bubblic.co
We take privacy seriously, so all data are anonymized and are not sold to anyone.
So far, we had a user who said that 'had it not been for Bubblic, I might not be here today'. This gives us so much drive to carry on with our project!
We'd appreciate any feedback you have :)
Why should be excited about or support a mental health startup, who stands to make money when people have poor mental health?
Does anonymized voice interaction help more than it hurts? Do you have any idea what you're doing or are you just doing it? What personally motivates you and your team?
I was going through a long-distance relationship at that time, and the workload was tough during my PhD. I did have friends that I hung out and even went to cafes to study together, but once they got girlfriends and boyfriends, they left me... I was not their priority anymore.
It felt incredibly lonely and I could not get the kind of support from my girlfriend since she was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I needed someone that I could talk to and do things with, outside of the romantic boundary. I tried looking, but what I found online were all these dating apps that capitalized on precisely the romantically lonely men and women.
I really did not like how the tools that claim to help people find partners and meaningful connections boil people down to simple profiles consisting of several pictures and bullet points of what they are looking for. I think it honestly creates increasing number of people reporting feeling lonely because all these tools overemphasize on vanity and shallow qualities of a person instead of who they are.
I think the web can be a better place for people to find others who they resonate with, and the current offerings just do not cut it. Having personally experienced loneliness and finding no solutions for my problem back then, I vowed to create an app myself that I think can help people find meaningful connections. So, here I am. I quit my job at Apple last year to dive into this full time as I thought about the meaning in life and what I wanted to leave in this world, and I thought solving the problem of loneliness is the most personal and meaningful problem that I want to take on.
We did our job of putting this out there. We hope people from different pockets in the world who feel the same come and join us. If it does not turn out well, I think the journey was well worth it.
Isn't the traditional solution not just to pick up some hobby's, go out, some cultural events?
It's not easy at times, but especially at events with shared interests it's normally easiest to connect to like minded people, and those connection have a chance of lasting.
The map feature can help bridge the gap between online connection and real-life connection, in my opinion. If you see that person you are talking to is near you and you hit it off very well, you can decide to meet in real life and form the real-life relationship, whether friendship or romantic relationship. That is the ultimate goal!
I want Bubblic to be the stepping stone for meaningful connections, a means to a real-life connection :)
Apps like these offer ways to cope for the time being. There are millions of people treading water and the old coping mechanisms aren't working anymore.
Many people suffer in the dark. I hope Bubblic can be some sturdy straws for them to grab on to re-shore themselves.
If you crave social connections, but dont know how to make them, you havent learned a coreskill for being a human and there are much deeper issues, such as depression, at play. Would be time to look at therapy or other more structural solutions.
An app won't solve your social & community issues.
Personally I don't like talking to disembodied voices (why I don't play multiplayer games with random people) - and I live 5 minutes from a dozen bars if I feel like meeting strangers. But I can't see how it really hurts, if it doesn't become polluted with griefers and perverts.
I used to think this way about therapy. After all, they stop getting paid from you when you stop seeing them. But then I realized I love programming. It's my favorite thing to do, and I love getting paid for it too.
There are people that love what they do, and they should get paid for it just like anyone else. That being said, getting paid as a therapist is different than targeting infinite growth and profit. So hopefully this app is made by someone who likes the idea and wants to be paid, not someone just looking for a profit.
Someone has to pay for the servers and put food on the table... right? :P
I won't let profit take precedence over the mission that we started out with: to help people suffering from loneliness. It is personal to me since I have been through it, and I will keep iterating to make this platform the most useful to the people it serves.
Then we got a tremendous response from various forums including Hacker News and Reddit, that we decided to pursue this idea further and develop into an app.
Our team is me, my wife, and a friend from South Africa that I met on the LonelyWorld website! I realize that had I never launched that mini MVP, I wouldn't have met my friend to work on my mission together! The mantra is right: one should always build in public :)
How do you ensure user privacy? If someone accessed your data could they link voice messages with email address?
All the voice notes and locations are anonymized, as in, the database for userId and email is separate from anonymized Id linked to the voice and location data.
Specifically, I use AWS Cognito for the email addresses, and DynamoDB for anonymized ID : voice notes and location data.
If you have a better suggestion, please let me know!
- Stripping data of any direct identifiers, such as user ID or name, before collection. - Manipulating data to break the linkage and prevent re-linkage to real-world identities.
