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Show HN: Radiopaper – Troll-resistant public conversations

• deeviant 4y ago
  The core premise seems completely asinine and the format is eye rending. Disallowing "dislikes" doesn't stop trolling (the recipient still receives the msg after all) "like" it or not, negative feedback is required for a healthy community moderated chat board.
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  I applaud any attempt to increase the diversity of platforms for people to share ideas. There will never be a single platform that will satisfy everybody, because people are diverse and have different definitions of what it means to troll.
• davidschaengold 4y ago
  Thanks, everyone, for your feedback and attention. We're grateful for all the suggestions, sign-ups, comments and criticisms. Here are a few things we want to add to the original post in response to your questions and feedback: 1. First, a clarification about our mechanism: * only the first message in a conversation or thread requires a reply or approval for publication. The algorithm is not "for every n messages in a conversation, publish n-1." The reason for this is discussed in some of your comments: if every message requires a reply to publish, then either party in a conversation can unilaterally end a conversation at any time. * Instead, once a conversation or a thread is published, either party can add messages to the conversation in any order. Does this mean that once you get past the first-message test, you can troll to your heart's content? Not really. Yes, you can keep publishing messages into the conversation. But unless your counterparty replies to you, additional messages will be considered "post-scripts." Post-scripts do not push a conversation to the top of any feeds, whether on a user page or on the Explore page. This will remain the case even when we have individual feeds and a more complex algorithm than simple reverse-chrono. What this means is that a conversation gets less and less discoverable the longer it goes without both parties jumping in. 2. Second, a clarification about our ambitions: * no system is perfectly troll-proof. We call Radiopaper "troll-resistant," rather than "troll-proof," for a reason. But we also believe that our level of troll resistance is sufficient to radically change the experience of using Radiopaper in the long term, vs other social sites. * two reasons for this: one is that most trolls are pretty lazy. Raising the bar even slightly eliminates 90%+ of the worst actors. More importantly, however, we reduce incentives for trolling. Right now a good way to gain clout on social networks is to post inflammatory or insulting replies. On Radiopaper, that will just get you ignored. On Radiopaper, the incentives are instead to strike a balance between engaging your interlocutor and engaging your audience. We believe this will eventually disproportionally attract the best minds on the internet to the site. 3. Third, a note about where we're headed: our next steps in the medium term are to add social features like following, notifications, reactions, and individual feeds. This will make Radiopaper a bit more like Twitter or Facebook, and a bit less like Reddit or HN. Our goal is to be more social network than forum. 4. Lastly, a call to action: if you like the concept and/or the design, we'd love it if you started a conversation! One important feature of the site is that you can converse on Radiopaper with someone purely via their email address. Only one person in a conversation ever even needs to log in or make an account. This feature is available at radiopaper.com/new. If you don't have any ideas for who to start chatting with, check out my user page: radiopaper.com/DavidSchaengold. I'd be happy to talk.
• deleted 4y ago
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• evnp 4y ago
  A few obvious gaps to highlight that we're actively working on: * The OAuth scopes for login with Twitter are overly broad. This appears to be a limitation of Firebase Auth's SDK, it only supports the Twitter OAuth 1.0 API, whereas Twitter only provides more fine-grained scopes if we use OAuth 2. We're looking into whether we can make changes to Firebase Auth to contribute upstream that would let us request email addresses without permission to view your timeline, followers, etc. * There are a few quirks with our UX on mobile devices, and Comments are not visible on mobile. We've focused on the desktop experience for reading and writing at first, but a lot of our users do come to us on Mobile, so making this better is a high priority. * We're missing a lot of the standard social features you might expect from an app like this: following, reactions, @-mentions, topics, search, etc. These and many others are on our roadmap, but as a bootstrapped team trying to maintain a high quality bar, we're moving on them pretty slowly.
  • kwhitefoot 4y ago
    > search, etc Without search I can't see how anyone could make much use of it.
• _zzaw 4y ago
  Looks like a cool idea, but I'm having trouble signing in. Clicking the link in the email just bounces me back to the website, where I'm still logged out. I like the idea that messages only appear after they've been approved by the receiving party. That's pretty clever.
  • evnp 4y ago
    Sorry about that! Would you be able to let us know which browser and device you're using? We're seeing some errors come in through Sentry about Firebase auth being unable to persist things in local storage, that may be what's going here. We'll keep digging!
