Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites

townsquare.cauenapier.com

278 pointscauenapier168 comments

https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/

I just took a look at the page's own 'town square'. At the moment, it's largely full of people saying offensive things for the sake of it.

After having been a moderator for a number of communities over the years—BBCs in the 90s, niche forums during the 00s & 10s, Reddit boards in the 20s—I’ve come to believe that running shadow services where disruptive individuals can comingle may be the best way to handle this.

The advent of LLMs really opens the door to shunting off these “community members “ who’d rather contribute in misanthropic ways for the lulz than either leave or not contribute at all. They can take part in an interactive echo chamber that gives just as well as they can. You don’t even need a powerful model so the overall costs to the community are probably lower than the alternatives of trying to coexist with community-arsonists.

I spent years trying to find ways to bring people productively “into the fold” but eventually realized that it is futile in some cases because there’s zero value to the individual or the community to find a middle ground. They want to see things burn, and the community simply wants them out.

But why not kick them out? Why bother with a shadow site for them?

If they don't know they're being quarantined, there's no reason for them to find a way around their block. They'll eventually tucker themselves out and move on to whatever their internet equivalent of burning ants with a magnifying glass is.

I used to run a small MMORPG. I only had to ban a player once but when I did they made it their life's mission to get around it and spam profanities. They went through every proxy in existence and I had to resort to banning whole IP ranges to keep them out.

The same reason people get shadowbanned. If they know they are banned they will attempt to work around it.

One day I'll find out that I've been shadow banned from HN, and all of you were bots all along, lolz

That defines planet earth nicely. Everybody here is shadow banned and has issues to sort out.

If they believe they’re still trolling people they will keep doing so and won’t make an alternative account and will keep harassing bots instead of real people.

This suggestion is scarier than the thought someone might say a slur.

You're talking about using a machine to detect social undesirables then quarantining them in the matrix.

A slur is rarely the problem. Trolls can (sometimes) add flavor to a community and keep things interesting. Mostly they can be an annoyance.

I’m specifically referring to people who have seemingly made it their sole purpose to create as much indiscriminate damage as possible.

You can ban them, block routes for them to attempt to Sybil themselves back to having accounts, etc. but even with great moderation tools and systems, it’s extremely difficult to set up a strong enough set of controls which don’t adversely impact everyone else who you want to have participate in the community.

Yes, a shadow environment is dystopian. It’s not my nature to want to even consider using one.

But we’re talking about privately run communities which also deserve to exist to serve their purposes.

So given the choice between anarchy which drives away people who contribute to make the community what it is and a shadow option for those actively working against its interests, I’ll consider the community first.

You may have misinterpreted my comment. I’m not suggesting you use LLMs as moderators. I’m talking about using LLMs as participant “members” of this shadow board to interact with someone whose account was flagged by a human moderator.

If someone is able to get around a ton of banning techniques, they will definitely notice they're shadowbanned.

In some cases, I’m sure you are right. That said, the online communities which currently employ shadowban systems continue to use them. That tells me there’s a value greater than their implementation and operation costs.

There is no perfect tech solution to a human problem. But in my opinion, having access to a partial mitigation is better than no mitigation.

There’s a difference between someone who is occasionally abrasive and mentally ill people want to destroy things other people enjoy.

If it's your forum you can do whatever you want with it.

Edit: Welcome to Hacker News btw! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618488 looks like a great project and I put it in the second-chance pool (explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309).

---

Can you please edit out swipes like "Do you hear yourself?". This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing the other guidelines too, we'd appreciate it. Note this one, for example:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

this comment immediately replying to "You're talking about using a machine to detect social undesirables then quarantining them in the matrix." raises interesting questions about the nature and purpose of dangbot

I would be happy to edit but I don't think I yet have the ability. Cheers.

Normally I'd say not to bother, but since your GP post got some interesting replies, I think it's a good idea so I've re-opened it for editing.

If you do that, let me know and I'll unflag the post and collapse the moderation bits ;)

Appreciated! It's edited.

Ok, all done. Thanks.