Additionally, in order for data not to be linked to a particular user’s identity, you must avoid certain activities after collection:
- You must not attempt to link the data back to the user’s identity. - You must not tie the data to other datasets that enable it to be linked to a particular user’s identity.
We do not attempt to link the data back to user's identity or tie the datasets to enable them to be linked.
If you have a more technical solutions/suggestions, we are all ears. Thank you very much!
Makes me think about if the user looses the key (uninstalls app, etc) what would be the recovery methods, if any?
Meanwhile, feel free to create an account and explore the app, even just by listening to other recordings! And only when you feel comfortable sharing your thoughts with your voice, you can participate.
This reminds me of, e.g., Eliza or situations that throw you into the role of therapist, or asking for therapy. Or Love Line from the 90s. It's actually quite good because it requires a lot of concentration and thought.
I don't know if it will take off. I don't have high hopes. But I think it would be great if it did. It has the exact type of trade-off and waiting/thinking period prior to response that is so missing from all of the current social platforms. You can respond, but you must listen and respond thoughtfully.
Maybe part of what I'm appreciating is that it has an inherent anti-bot mechanism, which is that it's all just human voice.
It's touching and sweet, as well. It's hard to define what I mean by that, but this piece of code has soul that almost everything these days lacks.
In the past few hours I've exchanged voicemails of support with people from Malaysia to Seattle, and it's surprisingly normal, like being the 3rd guy down the bar to throw in a piece of advice, but you can actually talk to people because you gotta listen to them. It's almost one of those things that's so stupidly brilliant, it's incredible no one thought of it before.
I hope it takes off.
I think you really get the intent of our app. We think there is a big chunk of humanity missing from all the app offerings out there that unfortunately tend to amplify misinterpretation and distrust all for the sake of eyeballs on screen.
And I also agree with your sentiment that this might not take off. I think apps with sexual and stimulating aspects that give instant dopamine hit would have a better chance of going viral, to be honest. But, in the world of fast-food apps, we want to create a whole-some app that people can get spiritual nourishment from. It might take a while, but we believe it is the right and the good thing for humanity :)
Also I think HN is good to get technical advice from but in this case getting advice from mental health experts is definitely needed.
Wish you the best :)
We will refer to some mental experts for this part. Thanks again!
And there might be a time where you feel you need to be heard, or even find someone who might be going through the same thing that you previously went through, and you can offer help!
Plus, this is the first iteration of the app. We do envision creating a platform for the general public not just for lonely people to discover meaningful connections that you wouldn't have been able to with other apps or just by bumping into strangers in real life.
A feature that would be great here though is to have realtime conversations, I think you can connect a lot more when it’s realtime. Also supporting text replies could be really helpful.
Anyway, love what you’re building here and hope it goes well!
In fact, we tried making real-time conversation feature in our previous mini-MVP, and the difficulty there was that 1. people were too hesitant to jump in a phone call 2. people were never online at the same time 3. conversations could not be enjoyed by other listeners in different times.
I have tried using Clubhouse for a while, and did not like the dynamics there, where you would only have a few speakers talking at the same time like MCs while the audience can only listen. I think by focusing on asynchronous voice messages, this platform can help individuals make connections with other individuals, which is not offered by any platforms out there.
I hope you continue to enjoy using it! And we would appreciate any feedback you have :)
We do have moderation functions available already by the way of individuals reporting the abusers.
I do really want to try it out though, it seems like a great idea and I'm excited by the stories I hear and I want to contribute.
Or, can you try signing up by creating a user ID? We do not sell your data, and your email is NOT linked to your voice notes (they are in separate database and the user IDs are anonymized by hashing). I would really love for you to try it out!
edit: hope this helps. I'm on a pixel 5 and use Firefox as my browser including for app webviews
Sorry that we did not catch this earlier :(
As an engineer I wonder if/how you would open this up to a wider audience (behind “lonely” users). Moderation is the first issue that comes to mind, but I’m guessing that’s already a concern with the current audience.
We first wanted to attack the 'hair on fire' problem as Paul Graham states it, creating solutions for people who really need this connection platform that is different from others because they would tolerate it even if our platform is sucky!
Moderation is easier on this platform I think, and so far we did not have to moderate any content. I think it is self-policing by nature because people need to speak what they want to share and also share their approximate location.
Already in listening through what is on there, a few people were clearly depressed, and lending support to those people is awesome, but also difficult to sustain (for any given individual).
