I wanted to highlight a couple of the unique characteristics of Radiopaper that may not be immediately apparent when browsing https://radiopaper.com/explore
* It's possible to interact with Radiopaper entirely by email, and never log-in interactively. The notification emails contain context that explains that if you reply to the email, your message will be published on https://radiopaper.com
* The key mechanism that makes Radiopaper different from other social networks, and more resistant to trolling and abuse, is that messages are not published until the counterparty replies or accepts your comment. You can read more about this in our manifesto at https://radiopaper.com/about
The technical stack is a Vue/TypeScript app talking to an API backend written in Go, running on Cloud Run, and using Firestore for persistence, Firebase Auth for authentication.
Email processing is handled through the Gmail API hooked up to a Cloud Pubsub notification which triggers another Cloud Run service. Outbound emails go through SendGrid.
The whole stack "scales-to-zero", and on days that we have a few hundred active users, we're still under the free limits of Firebase Hosting, Cloud Run & Firestore, so this has allowed us to operate for a long time without funding or revenue. Our overall burn rate is around $40/month, mostly from the smattering of other SaaS offerings we use: Sentry, Mixpanel, Github & SendGrid.
Dave & I discuss our tech stack in a little more detail in this conversation: https://radiopaper.com/conversation/4PsvfxLX2Q5NHLBs8nuN
The team (myself, daave, davidschaengold, youngnh) will be around to answer any questions!
It was a probabilistic method to filtering out the trolls, and it worked well. Trolls wanted to ban, but they themselves became the more-frequent targets of bans. Eventually, they would get frustrated with the bans and leave. The people that remained, stayed civil to not become a clear target of a ban. There would be brief chaotic behavior, but it never lasted. Cooler heads always prevailed.
Radiopaper mentions that there is a lot of room for exploration in this space, to try different models for creating emergent social behavior and productive conversations. I hope we see more of it!
This, I like. It would be interesting to experience this system.
My own personal policy on HN is: never downvote anyone for the content of their comment, prefer replying; if downvoting then it must be for extremely poor presentation, not content. That said, I don't tend to upvote or downvote a whole lot.
The troll behavior isn't punished, unless a moderator steps in, where arguably it would have reached the point of being quite obvious or outrageous. So on HN, it seems that if a user has an issue with trolling, they would have to e-mail HN about it. And here again, it would likely need to be something more on the continual, obvious, or outrageous side for actions to be taken.
For example: every time a big political announcement is to be made or an event happens, the optimal game theoretic play is to ban them to prevent them from being able to set the narrative. And it just takes one person to do it. That's not hard at all: if you have millions of users, someone will do it!
In your example, the person would have to have posted recently in order for you to ban them, since bans only worked on quasi-recent posts. But yes, if you made yourself into a target, someone would ban you, and it was accepted in the culture because it was fun. It was acceptable that everyone got banned frequently, but far less frequently than the trolls. I should probably have mentioned that all users were anonymous to each other.
Was that on a per-thread basis i.e. if I start a thread, I have the power to publicly ban other users who reply to my thread?
the trolls! That's genius!
Intriguing idea anyway. Looking forward to seeing how it pans out.
Either party can keep adding messages to the conversation in any order, but only a back-and-forth is considered an update to the conversation as a whole, for the purposes of sending it to the top of the feed. That way, if a conversation turns sour, one person only needs to stop replying, and the conversation will gradually sink down the list into oblivion, even if new messages continue to be added by the ignored party.
I mean, the parent-comment was saying that folks could get the last-word by replying-then-blocking. It sounds like folks on your platform could get the last-word by simply not approving the other-side's response.
To avoid one side getting a last-word in a feud, it'd seem like you'd need to ensure that both sides could eliminate the entire conversation should they not be satisfied with its ultimate conclusion, such that there'd be no last-words in any feuds as there wouldn't be any (published) feuds. Short of that, it'd seem like one party could end up getting in a last-word.
Without actually trying it, this seems like a solid design choice.
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"Why was I banned? I didn't say any hate speech. I just stated my favorite movie."
"I hate that movie, thus it is hate speech because it promotes hate (something that I hate)." or "Read the rules, figure it out"
Sometimes then the mods ironically send actual hate speech in their reply, then block you. Or you reply to them, and replies to mods automatically unlock the nuclear admin ban missiles "for harassment." God forbid you quote their literal message in a report which then triggers the automated word filter bans which are disabled for some reason when it's mod messages.
I'm not really surprised though, since
Yes, it can be abused by people who think that having the last word is "winning". One way to address that might be to add "Fred blocked Sam" to a thread in which both Fred and Sam previously posted, so everyone knows what happened.
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My mind is blown at how simple and elegant this solution is!
Great work there.
So there is a reduced incentive to invest your time in writing a reply.
On Gawker/Kinja if you've been "followed" by a power user, your comment shows up right away. If not, your comment goes into "the greys", which are hard to see, until either the person you replied to replies or stars your comment.
