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Show HN: Sqwok – A low-cruft, minimalist alternative to Reddit and Twitter

185 points by holler 6y ago

holler 6y ago
Hello HN, I'm building sqwok.im, a new open discussion site that mixes real time messaging with news aggregation. I started building this because I wanted an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics, and other general topics in a modern experience like Slack, with features built for the general user and not enterprise or gaming. I grew up hanging out on aol chat, irc, icq, aim, etc and with those experiences in mind, I'd like sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users. Currently the site works on both mobile and desktop web and supports multiple concurrent logins. That means you can have multiple tabs open and/or be logged in on a phone and desktop at the same time, and the real time features should work. The core differentiator for Sqwok is that it's built from the ground up for real time. The site is built around real time conversations that are both ephemeral and long-lived -- all posts include a built-in full-featured chat room. Have something on your mind or what to discuss the latest news? Simply create a post, share the url with anyone, and they will instantly be able to open it, see the active real time conversation, see who is currently in the conversation, and begin talking with a few clicks. The conversation can be rejoined at any time. It also includes the ability to @mention other users and send them an instant in-app notification to join you. Recently added is a "follow" feature that allows you to follow another user, and then when they are online and in conversation(s), to both see where they are and join them instantly. This lets you find your friends and join them in conversation at any time. To keep the site razor focused on actual conversation, I've opted to exclude any form of voting. Instead, relevance for "trending" is based on a combination of real time chat activity and time decay. I have further ideas I'd like to explore here to add options for how people find content, but the goal is to mimic the real world as much as possible, and keep the focus on building rich conversations versus invisible feedback loops. I've created a post on sqwok for this post on HN: https://sqwok.im/p/TE22DNgTPn5P9g https://sqwok.im/p/TE22DNgTPn5P9g One particular use case that's come up for this is using it to watch YouTube live streams outside of YouTube, or in the case where the YouTube stream has chat disabled, such as the example below. Feel free to try it out by creating a post and simply include the url for the YouTube stream in the post title. https://sqwok.im/p/SpGrYgY-vZ0haA https://sqwok.im/p/SpGrYgY-vZ0haA If you have any questions or comments please let me know, thank you!
Tipewryter 6y ago
Two Tips: 1: Opensource it. The type of person who would be an early adapter probably wants to have the option to improve / self host it. 2: Make a Twitter account to keep interested people informed about your progress.
- holler 6y ago
  hey thank you for the comments! 1) I've been focused on building it and hadn't thought much about open source or what that would look like until recently. I'd like to understand how similar projects that went open source did it and what the challenges were etc. 2) Definitely agree, I created it but haven't posted, today is probably a good day for that! I will make a post shortly! https://twitter.com/sqwokapp https://twitter.com/sqwokapp Thank you!
hisham_hm 6y ago
The #1 question to any social network: how do you handle moderation?
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  Hopefully they learn from the reddit mod experience, and don't let anyone moderate anything.
  - every 6y ago
    Or, perhaps they can learn something from MetaFilter[1] which has been successfully moderated for over 20 years... [1] https://www.metafilter.com/ https://www.metafilter.com/
    - busymom0 6y ago
      wow, the site is quite hard to read with that light blue color background. They really should be using darker shade of blue to make it readable.
      - every 6y ago
        Yeah, it's an artifact of web design from decades ago. Hence known as: The Blue. But with an account there are better, higher contrast choices. I suggest "plain"...
- fortran77 6y ago
  How do you handle moderation when you're just walking about in public?
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    Public has - Fewer people that can reach a given point at low cost to themselves - No sockpuppets (i.e. is relatively immune to Sybil attacks) - If you piss someone off enough, you are putting yourself in a position where immediate bodily harm could come to yourself And yet, walking about in public is still moderated by police.
hisham_hm 6y ago
> relevance for "trending" is based on a combination of real time chat activity and time decay How do you plan to prevent this from essentially devolving into "flamewars get promoted"?
- holler 6y ago
  That's a great question and concern! I want to add filtering that determines whether the same people are going back and forth over a certain period of time, and possibly other things like sentiment analysis or silent voting. It's a real concern and I'm hoping to be able to get something workable, but time will tell!
ajsfoux234 6y ago
Is any monetization planned?
- holler 6y ago
  In the short term I just want to stabilize the site and get it to a point where it's usable for most people. I'd like to solve some UI issues (many suggested via feedback), fix bugs etc. Eventually I'm hoping to get to a place where there could be an api, a paid plan for extra features, and the ability for users to monetize themselves w/integrations for the site features etc.
superfrank 6y ago
I don't usually like to comment on design when people post early stage products, because I understand that usually development is focused on core features and, as time goes on, the design will change. That being said, I feel like the homepage was overwhelming to the point where my immediate reaction was to back out of using the product, so I feel that it's worth commenting on in this case. I'm not trying to nit pick, but if other people had similar reactions, it could affect user acquisition. There's lots of big bold text and not a lot of use of negative space, so it's really hard to know what to focus on. I feel like a little more vertical space between posts and maybe making the URL smaller or moving it below the post title (or both) could really make the homepage a little less overwhelming with only a few minor changes.
- iagovar 6y ago
  I felt the same.
- emmelaich 6y ago
  Interesting! I thought the opposite; could do with less whitespace and smaller fonts.
  - holler 6y ago
    It is a challenge to get something optimal for _most_ people! But I'd like to hear feedback and adjust if necessary. Thank you!
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      Good defaults + configuration overrides are the recipe to solve that.
- holler 6y ago
  Hey thank you for the feedback and for checking it out! May I ask if you were on desktop or mobile? Definitely could adjust the font sizes and since I've been working mostly on my laptop, I realize I might not be optimizing for other screen sizes. > I feel like a little more vertical space between posts and maybe making the URL smaller or moving it below the post title (or both) could really make the homepage a little less overwhelming with only a few minor changes. I will experiment with this further. The vertical space should be easy, the urls are part of the text of the title, so maybe either shrink them slightly or a more muted blue? Thanks for the feedback!