Yes this is the way, give no affordance that they are banned

Within about 300ms I thought “moderation is going to be a problem”.

Why? Messages disappear after a few seconds. So all messages are self moderating!

AI can moderate given specific instructions to prevent anything that can damaged the brand's image.

Yeah, I had exactly the same thought.

Maybe a really lightweight fast LLM could moderate messages in realtime. Not sure how pricey that would get though.

No matter how cheap per request, someone will figure out a way to DoS that endpoint, and it will be extremely pricy unless you have effective rate limiting.

The OpenAI moderation endpoint is free and it doesn't count toward the usage limit.

Extremely if not behind substantially cheaper anti spam measures.

Further it may still make sense to use human reports to gate some automation even if it slows response.

So it’s a twitter plugin?

Love it, also love that there's one HN visitor just hanging out typing "dick and balls" over and over again. That's unmoderated anonymous public squares for you

That was dang if I'm not mistaken.

That person is still spamming the service even after 21 hours

Most of it were bots programmed to be saying silly things. I have already implemented some better counter-actions to that. This are much calmer now that the HN post is not on front page anymore.

The contrast between the example screenshots and the standard internet behavior in the live demo is hilarious

To paraphrase, there's no scheme for moderation / censoring / filtering that survives contact with the Internet. It simply can't be done. People take it as a challenge, and you can't design a system that handles it while remaining useful.

If you ban words, people will introduce typos / different spelling. If you ban concepts people will change the concepts (see the "unalive" thing that's popular now). If people want to be miserable, they will be miserable. And they'll invent new words, or use euphemisms to get their point across.

Oh how fun. Sadly I went there and someone has botted it with “dick and balls” constantly being spammed by multiple people. But that’s to be expected when something gets attention. On other sites I can see this being nice addition. And a great concept.

Most of it were bots programmed to be saying silly things. I have already implemented some better counter-actions to that. This are much calmer now that the HN post is not on front page anymore. it is pretty fun when you meet someone on a site and had an interesting conversation

I'm interested in trying a moderation scheme that puts the power in the receiving client, with opinionated defaults. Let the client filter for itself, mute users for itself, and make users invisible to itself. Have default settings that make sense for the app, but let the user override them.

Use a cheap purpose-built LLM like OpenAI's free moderation endpoint to classify the text and send the original text plus the classification to clients, and let clients choose what to do with it, with opinionated defaults appropriate to the app.

Maybe you still need to identify persistent bad actors rather than acting only on content. But still, allow clients to decide what to do with that information.

I suppose my thinking is that strong default automatic moderation that's invisible to offenders is a requirement for a project like this to be able to offer a welcoming experience to users, but putting the power in an LLM and fixed filter lists feels very wrong. So my thought is to use those things to give the client power. But maybe that makes no difference if nobody changes settings away from defaults anyway.

on the other hand, if someone is making their own site, they may care about the user impression their site gives to visitors.

i would think they should have the freedom on the site they build and host to choose the impression they give. and sure, if they choose to let their square be filled with noise rather than signal, that’s absolutely their choice. but they also may choose for it to be filled with signal rather than noise. the key thing is the site owner should have the choice to give whatever impression they want for their creation.

again, if they want that impression to be hijacked by noisy trolls, they can choose that too.

Is this related to my comment in a way I'm not understanding?

well yes, you indicate all of the moderation should be handled on the visitors end. i’m saying if the site owner is specifically intending the visitor to have a certain experience designed by the site owner themselves, then clients choosing their own moderation is the opposite of this.

if we limited it to client side only, the creator of the site has lost their choice of how they prefer their site to come across.

and for sure, some people may absolutely prefer to send an experience full of noise that overshadows the rest of their site.

I see. It seemed unrelated to me because I talked about strong opinionated defaults, which is, to me, entirely about the creator choosing how their site comes across. I don't think being able to turn showdead on here on HN significantly changes how the site comes across, but it being on by default would.