    • _zzaw 4y ago
      Thank you! This is happening on iOS 14.5.1, in Safari. I’m on an iPhone XS.
      • evnp 4y ago
        Thanks again for the bug report. We've managed to get someone on the team to reproduce the issue, it seems login-by-email doesn't work correctly in Safari for iOS. We found that after you click the email login link, it'll appear you're logged out, but once you refresh the page, you'll be logged in. We'll work on getting this squared away, but in the mean time, perhaps try the refresh- workaround; or a different browser or OAuth login method.
• Etheryte 4y ago
  This looks like an interesting idea. A twist on mailing lists with a web facing interface. One thing I couldn't figure out, are all threads one-on-one? Or is it possible to have threads with many people in them? A small technical nitpick, it seems cache headers are not set correctly for images and such right now. When you scroll up and down the homepage, the same images get re-requested again and again. Out of curiosity, why are the top items unrendered when scrolling down?
  • daave 4y ago
    Re caching: I had a look into it, and it seems we set the following headers when retrieving user images: > cache-control: public, max-age=3600 So I believe your browser _should_ be caching these.
  • brk 4y ago
    It looks like you can add to an existing conversation, there is a link on the right-side.
    • evnp 4y ago
      This is also correct, you can comment on any message in an existing conversation. The same publication rules apply here – this spins off a new one-on-one conversation with the message's author.
  • evnp 4y ago
    Yes, all the threads are one-on-one. We've toyed with the idea of group discussions, but haven't landed on what the path forward is there just yet. Thanks for highlighting the image caching issue, we'll look into it! As for the scrolling behavior, we render a sliding-window of rows to keep DOM size down, but the UX does need some work.
• tksmith151 4y ago
  Do you have plans for bots / bot networks that can simulate a conversation between two or more people? I do think the overall premise is interesting though and can see how it might deter undesired content from taking over your social network.
  • evnp 4y ago
    Thanks for the question! There's certainly a risk that some kinds of abuse patterns will get through our reply-to-publish model. Eventually we'd like to try and detect bot traffic and challenge them with a CAPTCHA or similar.
• jonahbenton 4y ago
  Relevant and timely. Bravo!
  • evnp 4y ago
    Thanks very much!
• freemint 4y ago
  I found it quiet unapproachable to find people i might want to interact with. Can you describe how one is supposed to discover who one wants to interact with?
  • daave 4y ago
    Thanks for taking a look! For now there are two ways to find an interlocutor: 1. Send a message to someone you already know, using their email address. 2. Comment on or start a conversation with someone whose post you find interesting. We expect to add more features around discovering both users and conversations in the future.
• encryptluks2 4y ago
  This seems more like a Facebook wall where you approve each post. The design looks good from what I can tell, not sure it you have apps or if this is open source, but in terms of making a company out of this it seems like little value compared to free alternatives that already exist. With email, I can already create white lists. Also, what is to stop a group of accounts from spamming someone with requests? Mastodon let's you filter people and block them as well, and there are plenty of similar apps that provide actions to create and filter groups of conversations.
• leakbang 4y ago
  This looks pretty cool! It feels like a new take on the idea of mailing lists. One suggestion that came to my mind, is to have the ability for viewers to subscribe to conversations. It could be either through Email notifications or RSS.
  • evnp 4y ago
    Fantastic suggestions, thanks – we have a notifications system on our road map but are still formulating the exact mechanics. We would also love to support RSS! One of many things that we will try to get to soon.
    • anotherevan 4y ago
      +1 for RSS feeds! Also, is there a blog or some way to follow¹ development and know when new features roll out? ¹ Preferably via RSS!!
      • dane-pgp 4y ago
        If we're making technology requests, is it too late to ask that the site work without JavaScript? I guess you could say "It works without JavaScript because you can interact via email", which is fair, but if you're adding support for RSS then it would be nice to be able to access the site via an API or with curl.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• leakbang 4y ago
  I've been browsing the site a little bit and I've got a question. Who is this or what is this for? I couldn't think of a personal use case for it so I'm asking out of curiosity.
