That's incredible. Within the first 5 posts we've got "Javascript is overrated", "tabs are better than spaces", something about trains/public transit, and a link to a hentai site. Talk about speed-running social media.
I've always thought that a problem with sites like Reddit and Hacker News is that a very small percentage of users engage with "new"; most people only see the posts that have been curated by that small minority which creates _some_ sort of bias (arguably, a positive one).
I've wanted to try something like a Hacker News where your homepage shows a random smattering of posts where the probability you'll see any particular one depends on its number of likes.
In other words, rather than having a firehose of "new" posts from which a few are elevated to the home page (masses), give everyone a dynamic home page which is mostly items that have been liked by many, but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet. Maybe instead of pure likes it could be a ratio of likes to views.
But the point is some way to engage everyone in the selection of what makes the homepage. It could even be as simple as "keep HN as is, but include 5 posts randomly chosen from recent submissions and tag them as such."
> dynamic home page which is mostly items that have been liked by many, but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet. Maybe instead of pure likes it could be a ratio of likes to views.
You've just invented much-hated engagement-maxxing The Algorithm.
However, I wonder why it hasn't been done by text-based platforms like Reddit and Hacker News?
Reddit has the drop down with "New" items (for the "curators" to watch) and "Best" (presumably for once the items have been elevated to the front page). HN has the the same: the "New" link versus the home page.
Twitter is slightly different, and maybe more of what I'm thinking of, but the content is very different: short form, and original content rather than links to finds with an accompanying discussion. Similar, but not the same.
I wonder if that tells me that it just only works with "doomscroll" content — the kind of content where it's plentiful, short, and very little commitment to read each piece (and therefore very little time lost for a "poor" suggestion)? Or if there's something fundamentally different I'm missing?
Curation IS arguably one of the most critical factors. A library is useful because of what it doesn't contain, not because of what it does contain. The hypothetical "library of all possible books" isn't useful to anyone.
That's a long way of agreeing with you that there is positive in the duration bias of HackerNews and other sites.
Of course anything can be hijacked, and metrics proverbially tend towards becoming targets (and hence a dumb arms race), but the general concept of the value of curation is sound.
Thanks -- totally agree that curation is essential, and I suspect my original point may have come across as advocating against curation, which I wasn’t.
My goal isn’t to randomize the homepage or flatten quality, but to involve a broader swath of users in the curation process. It’s currently dominated by the few who browse “new”, essentially a self-selected minority of curators.
Concretely, I was imagining something like:
* Every new post is shown to a small % of users as part of their regular homepage (not in a “new” tab they’d have to seek out).
* Posts that get engagement from that slice are shown to more users, and so on — a gradual ramp-up based on actual interest rather than early-bird luck.
So it’s not removing filtering; it’s just moving from a binary gate (past the goalpost = homepage) to a more continuous, probabilistic exposure curve.
Curation still happens, but more people get to participate in it, and the system becomes more robust to time-of-day luck or early vote pile-ons.
Anyway, I mostly wanted to clarify that I’m not against filtering -- just having a thought experiment about how we might make it more adaptive and inclusive.
Does that clarify my point? Any thoughts? I appreciate your engagement!
Apologize for the poor formatting in the parent post; I can't edit it now, but here it is as intended:
Thanks -- totally agree that curation is essential, and I suspect my original point may have come across as advocating against curation, which I wasn’t.
My goal isn’t to randomize the homepage or flatten quality, but to involve a broader swath of users in the curation process. It’s currently dominated by the few who browse “new”, essentially a self-selected minority of curators.
Concretely, I was thikinking something like:
* Every new post is shown to a small % of users as part of their regular homepage (not in a “new” tab they’d have to seek out).
* Posts that get engagement from that slice are shown to more users, and so on — a gradual ramp-up based on actual interest rather than early-bird luck.
So it’s not removing filtering; it’s just moving from a binary gate (past the goalpost = homepage) to a more continuous, probabilistic exposure curve. Curation still happens, but more people get to participate in it, and the system becomes more robust to time-of-day luck or early vote pile-ons.
Anyway, I mostly wanted to clarify that I’m not against filtering -- just having a thought experiment about how we might make it more adaptive and inclusive.
Does that clarify my point? Any thoughts? I appreciate your engagement!
This is a common idea, and it is a super-hard problem. Sites like Reddit are increasingly sampling by throwing more new posts into hot. That is a solution that may improve yet not really change HN. Ultimately, we don't all want the same feeds and user majorities tend to stifle key minorities such as early adopters.
I'm building such a system for prizeforge and am several more steps ahead on this solution. You need a decent background in probability and a more robust understanding of what a "good" outcome is to work on this kind of thing.
https://positron.solutions/careers if you do Rust and care a whole lot about this problem and can deal with the challenges we're going to have with PrizeForge.
I've been working on this kind of thing over the past several years (for a while full time as an attempted entrepreneur, now on the side for the past couple years). The latest iteration is https://yakread.com -- hit "take a look around" and you can see the "home page"/a list of recommendations without signing up. The recommendations are personalized, i.e. the probability you'll see any particular post depends on your individual interactions with past posts, if you've signed up. (it does collaborative filtering with spark mllib). So that may be a bit different from what you had in mind, since your comment sounds more like an unpersonalized system, but with some extra exploration thrown in. However in practice I suspect the biggest thing the collaborative filtering is doing at Yakread's current scale (not much) is learning which items are good/bad in general.
I also do have some methods baked in for doing exploration. "Epsilon greedy" is a common simple approach where x% of the recommendations are purely random. I do a bit more of a linear thing where I rank all the posts by how many times they've been recommended, then I pick a percentage 0 - 100, then I throw out the top x% most popular (previously recommended) items. that also gives you some flexibility to try out different distributions for the x% variable.
Thank you so much! "Epsilon greedy" sounds like a great approach for the general idea I had in mind — I only glanced it but will read it more deeply.
I'll definitely try out your product, but I have to say — an enter your email box is surprisingly high-friction and if you weren't a considerate person I'd met on Hacker News I'd probably close the tab when I saw that. I'll try it out and see if there's a particular reason why you need to capture an email address so early on, but I'd bet if you simplified it you'd get more traffic!
Thanks for the feedback. I've structured Yakread (and its predecessors) as a daily email newsletter because it increases user retention tremendously. It's much less work for users if Yakread can show up in a place they already check regularly (their email inbox) rather than trying to get users right away to build a habit of visiting a new website regularly. The most common approach to this problem for consumer products is to make a mobile app so you can send push notifications; I like email a lot more since it's a bit more decentralized and is/can be less pushy (no pun intended).
But yeah, I wouldn't be opposed to trying out an alternate landing page that shows you article recommendations up front with a signup box somewhere. Could be interesting to see how both approaches perform in an A/B test. Especially if I ever made a concerted effort to get traffic from HN; then structuring the site a bit more like HN would probably be great. Maybe even aggregate comments from bluesky/mastodon? Once I get through the mountain of other TODO items that's been piling up :).
I think this is an issue for any curation. It's especially an issue for music - bandcamp shows you music - top sellers, recently sold, liked by creators, etc that all require someone else to do curation. They do have a random listing, but the signal to noise ratio is so low that I doubt anyone listens to it.
So the most reliable way to get your music known is to have your personal network buy/comment on your music or share it elsewhere. There's _lots_ of music on there that is fantastic that nearly nobody has purchased.
The same goes for indie games on steam. Other people will buy your game if it has enough good reviews (past some threshold) to get a thumbs up icon. So whenever anyone launches a game they need to do networking, there's a desperate scramble to get their followers to review the game so that it reaches critical mass where non-network people start paying attention to it.
Algorithms can (I think) detect similar styles, but style is not quality, and what people look for in new works is the parts that they do differently and therefore cannot be correlated by algorithm.