Assuming one can keep bots out, I always wondered why people don't just let the users moderate themselves? You could have a system where someone who gets consistently downvoted by enough people eventually just gets muted or kicked/banned for example.

I made something similar last year: A p2p chat popup (that sits on bottom right of the page as a bubble) that allows all visitors to chat with each other. It had simple keyword based moderation in-built (can be easily bypassed though).

Was planning to add github oauth to get a known identity and persistent messaging so visitors can chat with each other across sites.

Instead of a webmaster adding script to their site, it was a browser extension.

The intent was two folds:

1. Get to know other people having similar interests,

2. Try something on the lines of a decentralized chat/messaging system.

It sounds like a nice idea, but probably only one of those things that work only once at scale - with hundreds of millions of pages, you will only meet others on the most common ones unless the extension is already very popular?

That's true.

Site-local chat was meant to be the default way. But, was not restricted to that. People could keep whitelisted list of sites that they are open to get pings/DM's from.

I was still not able to figure out the privacy-focused, and local, interest matching part since it was meant to be p2p (without any server storage), and local storage can easily be tweaked.

If this was solved, my plan then was to automatically suggest people who may have similar interests depending on the sites they browse, for how long, and the messages they generally send.

Kinda like tinder, but, you don't have to sign-up and install no app.

The network effect is HARD

Moderation moderation moderation . It’s a big problem

I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed

The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol

So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere

What is the difference between slurs and swears?

Slurs are targeted towards specific groups of people (or I guess just anyone? "Clanker" is considered a slur, and you can probably come up with plenty of slurs for animals, they just won't be considered offensive and socially unacceptable like the ones for humans)

…or you could just let people talk? People who engage with social features generally do so because they want to talk to other people. That carries some inherent risks.

No? Especially not in my case where it’s a share artefact that is intended to be shared with others on various platforms.

Having my game aesthetic + slur on a sharing artefact is a great way for people to think my game encourages that crap and to “cancel” the game.

Not that I agree with, or care about, cancel culture - but I don’t want people in general associating my game with slurs.

I’m all for swearing and saying funny things that are not pc, but I draw the line at harmful offensive content.

Do what you wish but do no harm unto others.

I get the desire to moderate your game, but how are words 'harmful' exactly? Especially random, throwaway internet spew. Harmful to your game's reputation, maybe. But to the people?

[flagged]

> call your wife a fat sow everyday in earnest for a year and see if she isn’t granted a divorce for maltreatment.

Is this an appeal to the law or something? It's not a very good argument. Many things which are harmful are not illegal. Many things which are illegal are not harmful.

Also, that's not even how divorce works!

> no one is claiming words are physically harmful

"speech is violence" is a position that some people hold.

> if words had no power, we wouldn’t fight so hard to protect them from government abuse.

People fight hard for all kinds of nonsense. Historically, people have fought hard for things that didn't matter at all.

Clearly you haven't been exposed to much of the underbelly of the internet. Words can translate to physical harm and actions in the real world, and do regularly

I grew up on the internet, I doubt there's any level of textual depravity I haven't seen.

This sounds like a disingenuous argument to actually try to argue for more racism. Every kid in the world has been called stupid by a classmate and knows that words aren't meaningless.

Who said that words are meaningless?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620564

>> if words had no power, we wouldn’t fight so hard to protect them from government abuse.

>People fight hard for all kinds of nonsense.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/nonsense

I think you've failed to understand the words in question, rather than them being meaningless

I think you're a troll who should be banned from this site for wasting everyone's time.

Hm, can't really have engaging discussions with people who just don't understand what's being said. Can't force the information into their brains so we can do that either. Not sure which action you'd like me to take to improve this situation, then.

when I entered site, all bubbles contained dicks/balls and combination of these... so... someone found words that are not banned, but still abused forum in most primitive way ..

you're wrong, moderation is needed in ventures like this

The demo widget right now is botted with people spamming nonsense to the point of breaking browsers, much less the intended use. "let people talk" is not the same as "give disruptive people the tools to prevent others from talking"

Yea I think this was somewhat true back in 2001. With bots composing half the traffic of the internet, governments controlling massive social botnets and the polarization of politics everywhere, the internet became a full scale spam/hate fest

I don't think horrible people (eg racist, xenophobic, bigots) have the right to share space with good, kind people.

