Call Someone Who Cares | Hacker News Reader

Call Someone Who Cares

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147 pointsandrewmwatson28 comments

"There is nobody that cares" hahahahaha. I feel sad now.

The idea's coming from the right place, but it looks like a serious troll magnet to me...

The 'Call Someone Who Cares' is coming across as sarcastic too despite the original intentions.

This might be a good example of where karma can be useful.

Karma for listeners: Highly upvoted accounts can take precedence to talking to newcomers; they've proved that they can listen well, giving new callers a good experience. This will encouraging them to come back or even to sign up as a listener by following the good listener's example.

Karma for callers: If they ever call again, they will be able to talk with newer listeners. Perhaps you need to have enough karma to even be a listener. Why? Listening is a more important quality for the site to be successful. Starting out as a caller lets allows you to follow the top listeners by example, while keeping the trolls away from other callers.

Also, a low enough score can block the account for an X amount of time. Where X increases each time they get blocked. And I think more karma = more weight on your vote could help with regulation. Mostly because voting will take place much less often than on other social sites.

This is an awesome idea though, I hope it catches on.

I doubt it. It's possible to be a troll regardless of whether you're a listener or a caller. Rating individual calls might help somewhat, but that's also possible to game, and by the time you've banned someone, it's too late - the call (complete with laugh track) will already be on Youtube.

I would love it to catch on, but there are massive social/legal/moral issues with it.

Eg 1- someone going through a depressive phase hits up with a troll (ref: case where someone was in a chat room, streaming a video of himself just before he committed suicide, people in the chat room egged him on)

Eg 2- Someone is suffering a depressive/manic episode, but turns to this and is not directed to medical help immediately OR someone has an issue which would require them to go to a professional, but the listener is not trained/aware and hence can't give them critical advice

Eg 3- Young adult who has had a traumatic day turns to this service, gets put in touch with someone who has strong beliefs. (or even mild ones)

Eg 4- High Karma person is taping calls of people talking to them

Yes, I do agree that there will be some edge cases with moral and legal issues. For everyone else with something on their minds, most of the time you just need to talk it out with another human being. It's the emotional side of their problems that they need help with. They shouldn't really be looking for advice here.

Kind of like AirBnB (for example) needing to have both parties be trustworthy, this will also require an element of trust. In the sense of confidentiality and compassion.

Just because the problems aren't immediately solvable doesn't mean we should avoid it though. We should instead try different things. Maybe on different sites or throughout the evolution of this one. But ultimately test to see what keeps the abusers away and also avoids the social/legal/moral issues.

Let me sign up and give an hour (of my choosing) block per week to listen to someone else. I would do it for karma.

Thanks for the feedback! Right now the app is pretty barebones. I can see what I can do to hack together a better user / presence system when I get some time.

Just last night, I was thinking how great (and successful) a service like this would be.

"There is nobody that cares. Maybe you should be that somebody."

Okay. Waiting for someone to call... ... ...

This is the most inefficient way to rickroll anyone ever

You should consider teaming up with http://compassionpit.com/

As the Reader's Digest once put it (according to Dale Carnegie): "Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience". This could save people if done well.

I can't give Twilio access to my microphone on Lion with the latest stable version of Chrome. So no, I can't really someone someone who cares.

http://www.twilio.com/help/lion-tamer

Thank you for this. The lack of working flash in Lion has been a really PITA.

[Honest question] By doing that aren't you allowing any app that uses the Twilio API to open your mic/camera without permission?

To be noted, it sounds like it's a problem with the current Flash version and Lion, rather than Twilio themselves.

Good work! I've had some cool ideas for Twilio projects but so far the pricing has made them all impractical. The Twilio Client is really opening some doors in this respect, being 1/4 the cost of a phone call and a cool feature to boot!

I still hope you have some throttling in place though because 1000 concurrent users will cost you $150/hr...

Go Frank!

Thanks! It was just a fun little idea I implemented when I should have been doing real work. :)

http://www.airbnb.com/ + http://www.call-someone-who-cares.com/ is better

For down voters, please refer top story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811080

There is nobody that cares :)

nice idea...(chat roulette - video)!

This reminds me of anicechat.net but it looks like it uses sound?

Bravo!

Hey, I run CompassionPit.com and have built up a sizable, stable community.... (40,000-200,000 unique visitors/month). I would be very happy to collaborate with a like-minded individual. The app is on the node.js stack and I've funded development and hosting entirely. I've released the source for free.

https://github.com/zackster/CompassionPit--Node-/

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