I don't think there's any way about it other than getting people to try some things purely randomly, even if most of those are awful. Maybe some way to reward people for taking a look at random selections?
Serious question is how often would you tolerate if those randomly displayed posts are absolutely out of your interests? Would you click or skip? Plenty of fish (Canadian-based dating site), programmed by Markus Frind, had a function: during onboarding you could choose types of people you think you prefer (e.g. brunette/blond etc.) and if you haven’t clicked later on them, algo had started to show different results…
Interesting anecdote on Plenty of Fish. It’s definitely interesting how people aren’t really good at telling you what they like; empirical evidence is far better. I believe Paul Graham has an essay on a similar topic where if you ask people if they like an idea you have for a product, they are likely to say yes even if they wouldn’t actually use it. But if you ask them how much they would pay for access, or if they’d pay a certain amount, you’d get a more accurate response.
FWIW, I wasn’t suggesting pure randomness though, it’s more like probabilistic randomness. Rather than a binary threshold a post must pass to make the homepage that divides the community into curators and consumers, this would show you posts with a degree of randomness with a probability proportional to the likes it’s garnered.
Btw, I’m not sure what you meant by randomness is an underdog? Are you implying it’s a nice goal but it rarely works out in practice, perhaps because people actually do fall into natural curator / consumer buckets?
I meant “underrated” by the word “underdog”. Like we don’t randomness appreciate too much, don’t think about it. But life is full of randomness, like a strange attractor. We try to predict future…
And in retrospect, we say that we did say that. After the battle, everyone's a general. :)
I loaded it up to find myself presented with a completely broken visual appearance, screaming audio, and all sorts of hate content and other horrors. Absolutely terrible.
> There are no 'likes', no followers, no algorithms here. There is only the freedom to express yourself with radical anonymity and connect purely.
> Start being FREE
Love the concept, let’s go one step further. No publishing at all. Only you can see what you wrote. No need to connect to anything, even if it’s “pure”.
Indeed. I'm already free to express myself with radical anonymity. Am I now free due to that site to do so and have it reach the people I want it to reach? No, not at all.
To be anonymous you cannot use gstatic.com because this way you're just telling google I was there.
Also tailwindcss and unpkg call sell data to others and there you go zero anonimous.
I'm sure you can fix this.
Thankfully, Ublock Origin in advanced mod can block those requests by default. It's just very irritating and I'd say disrespectful when you HAVE to unblock them for the site to work.
You might as well not use the web / internet at this point.
Unless you use busybox or an esoteric OS to browse the web, almost every browser or OS (macOS, Linux, Windows) will ping to Google or some other bad spyware website.
FYI this statement is wrong. You don't need an "esoteric OS". Just a firewall (such as Little Snitch on MacOS) and one of several browsers (such as Firefox) will enable you to browse the web without constantly calling home to Google.
> Firefox is funded by Google. By using it, Google is still benefiting from it, use a different browser.
1. You're moving the goalposts here. We were talking about avoiding tracking/pinging Google
2. Google pays Firefox to be the default search engine. If you change the search engine, how are you benefitting Google? They're paying for eyeballs that you're not providing, so you're technically making them spend money in vain.
> Google is known for trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses to get around blockers such as Little Snitch on popular software.
If we assumed that this was true, I don't see how switching out the OS makes any difference to the tactic of Google "trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses" from a 3rd-party website, which is where this conversation started.
This isn't accurate. I mean in generally you're pointing in the right direction. Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful, and in fact I think that it is maybe _you_ who don't know your computer as well as the person you were replying to, do -- after all they bring up relevant and actual details while you point at generalities like "Mail > Google".
Let me try to steer this in a constructive direction -- you're implying use of "GMail" with your "Mail > Google". That is fine -- it's certainly possible to set up a Google account with Mac OS X through the "Accounts" feature, implying SSO and/or reusable credentials API.
But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box. You do not need an "esoteric OS", and such an OS set up with something like described above for Mac OS X, or to demonstrate the simplicity of your argument, a Google Chrome binary blob (e.g. Ubuntu) makes the OS much less "esoteric" since it's now too a "Google vehicle". Point being that Mac OS is not a Google vehicle by default. Neither is Windows, for that matter. And this for a very simple reason -- normally both Apple and Microsoft are _competitors_ to Google, and they would very much prefer the data they would have been able to collect on the user, is sent upstream to Apple and Microsoft respectively, not to their competitor. But that is tangential, again -- the primary point is that by default Internet is not Google, not with e.g. Firefox on Windows.
Let me be perfectly clear -- there's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services. By using e.g. Firefox (which is indeed funded by Google) your data are _not_ sent to Google by default, and a Web extension like uMatrix also nips attempts by sites to send data to Google, in the bud. None of this is an esoteric OS.
I have nothing against warning us against Google monopoly, but I find your follow-up replies to be deflections and doubling down when the person is making it perfectly clear that their network does not contain data being sent to Google (in as far as they can trust their packet logs, I would say, but if you were to contest that, you'd need to try harder indeed).
Unfortunately you are 100% wrong and highly naive.
> But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box ... There's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services.
I have been perfectly clear about this:
> Not in source code not in network requests, zero.
You do realise that gstatic.com is a web service right that can be used for tracking.
The OP does not any Google requests, this includes gstatic, connectivitycheck.gstatic.com, Google owned IP addresses, DNS addresses and anything that can or could connect to or is affiliated with Google in anyway possible.
This includes Google baked into the source code that nobody asked for that can connect to Google for their own purposes. You have no clue what could change in an OS update with MacOS that you didn't ask for, and now with Apple is trying to work with Google to try and bake Google Gemini into their OS to power a voice assistant, an upcoming privacy nightmare nobody asked for. (0)
The fact that macOS is has Google integration baked into the OS with Mail, Calendar, Search, etc makes me not recommend it for anyone that cares about privacy.
> Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful.
Here is a concrete example:
You can use the base Linux kernel as an example, there are zero sources of Google in there which can be used as the basis of an "esoteric OS" so it is a good practical starting point to base a proper "ZeroGoogle" OS. Not any standard distro.
I even said busybox at one point, but you chose to ignore that.
Windows has its own different tracking which the OP also doesn't want so that is a complete moot point.
If you are serious about privacy and don't want any Google tracking, you would use an esoteric OS.
Well I don't know what "Internet Accounts" are, and your claim that Apple Mail uses Google tracking seems like an extraordinary claim that requires some sources (I couldn't find anything about that), so I think we should leave this conversation at that.
Your site about "pure freedom of expression" and "raw thoughts" stops me from posting about buying new golf balls because of a badwords.js word filter.
Why are your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy a collection of empty bullet points?
Well, badwords.js is client side, so if you just block it from loading you can post about balls and butts and slurs as much as you like. Absolutely incredible stuff.
Ah the good old "freedom to" that totally forgets that freedom also should contain a "freedom of". Free like in a chaotic war zone, where you can commit any kind of horrible attrocity, but if you just want to have a nice time, that isn't an option, because everybody behaves like an idiot. No thanks.
Freedom in reality isn't just a thing that you increase by reducing the rules. There comes a point where less rules result in less freedom. So it is always a balancing act between your freedom to do X and others freedom to not have to be subjected to X. Example: Giving up the freedom being able to murder random people is a little price to pay, if it means reducing the risk to be murdered yourself – especially since decent people wouldn't have the actionable urge to murder each other anyways. If you're a murderer however that may reduce your freedom in ways you dislike. But then, maybe, your freedom shouldn't matter as much.
Maybe I would care more about that specific idea of active freedom if I routinely wittnessed a real repression of any idea that isn't just the mean bullshit of egocentrics who have lost all touch with humanity and just want to see the world burn.
It's not, sadly, because technological choices are ethical choices.
