8 ms·

Tusk – Short-lived anonymous feedback

156 points by n_david 6y ago

flockonus 6y ago
What was the primary motivator creating this?
- chrislan815 6y ago
  I'm curious as well. It's an interesting app for sure.
  - dijit 6y ago
    Can't speak for everyone but I really dislike that negative feedback is perceived as somehow "unkind". People have no issue saying to others about all the reasons they dislike a person, from it being "too energetic" to "always makes it about themselves". But nobody will correct this behaviour, nobody will even point it out to the person exhibiting the behaviour until it's _extreme_. Part of my psychologists examination of me before (when I burned out) was to collect anonymous feedback from colleagues and friends on how they perceive me- because I had a growing anxiety that I was always somehow the bad guy in most situations. And the feedback- even when anonymous; was surprisingly neutral in tone. Open feedback is a hard problem, we're socially constructed to make people like us, and for that reason we don't want to be the person identifying a flaw or making someone feel bad. But honestly, without some kind of social mirror, how do we even know who we are?
    - LordOfWolves 6y ago
      The last two paragraphs of your experiences ring within me as well. The “power” we give people over our well-being when socially anxious is absolutely unwarranted.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      Is it considered unkind or do people just avoid it as some do not react well to it? I avoid giving negative feedback, especially if I need to interact with that person again, as people tend to get defensive and mad at me for giving them it, while they are happy if I praise them. Don't want to deal with that, so everything I say is positive. I don't avoid giving it it out of empathy and consideration, but self interest.
- n_david 6y ago
  I actually got the idea initially from listening to a podcast called Farnam Street (this episode specifically: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/adam-robinson-pt2/ https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/adam-robinson-pt2/). The idea is to provide a simple, convenient way for people to give and receive anonymous feedback. I think feedback is very important for growth and to be more self-aware in general, and the barrier to give feedback to somebody is far too high relative to the benefit this feedback could mean to the receiver. The comment by dijit I think sums up my motivation to build this pretty well. To be honest though I don't know if this app solves the problem. The way the app is currently, feedback is initiated by the person seeking feedback, whereas in the examples above it's the feedback giver initiating (or looking for a way to provide) the feedback. There is still value in this case where the feedback seeker initiates the feedback loop I think, but it doesn't quite solve the problem I initially set forth to solve. Maybe that use case can be addressed with further iterations.
bigiain 6y ago
Have you thought about how you're going to "dickproof" this? What's the plan for when trolls descend and start using it to anonymously host hate lies or abuse?
- z3t4 6y ago
  Do things that dont scale. Most problems can be solved. The most difficult one is making ppl love your service. eg. gaining users.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    Parler has just demonstrated this problem specifically cannot always be (easily) solved later. By the time a noticeable subset of your users are doing things your investors/advertisers/hosting providers/app stores/mother would consider "deplorable", it's _way_ too late to be thinking "Yeah, maybe we should have built in some protection for ordinary users against griefers/trolls/russian and chinese misinformation campaigns." I'm not saying they need to do it right now, or that it's a more important thing than gaining users/traction right now, but it should without doubt be a thing that's very near the top of their list of "things we have considered and have vague plans to implement, that need to watch carefully for, and to have not painted ourselves into corners where our ideas about what we'll need to do to stamp it out no longer work any more..."
    - saimiam 6y ago
      I feel this is a bit of a stretch. Parler was positioned as a free speech fundamentalist so it never stood a chance when it came time to moderate content to stay in the good books of its vendors. Otoh, seems to me that Tusk is "micro social" - a term I just invented - to socialize a page/concept amongst a smallish group of people. Unless that link leaks, how will the online trolls even find a page to tusk? And even if does, adding an auth layer on top of page tied to your identity should be relatively easy. FD - I am working on a "public" micro-social offering as well (info in profile) so how Tusk addresses this is of interest to me.
