Show HN: TrollBlock, It's Okay to Dislike | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TrollBlock, It's Okay to Dislike

trollblock.com

88 pointsbretthardin64 comments

I don't know about others, but anything that requires me to log in with Facebook ends up stopping me from using it because I don't want all my contacts to see that I signed up for it.

fragsworth. We will implement other logins soon. This was just an MVP and we wanted to have something "in the real world" to avoid people posting racist items.

I think you forgot the "V" in MVP... If we are free to be assholes in the social network and say what we really think ('cuz we are all assholes deep inside :-) ), the very last thing I want to do is tie it to my real-life account on FB.

Easy for you guys to implement, yes. "Viable"? I think not.

not sure if they implemented this in this mv?p but there is a trivial and at the same time incredibly unused solution: just add a checkbox "post anonimously" next to every interaction form.

Viable? Who knows. Hilarious? Yes! Now let us click through to peoples' profiles to view all their posts and it'll be awesome!

A social network that bases itself on the idea that by default you're "friends" with everybody should not have any barrier to entry, by the basic philosophy of the thing.

If I can't see why I might want to join without joining, I'm not going to join, plain and simple.

Are you sure you don't want to ban swear words too? Banning racist remarks on a trolling platform seems almost like forbidding anything pink on a my little pony site.

Statistics* show that conversions go up when users are offered a social alternative.

* I don't know where these stats are, or what the figures actually are. People just keep telling me this over and over again.

alternative is the key word there. trollblock gives you no other option

I agree 100%. I was going to give it a shot but I won't use anything that requires a facebook login either.

I cannot agree more. I deleted my facebook account.

I don't want Facebook knowing I used this, or anyone else, or anything. Just no.

It sounds interesting, however the dependency on Facebook makes me not want to even try it. What about it requires Facebook integration?

We just needed it for faster integration. And we want to steal market share from FB. :)

Try BrowserID, it has the fastest integration I've ever used (this is with django).

Great idea. We may integrate that into the system in the next day or so.

This seems to be the theory https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Identity/VerifiedEmailProtocol Can any HN folk comment on the quality of security this provides?

Heck, I don't even like using services with a Facebook button.

But without a "Like" button, how else will you communicate to the world that you cry every time you read the story?

I was thinking that this was going to be a filter on HN that blocked the comments by people you didn't like. That would be kind of a cool project. Basically, you could click "hide" and no longer see comments by a particular person. Over time, it could use clustering and machine learning to decide which comments you should see.

someday I hope the progress of technology will bring us back up to the level of 1980s killfiles ;-)

Much like the aphorism about all sufficiently complex programs effectively striving to re-implement Lisp, I think all sufficiently complex social sites are effectively striving to re-create usenet in its heyday.

I see a list of "Most disliked users" and "Most blocked users" once I'm logged in. That seems like this is going to be a competition to be blocked with people intentionally acting like trolls. I wouldn't want to spend time on the site if that's what ends up happening.

Michael, agreed. After you block people, the firehouse becomes more consumable. It was built in 30 hours. We will figure out better "games" in the future.

Yes, don't get me wrong, I like the idea of blocking people and understand the stage of development. I created an account and would like to participate. My feedback is not to encourage trolling. I'd like to see a system that rewards the person with the best message/block ratio.

Good luck with the project. I look forward to seeing it grow.

Startup Weekend Project!

Reason you should use it? By default you receive everyones posts. It's up to you to block who and what you don't want to see.

Check it out! Thanks.

We built this during Startup Weekend San Jose this weekend. It's built on node.js, socket.io, mongodb, redis and knockoutjs on the front end. Check it out - social networking in reverse!

mongo and redis - aren't both of those designed to serve basically the same purpose? why both?

Well, I used redis to hold a few sets for each user. You can atomically add items to sets in redis. Mongodb doesn't support this functionality (AFAIK). MongoDB is great for dumping and retrieving lots of data and is more durable than redis. Haven't built a site using these tools before so has all been a learning experience.

Redis now uses the same journaling for durability that Mongo does. What you get with Redis is complex atomic ops and transactions, but at the cost of not having sharding.

