Show HN: Thotly - An Anonymized Layer On Your Local Reality | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Thotly - An Anonymized Layer On Your Local Reality

thotly.com

30 pointskposehn24 comments

Interesting idea. So it's like an anonymous tweet-stream associated with a particular geographical location?

Comments:

a) It took me some time to understand what it was. I certainly didn't get it from the first paragraph, I had to scroll down. "Anonymized local layer on your reality"? Nobody is gonna understand what you mean by that. Really work on simplifying the product description so my mother could understand it.

b) It'd help if you provided some examples for things that you think people might use it for. All I see is some partially-obscured examples like "bread hot" and I'm curious as to what the hell ends with "bread hot" and is an appropriate thing to say.

c) You seem to be perfectly aware that trolling, griefing, pranking and general being-a-dick are likely to be a problem. It seems like it would be easy for bad content to drive out good. This seems like another good reason to provide more examples of what good content might look like.

Thanks for the feedback! We'll incorporate this on the home page...we posted this so we could get the hacker take on it :)

My first thoughts echoed some of these -- what are people thinking that I'd actually want to read?

Most thoughts that people (myself included) have are better off left in their heads... I worry this would be something like the experience of sitting at a restaurant near one of those people who speaks every thought that comes into their heads.

Now make it anonymous... I think there'd be a few large categories of thots, based on the motivations that would drive people to stop walking and type in the text of a thot... attempts to shock, attempts to be profound/fascinating, and simple brain dumps.

The actually interesting content would unfortunately be pretty rare, I'd guess, but I'm admittedly curious to know how it goes.

It could help to have some kind of crowd-sourced moderating approach, possibilities of flagging/banning the shockers/spammers, and/or ways to highlight users with frequently-liked thots. But still, filtering down the comments of the masses by the masses still gives you the quality of YouTube comment content.

Possibly better approach -- some way to let users self-categorize, and prioritize thots in the right category? It'd be interesting to crunch numbers out of the thots based on number of spelling errors, vocabulary range, like profiles, icon/mood/emoticon associated by the thot-thinker, etc., and let different users get differently-prioritized streams.

*edit: make slightly less curmudgeonly-sounding

Thanks for the feedback. I think we've accounted for this with the stream and how likes/dislikes work. By taking into account how people react, we want to make what resonates more visible. Kind of like HN (but I had never touched HN when I came up with this). As for flags, the threshold for nuking a Thot with a flag varies - it is a bit of our secret sauce as to how we optimize.

For self-categorization, that is coming in version 1.2 or 1.3. We know that as more people use it, content needs to get personalized. Definitely heading down that path quickly.

Quality content and the people who make it need to shine :)

The thing that facebook has taught me with a vengeance is that the definition of "quality content" is extremely subjective and personal. With my close friends, we often have a lot of overlap. But once I'm out of that small circle (into the larger & more intellectually diverse group of "everyone who has ever friended me for whatever reason"), there are tons of things people post that get lots of likes from their own circles of friends that I find trivial/boring/irrelevant, misguided/false, or even ideologically repugnant.

I'm not sure what kinds of content people are going to be posting as thots -- I'm curious about that (hopefully you'll post some data, like the okcupid data analyses at some point?), but I suspect that's going to be tricky to navigate.

Something like HN with a technical focus is safer ground -- but if people are making political "jokes" etc. in their thots (or thotting humor that treads the line of offensive), you could have a decent percentage of content that resonates greatly with some folks and really irritates others.

I have been working on almost this same project for a year, while I taught myself the proper way to code a project like this. Were it not for my slow grasp of MVC and Javascript's self model, I'd have not started over 20 times and been first! =) Looks great and I'll be excited to try it out.

Hey, best of luck! Ping me @kzorz if you want and maybe we can work together somehow instead of competing :)

Are you going to be doing some intense marketing in small geographic areas? This is the type of app that depends on high participation in a small area - I have a hard time seeing how it will succeed without focusing on a small area first.

Yes, we're starting on HN here just to get word out, but next up is hitting several cities in order. The stream makes it possible to enjoy without having anyone else nearby though, and you can keep participating in a thread you are in even after you've left an area.

Looks great. Citing a specific use case (whether in a particular area or event like a concert) would really help your intended audience understand how the app can be valuable.

Awesome concept

I like the look of the navigation banner, but for me it's really confusing to see more than one of them at once. "Features", for example, shows three copies down the page.

Thanks for the feedback! It's to allow better single page navigation right now, but we may change that soon.

Looks fantastic! I've had similar ideas over the years but never executed them. How geographically specific is each Thot?

Thanks!

Right now it is about 2km, but that will change as density increases.

We got written up in TheNextWeb! Thanks to Drew there for the article :)

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/10/26/thotly-asks-us-to-answ...

sounds like reddit / subreddits or maybe more like blockchalk

http://blog.blockchalk.com/post/323747254/blockchalk-arrives...

Haven't seen block chalk before - looks like no longer in the App Store. Thanks for telling us :)

they've pivoted because the idea didn't work, its now http://blockboard.org/

Looking at what they have now, they have a pretty different value proposition. I wish them the best with the pivot :)

just wondering what you think the difference in value proposition is ?

Well, BlockBoard looks more like a message board of commerce or friendly happenings. They want you to be identified as a person, which means you won't necessarily want to connect with everyone nearby.

For example, you don't really want to post in something like that that you think the Raiders are a terrible football team...at the raiders game...with your name on what you post along with a photo. You can get decked for it :P

What they appeal to more is those tightly knit communities of neighbors talking with each other and doing things, much different then we are.

Thotly is about ideas and what means something to you. Right now, what is happening or what you think. Soon, photos then sounds, music, questions, answers, whatever. We want to give people a way to say what they think and to be rewarded for that expression.

Think more like an idea forum than a bulletin board of stuff. BlockBoard has something good I think, but we aimed for something really different.

In the end though, it comes down to how people want to use it - that is our number one focus.

Wow, looks a lot like http://noyouu.com

You should use some nice examples in the front page, i can think of:

In the Movie Theater: "Mortal Kombat is a really cool movie! no plot though"

In a restaurant: "The spaguettis in this restaurant are just out of this world!"

You get the idea. And please integrate with twitter somehow (maybe a twitter client that also shows the "Thots") and also republish to twitter if the user wants to.

Edit: typo.

Thanks for the feedback!

Twitter is coming in just a day or two - but integration is tailored to letting you tweet what you found while keeping you unlinked from your Thotly device ID.

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