Thanks so much for checking this out. I made this site as part of Ludum Dare 46, a game jam. The theme was "Keep it alive." I wanted to do something that was positive and that would give people an outlet to write about their experiences related to Covid. I've had to deal with some abuse, particularly after the first week, but overall it's been an incredibly positive experience.
There are certainly a lot of improvements I hope to make soon. I honestly built it in an evening and expected it might be dead within a day or two. That it's lasted over a month is incredible.
With a large influx of new readers, I'm sure you'll come across a few less savory posts. I'd encourage you to click the report button on the bottom of the page.
Thanks so much for checking it out!
Edit: Since this is HN, and I'm bound to get the question - It's built with Rails and Vue, with PaperCSS for the styling, Postgres for the database, and Redis is being used as part of the spam mitigation system. Oh, and the DB really will wipe itself if it goes more than 24 hours without a post.
2. It's strange how the simple things, efforts and connections mean so much these days
3. It is joyous and comforting how many interesting, loving, quirky, emotional, sincere messages I've found, and how few trolls I've stumbled upon. Hope it stays that way (understanding that it may be unlikely if it keeps getting more visibility).
4. I have no idea if by deleting reported spam you become more culpable/liable for any offensive messages you don't remove, or any freedom of speech issues - check the laws in your region I guess, and yes it's sad that one has to think about these things :-/
Honestly, regarding 3, I've been really impressed by how positive people have been. When this was near the top of Reddit about a month ago, I really spend about 48 hours frantically coding and moderating. Those 48 hours taught me a lot about content moderation though.
On the whole, it's been an _incredibly_ positive community of people writing letters. We've received over 115,000 letters, and they've been read over 15 million times. Many of the first 75,000 letters were spam and highly moderated content. But I've been able to read most of the past 35,000 or so, and an astonishing number are kind, thoughtful, or heartbreaking.
We've also had a lot of positivity coming from non-english countries, which I've encouraged and enjoyed seeing on social media. It's been a bit of an excuse to brush up on my French. I'd eventually love to have a better native experience for non-english speakers, but there are only so many hours in the day.
Regarding 4, it's a private website. I don't think freedom of speech applies. If you have some sources that say otherwise I'd be interested to read them.
Have you written about your experience with abuse, or are you willing to share? It's absolutely awful that you would experience that for something so obviously positive, but if you have thoughts you want to share on that it could be helpful for those of us who want to continue to challenge abuse in tech generally and might be educational for people here (maybe me) who engage in harmful behaviors and don't realize it.
(It's also not your responsibility to publish your abuse, I'm only opening up the opportunity to say more if you want to.)
I definitely will once it's no longer up. I might before then, once I improve the moderation tools a bit more. But between just being a neat thing to spam, and specifically targeting me as a trans woman, a lot of people seemed to enjoy posting hateful messages on the site when it was popular on reddit.
The anti-trans messages were really important for me to remove. They weren't particularly hurtful to me, but a good portion of my webcomic's audience are trans teens, and I _really_ didn't want their first experience at this website I made to be hate directed at them.
Thanks for asking. I'll definitely write more at a later date. :)
I just want to say this: the angled design is absolute genius because it lets me hold my phone at an angle without bending my wrist. I thought it was a cute gimmick at first but turns out there’s a huge usability factor!
Makes me wonder how an ergonomic phone could be shaped. I imagine placing all content at an angle would be problematic. Anyone have RSI from holding a phone?
Does the game Queers in Love at the End of the World have an influence on your website? You mentioned your audience is very LGBT. This, combined with the "time is running out" feeling of your website, made me think of that game immediately.
While I don't know that I was thinking about Queers in Love at the End of the World specifically while making this, Anna Anthropy's games are definitely an inspiration for me more broadly.
I really like your idea and I felt like leaving a comment on your website! But I have a question: what does the heart button below other people's comment?
Not at the moment. I'll probably do something if it lasts six months. Right now, I've still got some accessibility and legalese changes I'd like to make before I work on that. Right now, if it stopped getting messages, after 24 hours it would just error out.
Thanks so much for the kind words! I agree. I love the internet for the weird and interesting things you can find. I’m glad this one has resonated with so many people.
“This website contains a timer for seven days. If this timer reaches zero a one million dollar donation will be made to numerous charities. The button below resets the timer.”
I was going to call it “This is why we can’t have nice things”
In high school I made a little game with a similar feel. It showed a tower of stones, same for everyone online. To add a stone you needed to hold mouse for about 7 seconds. There was also a massive red button to collapse the tower. The record was about 350 stones placed.
For a charity, you could choose a good cause that upsets assholes. So they have to donate money to the charity to prevent it from getting the money that was donated.
Make it so only one entry per IP address? The script would very quickly run out, assuming they couldn't spoof (not sure how easy it is to spoof IP addresses).
The major difference is that an individual reddit account could only press the button once and anonymous presses were not allowed.
A single person can send an unlimited number of messages to this new website.
Given that I would expect this to go longer.
On the other hand, The Button was an april fools experiment on one of the internet's most popular websites and thus garnered a ton of attention. This could easily fade into obscurity much faster.
I wish I didn’t make this life I have. I wish I had made different choices and had the foreknowledge to not meet certain people. I wish I felt happier with what I have, instead of yearning for the things and situations I don’t.
I just wanted to say, whoever posted this, things can get better. I was in much the same situation about four years ago.
One thing that helped greatly was antidepressants. But that's a can of worms that seems to upset people whenever it's brought up, so perhaps I'll just mention it in passing.