I've spent a lot of time reading Jezebel and TheRoot over the years — they're a balm after experiencing the single-silo HN. The Gawker properties aren't what they used to be, but this commenting mechanism has its advantages. It truly defangs trolls. Jezebel and TheRoot could never operate without troll protections — there are so many disturbed characters hanging around trying the most vile stunts, you'd never manage to have a conversation proceed otherwise.
There's a significant flaw, though: the more that your interlocutor disagrees with your reply, the less likely it is that your comment will get approved. This doesn't apply to everyone on Gawker properties because there are lots of approved posters. I don't think the chained comment system would be that great unless it's supplemented by a way of approving/deapproving posters as well.
Sockpuppets.
Edit : since the founders are reading this, i had an idea once about what an anti-twitter would be like and came to this idea : no message under 1k characters. Do what you want with that idea, i give it to you.
But maybe it won't be such a big deal in practice: in a way, it's kind of like enforcing a certain amount of politeness when conversing on someone else's turf; you've entered their 'house' and are expected to play by their rules while there.
On the other hand, when it comes to debate of any kind, there always has to be one party who gets priority over the other and can tailor the appearance of the outcome of the debate to a certain extent.
TBH, I'm mostly very curious what kind of behavioral dynamics would emerge around this—it's probably not possible to infer too much in the abstract. In any case, an interesting idea.
Are you considering a strongly-bound 1-account-per-person model with verified accounts?
It doesn't stop you from posting your own stuff at top level, just stops flames, I suppose?
If you get enough overhead from the platform from writing boilerplate comments, maybe you just stop?
Hoping this works out!
In the end, I see this as a feature for discussions / subreddits - not exactly a business. But who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Granted I don't expect to write something bad but yeah, I just have this gut reaction I did something bad, like downvotes
Like a "shadow ban"
This feels like something that would be hard to get traction with, but hats off on trying to do something different and thinking through what social could be. Also, love the design and UX - great stuff!
As we were building Radiopaper, we developed a concept we call "social skeuomorphism." ... Social skeuomorphism is the idea that a social network should be designed to resemble the best social events in the non-digital world. This is tricky, because internet communication differs from in-person communication in many dimensions, and it's not immediately obvious which of those dimensions are the important ones. In a few of these dimensions internet communication might even be superior to in-person communication.
...But parties have a number of built-in safeguards to prevent this phenomenon from becoming toxic. If A approaches B at a party and begins speaking, B is expected to acknowledge the approach, but is free to leave the conversation quickly if desired. If A then follows B, refusing to terminate the conversation, A is being rude, and publicly so. At parties this is often sufficient to ensure that no one has to engage in long, unwanted conversations, or at least not too often.
Maybe this could be a complement to other social sites like HN or Reddit. Sometimes you see two people start to go back and forth in a subthread. Maybe that could be a cue to "take it to Radiopaper".
It's interesting I see this project, because I've long thought the problem with social media is that everyone can talk to everyone and anyone at any time. Like everyone is in a giant stadium with access to the PA to announce themselves... and everyone in the stadium can use it all at the same time. Real life doesn't work this way. While unfettered communication is nice, it is also overwhelming and positive and healthy communication needs filters and topics and such.
I'll definitely be watching this app and hopefully using it. There is a lot of opportunity here. I really enjoy the clean and simple interface. Personally, I think this is probably the best social media app and idea I've seen come through HN in a long time.
A 'contact me' button which quick copies a link would be a nice addition.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around a general use case then. It seems like a neat idea for discussions or debates between two people which have public value.. but most of the time when I'm writing directly to someone, why would I want to have it shared? Looking at other social networks, most of the time you want to share something with your social circle and generate a conversation which has more than two people or you message them directly. Am I missing something?
I think this is for people who like to have other people read what they wrote (as a sort of validation), but doesn't like having people who reply with no-effort content. So the userbase would be people who like having intelligent debates in the open, but in a selective way (not with people they deem "not fit to debate with")
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* The OAuth scopes for login with Twitter are overly broad. This appears to be a limitation of Firebase Auth's SDK, it only supports the Twitter OAuth 1.0 API, whereas Twitter only provides more fine-grained scopes if we use OAuth 2. We're looking into whether we can make changes to Firebase Auth to contribute upstream that would let us request email addresses without permission to view your timeline, followers, etc.
* There are a few quirks with our UX on mobile devices, and Comments are not visible on mobile. We've focused on the desktop experience for reading and writing at first, but a lot of our users do come to us on Mobile, so making this better is a high priority.
* We're missing a lot of the standard social features you might expect from an app like this: following, reactions, @-mentions, topics, search, etc. These and many others are on our roadmap, but as a bootstrapped team trying to maintain a high quality bar, we're moving on them pretty slowly.
Without search I can't see how anyone could make much use of it.