xaduha 6y ago
Reminds me of ".feedback" TLD/stunt.
- turadg 6y ago
  What was that?
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    "There is a new TLD called .feedback. It is a scam and ICANN should be ashamed of approving it. The people that run .feedback have pre-registered 'for free' 5,000 major companies. As a result you can go to sites like http://www.google.feedback/ http://www.google.feedback/ and http://www.gandi.feedback/ http://www.gandi.feedback/ and http://www.stackoverflow.feedback/ http://www.stackoverflow.feedback/ and more." From: https://everythingsysadmin.com/2017/06/the-feedback-scam.html https://everythingsysadmin.com/2017/06/the-feedback-scam.htm... Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662107
    - kodah 6y ago
      That's really awful. I can already see businesses being held at ransom for whatever is posted there, much less, when will it extend to people?
bigdict 6y ago
Leave some feedback about tusk: https://tusk-feedback.tusk.page https://tusk-feedback.tusk.page
- n_david 6y ago
  Feel free to leave feedback here, but this is not the main feedback page. The main feedback page is https://feedback.tusk.page https://feedback.tusk.page
alpb 6y ago
Surprisingly this person didn't even bother adding a noindex/robots.txt measure to the website. So "deleted forever" is only as good as someone not saving the page to the Web Archive or archive.is etc. Then it's cached forever in archives, almost as good as notarized proof. http://web.archive.org/web/20210208070536/https://bruh-are-you-serious.tusk.page/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210208070536/https://bruh-are-y... To the author: please don’t make promises you can’t keep or meet.
- saimiam 6y ago
  After reading your comment, I realized that I had to do this on my own site as well. Harsh but valuable comment (to me).
  - rriepe 6y ago
    Mine got nuked somewhere along the way too.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  Really useful comment that I had to think twice not to downvote because of its snarkfulness.
- adamhearn 6y ago
  Can’t you just ignore robots.txt?
  - saimiam 6y ago
    Well behaved crawlers don't. Products like Google Search and Bing have a self-interest in supporting robots.txt because the alternative is annoyed webmasters suing them for not providing an opt-out due to which their unsecured credentials are a quick search away. In fact, I believe the robots.txt protocol was devised in consultation with search engines.
    - mrkramer 6y ago
      A lot of webmasters are amateurs who expose their credentials even when robot rules are respected. Google dorking is a way to find that credentials and other sensitive data and information.
dvh 6y ago
https://apis.tusk.page https://apis.tusk.page
xaduha 6y ago
https://donald.tusk.page https://donald.tusk.page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Tusk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Tusk
sanmak 6y ago
To author, user can input spam comments which actually doesn't make any sense and may corrupt the feedback loop. Have you given a thought about. Check the comments, https://testindia.tusk.page/ https://testindia.tusk.page/
- n_david 6y ago
  I spent a long time thinking about how to prevent abuse and just spam, and unfortunately I don't think I have a good solution for it. The idea though is that these domains are generated by people seeking feedback (or looking to talk about a certain topic) with a group of people that they at least have some sort of relationship with. It isn't really meant to be an anonymous message board where you set up the topic and literally anybody drops in and says anything they like. I was hoping that with an intimate smaller group where the domain is shared with only people the creator is interested in hearing from and trusts, this would reduce the amount of spam/abuse.
  - sanmak 6y ago
    Got your point. But since it's in a public link, unknowns will hop inn and start corrupting it. Because I liked the intent of your product and wanted to keep it sane. Try products like https://akismet.com/ https://akismet.com/. It'll help.
  - onara 6y ago
    anonymous comments are hard to moderate as more your product grows spammers will come. At this stage, I don't think you will have a major problem with spam but down the road you will get plenty of them. Check out solution like https://oopspam.com https://oopspam.com
baxtr 6y ago
That’s great. I think I will use it for my bootstrapped newsletters. Thank you :) PS: I think it’s perfect for small scale use cases with a known audience
- n_david 6y ago
  Very glad to hear that you have a use case for it :)
- saimiam 6y ago