Your site uses technologies that make it trivial for large entities (like Google) to know that person X living in Atlanta just posted a certain racially-charged diatribe.
This might come back to bite them in the rear-end in the future, in ways that they don't suspect today, because this data is never getting deleted and might be available to untold numbers of private and state actors in the future.
You can follow accounts which is a form of curation. I dropped all social media except this one because it was a time-sink but I did used to find following resulted in a useful feed on Instagram.
Adding "it's a fact" to claims does not make them impossible to disprove. You made a wild generalization (with the assumed meaning that ALL people want X) and the GP shared examples of people consuming "not X".
You can also see, on this same thread, people explicitly building experiments of uncurated content, which means they want it so much that they are willing to spend much effort building it themselves.
What would it take for you to consider that listing what you want does not necessarily imply a "fact" that all people want the same?
To the first point, could there not be an algorithm that nevertheless still works without followers, likes or ads? TikTok seems kind of similar, at least when it initially started. It seems its core algorithm doesn't need likes, it can detect whether you engage with a video via other metrics like time spent watching the video.
I suppose you'd want to allow people to self select based on topics, and then, well, you essentially get Reddit.
No way to filter by subjects one may be interested, no way to find likeminded individuals, no way to mute people, so yeah, not much value could be derived from it; I think that there is space for some pseudo-anonymous social network but this is not it, at least not in its current state.
I hope TW Körner doesn't have that last footnote on the topic..
(Fwiw left/right (meta-)division seems to me to encompass all the moral taxonomies of the day, TWK just happened to settle for rich/smart vs social wrt UK)
>Social Darwinism applies the Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest to human society. Rich social Darwinists take wealth as the best indication of fitness to survive, academic social Darwinists take intellectual achievements as the best indication and so on. They are often haunted by the fear that the unfit do not understand this and may outbreed the fit.
Haha, have you checked on it lately? You had it right on the money dude. The thing allowed HTML injection. It went from the N word and a couple emojis to downright ear-piercing multitudes of fascist /b/ propaganda over the course of an hour.
>Curious to see how it evolves and what kind of conversations happen when metrics are removed.
I've seen a ton of projects like this. It will get deluged with spam and shitposts and people will stop caring once the novelty wears off and leave once it becomes a cesspool. Probably for 4chan which at least has a culture and established userbase. And porn.
As some who loves dark mode, I hate that extension. I get the appeal of forcing every website to be dark mode, but that ends up breaking half of them or just making them look like trash. People need to custom design their dark modes for whatever each design is.
If you don't care about breaking design and stuff looking the way its supposed to, I guess the extension is fine but I rather use something like Stylus where you can use people's custom designed stylesheets for most known sites.
Every attempt at anonymous social fails terribly. Unfortunately without good moderation tooling this doesn't work. You have to limit the blast radius of what people put out there because on the internet, without repercussions, a lot of people say terrible things. After having tried a few things like this, it's clear identity matters. Yes you can find clever ways to get around it and surface the best content or have pseudonyms and all that, but essentially you must verify individuals. People need to know you can't just say anything aka you can't say terrible hurtful things without repercussions. You need a unique identifier per browser, per device, etc, and then you permaban anyone who uses vulgar language, racial slurs, or anything of the sort immediately. You use AI before the fact to actually moderate and check things, and anything that is attempted gets a warning.
Someone else said, let's go a step further and not post at all. You know what, YES. We have X, we have Facebook, we have many tools where you can create an account with any random email address, with any random name, and say anything you want. Let's leave behind the two decades of public social and go back to the real world e.g maybe there's a world in which you own what you say, its there forever and you have to be thoughtful before you say it, but we also put it in an appropriate place, in a category of communication that makes sense. Blogging was way better than microblogging, but obviously opening the door to everyone made social media far more viral and addictive. Adding pictures and video made it even more viral and addictive. It would just be nice to go back to something a bit more real, something that's not going to be horribly abused and it feels like part of that might mean, less public social.
> You have to limit the blast radius of what people put out there because on the internet, without repercussions, a lot of people say terrible things
And yet those same repercussions are the reason why social media is full of inoffensive slop. No one wants be the one who get fired for leaking their employer's unethical practices, after all.
Pseudonymity is not enough, sadly. Given enough time, you'll leak enough data points to be identified.
> Let's leave behind the two decades of public social and go back to the real world
The idea that the "internet" and the "real world" are separate has been outdated for a long time.
I've always liked the idea of being able to just post anonymously without any votes, but it always quickly devolves into incoherent spam and endless slurs.
The website has been active for an hour and I'm already seeing some of that. It always turns into 4chan.
I mean yeah it would turn into 4chan since 4chan is also a anonymous board similar to this...
But what's wild is that when you say it always turns into 4chan, everyone knows that it means something bad, something bs.
the fact that 4chan has such a bad reputation is absolutely valid though, there is no denying of it, and maybe these other experiments also prove it that such reputation maybe exists because of the reason that the underlying system is flawed regarding anonymity, but that's just my hunch.
I like anonymity as an ideal, but 4chan (anonymity irl) not so much...
Looks like you do only frontend validation and have XSS vulnerabilities all over the place. I also see aren’t taking down nazi posts and CP? I went ahead and reported you to the FBI, hopefully your vibe lawyer is good.
I always thought there was a space for a social media that has upvotes and followers and all that, with the intention of creating echo chambers and segregating users into their own groups and that sort of thing, but with the ability for anyone to go on a 'holiday' into the other echo chambers, to see what those other users experience.
Likes are not one dimensional. Likes flow from one person to another. If you like someones posts, you're more likely to enjoy the things they like. A network of endorsement emerges and the subgroups can become clear.
The important thing would be for moderators to be able to police "what is liked/disliked". Hear me out.
If you've got this space where dozens or hundreds of people all have a high overlap of favorable content, but there's this one turd who comes in and downvotes everything, always... he's not just a little different, and he's not assimilating. He's trying to sabotage. If this was visible to a moderator, that moderator could decide he doesn't belong to the group. I don't advocate that he no longer be able to view the content, but maybe his votes just stop counting. Maybe he's no longer able to post content of his own (would be up to the moderator, I think, perhaps his content was always good enough, but his voting is counterproductive).
I think that on places like reddit they avoided this functionality because it would give moderators too much control over their communities, and outsiders would be unable to come in and eventually take over and force the original group out. Being admins, they could of course have done this anyway, but it would require them to be heavy-handed and obvious.
I think, if you have a saboteur, they're probably not part of your 'network'. The people you've endorsed probably won't have endorsed the saboteur, so the saboteurs activity should not effect your feed in any meaningful way. This is how trust works in real social circles.
Moderators clearly work but it's a shame it relies on single people doing a good thing. It's a shame the moderation can't be done by everyone all the time, unconsciously.
That's not the important part. My point is that moderators should be able to see or at least set policies on what people vote... if these 3 posts are good and fit with the community, maybe someone is still permitted to downvote 1 of them. Just personal preference after all. But if they're downvoting those (and all the other good fits), then they're simply not compatible with the community. So a "people who constantly downvote good fits" (or upvote bad fits) are punished/removed/whatever.
The whole thing uses Firebase (as all vibe coded garbage does), and the 'country' property inline displays HTML without any kind of validation, meaning you can insert script tags, images, or more excitingly: autoplaying videos.
There's tons of swastikas and fascist imagery that plays 10 of the same video all at the same time. It's really cringe, who has the time to make these videos in the first place?
Looks like something nuked through the rate limit though, because when I try to post anything, it says I'm rate limited by Firebase or whatever in the console.
I like the project, but the words "Libre" and "experiment" made me assume it would be open source. Of course, it's the owner's decision, but the title biased my expectation.
It was very rude, and wasn’t punching up. Rude can be fine especially with a delineated purpose.