cvhashim 6y ago
I like it. Just have one call out. The text feels too large and too bold on mobile. Any chance it could look like this? Probably the best example of mobile friendly, minimalist content —> hckrnews.com
- holler 6y ago
  hey, I do like that very minimal font sizing! Maybe it'd be nice to add a way to shrink the text for people who'd like to do that? thank you for the feedback I appreciate it!
heleninboodler 6y ago
Looks great. Gut reaction on the UI is that it feels very cramped -- the fonts are kind of biggish for the spaces they go, and there isn't enough breathing room between things and somehow it manages to take my whole screen but still give me the feeling I'd like to make the window a lot bigger. (note: viewing on an MBP) Also, no comment threads? I'd much rather have commenting (hierarchical threads) on a reddit replacement than live chat. Maybe that's just me and maybe that's your entire point. I was just surprised by it and have very little interest in watching a chat stream fly by.
vijaybritto 6y ago
Hi the design is minimal and simple to understand. I hope this gets traction. But I noticed that you serve 450KB of JS on initial load. This is not required at all for a site with such a minimal design and a single list. Ideally this site should be less than 10kb in total with no js and atomic css. This is loading slow even in desktop. The app loads first and the /posts API response takes a lot of time to load. It could be server rendered for the initial load and served from a CDN.
- krimpenrik 6y ago
  Are you missing the real-time part?
  - vijaybritto 6y ago
    No I meant only the initial load
- holler 6y ago
  hey thanks for the feedback, I definitely agree it could be faster, and I'd like to get it there eventually. Right now the site is rendered using ssr on amazon cloudfront, and for pages that have been cached already, it should load very fast. The api requests could possibly be improved with caching as well. I share the sentiment you have and appreciate it! So far I've tried to keep the number of dependencies very low and keep things as optimal as possible, but always room for improvement. Thanks for checking it out!
  - vijaybritto 6y ago
    Glad to know! I've bookmarked and am using it in a pinned tab. Looking forward!
pkamb 6y ago
I really hate how there's lag when going "Back" from an article to the topic list (iOS, Safari). It resets the scroll position too, to the wrong spot. This is a major issue on Reddit too... a huge lag when going Back. I like that Sqwok looks HN/old.Reddit but with bigger mobile-sized tap targets and fonts. It feels like it works well in a browser. But the back experience kind of ruins the fluid UX.
- holler 6y ago
  hey thank you for checking it out! I realize that the back button is misleading and I plan to change it. I was thinking to make it behave more like a back button, perhaps with some context sort of how it works on e.g. instagram? Thank you for the feedback and checking it out, I appreciate it!
  - pkamb 6y ago
    I'm using the native swipe-back gesture on my phone, not the back button in the top left (which I don't really even think you need).
    - holler 6y ago
      ah ok gotcha, yeah right now there isn't any swipe functionality so I will need to investigate implementing it, thanks again for the feedback!
      - pkamb 6y ago
        Hopefully you don't need to implement anything... just allow the browser to go Back, then don't refresh the topic list page at all when I land.
BGthaOG 6y ago
I built an app in this same space (news aggregation, real-time discussions) and hope it is OK to share it as a comment to this post: https://newscussion.com https://newscussion.com . Its a little different in that latest news don't come from users posting them but rather are brought in via a third party API. Really happy to see Sqwok in this same space, as it validates that there are folks interested in ephemeral / real-time discussions around latest news :) @holler Let me know if you'd like to talk dev stories about building for this space, I'd be down.
- holler 6y ago
  hey thank you. how's your project going? definitely down, email me at guac@sqwok.im, thanks for checking out sqwok!
jen729w 6y ago
Meta question: why are we at v350.06680? The numbers nerd in me needs to understand.
- holler 6y ago
  haha! tbh I needed _something_ to be able to track versions for debugging purposes once I had some real users, and I ended up just using the client `v${commit number}.{last 5 commit hash}` Hope that answers it! thank you for checking out sqwok & have a nice day
  - jen729w 6y ago
    It does, thanks. I’ve always wondered, how does the commit hash get in to the actual version number? You don’t know the hash before you commit, so now to get the hash in to the public commit version you have to commit again, which changes the hash!
    - allenu 6y ago
      I'm guessing the build/deploy stage sets that up in the environment, so it's not actually committed in the repo.
      - holler 6y ago
        yep that's it, it's created in the build stage and passed into the app!
- jan6 6y ago
  uninformed guess: every commit is a version bump, every push to master is a major version bump?
tsherr 6y ago
On mobile. I like the layout and font size. Looks like something I'd use daily.
- holler 6y ago
  thank you for the feedback and for taking the time to check sqwok out, I really appreciate it! have a nice day
rattray 6y ago
I'm enthused! Personally, I have a hard time imagining using this without upvotes, reacjis, and/or threads – would anticipate far too much chaff to get to the wheat as I scroll through discussions. In a reasonably busy chat room, something needs to indicate what's worth reading or jumping in on, and separating the various streams of chatter.
- holler 6y ago
  hey thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it! I definitely agree that there has to be ways to filter out the noise. I've discussed adding a way to "like" messages, and have those end up displayed separate from the main list. I'm open to other ideas as well! Thanks again!
  - rattray 6y ago
    Good luck! Would love to see something like this take off :)
isakkeyten 6y ago
Tbh it's very hard on the eyes.
dvh 6y ago
Vanilla webview on android 10: The webpage at https://sqwok.im/ https://sqwok.im/ could not be loaded because: net::ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED
- jan6 6y ago
  I think the site probably just died because it couldn't handle HN storming in to all the chats ;p
  - holler 6y ago
    haha! I think there may be an issue around me switching from gzip to brotli compression for some browsers, but I'm not 100% sure if that's the issue. I will investigate, thank you!
swivelmaster 6y ago
Hah, I made a political satire idle game called Troll Farm and the first thing you do in the game is make an account on a site called “Squalk.” I guess it was too obvious a joke!
- holler 6y ago
  haha nice, how far did you get on making the game?
the_gipsy 6y ago
The navigation is somehow fucked up
- holler 6y ago