  Not sure if it’s considered rude to squat on someone else’s thread but since you’re looking for ways to get feedback on your newsletters, I wanted to introduce you to https://moogle.cc https://moogle.cc which was made with this exact use case in mind. FD - I made it.
rriepe 6y ago
Love the name.
kseistrup 6y ago
The instructions read “Your domain will disappear forever in 3 days.” Does that mean that in three days, not only will https://forever.tusk.page/ https://forever.tusk.page/ be inaccessible, but nobody will ‘ever’ be able to recreate the same domain?
- tedmiston 6y ago
  Their About page suggests that it's just that the data will be deleted.
  - kseistrup 6y ago
    Thanks, I hadn't read the About page. »After 3 days, all data for the domain (domain name, description, feedback posts) is hard deleted forever.« A domain name that is “hard deleted” can't resurface, can it?
- n_david 6y ago
  The domain names can be reused. 3 days after the domain names are created, both the domain name and the feedback comments are hard deleted. Since it is a hard delete, there's nothing that stops the domain name from being reused again. I thought about this a bit and I can see this being confusing and possibly dangerous though. For example if somebody shares a domain they created, and 3 days later somebody visits the domain but it's a totally different domain. Thanks for pointing this out! I will think about some ways to solve this.
  - kseistrup 6y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. Perhaps a quarantine period — say, 1 year — will work, the same way e.g. phonenumbers are recycled?
ellimilial 6y ago
Neat! I can imagine a periodic thread here where one could ask for, let's say 'unrestricted' feedback from the community.
wackro 6y ago
Feature suggestion: password protection (possibly optional?) Currently it's possible to brute force your way onto other people's pages.
- n_david 6y ago
  Good idea! It definitely would be undesireable for random people to jump into domains if the domain creator intended to only share the domain with a small intimate group. Maybe something as simple as a generated password displayed upon domain creation will suffice. Will add this to the feature requests.
sedeki 6y ago
I'd like to know the pun relating to Tusk (the person) with regard to the naming of this project, as it is not at all obvious to me.
- munificent 6y ago
  T.hought Y.ou (U) S.hould K.now
- n_david 6y ago
  I wasn't aware of who Tusk the person was. But munificent is correct, it stands for "thought you (u) should know"
xerxespoy 6y ago
Nice, but it already exists -and you're on it.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
I've seen pages like this before, where people can request anonymous feedback. They tend to get taken over by cyberbullies.
- donnyb572 6y ago
  This is a total rip-off of Increment.me ...and even stole the tag line.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
donnyb572 6y ago
This is a total rip-off of Increment.me ...and even stole the tag line.
- donnyb572 6y ago
  https://www.increment.me/ https://www.increment.me/
- jesvschrist 6y ago
  What tagline? "Anonymous feedback"?
- n_david 6y ago
  If you read my response to the user "flockonus" below, I got the idea from this podcast episode: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/adam-robinson-pt2/ https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/adam-robinson-pt2/. You can go to the timestamp 56:09 until around 1:04:00 where they talk about giving/receiving feedback. I can imagine it being frustrating seeing a similar product pop up a couple months after your launch (I found your hackernews post), but I've never seen Increment.me before. I honestly wouldn't even build something that already exists—I did research into this and I didn't find anything. You're accusing me of ripping off Increment.me based off of what? Anyways, this is just a fun side project for me (I'm a single person building this thing) so I don't plan to compete with Increment.me. Also, I don't understand how you think I stole Increment.me's tagline.
  - jfdi 6y ago
    Hey @n_david, creator of Increment[0] here. Congrats on your launch. Looks like we have some common ideas. FS is a great podcast. Q for you: I saw the press on LifeHacker[1]. Do you know the author David (Murphy)? I'd like to reach out to them and see if they'd be open to either reworking that to be more inclusive and include Increment or doing a spot on Increment specifically. I'm @ tw at increment.me for email, and of course I'd welcome connecting with you via my Increment (& Anyone in the HN community who'd like to weigh in!) at: https://www.increment.me/tw [0]: https://increment.me https://increment.me [1]: https://lifehacker.com/get-anonymous-feedback-about-anything-with-tusk-1846221328 https://lifehacker.com/get-anonymous-feedback-about-anything... src: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029904
swyx 6y ago
https://swyx.tusk.page/ https://swyx.tusk.page/