It was like “look behind you - the [racist trope] is the fault of the [ethnic group]”, and nothing political.
Racism is permitted there it sounds like, then? Wouldn’t have reported it if I’d known. Assumed taking swipes at minorities wouldn’t be tolerable outside of 4chan. I can always not visit when I don’t want to. But maybe I got the wrong impression, that someone decent was running the place and wouldn’t want garbage strewn about their halls. Course they might aim towards a different concept if so!
With none of those features there is no excuse for the site working that terribly with JS disabled. Look at HN for comparison, which degrades gracefully with JS disabled.
This is kind of the same idea as Yik Yak, which was an interesting app. Some good aspects (authenticity) and some bad aspects (lots of bomb threats and bullying).
All of us humans are fundamentally racist, spammy, and have some form of hate in us. Depending on the state of society, it can suppress or bring it out. Anonymous boards like this bring out the worst in all of us.
Just as the current administration has catered to our bigoted, racist selves. Anonymous boards have more or less the same effect.
That's exactly it. I would say that the experiment is not so novel, but non-novel experiments are good, too. We retread illuminating experiments from physics in school for good reason.
There are quite a lot of message boards and imageboards, large and small, which check the same boxes. Many of them have not gotten enough traction to catch the attention of the mainstream (e.g. lainchan), and have a distinct vibe.
I think that as soon as your userbase expands into a representative sample of the Internet user population, your platform's culture will become increasingly similar (i.e. "average out") to the largest platforms, e.g. 4chan.
The problem with openness and anonymity is that it invites bad actors. Social media is an unsolved problem and any platform that gets sufficiently large will be more valuable as a tool to disseminate misinformation and propaganda than as a tool for people to actually communate freely and openly.
As a developer on the ARPANET I've been on the net since the moment it existed. This is the arch opposite of the early internet, which was dominated by intelligent academics sharing technical articles and dense information.
Well, it only took about 15 hours for the site to be discovered by the Internet Troll Federation and be absolutely stuffed with slurs and hate memes.
Which was to be expected, frankly.
Not sure at which point the site allowed HTML, but for the first couple of hours or so there was only text for thoughts there, then the "hypermedia" of the kind described above, appeared, rendering the site useless. Just wait until someone discovers even better means to weaponize the HTML post feature -- there's bound to be galore of client-side vulnerabilities, I expect, if only due to Unicode possibilities...
I asked you to post the word that you were not allowed to post, not a list of words that are forbidden on the site. For some reason, you don't want to post your comment or the words here.
"I didn't say they are ... just some set of words that the creator doesn't personally approve of."
"And what are those words? Post them here."
"I don't have the list of word that are forbidden, only the creator does, so ask him."
You say "I asked you to post the word that you were not allowed to post, not a list of words that are forbidden on the site" but that is mistaken ... see the above context.
"For some reason, you don't want to post your comment or the words here."
That's incredible. Within the first 5 posts we've got "Javascript is overrated", "tabs are better than spaces", something about trains/public transit, and a link to a hentai site. Talk about speed-running social media.
It's full of the n-word right now. I'm really not surprised.
I got racial slurs and weird audio spam.
Confirmed but the css is off so it’s kind of unreadable on this phone
Edit. It works now, scrolling through the second character dump presumably posted to bury a bad review?
I've always thought that a problem with sites like Reddit and Hacker News is that a very small percentage of users engage with "new"; most people only see the posts that have been curated by that small minority which creates _some_ sort of bias (arguably, a positive one).
I've wanted to try something like a Hacker News where your homepage shows a random smattering of posts where the probability you'll see any particular one depends on its number of likes.
In other words, rather than having a firehose of "new" posts from which a few are elevated to the home page (masses), give everyone a dynamic home page which is mostly items that have been liked by many, but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet. Maybe instead of pure likes it could be a ratio of likes to views.
But the point is some way to engage everyone in the selection of what makes the homepage. It could even be as simple as "keep HN as is, but include 5 posts randomly chosen from recent submissions and tag them as such."
Dang, has anything like this been considered?
> dynamic home page which is mostly items that have been liked by many, but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet. Maybe instead of pure likes it could be a ratio of likes to views.
You've just invented much-hated engagement-maxxing The Algorithm.
If you want to go one step further, how about tracking users' engagement with the randomized posts, and using it to personalize what they see?
Wow, I just invented tiktok and Instagram
I had the exact same realization after I posted if you see below (or click this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44998664).
However, I wonder why it hasn't been done by text-based platforms like Reddit and Hacker News?
Reddit has the drop down with "New" items (for the "curators" to watch) and "Best" (presumably for once the items have been elevated to the front page). HN has the the same: the "New" link versus the home page.
Twitter is slightly different, and maybe more of what I'm thinking of, but the content is very different: short form, and original content rather than links to finds with an accompanying discussion. Similar, but not the same.
I wonder if that tells me that it just only works with "doomscroll" content — the kind of content where it's plentiful, short, and very little commitment to read each piece (and therefore very little time lost for a "poor" suggestion)? Or if there's something fundamentally different I'm missing?
Curation IS arguably one of the most critical factors. A library is useful because of what it doesn't contain, not because of what it does contain. The hypothetical "library of all possible books" isn't useful to anyone.
That's a long way of agreeing with you that there is positive in the duration bias of HackerNews and other sites.
Of course anything can be hijacked, and metrics proverbially tend towards becoming targets (and hence a dumb arms race), but the general concept of the value of curation is sound.
> The hypothetical "library of all possible books" isn't useful to anyone.
That's an archive, and it has its own uses for researchers, especially historians.
In the spirit of the library, which contains both your comment and mine:
> The hypothetical "library of all possible books" isn't useful to anyone.
That's not an archive, and has no uses even for researchers, especially not for historians.
a library containing all possible books is no more useful than having a random number generator
Thanks -- totally agree that curation is essential, and I suspect my original point may have come across as advocating against curation, which I wasn’t.
My goal isn’t to randomize the homepage or flatten quality, but to involve a broader swath of users in the curation process. It’s currently dominated by the few who browse “new”, essentially a self-selected minority of curators.
Concretely, I was imagining something like: * Every new post is shown to a small % of users as part of their regular homepage (not in a “new” tab they’d have to seek out). * Posts that get engagement from that slice are shown to more users, and so on — a gradual ramp-up based on actual interest rather than early-bird luck.
So it’s not removing filtering; it’s just moving from a binary gate (past the goalpost = homepage) to a more continuous, probabilistic exposure curve.
Curation still happens, but more people get to participate in it, and the system becomes more robust to time-of-day luck or early vote pile-ons.
Anyway, I mostly wanted to clarify that I’m not against filtering -- just having a thought experiment about how we might make it more adaptive and inclusive.
Does that clarify my point? Any thoughts? I appreciate your engagement!
Apologize for the poor formatting in the parent post; I can't edit it now, but here it is as intended:
Thanks -- totally agree that curation is essential, and I suspect my original point may have come across as advocating against curation, which I wasn’t. My goal isn’t to randomize the homepage or flatten quality, but to involve a broader swath of users in the curation process. It’s currently dominated by the few who browse “new”, essentially a self-selected minority of curators.
Concretely, I was thikinking something like:
* Every new post is shown to a small % of users as part of their regular homepage (not in a “new” tab they’d have to seek out).
* Posts that get engagement from that slice are shown to more users, and so on — a gradual ramp-up based on actual interest rather than early-bird luck.
So it’s not removing filtering; it’s just moving from a binary gate (past the goalpost = homepage) to a more continuous, probabilistic exposure curve. Curation still happens, but more people get to participate in it, and the system becomes more robust to time-of-day luck or early vote pile-ons.
Anyway, I mostly wanted to clarify that I’m not against filtering -- just having a thought experiment about how we might make it more adaptive and inclusive.