They have the privilege they forfeit the moment they try to hurt others. If they don't behave like cunts I don't care, but if they do, I'll use any tool I have at my disposal to bar them from the space they don't respect. They can talk to their kind in the nasty spaces anyway, so it's not like they're in the solitary confinement.

Nah, drive those horrible people out of social spaces. I want to talk to other people without racist assholes bumbling around.

Being a racist asshole carries some inherent risks too, like people choosing not to let you enter their spaces.

more than anything it’s just signal to noise ratios.

i’m so sick of people just adding dipshit noise to every single place they can and making it impossible to have normal ass conversation.

at the end of the day, these people need to realize the simple shit we realize in like 1st grade: if you’re an asshole to everyone around you, no one will want to be around you.

it really is that simple. but for some reason some of these people struggle to understand basic ass things little kids learn easily.

Unlike a playground assholes on the internet realize a couple things:

1. Theres a near endless supply of assholes

2. If youre loud enough and an asshole enough you'll find other assholes.

3. Your new found group of assholes can then go off and terrorize other people while attracting more assholes.

In a small local scene with several whatsapp groups, I put "don't be an edgelord" as a catch-all rule rule when I started a discord in the community.

Lo and behold, the EXACT person I had in mind when making the rule, moaned about it.

Works as intended.

There was a thing from the 90s kind of like this called Third Voice. It was a cool idea, but I remember there being a lot of backlash from brands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice

Matt Webb made a version of this (and wrote about it) a while back—Cursor Party: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party

I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.

I love the idea, but it’s a real shame how people are using it. I wonder if AI can moderate it for offensiveness and spam prevention

Well, this is the behaviour of the crowd. Before HN, or even if you go to other websites that are using TownSquare, it can be quite fun.

A hade a lot of very funny and meaningful interaction with people visiting the sites

> NOTE: This project has been mostly vibe-coded

I deeply appreciate the honesty here. I’ll pass based on the vibecodedness of it but perhaps it won’t be a dealbreaker for others.

Yeah. I also don’t like the fact the dev posts the link and doesn’t interact with anyone here at all, so the link posting is effectively spray and pray abandonware too. Easy come easy go like they say

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cauenapier shows a bunch of comments from the dev.

Sorry! I wasn't present because the post went to the FrontPage while I was at Rock in Rio. Two days of shows, going to sleep at 5 am. The original post didn't get to the FrontPage, but just later it got bumped.

Is it the philosophical reason you refuse to engage or is it because you don’t trust the security of this project?

Easy come, easy go. I find most vibe coded projects are abandonware.

Also, in this context, security.

Neat idea! It's simple but very effective - and I really enjoy the detail of the benches and the tree. Very nice.

I wouldn't add it to any of my sites due to the unmoderated nature of it - seeing some fairly unsavory things in your demo - but that's just a little tweak, I'm sure!

Actually, there is moderation. The problem is that the page came to HN before I added the moderation keywords or implemented more things :P But overall, it's possible.

On the details like benches and trees, you can also customize it. YOu can add as many props as you want, wherever you want, and style them accordingly. :)

Love the idea, I added to my site!

I know it might be too much to ask for, but it would be great to have the ability to add your own props, like an icon and how to animate it. I would love to add maybe cats or drones icons that also move around!

That's also coming! It's already in the roadmap since the beginning. I'll add some of those props myself, but I'm working on a plugin architecture so people can add their own stuff.

openai has a free moderation endpoint. no reason to not use it.

edit: downvoters either know something I don't about its unsuitability, or have outdated info on it and think it's against terms to use it for reasons unrelated to GPT. it's not against terms.

> no reason to not use it

Except that sending all your private communications to a big scary corporation is generally frowned upon.

If your website attracts such elements perhaps there's a reason?