• _alaeri 4y ago
  How can someone get involved in the project? Do you plan to hire soon? Do you plan to develop mobile apps? Working on a project that aims to improve online discussions is my current long term career goal. The "counterpart accepting your contribution" filter seems neat and simple.
  • evnp 4y ago
    A worthy goal indeed! We are very much looking at expansion of the team, as there are a number of additional features we'd like to roll out to strengthen the product (including a stronger mobile offering). We're exploring options for funding Radiopaper so we can kick it into high gear.
    • _alaeri 4y ago
      Please don't hesitate to get in touch. alaeri(at)gmail.com (android dev 8y+ experience).
• duck 4y ago
  I found this exchange super helpful in understanding what Radiopaper is: https://radiopaper.com/conversation/K5opCylqOizaZ0HQCB5Q/otsqJi9NJ1rsHKvbnYW3 https://radiopaper.com/conversation/K5opCylqOizaZ0HQCB5Q/ots... This feels like something that would be hard to get traction with, but hats off on trying to do something different and thinking through what social could be. Also, love the design and UX - great stuff!
  • klenwell 4y ago
    Thanks for pointing to that. I thought this part in particular really helped clarify how this is supposed to work: As we were building Radiopaper, we developed a concept we call "social skeuomorphism." ... Social skeuomorphism is the idea that a social network should be designed to resemble the best social events in the non-digital world. This is tricky, because internet communication differs from in-person communication in many dimensions, and it's not immediately obvious which of those dimensions are the important ones. In a few of these dimensions internet communication might even be superior to in-person communication. ...But parties have a number of built-in safeguards to prevent this phenomenon from becoming toxic. If A approaches B at a party and begins speaking, B is expected to acknowledge the approach, but is free to leave the conversation quickly if desired. If A then follows B, refusing to terminate the conversation, A is being rude, and publicly so. At parties this is often sufficient to ensure that no one has to engage in long, unwanted conversations, or at least not too often. Maybe this could be a complement to other social sites like HN or Reddit. Sometimes you see two people start to go back and forth in a subthread. Maybe that could be a cue to "take it to Radiopaper".
• Klonoar 4y ago
  Just wanted to comment and say that the design is a breath of fresh air. It feels in some ways similar to the startups of 10 years ago while still feeling modern and readable. I feel like, by avoiding some of the modern UI/UX landing page trends, it feels more authentic when I land there. I like it.
  • davidschaengold 4y ago
    Thank you — we wanted the design to communicate that Radiopaper is offering something quite different. "A breath of fresh air" is exactly what we hoped for!
• V__ 4y ago
  I hope I'm not missing something, but am I understanding it correctly: Messages between two people are publicly viewable, and then it's possible for other people to comment on them? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around a general use case then. It seems like a neat idea for discussions or debates between two people which have public value.. but most of the time when I'm writing directly to someone, why would I want to have it shared? Looking at other social networks, most of the time you want to share something with your social circle and generate a conversation which has more than two people or you message them directly. Am I missing something?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • rntksi 4y ago
    I have the same thoughts. I think this is for people who like to have other people read what they wrote (as a sort of validation), but doesn't like having people who reply with no-effort content. So the userbase would be people who like having intelligent debates in the open, but in a selective way (not with people they deem "not fit to debate with")
• twobitshifter 4y ago
  Is this an option for blog comments or something that is standalone? I’m on mobile and the interface looks pretty, but seems a little strange. I’m being exposed to the middle of conversations and missing the lede. Like walking into a room and having no clue what 2 people are chatting about.
• _aavaa_ 4y ago
  > The key mechanism that makes Radiopaper different from other social networks, and more resistant to trolling and abuse, is that messages are not published until the counterparty replies or accepts your comment. Isn't this the same thing as protecting your tweets and restricting who can tag you and reply to your tweets?
  • cormacrelf 4y ago
    That’s a very interesting question, and not one I have thought about before. Thank you for asking it, it has added a new dimension to my thinking and I will tell my grandchildren about your incisive inquiry. No. Do you see how you described a system based on identity, whereas this forces you to review individual comments before they’re published? There’s no way on Twitter to request the ability to reply. Edited to add the kind of fake boilerplate that seems to gush from every message on there in order to encourage acceptance.