Does that clarify my point? Any thoughts? I appreciate your engagement!
This is a common idea, and it is a super-hard problem. Sites like Reddit are increasingly sampling by throwing more new posts into hot. That is a solution that may improve yet not really change HN. Ultimately, we don't all want the same feeds and user majorities tend to stifle key minorities such as early adopters.
I'm building such a system for prizeforge and am several more steps ahead on this solution. You need a decent background in probability and a more robust understanding of what a "good" outcome is to work on this kind of thing. https://positron.solutions/careers if you do Rust and care a whole lot about this problem and can deal with the challenges we're going to have with PrizeForge.
I've been working on this kind of thing over the past several years (for a while full time as an attempted entrepreneur, now on the side for the past couple years). The latest iteration is https://yakread.com -- hit "take a look around" and you can see the "home page"/a list of recommendations without signing up. The recommendations are personalized, i.e. the probability you'll see any particular post depends on your individual interactions with past posts, if you've signed up. (it does collaborative filtering with spark mllib). So that may be a bit different from what you had in mind, since your comment sounds more like an unpersonalized system, but with some extra exploration thrown in. However in practice I suspect the biggest thing the collaborative filtering is doing at Yakread's current scale (not much) is learning which items are good/bad in general.
I also do have some methods baked in for doing exploration. "Epsilon greedy" is a common simple approach where x% of the recommendations are purely random. I do a bit more of a linear thing where I rank all the posts by how many times they've been recommended, then I pick a percentage 0 - 100, then I throw out the top x% most popular (previously recommended) items. that also gives you some flexibility to try out different distributions for the x% variable.
The source is at https://github.com/jacobobryant/yakread
Thank you so much! "Epsilon greedy" sounds like a great approach for the general idea I had in mind — I only glanced it but will read it more deeply.
I'll definitely try out your product, but I have to say — an enter your email box is surprisingly high-friction and if you weren't a considerate person I'd met on Hacker News I'd probably close the tab when I saw that. I'll try it out and see if there's a particular reason why you need to capture an email address so early on, but I'd bet if you simplified it you'd get more traffic!
Thanks for the feedback. I've structured Yakread (and its predecessors) as a daily email newsletter because it increases user retention tremendously. It's much less work for users if Yakread can show up in a place they already check regularly (their email inbox) rather than trying to get users right away to build a habit of visiting a new website regularly. The most common approach to this problem for consumer products is to make a mobile app so you can send push notifications; I like email a lot more since it's a bit more decentralized and is/can be less pushy (no pun intended).
But yeah, I wouldn't be opposed to trying out an alternate landing page that shows you article recommendations up front with a signup box somewhere. Could be interesting to see how both approaches perform in an A/B test. Especially if I ever made a concerted effort to get traffic from HN; then structuring the site a bit more like HN would probably be great. Maybe even aggregate comments from bluesky/mastodon? Once I get through the mountain of other TODO items that's been piling up :).
Interesting project!
I also appreciate being introduced to the digital public infra initiative.
I think this is an issue for any curation. It's especially an issue for music - bandcamp shows you music - top sellers, recently sold, liked by creators, etc that all require someone else to do curation. They do have a random listing, but the signal to noise ratio is so low that I doubt anyone listens to it.
So the most reliable way to get your music known is to have your personal network buy/comment on your music or share it elsewhere. There's _lots_ of music on there that is fantastic that nearly nobody has purchased.
The same goes for indie games on steam. Other people will buy your game if it has enough good reviews (past some threshold) to get a thumbs up icon. So whenever anyone launches a game they need to do networking, there's a desperate scramble to get their followers to review the game so that it reaches critical mass where non-network people start paying attention to it.
Algorithms can (I think) detect similar styles, but style is not quality, and what people look for in new works is the parts that they do differently and therefore cannot be correlated by algorithm.
I don't think there's any way about it other than getting people to try some things purely randomly, even if most of those are awful. Maybe some way to reward people for taking a look at random selections?
Actually, isn't this a bit like TikTok and why it allows low-follower profiles to rise to the top on occasion?
Yes, TikTok uses similar algorithm to push new content, that's why anyone can go viral there.
Randomness is an underdog.
Serious question is how often would you tolerate if those randomly displayed posts are absolutely out of your interests? Would you click or skip? Plenty of fish (Canadian-based dating site), programmed by Markus Frind, had a function: during onboarding you could choose types of people you think you prefer (e.g. brunette/blond etc.) and if you haven’t clicked later on them, algo had started to show different results…
Interesting anecdote on Plenty of Fish. It’s definitely interesting how people aren’t really good at telling you what they like; empirical evidence is far better. I believe Paul Graham has an essay on a similar topic where if you ask people if they like an idea you have for a product, they are likely to say yes even if they wouldn’t actually use it. But if you ask them how much they would pay for access, or if they’d pay a certain amount, you’d get a more accurate response.
FWIW, I wasn’t suggesting pure randomness though, it’s more like probabilistic randomness. Rather than a binary threshold a post must pass to make the homepage that divides the community into curators and consumers, this would show you posts with a degree of randomness with a probability proportional to the likes it’s garnered.
Btw, I’m not sure what you meant by randomness is an underdog? Are you implying it’s a nice goal but it rarely works out in practice, perhaps because people actually do fall into natural curator / consumer buckets?
I meant “underrated” by the word “underdog”. Like we don’t randomness appreciate too much, don’t think about it. But life is full of randomness, like a strange attractor. We try to predict future…
And in retrospect, we say that we did say that. After the battle, everyone's a general. :)
But it is pure randomness…
> "...but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet"
Have you ever browsed /new with showdead turned on? A large fraction of the submissions are either spam/SEO, self-promotion, or just plain off topic.
I see what you mean, and yes that's a good idea
Personally, I would just mix posts with a hot sorting, with different time spans, like 24h, 4h, 1h, one third of each.
Or maybe display two time spans on the front page.
Personally, I use many multi reddit, like 15 of them, I don't see other platforms offering that.
You could email the mods and ask them to reply. Otherwise they may not see your question.
Interesting, but after my initial impressions I predict the results of the experiment will be "this is why we can't have nice things"
I feel like this experiment has already kind of been run with 4chan and 8kun, which are sort of famous for their awfulness.
Yep. Just took a look and the top post is just someone writing the n-word over and over.
The first post in my feed was "Kill all Jews" I feel like we're already there.
I loaded it up to find myself presented with a completely broken visual appearance, screaming audio, and all sorts of hate content and other horrors. Absolutely terrible.
orange site on a saturday night.
> There are no 'likes', no followers, no algorithms here. There is only the freedom to express yourself with radical anonymity and connect purely.
> Start being FREE
Love the concept, let’s go one step further. No publishing at all. Only you can see what you wrote. No need to connect to anything, even if it’s “pure”.
Indeed. I'm already free to express myself with radical anonymity. Am I now free due to that site to do so and have it reach the people I want it to reach? No, not at all.
I already saw racial slurs on the first page, and it looks like people are able to post arbitrary HTML, so I'd say the experiment needs a lot of work.
I would say it’s a great success… the debate is now what was the experiment?
I recently launched Libre , a small side project and social experiment. It’s not a social network, but kind of the opposite:
No profiles, usernames, or followers
No likes, trending topics, or algorithms
No ads, no data collection
Just anonymous thoughts from people around the world. Curious to see how it evolves and what kind of conversations happen when metrics are removed.
To be anonymous you cannot use gstatic.com because this way you're just telling google I was there. Also tailwindcss and unpkg call sell data to others and there you go zero anonimous. I'm sure you can fix this.
Thankfully, Ublock Origin in advanced mod can block those requests by default. It's just very irritating and I'd say disrespectful when you HAVE to unblock them for the site to work.
i dont know any other way to show where the msg was sent if not
"I don't know how to do this while maintaining anonymity" is not an excuse to do it in a way which does not maintain anonymity while claiming it does.