156 points by n_david 6y ago

flockonus 6y ago

What was the primary motivator creating this?

chrislan815 6y ago
I'm curious as well. It's an interesting app for sure.
- dijit 6y ago
  Can't speak for everyone but I really dislike that negative feedback is perceived as somehow "unkind". People have no issue saying to others about all the reasons they dislike a person, from it being "too energetic" to "always makes it about themselves". But nobody will correct this behaviour, nobody will even point it out to the person exhibiting the behaviour until it's _extreme_. Part of my psychologists examination of me before (when I burned out) was to collect anonymous feedback from colleagues and friends on how they perceive me- because I had a growing anxiety that I was always somehow the bad guy in most situations. And the feedback- even when anonymous; was surprisingly neutral in tone. Open feedback is a hard problem, we're socially constructed to make people like us, and for that reason we don't want to be the person identifying a flaw or making someone feel bad. But honestly, without some kind of social mirror, how do we even know who we are?
  - LordOfWolves 6y ago
    The last two paragraphs of your experiences ring within me as well. The “power” we give people over our well-being when socially anxious is absolutely unwarranted.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Is it considered unkind or do people just avoid it as some do not react well to it? I avoid giving negative feedback, especially if I need to interact with that person again, as people tend to get defensive and mad at me for giving them it, while they are happy if I praise them. Don't want to deal with that, so everything I say is positive. I don't avoid giving it it out of empathy and consideration, but self interest.
n_david 6y ago
I actually got the idea initially from listening to a podcast called Farnam Street (this episode specifically: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/adam-robinson-pt2/ https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/adam-robinson-pt2/). The idea is to provide a simple, convenient way for people to give and receive anonymous feedback. I think feedback is very important for growth and to be more self-aware in general, and the barrier to give feedback to somebody is far too high relative to the benefit this feedback could mean to the receiver. The comment by dijit I think sums up my motivation to build this pretty well. To be honest though I don't know if this app solves the problem. The way the app is currently, feedback is initiated by the person seeking feedback, whereas in the examples above it's the feedback giver initiating (or looking for a way to provide) the feedback. There is still value in this case where the feedback seeker initiates the feedback loop I think, but it doesn't quite solve the problem I initially set forth to solve. Maybe that use case can be addressed with further iterations.

bigiain 6y ago

Have you thought about how you're going to "dickproof" this? What's the plan for when trolls descend and start using it to anonymously host hate lies or abuse?

z3t4 6y ago
Do things that dont scale. Most problems can be solved. The most difficult one is making ppl love your service. eg. gaining users.
- bigiain 6y ago
  Parler has just demonstrated this problem specifically cannot always be (easily) solved later. By the time a noticeable subset of your users are doing things your investors/advertisers/hosting providers/app stores/mother would consider "deplorable", it's _way_ too late to be thinking "Yeah, maybe we should have built in some protection for ordinary users against griefers/trolls/russian and chinese misinformation campaigns." I'm not saying they need to do it right now, or that it's a more important thing than gaining users/traction right now, but it should without doubt be a thing that's very near the top of their list of "things we have considered and have vague plans to implement, that need to watch carefully for, and to have not painted ourselves into corners where our ideas about what we'll need to do to stamp it out no longer work any more..."
  - saimiam 6y ago
    I feel this is a bit of a stretch. Parler was positioned as a free speech fundamentalist so it never stood a chance when it came time to moderate content to stay in the good books of its vendors. Otoh, seems to me that Tusk is "micro social" - a term I just invented - to socialize a page/concept amongst a smallish group of people. Unless that link leaks, how will the online trolls even find a page to tusk? And even if does, adding an auth layer on top of page tied to your identity should be relatively easy. FD - I am working on a "public" micro-social offering as well (info in profile) so how Tusk addresses this is of interest to me.

xaduha 6y ago

Reminds me of ".feedback" TLD/stunt.