  hey thanks for checking it out, did you happen to click the left "chevron" and it confused you? Just curious if that's what you're referring to because it's been mentioned a few times, and I'm planning to change how that works to be more intuitive as a back button. thanks!
  - the_gipsy 6y ago
    Yes. At least when I land from a link, I would expect that thing to take me to the "home" or "frontpage". There just is no back/history if I just landed. In general, I would a expect a "low-cruft and minimalist" to NOT mtry to get smart with history. It always fails, e.g. twitter, reddit. Just leave it up to the browser.
    - holler 6y ago
      > I would a expect a "low-cruft and minimalist" to NOT mtry to get smart with histor fair point and I agree, thank you
- superkuh 6y ago
  You get navigation? All I see is a binary string of mangled characters. It's not even a valid website. > ~=�y-�%�:�J�.�GW9��WI��J�&��2��Ȕ��I�N�� ~-Hrb�Oa[�uΪ�>�(O�(�6:B�ff_��۷�8�*��IE...
  - holler 6y ago
    what browser are you using? it's possible that it doesn't support brotli, although I'd like to know if it's something else. Sorry you're seeing that.
abhinav22 6y ago
I was on my iPhone and it looked pretty cool, albeit fonts slightly large. I wasn’t able to sign up - page kept freezing. Otherwise I think this has great potential and wish you the best of luck
- holler 6y ago
  Thank you I really appreciate it! I'm not sure why you weren't able to sign up, did it give you an error? This is the most people I've had on the site today so it's possible that a load issue was surfaced. Thanks again!
  - abhinav22 6y ago
    I’ve had issues on the odd other site, it just freezes at the username entry (can’t switch from username to password). Just something for you to keep an eye on. Saw your most recent post. You are a good guy —- rooting for you! In 1 year or whenever I am looking forward to seeing this explode into popularity. Keep a journal if it’s not too much of a bother, I’d love to read the full story and growth of your website after it’s all said and done because I really think if you keep at it, you have a winner on your hands.
dingdingdang 6y ago
2.18mb loaded for pure text design. Low-cruft? Minimalist? Sorry, but please use descriptors with discernment, this discrepancy alone has made me withdraw from looking any further at this project.
- krick 6y ago
  Yeah, it seems that some people mistake minimalism for "it took me 10 minutes to build and I didn't care about the visual design". It's heavy, clunky, and even though it's text-only, it has some pretty awful typography. But, anyway, thinking that social media is about the GUI is silly. If GUI is suboptimal, people just make alternative clients and browser extensions to visit your platform despite them disliking the interface. People use Reddit or Twitter because of community, because of network effect, because other people use Reddit or Twitter. And to a smaller extent, because content format suits them. Clean UI helps to get traction, but it's never the main selling point nor the real reason why people stay.
nine_k 6y ago
I'd like to say that what makes reddit and twitter big and important is not technical sophistication. It is the fact that a lot of interesting people are there — so another person would join to read and interact with them. So I'd try to build the simplest thing that conveys the idea and provides the experience (twitter was initially a Rails app), and spend most of the effort on getting and keeping interesting people aboard. These trendsetters are the users you want to listen to, and pander to. You went them around. You want their audience around. I can remember a somehow similar site, only more minimalist, founded like 15 years ago. It was friendfeed.com: link sharing, posting commenting, real-time IM-like updates (it even had a Jabber gateway for some time). It was great, though it never grew huge. Facebook bought them and acquired their most important invention, the "Like" button. I don't say that technical sophistication is not important! It is. But it becomes important when your social / communication mechanics work, and you have a number of real users. Until then, you want your technology small and easily malleable. Back in the day I've seen a brilliant online community forming around a few hundred lines of Perl scripts. Guys from friendfeed first came with a schemaless DB, and only later with the high-performance Tornado server (in Python still). Guys from YouTube first found the area where their site was useful (not their initial dating, but video publishing and discovery), and later came up with advanced video delivery solutions. Same likely applies to your site. Good luck!
- Nkuna 6y ago
  > I'd like to say that what makes reddit and twitter big and important is not technical sophistication. It is the fact that a lot of interesting people are there — so another person would join to read and interact with them. Adopting Twitter's user acquisition strategies does not, in hindsight, seem all that smart considering Twitter's growth relative to its peers? I believe this led to their current predicament where all but the early/'power' users enjoy the vast majority of attention on the platform whilst new users scream into the ether and finally give up on the platform. Yes, one can gain a huge following with the time investment involved but for the average user, even hitting a 1K following is a pipe dream. Contrast that with TikTok.
  - nine_k 6y ago
webdog 6y ago
I feel like this gives too much weighting to the discourse around a topic or article (Ironic, given I'm doing the same thing in this thread). One of the reasons I loathe twitter and reddit is the conversations and comments in threads are just plain awful a lot of times. This seems to create the potential to amplify that while reading an article or watching a video in real-time, creating a competing interest of consuming media vs opinions. This is critical feedback, but I don't think this solves the problem around propagation of misinformation, bad actors, or opinion vacuums. The reason I dislike the modern web is that conversation and engagement are the key drivers for a site, the content second. This has, in my opinion, created the worst-case scenario in which the value of an opinion of statement is so commodified that the only way to create value from discourse is to have a lot of it, and most of it ends up being toxic and terrible because people seem to only create negative discourse en masse, or at least the current system has been gamified to do just that.
- holler 6y ago
  hey thank you for checking out sqwok and giving feedback, I appreciate it. > This is critical feedback, but I don't think this solves the problem around propagation of misinformation, bad actors, or opinion vacuums. I certainly agree that it isn't going to solve all of these problems. The genesis of this project actually goes back to ~2015 and predates the current social medial landscape. But the challenges will be there and have to be addressed, while balancing building something people enjoy enough to use and help grow. One problem I see with sites like Twitter, is that there isn't _enough_ discourse. Anyone can make a statement, go viral, and there isn't a true "conversation" around it. There are threaded comments but it's not the same, and the idea here is to explore building real time conversations around those statements, and allow more critique. I'd like to explore building ways to reward messages that are relevant such as letting users nominate a message if it adds value. Additionally there should be basic features such as muting/blocking people you don't want to see, and am openminded to hear other ideas people have. I will say that HN is a shining example of how to keep a certain level of civility on a discussion site, but as it's been mentioned before, scaling that to a much larger size may be very difficult.