You might as well not use the web / internet at this point.
Unless you use busybox or an esoteric OS to browse the web, almost every browser or OS (macOS, Linux, Windows) will ping to Google or some other bad spyware website.
FYI this statement is wrong. You don't need an "esoteric OS". Just a firewall (such as Little Snitch on MacOS) and one of several browsers (such as Firefox) will enable you to browse the web without constantly calling home to Google.
Firefox is funded by Google. By using it, Google is still benefiting from it, use a different browser.
Google is known for trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses to get around blockers such as Little Snitch on popular software.
But that isn't enough to get around Google's tracking hence you would need an esoteric OS.
> Firefox is funded by Google. By using it, Google is still benefiting from it, use a different browser.
1. You're moving the goalposts here. We were talking about avoiding tracking/pinging Google
2. Google pays Firefox to be the default search engine. If you change the search engine, how are you benefitting Google? They're paying for eyeballs that you're not providing, so you're technically making them spend money in vain.
> Google is known for trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses to get around blockers such as Little Snitch on popular software.
If we assumed that this was true, I don't see how switching out the OS makes any difference to the tactic of Google "trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses" from a 3rd-party website, which is where this conversation started.
> If we assumed that this was true, I don't see how switching out the OS makes any difference...
Because we want absolutely zero Google tracking here and an esoteric OS has zero Google tracking. Not in source code not in network requests, zero.
No amount of "Little Snitch" will help you here.
I'm not even sure you're being serious here, but I'll assume good faith.
What Google tracking is there in, for instance, vanilla MacOS?
I have my traffic logs, so please let me know and I'll check it for myself.
Edit: and please don't say "Safari has Google as the default engine", since we've covered that above. What else is there?
> What Google tracking is there in, for instance, vanilla MacOS?
Mail > Google
Internet Accounts > Google
As I said:
> Absolutely zero Google tracking here and an esoteric OS has zero Google tracking. Not in source code not in network requests, zero.
Even with the mere integration of Google this deep into the OS is enough for those respect their privacy to not want to use MacOS.
This isn't accurate. I mean in generally you're pointing in the right direction. Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful, and in fact I think that it is maybe _you_ who don't know your computer as well as the person you were replying to, do -- after all they bring up relevant and actual details while you point at generalities like "Mail > Google".
Let me try to steer this in a constructive direction -- you're implying use of "GMail" with your "Mail > Google". That is fine -- it's certainly possible to set up a Google account with Mac OS X through the "Accounts" feature, implying SSO and/or reusable credentials API.
But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box. You do not need an "esoteric OS", and such an OS set up with something like described above for Mac OS X, or to demonstrate the simplicity of your argument, a Google Chrome binary blob (e.g. Ubuntu) makes the OS much less "esoteric" since it's now too a "Google vehicle". Point being that Mac OS is not a Google vehicle by default. Neither is Windows, for that matter. And this for a very simple reason -- normally both Apple and Microsoft are _competitors_ to Google, and they would very much prefer the data they would have been able to collect on the user, is sent upstream to Apple and Microsoft respectively, not to their competitor. But that is tangential, again -- the primary point is that by default Internet is not Google, not with e.g. Firefox on Windows.
Let me be perfectly clear -- there's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services. By using e.g. Firefox (which is indeed funded by Google) your data are _not_ sent to Google by default, and a Web extension like uMatrix also nips attempts by sites to send data to Google, in the bud. None of this is an esoteric OS.
I have nothing against warning us against Google monopoly, but I find your follow-up replies to be deflections and doubling down when the person is making it perfectly clear that their network does not contain data being sent to Google (in as far as they can trust their packet logs, I would say, but if you were to contest that, you'd need to try harder indeed).
Unfortunately you are 100% wrong and highly naive.
> But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box ... There's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services.
I have been perfectly clear about this:
> Not in source code not in network requests, zero.
You do realise that gstatic.com is a web service right that can be used for tracking.
The OP does not any Google requests, this includes gstatic, connectivitycheck.gstatic.com, Google owned IP addresses, DNS addresses and anything that can or could connect to or is affiliated with Google in anyway possible.
This includes Google baked into the source code that nobody asked for that can connect to Google for their own purposes. You have no clue what could change in an OS update with MacOS that you didn't ask for, and now with Apple is trying to work with Google to try and bake Google Gemini into their OS to power a voice assistant, an upcoming privacy nightmare nobody asked for. (0)
The fact that macOS is has Google integration baked into the OS with Mail, Calendar, Search, etc makes me not recommend it for anyone that cares about privacy.
> Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful.
Here is a concrete example:
You can use the base Linux kernel as an example, there are zero sources of Google in there which can be used as the basis of an "esoteric OS" so it is a good practical starting point to base a proper "ZeroGoogle" OS. Not any standard distro.
I even said busybox at one point, but you chose to ignore that.
Windows has its own different tracking which the OP also doesn't want so that is a complete moot point.
If you are serious about privacy and don't want any Google tracking, you would use an esoteric OS.
(0) https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/apple-is-in-talks-to-use-g...
Well I don't know what "Internet Accounts" are, and your claim that Apple Mail uses Google tracking seems like an extraordinary claim that requires some sources (I couldn't find anything about that), so I think we should leave this conversation at that.
Well, maybe you don't know your computer / OS as much as you think you do.
> No ads, no data collection [...] Just anonymous thoughts from [...]
It currently leaks cross-site user tracking information to Google (www.gstatic.com).
Your site about "pure freedom of expression" and "raw thoughts" stops me from posting about buying new golf balls because of a badwords.js word filter.
Why are your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy a collection of empty bullet points?
How can you comment this without including the post content that triggered the filter?
Literally just try it: "golf balls".
The badwords.js isn't even particularly hidden if you check the page's source: https://libreantisocial.com/badwords.js
I'll add that, based on the other posts I saw on the site, it certainly didn't occur to me that there was any filtering in place.
Well, badwords.js is client side, so if you just block it from loading you can post about balls and butts and slurs as much as you like. Absolutely incredible stuff.
I... did not think you were being quite so literal.
No value--people want content that is focused, accurate, curated, reliable, relevant, high quality, etc.
Also no freedom, with all your content restrictions.
Ah the good old "freedom to" that totally forgets that freedom also should contain a "freedom of". Free like in a chaotic war zone, where you can commit any kind of horrible attrocity, but if you just want to have a nice time, that isn't an option, because everybody behaves like an idiot. No thanks.
Freedom in reality isn't just a thing that you increase by reducing the rules. There comes a point where less rules result in less freedom. So it is always a balancing act between your freedom to do X and others freedom to not have to be subjected to X. Example: Giving up the freedom being able to murder random people is a little price to pay, if it means reducing the risk to be murdered yourself – especially since decent people wouldn't have the actionable urge to murder each other anyways. If you're a murderer however that may reduce your freedom in ways you dislike. But then, maybe, your freedom shouldn't matter as much.
Maybe I would care more about that specific idea of active freedom if I routinely wittnessed a real repression of any idea that isn't just the mean bullshit of egocentrics who have lost all touch with humanity and just want to see the world burn.
I didn't say that I wanted a "freedom to" site, I'm just saying that the site is mischaracterized.
And I saw a ton of racist, genozidal, sexualized and otherwise unhinged content that the worst people would think call "freedom".
So again, tell me what you're unfree to write there?
I already said. And again, I'm not seeking that sort of freedom ... the one sort of freedom the site offers is freedom from moral consequence.
It's not, sadly, because technological choices are ethical choices.
Your site uses technologies that make it trivial for large entities (like Google) to know that person X living in Atlanta just posted a certain racially-charged diatribe.
