Show HN: Nightchamber, a slow-web social site | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Nightchamber, a slow-web social site

nightchamber.com

73 pointss_kilk41 comments

You could actually convert this into some kind of social network. Just enable people to follow each other in some sense, i.e. their messages appear in your feed with higher probability or so. It's nice and somewhat artistic to follow other persons only based on what they say/said, not based on who they are.

We think alike, that's been on the todo list for a while :)

Thanks for the input!

Along those lines: people's handles could be more memorable but still random. Maybe something like the github repository name recommender. "Oh, great, another post from ice-badger-weasel-fox, I love those!"

Good call, I like it!

I would caution you not to go for the cutesy, "random" aesthetic that github does with their name generator. People may not wish to be addressed in that way.

They'll never know if they are, and if they do -- they'll never know by who.

If that's still a problem, I humbly suggest that those people might not be the right audience for a socnet that lets one post only once a day.

maybe ala heroku? whispering-glades-5487

Having zero directed interaction might be a problem, but seeing only 5 thoughts for 24 hours makes you think about those thoughts a lot more and gives you a lot of time to process and answer them. Maybe there are interesting answers to your thoughts and questions you will never know of.

Hi HN. I made this over the last few months.

The idea is to have an activity feed which is randomly generated, and only refreshes once every 24 hours.

The auth system incorporates some ideas discussed in this thread (The God Login): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8861800

I'm happy to answer any questions!

I'm confused about why a person would want to use this? If I only get a random "tweet" every 24 hours that lacks context, I don't see myself coming back often.

Two suggestions: 1. Allow the user to configure how often they get new thoughts. 2. Allow voting so that hopefully the random thoughts that are actually worth reading propagate out and people are reading something worth reading.

I actually really like this as a reaction against Twitter. You only get one thing to say per day, so you want to make it count. And I don't want another site to visit 50 times per day, once is enough.

Kudos to the creator, this is really neat.

I like the idea of only being able to post once a day, but I think the solution would be more fun if you could read as much you want.

Thanks!

That means a lot to mea, if even a few people get a kick out of it then it was worth the effort.

As long as this doesn't become a playground of spam, I could see it as being a great place to get inspiration for... just about anything. For example, I shared my recipe for eggnog just now. That could be useful for someone, right?

Sure, why not? We could all do with a little more eggnog in our lives.

The god login is really an interesting idea ! Could you elaborate on your choice about the random feed?

I like the idea of a random, or semi-random, feed of content that the user has no real control over.

You don't get to build yourself an echo-chamber.

It's actually mostly inspired by postsecret.com in that way. People submit things, a feed is generated (or curated, in the case of PostSecret).

EDIT: I think later on we could introduce a form of upvoting, which would influence the odds of a given thought (or further thoughts from that author) ending up in a feed.

How about restrict the upvoting too? You're only allowed to upvote/recommend a single post per day :)

I like this. You could only allow a user to upvote one of the posts on each day's feed, which increases that post's author's probability of being put on a feed.

Yes, I think the upvotes would be restricted in the same way as posting thoughts.

Neat exploration of a solution - but I wouldn't consider this a complete product - more of a test of auth-less logins for a randomized guest book.

There is a lot more that would be needed before people used this. I can almost guarantee that random posts will be worthless and I have no feedback on the messages I personally send.

Thanks for the comment, and I agree, it's very bare-bones right now.

In an ideal world, what would a product like this look like when fully fleshed-out?

I can't see it becoming a product as in "makes money" or "attracts investors" without compromising the slow-web spirit. Social sites traditionally thrive on compulsive re-visiting (because ad money), and limiting users to one update per day kills that dead.

That said, it might become a more attractive experiment if it had some way of floating good thoughts to more readers. E.g. you could "like" only one of the thoughts from your feed and have an extra slot in your feed for a thought that another user "liked."

>> I can't see it becoming a product as in "makes money" or "attracts investors" without compromising the slow-web spirit.

We're on the same page there. Still it would be nice to find a way to make enough to cover the server costs without fucking up the site.

The notion of upvoting thoughts is a recurring theme in this discussion, so I'm bumping that to the top of the todo list. Again, thanks for the input, it's very much appreciated.

Not quite building off of your current system, but I've long wanted a service where I could log-in and be approved to participate anonymously in conversations that are still somewhat moderated. "?&%$#?#$&?", you ask.