  - 6y ago
highmastdon 6y ago
Scrolling is horrifying on mobile phone (iPhone 6, iOS 12.4.8). I have to move it instead of letting it slide. Not sure why that is, maybe you’re taking over the scroll, or scroll listeners
- holler 6y ago
  hey thanks for the feedback, I haven't tested in ios 6 so not sure what you're seeing, but I am marking that down to investigate this weekend. Sorry that it's not working but thanks for checking it out!
Nkuna 6y ago
That name (or its spelling rather) is... unfortunate.
appleflaxen 6y ago
For anyone looking to host their own instance, this is not open source. lemmy is an option with similar functionality that is, IIRC.
paxys 6y ago
Minimal doesn't automatically equal functional or appealing. Designing a good UX is very hard work, and "simple" is always harder.
kkotak 6y ago
Sadly this is trending at #3 - https://sqwok.im/p/QwqOd1D0x2HvKw https://sqwok.im/p/QwqOd1D0x2HvKw
- as-j 6y ago
  And here I thought it was going to be a Trump thing. At least this made chuckle. ;)
- holler 6y ago
  Well, although I was hoping I wouldn't see anything too bad, it's also somewhat not surprising. I think any new discussion site will have to deal with it at some point. This is the mvp release so it is still lacking many features, but it will be addressed.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
curl https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im It's not TXT, HTML, JSON, XML, GZIP, JPG, PNG, GIF, ... Would be nice to have a hint. Nothing useful in the headers except something about AWS Lambda.
- holler 6y ago
  interesting, it should be HTML for the main web response.. will look, thank you
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Cool thing about HN is that often a downvote can be a signal you missed something obvious. As was the case here. The data returned was compressed using brotli, as indicated by the content-encoding header value "br". Duh. curl https://sqwok.im|brotli https://sqwok.im|brotli -dc
  - holler 6y ago
    glad you got it!
mleonhard 6y ago
Good job launching. I clicked on a topic and then clicked the "<" button. It didn't go back to the home page.
- holler 6y ago
  thank you! I agree that button is confusing, and a few others have mentioned it as well. I'm going to change it to behave like a normal back button. Thanks for stopping by!
JulianWasTaken 6y ago
Seems nice, though I typoed my password, but it seems so minimalist that on mobile there's no way to change it (when logged in obviously).
- holler 6y ago
  hey sorry about that, I do plan to add a settings page very soon! right now you could try the "forgot password" link while logged out. Thank you for checking it out & sharing feedback!
holler 6y ago
Thank you to everyone who has commented and taken the time to check out Sqwok. It's been a labor of love, and sometimes frustration, and it's really encouraging to see people using it and giving great feedback. It has a long way to go but I'm hopeful to realize the vision of a new alternative for open discussion. I also wanted to share the first post I made on Sqwok, dedicated to my late friend Thom Simmons. The reason I want to share this is because you never know who you'll meet and what impact they'll have. I met Thom when I was learning python and hanging out in #django on freenode a decade ago. We went on to become good friends and he helped me learn how to program beyond html, while we constantly plotted what our next project would be. He introduced me to Reddit around ~2009 which at the time wasn't nearly as popular or known outside of tech. I had just thought of the idea for Sqwok about two weeks before his passing, but opted not to mention it on one of our last calls because he was going through some personal struggles. I know he would have been excited for it. In this crazy year of 2020, I hope more people can find positive connections, however that may be, and that we learn from each other, grow, prosper, and thrive. https://sqwok.im/p/TsuqjEqi3OwXiA https://sqwok.im/p/TsuqjEqi3OwXiA I'm very grateful, thank you.
- cabalamat 6y ago
  Some feedback: When I scroll to the top of a conversation, it automatically scrolls me down. I find this annoying and unintuitive. To me, if I tell the computer to do something, it should do that thing, not immediately disobey me. Some questions: Do you intend to put this on the Fediverse with ActivityPub? If not, why not?
moocowtruck 6y ago
seems like cool idea, feels kinda slow for 'minimalist' what does actually mean by use of that word here
gbh444g 6y ago
Here's my 2c. All these clever ranking algorithms are irrelevant technicalities in chatting platforms. What matters is the type of people that constitute your audience. Reddit chooses to cater to emotions: their front page encourages low-effort posts that invoke strong emotions (outrage, etc.) and those emotions nudge their audience to argue with each other and spend more time on the site. This particular type of people - emotional and combative - are good for their revenue model, so reddit specifically caters to them. HN is the other end of the spectrum: it caters to audience that values dry precise knowledge. HN's (or rather YC's) business model revolves around this type of people, so HN is carefully designed to attract its audience and repel everyone else. The HN's primitive design isn't a flaw, but a carefully designed feature with that goal in mind. If you're designing a new platform like that, the number one question is "what audience do I want on my forum?" Once you have an answer, you can design the UX and various technicalities: it may be a super-dry arxiv-style forum if you want scientists or a flashy and colorful site leveraging emotions. The common mistake is to try to design a general-purpose forum where people of all types would figure it out among themselves how and what to talk about. That's not gonna work because a Joe-the-redneck can't have a meaningful conversation with a Joe-the-scientist: either the former will start a fight, or the latter will leave. For example, from your description: "an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics <...> sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users." See, you're trying to mix science with politics with non-tech users and so on. Edit: using words from the Thiel's "zero to one" book, you need to find your niche where you can differentiate from competitors, win that local competition, and only then expand.
- superasn 6y ago
  Very insightful comment. Communities also evolve too, like reddit wasn't always like this but i think flanderization happens to website too.
- noja 6y ago
  > but a carefully designed feature with that goal in mind. Was it carefully designed? That implies a very direct, conscious decision. Or was it designed by someone to whom design is not vital, and it worked out because everyone similar tends to think the same?
ComodoHacker 6y ago
From your description I think you'll be competing more with Telegram and Viber, not Reddit.