Take a look at the $push and $addToSet[1] update operators in mongodb. They are both for atomically adding one or more elements to an array in an object. On the other hand, MongoDB doesn't support server-side set union or intersection so if you are using those features redis would still probably be a good use there.

[1] http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Updating#Updating-%24add...

The way your HN title is written it makes your project look like a fb plug in or somthing. You may be more direct in what is your interesting project about.

Other attempts from the past: http://fiendster.com

I feel like this is exactly what's going on with the HN G+ circle. About 80% are reposters, who I immediately remove from circles, about 15% post interesting stuff, and about 5% are just people sort of worth following like Linus Torvalds and Richard Branson.

I would definitely try it if for no other reason than the novelty. But I don't enjoy logging into facebook to check facebook... much less logging into facebook to check some other social networking site.

Cool idea, though.

This is a case where using Bootstrap didn't help them with having a clean design out of the gate.

I like the idea, but there is pretty much no way I'm going to authenticate with Facebook, simply because it looks so unprofessional and ugly.

A few simple changes, like not using the purple on grey, not using the color pink at all (there are lots of sites that will help you generate a good color pallet), and being more consistent with your padding between rows, would go a long way.

I'm afraid designers were few and far between at the SWSJ event and we didn't have one on the team.

I actually think this solves some serious problems.

I think most non-trolls don't realize how powerful the 'dislike' button is. With a like or upvote button, you don't do anything by way of separating trolls from real content. That's what the 'no' is for, and websites shouldn't be afraid of that.

Seriously, from here on out it should rapid cross-platform expansion. I'm looking at you, Youtube.

I like the idea, and tried to share the site on Facebook. For some reason it came out with just the link and no descriptive text (usually you get the first few sentences from the page, which you can then edit). Something in the way the code is being generated, maybe?

Maybe if they have a blank meta description HTML tag?

Yeah, we didn't right a meta tag... On the to do list.

Yes, you need to make that "Like" convert to a nice meta tag and full description, with the trollface thumbnail.

If you want a proper thumbnail & description when people share your site on Facebook, consider using the Open Graph meta tags starting with "og:" which Facebook parses: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/objects/

Just FYI - site appears to be down at the moment. Overloaded?

Confirmed by http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/trollblock.com

There have been intermittent issues. I was driving home from SWSJ and unable to deal with it for around an hour earlier this evening. Trying to fix a few bugs in the code now.

I think it would be funny if you started out blocked by everyone since you are the owner, sort of a joke at Tom from Myspace.

And that's an interested idea, how do you think user growth will affect this model?

No idea. We are playing with it and figure it out.

Maybe you can get an initial block of 100 people to follow and have a "Give me 100 new friends" button which gives the user another 100 random people to follow.

Heads up: remove the comma between "are friends" and "with everyone."

I think they wanted to add it for a dramatic pause. Maybe an ellipsis would work better. "As soon as you start using TrollBlock you are friends... with everyone."

This reminds me of the Professional where Gary Oldman says "Bring me everyone. EVERYONE." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB_deAcoC2I

Then a hyphen would be better:

"As soon as you start using TrollBlock you are friends - with everyone."

Actually that situation calls for an em dash.

Added Elipses for dramatic pause!

Misspelling on front page with "consantly"..

"The content that you see is consantly changing based on who is using TrollBlock"

Thanks. I am a pretty bad speeler. :) Will fix it soon.

After reading the front page, it's not obvious to me why anyone would use this. What is the use case you had in mind?

Hardest part about social networks is getting people you know on this site. With this, everyone is your friend to start with.

And yet you know none of the people...?

I'm guessing you'd get to know them by their posts, and day by day eliminate the ones you don't really want to hear about... would be cool if when you dislike they just appear less often, so there is no need to block

Interesting idea, I'll definitely try it once I can login some other way.

HN effect? Site is down.

I think it's hilarious and I'm proud to link it to FB :)

Finally!

Guys, don't listent to wrong feedback coming out of... whatever. Trollblock is an awesome resource for trolling and you should stick to that idea. Comments should be hella funny and yeah, keep the facebook login. Otherwise u'll have a bunch of weirdo nazis screaming out loud. Cool stuff!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com