This might come back to bite them in the rear-end in the future, in ways that they don't suspect today, because this data is never getting deleted and might be available to untold numbers of private and state actors in the future.
people want content that is focused, accurate, curated, reliable, relevant, high quality, etc.
That is trivially disproven by observing that massive numbers of people use Twitter, Facebook, etc.
You can follow accounts which is a form of curation. I dropped all social media except this one because it was a time-sink but I did used to find following resulted in a useful feed on Instagram.
It's a fact so it can't be disproven. Your response is a fallacy of denial of the antecedent.
Adding "it's a fact" to claims does not make them impossible to disprove. You made a wild generalization (with the assumed meaning that ALL people want X) and the GP shared examples of people consuming "not X".
You can also see, on this same thread, people explicitly building experiments of uncurated content, which means they want it so much that they are willing to spend much effort building it themselves.
What would it take for you to consider that listing what you want does not necessarily imply a "fact" that all people want the same?
To the first point, could there not be an algorithm that nevertheless still works without followers, likes or ads? TikTok seems kind of similar, at least when it initially started. It seems its core algorithm doesn't need likes, it can detect whether you engage with a video via other metrics like time spent watching the video.
I suppose you'd want to allow people to self select based on topics, and then, well, you essentially get Reddit.
i cant make a site with 100% freedom, beacuse of obvious reasons, that would be like utopic i think
Then don't call it that.
There's nothing about your site that grants me the sort of freedoms I want, including the freedom to locate useful content.
Nah, disagree. I feel more free on this site than all the others so I back the name.
i think that maybe you are looking in mi site something thats already in others
P.S. I'm not looking for anything in your site, I'm just saying that it's not what you're presenting it as.
No way to filter by subjects one may be interested, no way to find likeminded individuals, no way to mute people, so yeah, not much value could be derived from it; I think that there is space for some pseudo-anonymous social network but this is not it, at least not in its current state.
> Curious to see how it evolves
being a haven for sharing very illegal content is probably how it's going to evolve... unfortunately
Some kind of trouble one way or the other.
Strong link trouble or weak link trouble :)?
In any case..
I hope TW Körner doesn't have that last footnote on the topic..
(Fwiw left/right (meta-)division seems to me to encompass all the moral taxonomies of the day, TWK just happened to settle for rich/smart vs social wrt UK)
>Social Darwinism applies the Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest to human society. Rich social Darwinists take wealth as the best indication of fitness to survive, academic social Darwinists take intellectual achievements as the best indication and so on. They are often haunted by the fear that the unfit do not understand this and may outbreed the fit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24154247
God that guy might turn up close to me by an embedding search.
;)
(For some reason the algolia DB wasn't properly normalised)
hopefuly not, thank you
Why wouldn't it? How would you prevent it?
You talk about evolution ... that's change over time. How it evolves is how you decide to change it.
it's inevitable with any anonymous service
Did you vibe code this by any chance? It's clearly insecure.
Oh, yes, you did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44656840
So you launched /b/?
This is what I thought too. It'll go full Nazi in less than 5 hours from now. Anyone want to place bets?
Haha, have you checked on it lately? You had it right on the money dude. The thing allowed HTML injection. It went from the N word and a couple emojis to downright ear-piercing multitudes of fascist /b/ propaganda over the course of an hour.
And now it's completely broken this morning...
There's no way of ever hearing back; being responded to, right?
>Curious to see how it evolves and what kind of conversations happen when metrics are removed.
I've seen a ton of projects like this. It will get deluged with spam and shitposts and people will stop caring once the novelty wears off and leave once it becomes a cesspool. Probably for 4chan which at least has a culture and established userbase. And porn.
The first message is from July 2022. Is it really recent?
i launched it 1 month ago aprox
Could you look into your dark mode please? Thank you!:)
I highly suggest the Dark Reader extension.
I have Dark Reader. I think it wasn't working properly for me. Right now the site is 404, can't check.
But I agree with other commentors, Dark Reader isn't the solution. There is not really an excuse for not doing a builtin darkmode nowadays, imo.
As some who loves dark mode, I hate that extension. I get the appeal of forcing every website to be dark mode, but that ends up breaking half of them or just making them look like trash. People need to custom design their dark modes for whatever each design is.
If you don't care about breaking design and stuff looking the way its supposed to, I guess the extension is fine but I rather use something like Stylus where you can use people's custom designed stylesheets for most known sites.
I love it and I've never had a problem with it... I don't get the hate at all /shrug
What are algorithms?
This looks like a different take on 4chan, and the content resembles the scrawls on the bathroom wall of a pub.
Every attempt at anonymous social fails terribly. Unfortunately without good moderation tooling this doesn't work. You have to limit the blast radius of what people put out there because on the internet, without repercussions, a lot of people say terrible things. After having tried a few things like this, it's clear identity matters. Yes you can find clever ways to get around it and surface the best content or have pseudonyms and all that, but essentially you must verify individuals. People need to know you can't just say anything aka you can't say terrible hurtful things without repercussions. You need a unique identifier per browser, per device, etc, and then you permaban anyone who uses vulgar language, racial slurs, or anything of the sort immediately. You use AI before the fact to actually moderate and check things, and anything that is attempted gets a warning.
Someone else said, let's go a step further and not post at all. You know what, YES. We have X, we have Facebook, we have many tools where you can create an account with any random email address, with any random name, and say anything you want. Let's leave behind the two decades of public social and go back to the real world e.g maybe there's a world in which you own what you say, its there forever and you have to be thoughtful before you say it, but we also put it in an appropriate place, in a category of communication that makes sense. Blogging was way better than microblogging, but obviously opening the door to everyone made social media far more viral and addictive. Adding pictures and video made it even more viral and addictive. It would just be nice to go back to something a bit more real, something that's not going to be horribly abused and it feels like part of that might mean, less public social.
> You have to limit the blast radius of what people put out there because on the internet, without repercussions, a lot of people say terrible things
And yet those same repercussions are the reason why social media is full of inoffensive slop. No one wants be the one who get fired for leaking their employer's unethical practices, after all.
Pseudonymity is not enough, sadly. Given enough time, you'll leak enough data points to be identified.
> Let's leave behind the two decades of public social and go back to the real world
The idea that the "internet" and the "real world" are separate has been outdated for a long time.
I feel like this kind of how Twitter started. Just text messages to the world. But it’s hard to resist monetization and network effects.
This got hacked pretty fast.
exactly my thoughts too
Yeah, when I visited, it was utterly destroyed with racist ranting and (I think) some neo-Nazi. Horrifying, yet impressive.
no goatse? I'm saddened.
I've always liked the idea of being able to just post anonymously without any votes, but it always quickly devolves into incoherent spam and endless slurs.
The website has been active for an hour and I'm already seeing some of that. It always turns into 4chan.
I mean yeah it would turn into 4chan since 4chan is also a anonymous board similar to this...
But what's wild is that when you say it always turns into 4chan, everyone knows that it means something bad, something bs.
the fact that 4chan has such a bad reputation is absolutely valid though, there is no denying of it, and maybe these other experiments also prove it that such reputation maybe exists because of the reason that the underlying system is flawed regarding anonymity, but that's just my hunch.
I like anonymity as an ideal, but 4chan (anonymity irl) not so much...
Looks like you do only frontend validation and have XSS vulnerabilities all over the place. I also see aren’t taking down nazi posts and CP? I went ahead and reported you to the FBI, hopefully your vibe lawyer is good.
I always thought there was a space for a social media that has upvotes and followers and all that, with the intention of creating echo chambers and segregating users into their own groups and that sort of thing, but with the ability for anyone to go on a 'holiday' into the other echo chambers, to see what those other users experience.
Likes are not one dimensional. Likes flow from one person to another. If you like someones posts, you're more likely to enjoy the things they like. A network of endorsement emerges and the subgroups can become clear.