185 points by holler 6y ago

Hello HN, I'm building sqwok.im, a new open discussion site that mixes real time messaging with news aggregation. I started building this because I wanted an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics, and other general topics in a modern experience like Slack, with features built for the general user and not enterprise or gaming. I grew up hanging out on aol chat, irc, icq, aim, etc and with those experiences in mind, I'd like sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users. Currently the site works on both mobile and desktop web and supports multiple concurrent logins. That means you can have multiple tabs open and/or be logged in on a phone and desktop at the same time, and the real time features should work. The core differentiator for Sqwok is that it's built from the ground up for real time. The site is built around real time conversations that are both ephemeral and long-lived -- all posts include a built-in full-featured chat room. Have something on your mind or what to discuss the latest news? Simply create a post, share the url with anyone, and they will instantly be able to open it, see the active real time conversation, see who is currently in the conversation, and begin talking with a few clicks. The conversation can be rejoined at any time. It also includes the ability to @mention other users and send them an instant in-app notification to join you. Recently added is a "follow" feature that allows you to follow another user, and then when they are online and in conversation(s), to both see where they are and join them instantly. This lets you find your friends and join them in conversation at any time. To keep the site razor focused on actual conversation, I've opted to exclude any form of voting. Instead, relevance for "trending" is based on a combination of real time chat activity and time decay. I have further ideas I'd like to explore here to add options for how people find content, but the goal is to mimic the real world as much as possible, and keep the focus on building rich conversations versus invisible feedback loops. I've created a post on sqwok for this post on HN: https://sqwok.im/p/TE22DNgTPn5P9g https://sqwok.im/p/TE22DNgTPn5P9g One particular use case that's come up for this is using it to watch YouTube live streams outside of YouTube, or in the case where the YouTube stream has chat disabled, such as the example below. Feel free to try it out by creating a post and simply include the url for the YouTube stream in the post title. https://sqwok.im/p/SpGrYgY-vZ0haA https://sqwok.im/p/SpGrYgY-vZ0haA If you have any questions or comments please let me know, thank you!

Tipewryter 6y ago

Two Tips: 1: Opensource it. The type of person who would be an early adapter probably wants to have the option to improve / self host it. 2: Make a Twitter account to keep interested people informed about your progress.

holler 6y ago
hey thank you for the comments! 1) I've been focused on building it and hadn't thought much about open source or what that would look like until recently. I'd like to understand how similar projects that went open source did it and what the challenges were etc. 2) Definitely agree, I created it but haven't posted, today is probably a good day for that! I will make a post shortly! https://twitter.com/sqwokapp https://twitter.com/sqwokapp Thank you!

hisham_hm 6y ago

The #1 question to any social network: how do you handle moderation?

stronglikedan 6y ago
Hopefully they learn from the reddit mod experience, and don't let anyone moderate anything.
- every 6y ago
  Or, perhaps they can learn something from MetaFilter[1] which has been successfully moderated for over 20 years... [1] https://www.metafilter.com/ https://www.metafilter.com/
  - busymom0 6y ago
    wow, the site is quite hard to read with that light blue color background. They really should be using darker shade of blue to make it readable.
    - every 6y ago
      Yeah, it's an artifact of web design from decades ago. Hence known as: The Blue. But with an account there are better, higher contrast choices. I suggest "plain"...
fortran77 6y ago
How do you handle moderation when you're just walking about in public?
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Public has - Fewer people that can reach a given point at low cost to themselves - No sockpuppets (i.e. is relatively immune to Sybil attacks) - If you piss someone off enough, you are putting yourself in a position where immediate bodily harm could come to yourself And yet, walking about in public is still moderated by police.

hisham_hm 6y ago

> relevance for "trending" is based on a combination of real time chat activity and time decay How do you plan to prevent this from essentially devolving into "flamewars get promoted"?

holler 6y ago
That's a great question and concern! I want to add filtering that determines whether the same people are going back and forth over a certain period of time, and possibly other things like sentiment analysis or silent voting. It's a real concern and I'm hoping to be able to get something workable, but time will tell!

ajsfoux234 6y ago

Is any monetization planned?

holler 6y ago
In the short term I just want to stabilize the site and get it to a point where it's usable for most people. I'd like to solve some UI issues (many suggested via feedback), fix bugs etc. Eventually I'm hoping to get to a place where there could be an api, a paid plan for extra features, and the ability for users to monetize themselves w/integrations for the site features etc.

superfrank 6y ago

I don't usually like to comment on design when people post early stage products, because I understand that usually development is focused on core features and, as time goes on, the design will change. That being said, I feel like the homepage was overwhelming to the point where my immediate reaction was to back out of using the product, so I feel that it's worth commenting on in this case. I'm not trying to nit pick, but if other people had similar reactions, it could affect user acquisition. There's lots of big bold text and not a lot of use of negative space, so it's really hard to know what to focus on. I feel like a little more vertical space between posts and maybe making the URL smaller or moving it below the post title (or both) could really make the homepage a little less overwhelming with only a few minor changes.

iagovar 6y ago
I felt the same.
emmelaich 6y ago
Interesting! I thought the opposite; could do with less whitespace and smaller fonts.
- holler 6y ago
  It is a challenge to get something optimal for _most_ people! But I'd like to hear feedback and adjust if necessary. Thank you!
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Good defaults + configuration overrides are the recipe to solve that.
holler 6y ago
Hey thank you for the feedback and for checking it out! May I ask if you were on desktop or mobile? Definitely could adjust the font sizes and since I've been working mostly on my laptop, I realize I might not be optimizing for other screen sizes. > I feel like a little more vertical space between posts and maybe making the URL smaller or moving it below the post title (or both) could really make the homepage a little less overwhelming with only a few minor changes. I will experiment with this further. The vertical space should be easy, the urls are part of the text of the title, so maybe either shrink them slightly or a more muted blue? Thanks for the feedback!

