cache issue. If that doesn't work, let me know

Worked! Thanks.

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