The demo is attracting the HN crowd and it’s getting… well, let’s just say this crowd is about as good as it gets online.

The HN crowd is about as worst as it gets. The people here are really bad.

I think the HN crowd might be the worst commentariat on a site that isn't explicitly focused on antisocial behaviour.

You clearly haven't visited any Buddhist forums, or generally non-islamic religious forums

Love the idea. Could use some filters and stale (sleeping) clients could get removed quicker.

Also, it seemed to be disconnecting quite often, maybe a hug of death thing.

Yeah, I'll definatelly improve that! I wasn't expecting HN crowd :sweat

> A problem repeatedly occurred on https://cauenapier.com/

People are flooding the channel with messages, causing the widget to use too many resources on ios; and the website is being endlessly reloaded.

Any idea how to fix this? Bonus points for user friendly non technical solutions, ie is there a way to design an online social space where people want to collaborate and their first thought isn’t trolling?

I’m not on pc so can’t inspect it, but make it a sandboxes iframe so it can’t interact with the parent site.

Is there a way to throttle iframe cpu usage ?

You could probably queue messages, cull old messages, cap concurrent connections. That may be the issue is too many peers

Nobody trolled it before the HN FrontPage.

Whatever it is, if something hit the crowd, you will end up with people trolling. No matter how much moderation you add.

You can check it now and things are much calmer and friendlier. The same if you go to other people's websites using TownSquare.

Regaring the mobile resources usage, I'll need to fix it. I'll be working on it next.

This is really cool. Is there anyway to keep some people off my small part of the webverse?

Having read some of the comments, I'd happily use if there was a way to blast (prefarably with a Doom shotgun) some of the miscreants from appearing, but only on my site, and maybe some filters (slurs, etc) that auto-ban them that I can set. Other people could moderate as they will but I'm kind of tired of the toxic people ruining everything.

Yeah, there is kicking and ban features. As well as forbidden words.

But I'm also adding more moderation functionalities. Feel free to send me an email with more ideas :D

Nevertheless, in general, the sites using TownSquare are much much quieter then the landing page.

I love the idea! The next step is to add role play games in town squares.

I was thinking the same thing, or even just little minigames and Easter eggs for people to find.

That's definitely coming!

Built something like this for the v1.0 launch of RedwoodSDK in March; but it's a popularity graph (like the time scrubber on YouTube). I figured that it could be useful to myself, and others, to aggregate the information that people find most useful.

https://rwsdk.com

I've always wondered if we could find a way to add content website's content without it turning into a shitshow. MLS listings / Zillow is an interesting use-case. A realtor might describe something as "sun-filled" but omit that the home is next to a 24/7 dump truck repair warehouse.

Make a MapleStory-like one where each website can design their own room, and you can kill mobs and bosses and stuff. It would be neat if the characters and items persisted between.

Edit: a super smash brothers-like would be fun too. Maybe the page itself could be the platforms.

This is great! Thank you for sharing it. Fun to use and already customizable.

Thanks! And more customizations are coming!

I messed around some, talked to two people. Watched the birds fly.

I did the "go to next town" It worked, but then I got to (https://emilesilvis.com/) and got stuck. The Town Square is in 1/2 the page, so you can't get to the two ends to be able to go to the next town.

I've been playing with presence too...! I def am thinking about using it more for real-time motion communication (which is largely missing from web) rather than text (which is very overrepresented, and where most moderation comes in).

I was toying with the idea of making a little crowd representation sticky at the bottom, like watching a screen together :)

Regardless, I love concepts like this. Thanks!

rather interesting, except the spamming of the inappropriate messages.

The spamming and trolling was just an issue during the HN traffic spike. Now things are much calmer and more interesting. Additionally, I'm also adding more moderation and counter-bot mechanism.

This is so cool, gonna add this to my game website. This can easily help to get me multiplayer matching in the game.

Cool! Let me know when you add it! I'll like to make a blog post about it :)

I added it in my game website: Ghostfleet.in, check it out. There is a need for moderation in the player names too, chat moderation may not be sufficient and names can be swear words too!!