I am not person who wrote the message but I am in similar situation, may be it’s the quarentine and being alone at home for weeks now but I have been thinking about my choices and mistakes.
Scheduled AWS lamda using the Mechanical Turk HITRequest API to get some random person to post to the site once a day. Shouldn’t cost more than a dime a day.
Please considering adding a privacy policy and some CYA legalese. I know it probably seems excessive and unnecessary but I would just hate to see someone wind up in a whole mess of trouble for a super cool side project that was supposed to be fun.
The FTC has resources for small-business COPPA compliance and there are plenty of free tools to help with a privacy policy.
This is extremely high on the todo list. It was going to be done this weekend, but then I ended up living a little too close to some of the ongoing protests in the US to concentrate on getting it done.
I'm late to the party, but wanted to say I really liked the slight tilt on the wonderful floating buttons, with their gentle shadow and floaty-but-satisfying animation.
Great page and excellent attention to the little details that makes it feel like it was made with love :)
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Thanks so much for checking this out. I made this site as part of Ludum Dare 46, a game jam. The theme was "Keep it alive." I wanted to do something that was positive and that would give people an outlet to write about their experiences related to Covid. I've had to deal with some abuse, particularly after the first week, but overall it's been an incredibly positive experience.
There are certainly a lot of improvements I hope to make soon. I honestly built it in an evening and expected it might be dead within a day or two. That it's lasted over a month is incredible.
With a large influx of new readers, I'm sure you'll come across a few less savory posts. I'd encourage you to click the report button on the bottom of the page.
Thanks so much for checking it out!
Edit: Since this is HN, and I'm bound to get the question - It's built with Rails and Vue, with PaperCSS for the styling, Postgres for the database, and Redis is being used as part of the spam mitigation system. Oh, and the DB really will wipe itself if it goes more than 24 hours without a post.
2. It's strange how the simple things, efforts and connections mean so much these days
3. It is joyous and comforting how many interesting, loving, quirky, emotional, sincere messages I've found, and how few trolls I've stumbled upon. Hope it stays that way (understanding that it may be unlikely if it keeps getting more visibility).
4. I have no idea if by deleting reported spam you become more culpable/liable for any offensive messages you don't remove, or any freedom of speech issues - check the laws in your region I guess, and yes it's sad that one has to think about these things :-/
5. Best of luck! :)
Honestly, regarding 3, I've been really impressed by how positive people have been. When this was near the top of Reddit about a month ago, I really spend about 48 hours frantically coding and moderating. Those 48 hours taught me a lot about content moderation though.
On the whole, it's been an _incredibly_ positive community of people writing letters. We've received over 115,000 letters, and they've been read over 15 million times. Many of the first 75,000 letters were spam and highly moderated content. But I've been able to read most of the past 35,000 or so, and an astonishing number are kind, thoughtful, or heartbreaking.
We've also had a lot of positivity coming from non-english countries, which I've encouraged and enjoyed seeing on social media. It's been a bit of an excuse to brush up on my French. I'd eventually love to have a better native experience for non-english speakers, but there are only so many hours in the day.
Thanks again for the kind words.
(It's also not your responsibility to publish your abuse, I'm only opening up the opportunity to say more if you want to.)
The anti-trans messages were really important for me to remove. They weren't particularly hurtful to me, but a good portion of my webcomic's audience are trans teens, and I _really_ didn't want their first experience at this website I made to be hate directed at them.
Thanks for asking. I'll definitely write more at a later date. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queers_in_Love_at_the_End_of_t...
Deleted Comment
I think managing the spam could be the worse part, but best of lucky
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346004
Deleted Comment
“This website contains a timer for seven days. If this timer reaches zero a one million dollar donation will be made to numerous charities. The button below resets the timer.”
I was going to call it “This is why we can’t have nice things”
But I couldn’t find a million dollars.
For a charity, you could choose a good cause that upsets assholes. So they have to donate money to the charity to prevent it from getting the money that was donated.
Deleted Comment
Ah, here we go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button_(Reddit)
Looks like it lasted about 4 months. So I guess that gives us a baseline for the over-under on the lifetime of this site.
A single person can send an unlimited number of messages to this new website.
Given that I would expect this to go longer.
On the other hand, The Button was an april fools experiment on one of the internet's most popular websites and thus garnered a ton of attention. This could easily fade into obscurity much faster.
So who knows!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button_(Reddit)
I wish I didn’t make this life I have. I wish I had made different choices and had the foreknowledge to not meet certain people. I wish I felt happier with what I have, instead of yearning for the things and situations I don’t.
I just wanted to say, whoever posted this, things can get better. I was in much the same situation about four years ago.
One thing that helped greatly was antidepressants. But that's a can of worms that seems to upset people whenever it's brought up, so perhaps I'll just mention it in passing.
Good luck, whoever and wherever you are.
I am not person who wrote the message but I am in similar situation, may be it’s the quarentine and being alone at home for weeks now but I have been thinking about my choices and mistakes.
I hope it gets better eventually.
curl -XPOST -d 'body=you cant die. you will never die' "https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com/api/send_letter"
:)
Deleted Comment
Outlive an AWS account that never generates a bill? That could be a challenge.
Maybe run something like this hourly, which would give about 2 hours notice:
curl https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com/api/get_ttl -s | wc -c | grep -v 26
(Though don't run it right on the hour as too many people doing that might temporarily take down the website.)
Deleted Comment
The FTC has resources for small-business COPPA compliance and there are plenty of free tools to help with a privacy policy.
Thanks for the reminder.
Great page and excellent attention to the little details that makes it feel like it was made with love :)