cvhashim 6y ago

I like it. Just have one call out. The text feels too large and too bold on mobile. Any chance it could look like this? Probably the best example of mobile friendly, minimalist content —> hckrnews.com

holler 6y ago
hey, I do like that very minimal font sizing! Maybe it'd be nice to add a way to shrink the text for people who'd like to do that? thank you for the feedback I appreciate it!

heleninboodler 6y ago

Looks great. Gut reaction on the UI is that it feels very cramped -- the fonts are kind of biggish for the spaces they go, and there isn't enough breathing room between things and somehow it manages to take my whole screen but still give me the feeling I'd like to make the window a lot bigger. (note: viewing on an MBP) Also, no comment threads? I'd much rather have commenting (hierarchical threads) on a reddit replacement than live chat. Maybe that's just me and maybe that's your entire point. I was just surprised by it and have very little interest in watching a chat stream fly by.

vijaybritto 6y ago

Hi the design is minimal and simple to understand. I hope this gets traction. But I noticed that you serve 450KB of JS on initial load. This is not required at all for a site with such a minimal design and a single list. Ideally this site should be less than 10kb in total with no js and atomic css. This is loading slow even in desktop. The app loads first and the /posts API response takes a lot of time to load. It could be server rendered for the initial load and served from a CDN.

krimpenrik 6y ago
Are you missing the real-time part?
- vijaybritto 6y ago
  No I meant only the initial load
holler 6y ago
hey thanks for the feedback, I definitely agree it could be faster, and I'd like to get it there eventually. Right now the site is rendered using ssr on amazon cloudfront, and for pages that have been cached already, it should load very fast. The api requests could possibly be improved with caching as well. I share the sentiment you have and appreciate it! So far I've tried to keep the number of dependencies very low and keep things as optimal as possible, but always room for improvement. Thanks for checking it out!
- vijaybritto 6y ago
  Glad to know! I've bookmarked and am using it in a pinned tab. Looking forward!

pkamb 6y ago

I really hate how there's lag when going "Back" from an article to the topic list (iOS, Safari). It resets the scroll position too, to the wrong spot. This is a major issue on Reddit too... a huge lag when going Back. I like that Sqwok looks HN/old.Reddit but with bigger mobile-sized tap targets and fonts. It feels like it works well in a browser. But the back experience kind of ruins the fluid UX.

holler 6y ago
hey thank you for checking it out! I realize that the back button is misleading and I plan to change it. I was thinking to make it behave more like a back button, perhaps with some context sort of how it works on e.g. instagram? Thank you for the feedback and checking it out, I appreciate it!
- pkamb 6y ago
  I'm using the native swipe-back gesture on my phone, not the back button in the top left (which I don't really even think you need).
  - holler 6y ago
    ah ok gotcha, yeah right now there isn't any swipe functionality so I will need to investigate implementing it, thanks again for the feedback!
    - pkamb 6y ago
      Hopefully you don't need to implement anything... just allow the browser to go Back, then don't refresh the topic list page at all when I land.

BGthaOG 6y ago

I built an app in this same space (news aggregation, real-time discussions) and hope it is OK to share it as a comment to this post: https://newscussion.com https://newscussion.com . Its a little different in that latest news don't come from users posting them but rather are brought in via a third party API. Really happy to see Sqwok in this same space, as it validates that there are folks interested in ephemeral / real-time discussions around latest news :) @holler Let me know if you'd like to talk dev stories about building for this space, I'd be down.

holler 6y ago
hey thank you. how's your project going? definitely down, email me at guac@sqwok.im, thanks for checking out sqwok!

jen729w 6y ago

Meta question: why are we at v350.06680? The numbers nerd in me needs to understand.

holler 6y ago
haha! tbh I needed _something_ to be able to track versions for debugging purposes once I had some real users, and I ended up just using the client `v${commit number}.{last 5 commit hash}` Hope that answers it! thank you for checking out sqwok & have a nice day
- jen729w 6y ago
  It does, thanks. I’ve always wondered, how does the commit hash get in to the actual version number? You don’t know the hash before you commit, so now to get the hash in to the public commit version you have to commit again, which changes the hash!
  - allenu 6y ago
    I'm guessing the build/deploy stage sets that up in the environment, so it's not actually committed in the repo.
    - holler 6y ago
      yep that's it, it's created in the build stage and passed into the app!
jan6 6y ago
uninformed guess: every commit is a version bump, every push to master is a major version bump?

tsherr 6y ago

On mobile. I like the layout and font size. Looks like something I'd use daily.

holler 6y ago
thank you for the feedback and for taking the time to check sqwok out, I really appreciate it! have a nice day

rattray 6y ago

I'm enthused! Personally, I have a hard time imagining using this without upvotes, reacjis, and/or threads – would anticipate far too much chaff to get to the wheat as I scroll through discussions. In a reasonably busy chat room, something needs to indicate what's worth reading or jumping in on, and separating the various streams of chatter.

holler 6y ago
hey thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it! I definitely agree that there has to be ways to filter out the noise. I've discussed adding a way to "like" messages, and have those end up displayed separate from the main list. I'm open to other ideas as well! Thanks again!
- rattray 6y ago
  Good luck! Would love to see something like this take off :)

isakkeyten 6y ago

Tbh it's very hard on the eyes.

dvh 6y ago

Vanilla webview on android 10: The webpage at https://sqwok.im/ https://sqwok.im/ could not be loaded because: net::ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED

jan6 6y ago
I think the site probably just died because it couldn't handle HN storming in to all the chats ;p
- holler 6y ago
  haha! I think there may be an issue around me switching from gzip to brotli compression for some browsers, but I'm not 100% sure if that's the issue. I will investigate, thank you!

swivelmaster 6y ago

Hah, I made a political satire idle game called Troll Farm and the first thing you do in the game is make an account on a site called “Squalk.” I guess it was too obvious a joke!

holler 6y ago
haha nice, how far did you get on making the game?