A couple comments -

Internal link to blog gives 403 https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/blog/

Townsquare is probably not the best name - there are tons of things already with that name

Oh noo, thanks to mention it! It was working recently. I'll fix it asap.

Regarding the name, I'm exploring other ideas, but that's not hard.

This was actually a lot of fun. Not as much trolling as I anticipated. Surprising amount of normal chit chat.

When you go to a nice website and encounter people with similar interests reading the same thing, the experience is awesome!

this is a very clever concept. I'll keep it in mind for the future - when my app site has persistent amount of visitors. Are there some rules/settings for stop words to prevent some types of abuse? Or is it planned?

Thanks!! :D Yes there is already rules/settings to stop words and ban people. I'm also improving overall moderation and banning mechanisms.

This is amazing! Congratulations on the launch. Repository link somewhere?

In the footer. https://github.com/cauenapier/TownSquare

In case you wanted a comment section but less civilized

I enjoyed the design.

Thaaanks :D

This is too cool for the current state of humanity.

I love the atmosphere with the benches and the tree

Good! The idea was to give a lovely calm atmosphere. I also allow site owners to customize the scene as they want.

This is actually really cool. We’ve needed this concept everywhere in technology. Something like this would have prevented the isolation and loneliness technology and the internet has created.

I don’t know all the answers, but joining people together, and reminders there are real people still there as we’ve moved from the physical world to the virtual world is an important part of the progression. In 50-100 years we will either have this epiphany or we will fail miserably.

Really cool but should limit # of people shown when there are too many. Currently it gets really laggy

There is actually a limit, but I think it was too high. Currently the limit is for the deployment, but your comment gave me the idea that I should give this option to the site owner.

interesting. i'm appearing as a grey guy not the orange guy like your blog says

You can change your color by clicking in the pencil icon.

haha nice project! I stayed there for a couple of minutes and had such a good time!

I'm glad to hear it! It makes me happy to see that other people are also having a good time in there. That was the goal!

Oh what the heck? That's super cool! Awesome idea. Possible future enhancement: some basic day/night (or even weather?) design elements that match the timezone of the person whose site it is? Still, doesn't even need it, it's really cool as-is!

I could see it being used as some avenue for saying toxic stuff, so I'm suddenly feeling like the only allowed actions should be ones that can never be harmful (like text interactions are just choosing from a pre-set list)..

Thaaanks! I've thought about weather , but I loved the idea for day/night! I'll definately implement that soon!

It already has block/ban and block word list, but unfortunatelly I haven't added them in the settings for the landing page before HN made it front page.. Opsy

Nintendo does this on Mario Kart, just allowing text from a pre-set list. It's very limited, but works.

yay i just added it to my site signupdoggy.pages.dev thanks so much

This is sick!

Maybe adding rooms will be a good move

Neat idea, but there seems to be zero defense against spammer scum. One jerk with a bot script seems able to make it totally useless for everyone else there.

Actually, there was. But I haven't added all of them to the landing page. I wasn't expecing making HN front page :sweat (opooops) But there is already some basic moderation and ban/kick functionalities.

However, there is still lots of room for improvement.

I like the idea! congrats!

Thaaanks :)

In the "this is why we can't have nice things" category, the first thing I saw was someone calling themselves "dick and balls". :(

Yeah, but don't lat the HN crowd spoil the thing. You can check the other sites that are using Hackernews and you might have a great experience! I've been chatting with a lot of people with similar interest and had a lot of very nice interactions!

brilient! i love it.

Thanks!

what a cute project

I like the idea of this like a town square for websites. Nice job

would make more sense with webrtc.

Looks good!

cool idea!

Not really a square if it's 1D - everyone ends up on top of each other.

It has length and height, so it's 2D... Heheh

But I get your point.

Not really a highway if it's a series of tubes.

First saw this on lobste.rs . Great idea, perhaps allow for a little customisation? I'd like minimal animation, just a counter of present people and a green dot that vibrates when someone is typing. Clicking either opens a chat box with last 20 minutes.

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