11 ms·

Show HN: Sqwok – A social chat alternative to Twitter and Reddit

218 points by holler 4y ago

I previously did a Show HN late Dec 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25470672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25470672 That was a great experience and in the past year I continued to develop the site to bring it to a level of stability and maturity that I felt necessary for it to have a chance to succeed. Sqwok is all about answering the question: Can we have better open conversations on the internet? I wasn’t satisfied with the existing means of discussing topics such as culture, history, politics, and technology through threaded comments, and was simultaneously impressed with Slack bringing the IRC experience to the browser for a more general but enterprise focused audience. I wondered why not create an open Slack-like chat app for general discussion? Not gamers or enterprise but rather for people to have open, kitchen-table discussion on the matters of the day (or just for fun!). I set out to build this because I wanted to use it myself and felt that existing chat apps weren't designed for open public discourse in the way Reddit/Twitter are but for threaded comments & mostly unidirectional communication. This past year I’ve been very grateful to have a group of people continuously show up, offer support of the site and the idea, encouraging me to continue. Without those people I would have probably gave up! But alas I want to see this through and I believe now is the moment to make it happen. Since the last Show HN I’ve added: - markdown support in chat messages, post text, and user bio in profile (soon coming to full text post). - User profiles including bio, location, photo avatar, and chronological post listings. - New “who’s online” list that shows the top 10 ppl online and helps steer people to active conversations. - @mentions now work in posts, user bios, as well as chat messages. - Email notifications to be alerted when someone @mentions you. - Settings pages with ability to change password, delete account, and manage notification settings. - Upgraded image handling to support higher res photos with upcoming features allowing enhanced viewing. - Major refactor of the chat handling to stabilize it and fix many bugs with presence, locations, etc. - Many improvements to the codebase, frontend, backend, UI, tests, etc - Updated mobile web UI that drops you straight into the chat in a single view. - Ability to toggle full width chat view on desktop. - Live message counts displayed on the post list items that are updated in realtime. - Updated location handling for realtime location display. - Backend stability & aggregate analytics. Through Sqwok and particularly through the last Show HN I've met & got to know numerous people living across the entire Earth from Laos to Europe to Africa, all through a silly piece of software that for some reason seemed like the thing to work on. Truth be told there is much, much more I want to do with this. I believe now is the perfect time with the state of existing social networks and I’m hoping to find more people to support the site and help drive it to the next level. Let me know if you have any questions, Thanks!

MarcelOlsz 4y ago
Please pay a designer. Pretty please.
- holler 4y ago
  lol! I'd love to once I figure out how to.
  - MarcelOlsz 4y ago
    Well you can login to your bank and send any amount of money you please my way, they should have a support number. I can't promise any design coming out the other end though.
  - presentation 4y ago
    Even if you just hired someone to, ignoring UX altogether, do a pure UI pass to just make it look pretty - it would probably be significantly more likely to go viral. My initial instinct looking at this, without having touched the product at all, was immediately that "this is an ugly app for nerds" and I figure that (dumb) issue would keep it from really going mainstream. Luckily I'm a nerd, so I'm willing to put up with it, but don't listen to the other nerds here who think that it's fine as it is—they're not a credible source for how real people will actually react to things, and there's a reason why all the popular apps you probably do use look polished, it's because the ugly ones don't survive, regardless of what visually obtuse nerds think. I've mostly had success getting design help from friends who are designers (for my current app, I have an experienced designer friend who works 3-5 hours a week prettying up the UX that my engineering team puts together) and immediately everyone we interact with thinks our app is super sexy, the best, and want to use it even if it's less capable than what they were using before, despite us not really having invested that much into design (I'd link it, but it's a B2B enterprise app with no public face). Where to find designers: I've mostly had success from my extended network, but there are lots of talent on Upwork, Dribbble, and definitely there are people who really are good; but unfortunately there's also a ton of people who have no idea what they're doing, and unless you have some way to vet them, you'll have a hard time wading through the noise. With design, it seems that practitioners either "got it" or they don't, and if you don't, you'll probably hurt the project you're working on more than you'll help it (wasting development time for something that ultimately isn't even a benefit to users/business). There's also expensive talent aggregators like Toptal, though haven't really used those before. I also see new talent aggregators like Pallet [1], which looks interesting, though no idea how good those are, and not sure if you're prepared to pay the entry fee. I mostly appreciate designers who: - are able to explain why one design is better in terms of actual usability + business impact, not just because they think it looks nicer - can make designs that are flexible to the real uses of users - e.g. don't make a design that only works on mobile or only works on desktop, whatever they come up with can deal with both if your users will use both (which this app definitely would) - make designs in a methodical way, i.e. viewing the UI as a system that you can set general guidelines on. The spatial/visual relationships between elements is a reflection of how different information in your app relates to one another, not just a purely aesthetic thing (aka "Information Architecture") - are able to communicate the work clearly; usually that means well-annotated wireframes in Figma for my team, and are available to do some live visual QA sessions when things are unclear. - can prove that they are able to make steady and incremental progress at least at the pace that my developer team can keep up with, i.e. we're not blocked on design work. My current designer can do that with just a few hours a week. His rate is admittedly expensive, but the results with so few hours are undeniable. Hope that gives you something to work from! [1] https://ridd.pallet.com/talent/welcome https://ridd.pallet.com/talent/welcome

