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- Hacker News
- Neat idea! It's simple but very effective - and I really enjoy the detail of the benches and the tree. Very nice.
I wouldn't add it to any of my sites due to the unmoderated nature of it - seeing some fairly unsavory things in your demo - but that's just a little tweak, I'm sure!
- If your website attracts such elements perhaps there's a reason?by sourcegrift
- openai has a free moderation endpoint. no reason to not use it.
edit: downvoters either know something I don't about its unsuitability, or have outdated info on it and think it's against terms to use it for reasons unrelated to GPT. it's not against terms.
by wahnfrieden - Actually, there is moderation. The problem is that the page came to HN before I added the moderation keywords or implemented more things :P But overall, it's possible.
On the details like benches and trees, you can also customize it. YOu can add as many props as you want, wherever you want, and style them accordingly. :)
by cauenapier - > NOTE: This project has been mostly vibe-coded
I deeply appreciate the honesty here. I’ll pass based on the vibecodedness of it but perhaps it won’t be a dealbreaker for others.
- Is it the philosophical reason you refuse to engage or is it because you don’t trust the security of this project?by lolptdr
- Yeah. I also don’t like the fact the dev posts the link and doesn’t interact with anyone here at all, so the link posting is effectively spray and pray abandonware too. Easy come easy go like they sayby purple-leafy
- I love the idea, but it’s a real shame how people are using it. I wonder if AI can moderate it for offensiveness and spam preventionby dawie
- Well, this is the behaviour of the crowd. Before HN, or even if you go to other websites that are using TownSquare, it can be quite fun.
A hade a lot of very funny and meaningful interaction with people visiting the sites
by cauenapier - Matt Webb made a version of this (and wrote about it) a while back—Cursor Party: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party
I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.
by figbert - There was a thing from the 90s kind of like this called Third Voice. It was a cool idea, but I remember there being a lot of backlash from brands.by afpx
- Moderation moderation moderation . It’s a big problem
I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed
The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol
So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere
by purple-leafy - …or you could just let people talk? People who engage with social features generally do so because they want to talk to other people. That carries some inherent risks.by sneak
- What is the difference between slurs and swears?by tasuki
- I made something similar last year: A p2p chat popup (that sits on bottom right of the page as a bubble) that allows all visitors to chat with each other. It had simple keyword based moderation in-built (can be easily bypassed though).
Was planning to add github oauth to get a known identity and persistent messaging so visitors can chat with each other across sites.
Instead of a webmaster adding script to their site, it was a browser extension.
The intent was two folds:
1. Get to know other people having similar interests,
2. Try something on the lines of a decentralized chat/messaging system.
by freakynit - It sounds like a nice idea, but probably only one of those things that work only once at scale - with hundreds of millions of pages, you will only meet others on the most common ones unless the extension is already very popular?by goobatrooba
- I'm interested in trying a moderation scheme that puts the power in the receiving client, with opinionated defaults. Let the client filter for itself, mute users for itself, and make users invisible to itself. Have default settings that make sense for the app, but let the user override them.
Use a cheap purpose-built LLM like OpenAI's free moderation endpoint to classify the text and send the original text plus the classification to clients, and let clients choose what to do with it, with opinionated defaults appropriate to the app.
Maybe you still need to identify persistent bad actors rather than acting only on content. But still, allow clients to decide what to do with that information.
I suppose my thinking is that strong default automatic moderation that's invisible to offenders is a requirement for a project like this to be able to offer a welcoming experience to users, but putting the power in an LLM and fixed filter lists feels very wrong. So my thought is to use those things to give the client power. But maybe that makes no difference if nobody changes settings away from defaults anyway.
- Assuming one can keep bots out, I always wondered why people don't just let the users moderate themselves? You could have a system where someone who gets consistently downvoted by enough people eventually just gets muted or kicked/banned for example.
- on the other hand, if someone is making their own site, they may care about the user impression their site gives to visitors.
i would think they should have the freedom on the site they build and host to choose the impression they give. and sure, if they choose to let their square be filled with noise rather than signal, that’s absolutely their choice. but they also may choose for it to be filled with signal rather than noise. the key thing is the site owner should have the choice to give whatever impression they want for their creation.
again, if they want that impression to be hijacked by noisy trolls, they can choose that too.
by toofy - Oh how fun. Sadly I went there and someone has botted it with “dick and balls” constantly being spammed by multiple people. But that’s to be expected when something gets attention. On other sites I can see this being nice addition. And a great concept.by justeoghan
- Most of it were bots programmed to be saying silly things. I have already implemented some better counter-actions to that. This are much calmer now that the HN post is not on front page anymore. it is pretty fun when you meet someone on a site and had an interesting conversationby cauenapier
- The contrast between the example screenshots and the standard internet behavior in the live demo is hilariousby thatguysaguy
- To paraphrase, there's no scheme for moderation / censoring / filtering that survives contact with the Internet. It simply can't be done. People take it as a challenge, and you can't design a system that handles it while remaining useful.
If you ban words, people will introduce typos / different spelling. If you ban concepts people will change the concepts (see the "unalive" thing that's popular now). If people want to be miserable, they will be miserable. And they'll invent new words, or use euphemisms to get their point across.
- Love it, also love that there's one HN visitor just hanging out typing "dick and balls" over and over again. That's unmoderated anonymous public squares for youby swiftcoder
- That was dang if I'm not mistaken.by childintime
- I just took a look at the page's own 'town square'. At the moment, it's largely full of people saying offensive things for the sake of it.by lambdaone
- So it’s a twitter plugin?by dools
- Maybe a really lightweight fast LLM could moderate messages in realtime. Not sure how pricey that would get though.by lifeformed
- Within about 300ms I thought “moderation is going to be a problem”.by trollbridge
- After having been a moderator for a number of communities over the years—BBCs in the 90s, niche forums during the 00s & 10s, Reddit boards in the 20s—I’ve come to believe that running shadow services where disruptive individuals can comingle may be the best way to handle this.
The advent of LLMs really opens the door to shunting off these “community members “ who’d rather contribute in misanthropic ways for the lulz than either leave or not contribute at all. They can take part in an interactive echo chamber that gives just as well as they can. You don’t even need a powerful model so the overall costs to the community are probably lower than the alternatives of trying to coexist with community-arsonists.
I spent years trying to find ways to bring people productively “into the fold” but eventually realized that it is futile in some cases because there’s zero value to the individual or the community to find a middle ground. They want to see things burn, and the community simply wants them out.
by Mtinie