the_gipsy 6y ago

The navigation is somehow fucked up

holler 6y ago
hey thanks for checking it out, did you happen to click the left "chevron" and it confused you? Just curious if that's what you're referring to because it's been mentioned a few times, and I'm planning to change how that works to be more intuitive as a back button. thanks!
- the_gipsy 6y ago
  Yes. At least when I land from a link, I would expect that thing to take me to the "home" or "frontpage". There just is no back/history if I just landed. In general, I would a expect a "low-cruft and minimalist" to NOT mtry to get smart with history. It always fails, e.g. twitter, reddit. Just leave it up to the browser.
  - holler 6y ago
    > I would a expect a "low-cruft and minimalist" to NOT mtry to get smart with histor fair point and I agree, thank you
superkuh 6y ago
You get navigation? All I see is a binary string of mangled characters. It's not even a valid website. > ~=�y-�%�:�J�.�GW9��WI��J�&��2��Ȕ��I�N�� ~-Hrb�Oa[�uΪ�>�(O�(�6:B�ff_��۷�8�*��IE...
- holler 6y ago
  what browser are you using? it's possible that it doesn't support brotli, although I'd like to know if it's something else. Sorry you're seeing that.

abhinav22 6y ago

I was on my iPhone and it looked pretty cool, albeit fonts slightly large. I wasn’t able to sign up - page kept freezing. Otherwise I think this has great potential and wish you the best of luck

holler 6y ago
Thank you I really appreciate it! I'm not sure why you weren't able to sign up, did it give you an error? This is the most people I've had on the site today so it's possible that a load issue was surfaced. Thanks again!
- abhinav22 6y ago
  I’ve had issues on the odd other site, it just freezes at the username entry (can’t switch from username to password). Just something for you to keep an eye on. Saw your most recent post. You are a good guy —- rooting for you! In 1 year or whenever I am looking forward to seeing this explode into popularity. Keep a journal if it’s not too much of a bother, I’d love to read the full story and growth of your website after it’s all said and done because I really think if you keep at it, you have a winner on your hands.

dingdingdang 6y ago

2.18mb loaded for pure text design. Low-cruft? Minimalist? Sorry, but please use descriptors with discernment, this discrepancy alone has made me withdraw from looking any further at this project.

krick 6y ago
Yeah, it seems that some people mistake minimalism for "it took me 10 minutes to build and I didn't care about the visual design". It's heavy, clunky, and even though it's text-only, it has some pretty awful typography. But, anyway, thinking that social media is about the GUI is silly. If GUI is suboptimal, people just make alternative clients and browser extensions to visit your platform despite them disliking the interface. People use Reddit or Twitter because of community, because of network effect, because other people use Reddit or Twitter. And to a smaller extent, because content format suits them. Clean UI helps to get traction, but it's never the main selling point nor the real reason why people stay.

nine_k 6y ago

I'd like to say that what makes reddit and twitter big and important is not technical sophistication. It is the fact that a lot of interesting people are there — so another person would join to read and interact with them. So I'd try to build the simplest thing that conveys the idea and provides the experience (twitter was initially a Rails app), and spend most of the effort on getting and keeping interesting people aboard. These trendsetters are the users you want to listen to, and pander to. You went them around. You want their audience around. I can remember a somehow similar site, only more minimalist, founded like 15 years ago. It was friendfeed.com: link sharing, posting commenting, real-time IM-like updates (it even had a Jabber gateway for some time). It was great, though it never grew huge. Facebook bought them and acquired their most important invention, the "Like" button. I don't say that technical sophistication is not important! It is. But it becomes important when your social / communication mechanics work, and you have a number of real users. Until then, you want your technology small and easily malleable. Back in the day I've seen a brilliant online community forming around a few hundred lines of Perl scripts. Guys from friendfeed first came with a schemaless DB, and only later with the high-performance Tornado server (in Python still). Guys from YouTube first found the area where their site was useful (not their initial dating, but video publishing and discovery), and later came up with advanced video delivery solutions. Same likely applies to your site. Good luck!

Nkuna 6y ago
> I'd like to say that what makes reddit and twitter big and important is not technical sophistication. It is the fact that a lot of interesting people are there — so another person would join to read and interact with them. Adopting Twitter's user acquisition strategies does not, in hindsight, seem all that smart considering Twitter's growth relative to its peers? I believe this led to their current predicament where all but the early/'power' users enjoy the vast majority of attention on the platform whilst new users scream into the ether and finally give up on the platform. Yes, one can gain a huge following with the time investment involved but for the average user, even hitting a 1K following is a pipe dream. Contrast that with TikTok.
- nine_k 6y ago

webdog 6y ago

I feel like this gives too much weighting to the discourse around a topic or article (Ironic, given I'm doing the same thing in this thread). One of the reasons I loathe twitter and reddit is the conversations and comments in threads are just plain awful a lot of times. This seems to create the potential to amplify that while reading an article or watching a video in real-time, creating a competing interest of consuming media vs opinions. This is critical feedback, but I don't think this solves the problem around propagation of misinformation, bad actors, or opinion vacuums. The reason I dislike the modern web is that conversation and engagement are the key drivers for a site, the content second. This has, in my opinion, created the worst-case scenario in which the value of an opinion of statement is so commodified that the only way to create value from discourse is to have a lot of it, and most of it ends up being toxic and terrible because people seem to only create negative discourse en masse, or at least the current system has been gamified to do just that.

holler 6y ago
hey thank you for checking out sqwok and giving feedback, I appreciate it. > This is critical feedback, but I don't think this solves the problem around propagation of misinformation, bad actors, or opinion vacuums. I certainly agree that it isn't going to solve all of these problems. The genesis of this project actually goes back to ~2015 and predates the current social medial landscape. But the challenges will be there and have to be addressed, while balancing building something people enjoy enough to use and help grow. One problem I see with sites like Twitter, is that there isn't _enough_ discourse. Anyone can make a statement, go viral, and there isn't a true "conversation" around it. There are threaded comments but it's not the same, and the idea here is to explore building real time conversations around those statements, and allow more critique. I'd like to explore building ways to reward messages that are relevant such as letting users nominate a message if it adds value. Additionally there should be basic features such as muting/blocking people you don't want to see, and am openminded to hear other ideas people have. I will say that HN is a shining example of how to keep a certain level of civility on a discussion site, but as it's been mentioned before, scaling that to a much larger size may be very difficult.
- 6y ago

highmastdon 6y ago

Scrolling is horrifying on mobile phone (iPhone 6, iOS 12.4.8). I have to move it instead of letting it slide. Not sure why that is, maybe you’re taking over the scroll, or scroll listeners

holler 6y ago
hey thanks for the feedback, I haven't tested in ios 6 so not sure what you're seeing, but I am marking that down to investigate this weekend. Sorry that it's not working but thanks for checking it out!