218 points by holler 4y ago

MarcelOlsz 4y ago

Please pay a designer. Pretty please.

holler 4y ago
lol! I'd love to once I figure out how to.
- MarcelOlsz 4y ago
  Well you can login to your bank and send any amount of money you please my way, they should have a support number. I can't promise any design coming out the other end though.
- presentation 4y ago
  Even if you just hired someone to, ignoring UX altogether, do a pure UI pass to just make it look pretty - it would probably be significantly more likely to go viral. My initial instinct looking at this, without having touched the product at all, was immediately that "this is an ugly app for nerds" and I figure that (dumb) issue would keep it from really going mainstream. Luckily I'm a nerd, so I'm willing to put up with it, but don't listen to the other nerds here who think that it's fine as it is—they're not a credible source for how real people will actually react to things, and there's a reason why all the popular apps you probably do use look polished, it's because the ugly ones don't survive, regardless of what visually obtuse nerds think. I've mostly had success getting design help from friends who are designers (for my current app, I have an experienced designer friend who works 3-5 hours a week prettying up the UX that my engineering team puts together) and immediately everyone we interact with thinks our app is super sexy, the best, and want to use it even if it's less capable than what they were using before, despite us not really having invested that much into design (I'd link it, but it's a B2B enterprise app with no public face). Where to find designers: I've mostly had success from my extended network, but there are lots of talent on Upwork, Dribbble, and definitely there are people who really are good; but unfortunately there's also a ton of people who have no idea what they're doing, and unless you have some way to vet them, you'll have a hard time wading through the noise. With design, it seems that practitioners either "got it" or they don't, and if you don't, you'll probably hurt the project you're working on more than you'll help it (wasting development time for something that ultimately isn't even a benefit to users/business). There's also expensive talent aggregators like Toptal, though haven't really used those before. I also see new talent aggregators like Pallet [1], which looks interesting, though no idea how good those are, and not sure if you're prepared to pay the entry fee. I mostly appreciate designers who: - are able to explain why one design is better in terms of actual usability + business impact, not just because they think it looks nicer - can make designs that are flexible to the real uses of users - e.g. don't make a design that only works on mobile or only works on desktop, whatever they come up with can deal with both if your users will use both (which this app definitely would) - make designs in a methodical way, i.e. viewing the UI as a system that you can set general guidelines on. The spatial/visual relationships between elements is a reflection of how different information in your app relates to one another, not just a purely aesthetic thing (aka "Information Architecture") - are able to communicate the work clearly; usually that means well-annotated wireframes in Figma for my team, and are available to do some live visual QA sessions when things are unclear. - can prove that they are able to make steady and incremental progress at least at the pace that my developer team can keep up with, i.e. we're not blocked on design work. My current designer can do that with just a few hours a week. His rate is admittedly expensive, but the results with so few hours are undeniable. Hope that gives you something to work from! [1] https://ridd.pallet.com/talent/welcome https://ridd.pallet.com/talent/welcome