There are a lot of sites that I participate in that allow you to rate and flag other users (e.g. HN). I actually really like this ability. But frequently I want to make many posts to such site, but I don't really want all my comments to be able to be tied together

For example, there's an HN post about BFE, Idaho and I mention that's my hometown. In another post, it's relevant to the conversation, so I mention I'm Italian. In another post it becomes clear that I have extensive professional experience in underwater basket weaving. Put these three facts together and they can quickly undermine any anonymity (i.e. I'm the only Italian born in BFE, Idaho that has a career in underwater basket weaving).

So having a log-on system that allows me to be held accountable (i.e. If I make a comment on HN that gets downvoted, my HN rating still goes down) but where I can still be anonymous (i.e. no one can aggregate my comments). From a service perspective, I'm thinking of something like a Disqus plug-in architecture where I could log-in to the primary service, and only that service would ever know that I'm a singular entity. That service would provide an api that other sites could use set and grab general reputation data.

For example, I log into Service as 'yaddayadda'. I navigate to HN, and log-in. The Service reports to HN that I'm an authorized user currently known as 2051013165142 (new, random user id each time I visit HN). HN polls the Service API for my current user id. The Service reports back that my identity has earned a total of X HN submission up votes, Y HN comment up votes, and Z HN downvotes. HN can then do what it does to calculate my reputation. When I subsequently make a submission or comment and am rated, HN reports those points back to the Service, which aggregates them into 'yaddayadda's' HN totals.

Some subreddits of the reddit fork voat.co do this

Quite a few brain (and cpu) cycles have been spent on 'author identification' software that allows to tie together pieces of text at various points in time to a single author.

Opportunity for a text anonymization API here. Insert subtle stylistic changes for the pendants with more obvious 'foreign-isms' for those seeking a greater degree of misdirection and anonymity.

I believe most of them still require sizable amounts of work. For example, this individual comment might be able to narrow me down to native U.S. English speaker with higher education, but not much beyond that.

I have played with gender-identification software[1], which has such a limit. Frankly, the identification seems to be more topically sensitive than it is gender sensitive. For example, if I put in my writing about robots it will id me as male, but if I put in my writing about cooking it will id me as female.

Combining the 'author identification' software with known identities (such as we have here on HN) will certainly make them more accurate. Hence, my desire for a system that limits such computations.

[1] http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php

Novel. I like it.

Has me thinking about a 'slow' messaging app: basically email but in daily digest format. E-mail, but with the latency of physical mail. You may reply at your convenience. Your message will be received at the time of the recipient's choosing, along with the rest of the day's correspondence. Optionally including weekly days off.

Probably not great for business. Between friends it might encourage more long-format replies which might be more enjoyable; an alternative to short, frequent messages.

I like your idea very much. There's just something about artificial constraints that I find appealing.

Do let us know if you ever decide to build it, I'll be first in line to try it out!

You can just do this with your friends! Send long emails and establish an expectation of reply-at-your-convenience. It's a tricky norm to get started but once it does it's quite rewarding.

Love the concept. I would love for this to go big.

But I went to the site a couple of times and "I love turtles." was the most coherent message I received.

Take that as you will.

This is cool, but I kind of see the use case a little different. I'd like to be able to receive a message like this on my phone once a day, just as a notification, at a time of my choosing. It would still be a random anonymous message, but it would be interesting because everyday I would receive some random/hilarious crap from someone elsewhere in the world.

Nice idea,

It could make a nice companion app for the site actually.

I like this. I think a good length for a 'daily' one-shot update might be a bit longer than a tweet though. The layout makes it look like you're expecting tweets right now. Have you experimented with longer-form posts to see how they feel?

I was intending for long-form posts to be encouraged on this site, but I do agree that the current layout may not be the best for that.

I'll take your suggestion and experiment with longer content and find a layout that makes it pleasant to read.

Ideally I'd love to see short-stories or poetry being shared on the site.

Interesting idea. Appears that whitespace is not preserved by the editor though; another vote for supporting medium-to-long-form posts.

I'm actually working on a fix for that just now :)

Will be deployed shortly, pending tests.

EDIT: and it's deployed to Live. Enjoy!

> Don't share your identity with anyone else.

Maybe implement HTTPS then?

Deploying HTTPS is next on the todo-list for today :)

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