Nkuna 6y ago

That name (or its spelling rather) is... unfortunate.

appleflaxen 6y ago

For anyone looking to host their own instance, this is not open source. lemmy is an option with similar functionality that is, IIRC.

paxys 6y ago

Minimal doesn't automatically equal functional or appealing. Designing a good UX is very hard work, and "simple" is always harder.

kkotak 6y ago

Sadly this is trending at #3 - https://sqwok.im/p/QwqOd1D0x2HvKw https://sqwok.im/p/QwqOd1D0x2HvKw

as-j 6y ago
And here I thought it was going to be a Trump thing. At least this made chuckle. ;)
holler 6y ago
Well, although I was hoping I wouldn't see anything too bad, it's also somewhat not surprising. I think any new discussion site will have to deal with it at some point. This is the mvp release so it is still lacking many features, but it will be addressed.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

curl https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im It's not TXT, HTML, JSON, XML, GZIP, JPG, PNG, GIF, ... Would be nice to have a hint. Nothing useful in the headers except something about AWS Lambda.

holler 6y ago
interesting, it should be HTML for the main web response.. will look, thank you
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Cool thing about HN is that often a downvote can be a signal you missed something obvious. As was the case here. The data returned was compressed using brotli, as indicated by the content-encoding header value "br". Duh. curl https://sqwok.im|brotli https://sqwok.im|brotli -dc
- holler 6y ago
  glad you got it!

mleonhard 6y ago

Good job launching. I clicked on a topic and then clicked the "<" button. It didn't go back to the home page.

holler 6y ago
thank you! I agree that button is confusing, and a few others have mentioned it as well. I'm going to change it to behave like a normal back button. Thanks for stopping by!

JulianWasTaken 6y ago

Seems nice, though I typoed my password, but it seems so minimalist that on mobile there's no way to change it (when logged in obviously).

holler 6y ago
hey sorry about that, I do plan to add a settings page very soon! right now you could try the "forgot password" link while logged out. Thank you for checking it out & sharing feedback!

holler 6y ago

Thank you to everyone who has commented and taken the time to check out Sqwok. It's been a labor of love, and sometimes frustration, and it's really encouraging to see people using it and giving great feedback. It has a long way to go but I'm hopeful to realize the vision of a new alternative for open discussion. I also wanted to share the first post I made on Sqwok, dedicated to my late friend Thom Simmons. The reason I want to share this is because you never know who you'll meet and what impact they'll have. I met Thom when I was learning python and hanging out in #django on freenode a decade ago. We went on to become good friends and he helped me learn how to program beyond html, while we constantly plotted what our next project would be. He introduced me to Reddit around ~2009 which at the time wasn't nearly as popular or known outside of tech. I had just thought of the idea for Sqwok about two weeks before his passing, but opted not to mention it on one of our last calls because he was going through some personal struggles. I know he would have been excited for it. In this crazy year of 2020, I hope more people can find positive connections, however that may be, and that we learn from each other, grow, prosper, and thrive. https://sqwok.im/p/TsuqjEqi3OwXiA https://sqwok.im/p/TsuqjEqi3OwXiA I'm very grateful, thank you.

cabalamat 6y ago
Some feedback: When I scroll to the top of a conversation, it automatically scrolls me down. I find this annoying and unintuitive. To me, if I tell the computer to do something, it should do that thing, not immediately disobey me. Some questions: Do you intend to put this on the Fediverse with ActivityPub? If not, why not?

moocowtruck 6y ago

seems like cool idea, feels kinda slow for 'minimalist' what does actually mean by use of that word here

gbh444g 6y ago

Here's my 2c. All these clever ranking algorithms are irrelevant technicalities in chatting platforms. What matters is the type of people that constitute your audience. Reddit chooses to cater to emotions: their front page encourages low-effort posts that invoke strong emotions (outrage, etc.) and those emotions nudge their audience to argue with each other and spend more time on the site. This particular type of people - emotional and combative - are good for their revenue model, so reddit specifically caters to them. HN is the other end of the spectrum: it caters to audience that values dry precise knowledge. HN's (or rather YC's) business model revolves around this type of people, so HN is carefully designed to attract its audience and repel everyone else. The HN's primitive design isn't a flaw, but a carefully designed feature with that goal in mind. If you're designing a new platform like that, the number one question is "what audience do I want on my forum?" Once you have an answer, you can design the UX and various technicalities: it may be a super-dry arxiv-style forum if you want scientists or a flashy and colorful site leveraging emotions. The common mistake is to try to design a general-purpose forum where people of all types would figure it out among themselves how and what to talk about. That's not gonna work because a Joe-the-redneck can't have a meaningful conversation with a Joe-the-scientist: either the former will start a fight, or the latter will leave. For example, from your description: "an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics <...> sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users." See, you're trying to mix science with politics with non-tech users and so on. Edit: using words from the Thiel's "zero to one" book, you need to find your niche where you can differentiate from competitors, win that local competition, and only then expand.

superasn 6y ago
Very insightful comment. Communities also evolve too, like reddit wasn't always like this but i think flanderization happens to website too.
noja 6y ago
> but a carefully designed feature with that goal in mind. Was it carefully designed? That implies a very direct, conscious decision. Or was it designed by someone to whom design is not vital, and it worked out because everyone similar tends to think the same?

ComodoHacker 6y ago

From your description I think you'll be competing more with Telegram and Viber, not Reddit.