Whispererly | Hacker News Reader

Whispererly

whispererly.weebly.com

49 pointswilozxc37 comments

I made something similar to this (it was an Irc bot that allowed tweeting via a command on a fairly large channel) and got shut down, my host subpoenaed (Linode at the time) and eventually got a visit from law enforcement at my house due to people sending abusive tweets. Just a heads up, I would add moderation sooner than later.

Wait, do they track who says what themselves? https://twitter.com/whispererly/status/615513760107732996

Judging by the fact you have to DM "to get send anonymous messages" (as per their profile description on Twitter) I would suggest it's not that hard to track in the event they need to report the end-user to law enforcement.

That is NOT a tweet we wrote but an anonymous one by someone we do not know!

Whispererly is a twitter bot that allows you to send anonymous tweets by simply direct messaging it your tweets!

The bot can be used to joke around, express political views, give feedback to you're friends or any else you want it to be used for. We already have close to 200 tweets in the past two days and can't wait for what the Hacker News community comes up with!

Test it out, and if you have any questions or suggestions feel free to drop them in here.

Pretty obvious to the HN community, but perhaps worth making it obvious before this becomes a public thing that this is definitely not even remotely law-enforcement proof, just in case someone thinks of using this to tweet something illegal. You know it's only a matter of time...

With all the existing issues with abuse on twitter won't this just acerbate the problem?

My goal is for this to be used for: giving feedback, poking fun at companies and politicians, or maybe having a fun time with your friends. I hope it is not used for abuse and I do have ways of prevent abuse in place!

Yes.

I would say I'm shocked anyone thought this was a good idea, but I'm not, sadly.

Privileged nerds seem perpetually oblivious of any problem that doesn't personally harm them.

Has abuse actually happened? Have you considered that the author might have actually thought about it? Hurray for pre-condemnation.

It's called forethought.

I know that doesn't fit well with the whole "move fast, break stuff" attitude in SV, but then, tech people usually aren't the ones being broken.

Again, how do you actually know the author hasn't thought about it? I'm not praising the attitude your referring to, I'm criticizing your prejudices against the author, the baseless assumption that (s)he fits the label of "oblivious privileged SV tech nerd" you've decided to attribute.

If it takes you more than 30 seconds to come to "An app that allows anonymous public messages on a social network currently wracked by abuse is not a good idea", you haven't been thinking.

I think you're confusing "anonymous" with "uncensored". Nothing prevents these messages from being filtered for abuse.

Not to mention that being a single account, and hence easily blocked, the potential for abuse is minimal compared to the alternative of simply creating a new Twitter account, which would be just as anonymous.

You could look at it that way. Or you could look at it as focusing a chunk of abuse into one account from many, which is easier to block.

I thought about this a while back. I'd imagine it would be better to not use DMs and just have them create an account on your site so as to not tie them together. I had thoughts about twitter eventually banning the account, so you'd probably need an account creation script (possibly use the handle of the account being mentioned plus _w added to the end). It would also be a good idea to add language filtering and check the tweet against a database of abusive words so as to really slow down the abuse. I thought about this as an employee feedback tool at first, but everyone could use a little anonymous constructive feedback. Keep at it, many of the problems can be solved with a little creativity. Good luck :D

Doesn't Twitter ban you if you send too many @-messages to random people?

I wonder where this would stand if the app was used for cyber bullying or some kind of threat?

Side note, typo in the footer comment on the homepage. "creat" rather than "create".

For cool secret features of the bot and some more information - https://medium.com/@Go_Soroush/introducing-whispererly-705f6...

Typo: "Not only will know one know who it was but you will be hidden behind a random animal! This is our way of guarantying 100% anonymity."

Fixed - Thank you!

I would be careful about "guaranteeing 100% anonymity" too. I think that would very quickly not be the case should law enforcement get involved after your service is used to send threatening messages to someone it shouldn't.

Ya pretty much don't ever use this app if you actually want to be anonymous. DM's are logged and I really doubt the author would not comply if the Feds came knocking.

It would not even be up to the author, Twitter would have the data and could provide this to authorities.

What's with using *ly names that aren't on a .ly domain? I'm extremely likely, especially with a long and somewhat contrived name like whisperer-ly, to misremember the web address if it's a faux .ly.

Very fun, do you plan to let user choose which anonymous animal will whisper it's tweet ? I don't trust anonymous chipmunks ;)

What animal would you choose?

Unicorn obviously :)

It is one of the options!

That can be fun :) How do you plan to moderate it?

I do have plans and ways of moderating in place but, for now I want to see what the community can do with it!

Sounds reasonable :) We too often build restrictions before even being sure we actually need them.

Always good to be precautions!

Anonymity seems to appeal most to the dregs of society. Whatever the intentions of the developers, I honestly can't see this ending well.

Well said, "kitd".

A username isn't the same as anonymity. You can look through my comment history (and as it happens get a pretty good idea of what I do and where I come from). And my username relates pretty closely to my real name. That isn't much protection of my identity.

Total anonymity (no username, no identity) opens the door for anyone to say anything. In some cases that's good. But IME, it is a benefit that ia mainly used by the dregs .

maybe change the name of the product? it's quite easy to confuse this with "whisper", which is also another anonymous product.

obviously whisper and whisperly are different, but it takes some mental effort to separate them, which is not good for branding

Reply on news.ycombinator.com