turadg 6y ago
What was that?
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  "There is a new TLD called .feedback. It is a scam and ICANN should be ashamed of approving it. The people that run .feedback have pre-registered 'for free' 5,000 major companies. As a result you can go to sites like http://www.google.feedback/ http://www.google.feedback/ and http://www.gandi.feedback/ http://www.gandi.feedback/ and http://www.stackoverflow.feedback/ http://www.stackoverflow.feedback/ and more." From: https://everythingsysadmin.com/2017/06/the-feedback-scam.html https://everythingsysadmin.com/2017/06/the-feedback-scam.htm... Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662107
  - kodah 6y ago
    That's really awful. I can already see businesses being held at ransom for whatever is posted there, much less, when will it extend to people?

bigdict 6y ago

Leave some feedback about tusk: https://tusk-feedback.tusk.page https://tusk-feedback.tusk.page

n_david 6y ago
Feel free to leave feedback here, but this is not the main feedback page. The main feedback page is https://feedback.tusk.page https://feedback.tusk.page

alpb 6y ago

Surprisingly this person didn't even bother adding a noindex/robots.txt measure to the website. So "deleted forever" is only as good as someone not saving the page to the Web Archive or archive.is etc. Then it's cached forever in archives, almost as good as notarized proof. http://web.archive.org/web/20210208070536/https://bruh-are-you-serious.tusk.page/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210208070536/https://bruh-are-y... To the author: please don’t make promises you can’t keep or meet.

saimiam 6y ago
After reading your comment, I realized that I had to do this on my own site as well. Harsh but valuable comment (to me).
- rriepe 6y ago
  Mine got nuked somewhere along the way too.
skinkestek 6y ago
Really useful comment that I had to think twice not to downvote because of its snarkfulness.
adamhearn 6y ago
Can’t you just ignore robots.txt?
- saimiam 6y ago
  Well behaved crawlers don't. Products like Google Search and Bing have a self-interest in supporting robots.txt because the alternative is annoyed webmasters suing them for not providing an opt-out due to which their unsecured credentials are a quick search away. In fact, I believe the robots.txt protocol was devised in consultation with search engines.
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    A lot of webmasters are amateurs who expose their credentials even when robot rules are respected. Google dorking is a way to find that credentials and other sensitive data and information.

dvh 6y ago

https://apis.tusk.page https://apis.tusk.page

xaduha 6y ago

https://donald.tusk.page https://donald.tusk.page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Tusk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Tusk

sanmak 6y ago

To author, user can input spam comments which actually doesn't make any sense and may corrupt the feedback loop. Have you given a thought about. Check the comments, https://testindia.tusk.page/ https://testindia.tusk.page/

n_david 6y ago
I spent a long time thinking about how to prevent abuse and just spam, and unfortunately I don't think I have a good solution for it. The idea though is that these domains are generated by people seeking feedback (or looking to talk about a certain topic) with a group of people that they at least have some sort of relationship with. It isn't really meant to be an anonymous message board where you set up the topic and literally anybody drops in and says anything they like. I was hoping that with an intimate smaller group where the domain is shared with only people the creator is interested in hearing from and trusts, this would reduce the amount of spam/abuse.
- sanmak 6y ago
  Got your point. But since it's in a public link, unknowns will hop inn and start corrupting it. Because I liked the intent of your product and wanted to keep it sane. Try products like https://akismet.com/ https://akismet.com/. It'll help.
- onara 6y ago
  anonymous comments are hard to moderate as more your product grows spammers will come. At this stage, I don't think you will have a major problem with spam but down the road you will get plenty of them. Check out solution like https://oopspam.com https://oopspam.com

baxtr 6y ago

That’s great. I think I will use it for my bootstrapped newsletters. Thank you :) PS: I think it’s perfect for small scale use cases with a known audience

n_david 6y ago
Very glad to hear that you have a use case for it :)
saimiam 6y ago
Not sure if it’s considered rude to squat on someone else’s thread but since you’re looking for ways to get feedback on your newsletters, I wanted to introduce you to https://moogle.cc https://moogle.cc which was made with this exact use case in mind. FD - I made it.