And a couple of very interesting occasions were when the people who initially reported 'lonely' decided to become 'supporters' because they wanted to give back to the community for the support they got, and wanted to help others who are in need more than themselves. I found that very touching :')
In the near future, we plan to implement private messaging functions, which will be end-to-end encrypted. Upcoming feature! :)
Best of luck on your app!
Do you use uploaded voice messages to train AI models?
Do you share any data uploaded by users (either in raw or aggregate form, including "anonymized") with third parties?
What identifiers do you collect during signup and with your phone apps?
Are you GDPR compliant? Where is your formal privacy policy? A single-sentence promise doesn't cut it.
Who is actually behind this? "Mountain View, CA" is not an address, despite what your website claims.
With a service like this one, privacy is the elephant in the room. The information you currently provide on that topic is nowhere near sufficient.
We do not use it to train any models or share the data with ANYONE.
I currently work from home with my wife, we are not incorporated yet. I live in Mountain View, CA right now. Do you suggest that I put my home address there?
We are GDPR compliant. We do not sell or share users' data and we let them know what kind of data we collect for what purposes. Plus, users can delete their data COMPLETELY from our system with a single button within the app. No emailing or calling a number shenanigans.
That would be a silly objection, like claiming restaurants are exploiting people's hunger by selling food for money.
That being said, the moment such a platform makes a single iota of data about their users (even seemingly mundane information such as how many users there are, their geographic distribution, how many messages the average user writes etc.) available to anyone for any purpose – including research and non-profit purposes – I would consider the whole enterprise to have turned unethical. It doesn't matter whether the field of psychology could benefit from it, or what the "greater good" might be. It has to be crystal clear and non-negotiable that the only use for those messages is going to be letting other regular users listen to them.
You should also think about what you will do in case law enforcement demands access to user data. The less information you store, the better. Consider automatically deleting messages after a period of time, or similar proactive measures. And of course, maintain a strict process for disposing of backups, else the "delete my data" function is effectively worthless.
Regarding law enforcement: I think that could be a good idea. Have the data permanently deleted after a period of time and/or ensure backups are deleted completely. Thank you for your feedback!
A bit of a broken analogy, but if I were to indulge, it’s similar to denying rice to starving people who’ve lost all worldly possessions in a war-ravaged country because they couldn’t pay up.
There are wellness apps that give a no-questions-asked zero subscription to anyone who says they can't afford the cost. This is potentially one way out. But a freemium model, where paying people get better features of some consequence, is a little demoralizing, and you probably don't want to demoralize people with mental health issues, IMHO
Ok. I wasn't able to find it myself because AFAICT, it isn't linked from your homepage. To quote https://gdpr.eu/privacy-notice/ (emphasis added):
"Every organization that maintains a website should publish their privacy notice there, under the title “Privacy Policy,” and it should be accessible via a direct link from every webpage."
> Do you suggest that I put my home address there?
I suggest that you speak to a legal professional to answer that question. You are collecting some very sensitive, highly intimate data from users. I'm not sure whether such an enterprise lends itself to a "run from home" setup. You should definitely get advice from a competent professional as to what regulations apply, and which information you are required to provide.
But you haven't answered my first and most important question: How are you planning to monetize this? As you are no doubt aware, businesses that start out with good (or vague) intentions have a tendency to turn to the dark side once their userbase is big enough to be of interest to data miners. In order to prevent this, you need a steady revenue stream that covers your costs so you can avoid selling your soul to VCs and tracking companies. Where will that revenue stream come from?
As far as monetization goes, we plan to add premium features like stickers, and voice changers. There will be people who do not want to talk with their voice precisely for the reason you mentioned: one can consider it to be a sensitive data. Why do we want to offer voice-alteration as a paid feature? Because, if it is free for all, we fear that there will be people abusing the feature that jeopardizes the authenticity of the platform.
We do NOT plan to sell or share users' data with a third party, or use users' data to train an internal AI model because I think that fundamentally betrays the goodwill that users bring to our platform.
Have you considered limiting the number of voice messages non-paying users can post? As in, free users can post up to 5 messages per month, while paying users can post an unlimited number. Everybody can listen to as many messages as they want. The desire to "get your voice out" can be a powerful incentive to subscribe.
I think having voice alteration as a premium feature so that it is not abuse-able but accessible to people who are willing to pay for it for the extra layer of privacy, could be a net boon for the network. Still food for thought :)