The important thing would be for moderators to be able to police "what is liked/disliked". Hear me out.
If you've got this space where dozens or hundreds of people all have a high overlap of favorable content, but there's this one turd who comes in and downvotes everything, always... he's not just a little different, and he's not assimilating. He's trying to sabotage. If this was visible to a moderator, that moderator could decide he doesn't belong to the group. I don't advocate that he no longer be able to view the content, but maybe his votes just stop counting. Maybe he's no longer able to post content of his own (would be up to the moderator, I think, perhaps his content was always good enough, but his voting is counterproductive).
I think that on places like reddit they avoided this functionality because it would give moderators too much control over their communities, and outsiders would be unable to come in and eventually take over and force the original group out. Being admins, they could of course have done this anyway, but it would require them to be heavy-handed and obvious.
I think, if you have a saboteur, they're probably not part of your 'network'. The people you've endorsed probably won't have endorsed the saboteur, so the saboteurs activity should not effect your feed in any meaningful way. This is how trust works in real social circles.
Moderators clearly work but it's a shame it relies on single people doing a good thing. It's a shame the moderation can't be done by everyone all the time, unconsciously.
what you describe is called "shadow banning".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning
That's not the important part. My point is that moderators should be able to see or at least set policies on what people vote... if these 3 posts are good and fit with the community, maybe someone is still permitted to downvote 1 of them. Just personal preference after all. But if they're downvoting those (and all the other good fits), then they're simply not compatible with the community. So a "people who constantly downvote good fits" (or upvote bad fits) are punished/removed/whatever.
Vibe coding at its best. Did you expect something different from this "experiment"?
I am curious to know what was your thought process for this.
Has the site been hacked or is this how it is supposed to look? Usually racial slurs are buried deeper than the landing page.
Trolls likely injecting HTML.
The whole thing uses Firebase (as all vibe coded garbage does), and the 'country' property inline displays HTML without any kind of validation, meaning you can insert script tags, images, or more excitingly: autoplaying videos.
There's tons of swastikas and fascist imagery that plays 10 of the same video all at the same time. It's really cringe, who has the time to make these videos in the first place?
Looks like something nuked through the rate limit though, because when I try to post anything, it says I'm rate limited by Firebase or whatever in the console.
> who has the time to make these videos in the first place?
Lets just say 4chan has a lot more, unfortunately.
1 day later: it's a total mess.
Oh buddy, being hacked is absolutely crazy tbh. to me it now feels whether it was adequately prepared/ maybe was vibe coded?
This is very similar to an app I launched a while ago. Anonymity leads to some "interesting" posts. https://speczo.dev/hoot
"Anonymously share" which using an app on an Apple or Google phone, installed via their respective stores.
Seems legit.
How is it doing? Did it get any traction?
I like the project, but the words "Libre" and "experiment" made me assume it would be open source. Of course, it's the owner's decision, but the title biased my expectation.
Why call it "Libre" though? Or am I missing the link to code?
Reported racism, showed “Reporting…”, got:
“Could not send the report. Please try again.”
Why do you feel the need to report it? Is it a direct threat to someone? Is it illegal -or- do you just not like it and want it to go away?
It seems pretty clear to me no one that cares is on the other end of this.
It was very rude, and wasn’t punching up. Rude can be fine especially with a delineated purpose.
It was like “look behind you - the [racist trope] is the fault of the [ethnic group]”, and nothing political.
Racism is permitted there it sounds like, then? Wouldn’t have reported it if I’d known. Assumed taking swipes at minorities wouldn’t be tolerable outside of 4chan. I can always not visit when I don’t want to. But maybe I got the wrong impression, that someone decent was running the place and wouldn’t want garbage strewn about their halls. Course they might aim towards a different concept if so!
With none of those features there is no excuse for the site working that terribly with JS disabled. Look at HN for comparison, which degrades gracefully with JS disabled.
This is kind of the same idea as Yik Yak, which was an interesting app. Some good aspects (authenticity) and some bad aspects (lots of bomb threats and bullying).
The "Import ID" feature doesn't seem to work. I keep getting this error: "The identifier is not valid."
UI seems a little jank on iPhone SE, other than that, cool project. Q. How do you prevent racism, spam and hate speech?
A: you don’t
All of us humans are fundamentally racist, spammy, and have some form of hate in us. Depending on the state of society, it can suppress or bring it out. Anonymous boards like this bring out the worst in all of us.
Just as the current administration has catered to our bigoted, racist selves. Anonymous boards have more or less the same effect.
You are describing a standard message board. Old things are new again I suppose.
That's exactly it. I would say that the experiment is not so novel, but non-novel experiments are good, too. We retread illuminating experiments from physics in school for good reason.
There are quite a lot of message boards and imageboards, large and small, which check the same boxes. Many of them have not gotten enough traction to catch the attention of the mainstream (e.g. lainchan), and have a distinct vibe.
I think that as soon as your userbase expands into a representative sample of the Internet user population, your platform's culture will become increasingly similar (i.e. "average out") to the largest platforms, e.g. 4chan.
No HTML sanitization?
it's kind of a shock site right now. don't do experiments in the future without considering the avenues for abuse.
The problem with openness and anonymity is that it invites bad actors. Social media is an unsolved problem and any platform that gets sufficiently large will be more valuable as a tool to disseminate misinformation and propaganda than as a tool for people to actually communate freely and openly.
Don't know how long it took, but we made it to Nazi videos pretty quick.
For a stress-test, your doing pretty well.
Biggest issue is reporting posts is broken
This reminds me of the early internet.
As a developer on the ARPANET I've been on the net since the moment it existed. This is the arch opposite of the early internet, which was dominated by intelligent academics sharing technical articles and dense information.
This is actually really good
what could go wrong?
(frontpage is already filled with /pol/ trash)
Good ole anonymous boards. Nothing else like them brings out the worst in humanity
I liked this post :)
I like this a lot.
Sadists and psychopaths seem to have taken over this experiment.
You sure that call wasn’t always coming from inside the house?
Perhaps the more fake and curated the internet becomes, the more people will act out when given the chance?
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Now this is some peak ai vibe coded slop
Well, it only took about 15 hours for the site to be discovered by the Internet Troll Federation and be absolutely stuffed with slurs and hate memes.
Which was to be expected, frankly.
Not sure at which point the site allowed HTML, but for the first couple of hours or so there was only text for thoughts there, then the "hypermedia" of the kind described above, appeared, rendering the site useless. Just wait until someone discovers even better means to weaponize the HTML post feature -- there's bound to be galore of client-side vulnerabilities, I expect, if only due to Unicode possibilities...
When I tried to post a comment saying what I thought of the idea of this site, it told me that my words were "prohibited". So much for freedom.
Post the comment you wanted to make here.
Well, one of the first posts I saw was just a repeated ethnic slur, so not all "bad words" are prohibited.
I didn't say they are ... just some set of words that the creator doesn't personally approve of.
And what are those words? Post them here.
https://libreantisocial.com/badwords.js
I run into false positives on like every third post I try to make
I don't have the list of word that are forbidden, only the creator does, so ask him.
I asked you to post the word that you were not allowed to post, not a list of words that are forbidden on the site. For some reason, you don't want to post your comment or the words here.
"not all "bad words" are prohibited"
"I didn't say they are ... just some set of words that the creator doesn't personally approve of."
"And what are those words? Post them here."
"I don't have the list of word that are forbidden, only the creator does, so ask him."
You say "I asked you to post the word that you were not allowed to post, not a list of words that are forbidden on the site" but that is mistaken ... see the above context.
"For some reason, you don't want to post your comment or the words here."
I do have reasons not to accede to your demands, and I won't respond further to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
how is this sealioning?
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