rriepe 6y ago

Love the name.

kseistrup 6y ago

The instructions read “Your domain will disappear forever in 3 days.” Does that mean that in three days, not only will https://forever.tusk.page/ https://forever.tusk.page/ be inaccessible, but nobody will ‘ever’ be able to recreate the same domain?

tedmiston 6y ago
Their About page suggests that it's just that the data will be deleted.
- kseistrup 6y ago
  Thanks, I hadn't read the About page. »After 3 days, all data for the domain (domain name, description, feedback posts) is hard deleted forever.« A domain name that is “hard deleted” can't resurface, can it?
n_david 6y ago
The domain names can be reused. 3 days after the domain names are created, both the domain name and the feedback comments are hard deleted. Since it is a hard delete, there's nothing that stops the domain name from being reused again. I thought about this a bit and I can see this being confusing and possibly dangerous though. For example if somebody shares a domain they created, and 3 days later somebody visits the domain but it's a totally different domain. Thanks for pointing this out! I will think about some ways to solve this.
- kseistrup 6y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. Perhaps a quarantine period — say, 1 year — will work, the same way e.g. phonenumbers are recycled?

ellimilial 6y ago

Neat! I can imagine a periodic thread here where one could ask for, let's say 'unrestricted' feedback from the community.

wackro 6y ago

Feature suggestion: password protection (possibly optional?) Currently it's possible to brute force your way onto other people's pages.

n_david 6y ago
Good idea! It definitely would be undesireable for random people to jump into domains if the domain creator intended to only share the domain with a small intimate group. Maybe something as simple as a generated password displayed upon domain creation will suffice. Will add this to the feature requests.

sedeki 6y ago

I'd like to know the pun relating to Tusk (the person) with regard to the naming of this project, as it is not at all obvious to me.

munificent 6y ago
T.hought Y.ou (U) S.hould K.now
n_david 6y ago
I wasn't aware of who Tusk the person was. But munificent is correct, it stands for "thought you (u) should know"

xerxespoy 6y ago

Nice, but it already exists -and you're on it.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

I've seen pages like this before, where people can request anonymous feedback. They tend to get taken over by cyberbullies.

donnyb572 6y ago
This is a total rip-off of Increment.me ...and even stole the tag line.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

donnyb572 6y ago

This is a total rip-off of Increment.me ...and even stole the tag line.

donnyb572 6y ago
https://www.increment.me/ https://www.increment.me/
jesvschrist 6y ago
What tagline? "Anonymous feedback"?
n_david 6y ago
If you read my response to the user "flockonus" below, I got the idea from this podcast episode: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/adam-robinson-pt2/ https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/adam-robinson-pt2/. You can go to the timestamp 56:09 until around 1:04:00 where they talk about giving/receiving feedback. I can imagine it being frustrating seeing a similar product pop up a couple months after your launch (I found your hackernews post), but I've never seen Increment.me before. I honestly wouldn't even build something that already exists—I did research into this and I didn't find anything. You're accusing me of ripping off Increment.me based off of what? Anyways, this is just a fun side project for me (I'm a single person building this thing) so I don't plan to compete with Increment.me. Also, I don't understand how you think I stole Increment.me's tagline.
- jfdi 6y ago
  Hey @n_david, creator of Increment[0] here. Congrats on your launch. Looks like we have some common ideas. FS is a great podcast. Q for you: I saw the press on LifeHacker[1]. Do you know the author David (Murphy)? I'd like to reach out to them and see if they'd be open to either reworking that to be more inclusive and include Increment or doing a spot on Increment specifically. I'm @ tw at increment.me for email, and of course I'd welcome connecting with you via my Increment (& Anyone in the HN community who'd like to weigh in!) at: https://www.increment.me/tw [0]: https://increment.me https://increment.me [1]: https://lifehacker.com/get-anonymous-feedback-about-anything-with-tusk-1846221328 https://lifehacker.com/get-anonymous-feedback-about-anything... src: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029904

swyx 6y ago

https://swyx.tusk.page/ https://swyx.tusk.page/