    • _zzaw 4y ago
      Thank you, cormacrelf. Your gratuitous, utterly unwarranted nastiness here is an excellent example of why communities like Radiopaper sound particularly appealing right now. That kind of overtly obnoxious response is generally discouraged on HN.
      • cormacrelf 4y ago
        My comment was a direct illustration of the difference between Twitter’s reply-limiting system and Radiopaper’s, and one of its primary effects, which is to dress up discussion in niceties out of fear of not getting accepted. The first sentence is a direct quote from one of the threads on Radiopaper, one which seemed to be echoed in many others in their own way. It was a very light parody. I didn’t direct vitriol at anybody. And I raised a point that nobody else had. If you thought I was being sardonic and nasty towards the question about Twitter, all that went way over your head. I don’t think the over-friendliness would last as a phenomenon because frankly I got quickly bored reading replies like that, so I would expect the community to get over it and switch to trying to write good posts instead of performatively respectful ones.
• karencarits 4y ago
  I enjoy the design; clean and simple! Somehow, the initials in red reminds me of liturgical texts Also, I love the approach with close integration with mails - I think it is strange that the mail protocol isn't more widely used - having my own copies of the conversations, easily searchable and exportable, is a huge advantage!
  • davidschaengold 4y ago
    Thank you! We felt that it was really important to get the design right, and I'm glad that you found it clean and simple. You're absolutely right that we were inspired by the graphic design of old breviaries and liturgical books. Email is in some ways like a whole hidden social internet. A lot of people use email who have no interest in Twitter, Facebook, etc. And many of those people are really interesting. Radiopaper provides a way for them to have public conversations online without having to learn a new technology, and without having to worry about what might end up associated with their online presence in the absence of active management.
    • Snild 4y ago
      What if I don't like my initials? I share them with a political party that I disagree with, and it always irks when I am called by them. Maybe I should create an account and check if there's a setting before I whine about it... but this is still the internet!
• russdpale 4y ago
  This looks like a bloody brilliant idea thus far. I'm curious as to how you guys approach implementing some of the traditional social media experiences (likes, follows, retweets, etc). There are so many things to consider.. I was telling my BIL, who is a psychiatrist, that we as devs don't do enough to include other voices from other experts in the dev process.. It seems like many of the traditional social media functions could be more harmful then helpful, both individually and as an unhealthy group dynamic. Perhaps simple changes can make big impacts, such as approving people to follow you when they request it, and the option of turning off new follow requests altogether. It's interesting I see this project, because I've long thought the problem with social media is that everyone can talk to everyone and anyone at any time. Like everyone is in a giant stadium with access to the PA to announce themselves... and everyone in the stadium can use it all at the same time. Real life doesn't work this way. While unfettered communication is nice, it is also overwhelming and positive and healthy communication needs filters and topics and such. I'll definitely be watching this app and hopefully using it. There is a lot of opportunity here. I really enjoy the clean and simple interface. Personally, I think this is probably the best social media app and idea I've seen come through HN in a long time. A 'contact me' button which quick copies a link would be a nice addition.
  • dimal 4y ago
    I would suggest that retweets should not be implemented. They’re the main vector for toxic discussion amplification, and they add nothing to a conversation. It’s a lazy way of participating in a mob.
    • russdpale 4y ago
      I concur.
• Apreche 4y ago
  > is that messages are not published until the counterparty replies or accepts your comment Ok, this is a really smart idea. Can you just please add a link to your about page on your home page? without this posting, I never would have found it.
  • evnp 4y ago
    Sorry it's a little hard to find – if you hover your cursor at the bottom of any page there'll be a link to the "about" and "policies" pages, https://radiopaper.com/about https://radiopaper.com/about
    • Apreche 4y ago
      Oh, there it is!
• fishtoaster 4y ago
  This is very neat! The premise (1-1 convos, messages published only on reply) is pretty unique. It's not at all clear to me how that premise is going to lead to more civil conversations, but I am 100% behind people trying out different online conversation mechanics and seeing what falls out of them. Stack overflow, 4chan, twitter, every phpBB ever... the communities they developed were all heavily influenced by the mechanics of interacting with them. I strongly believe that there's plenty of solution space left to explore with the problem of "how do we design interaction mechanics to produce the community we want." I applaud anyone exploring that solution space!
• mleonhard 4y ago
  Have ideas about UX and developer productivity? Message me on Radiopaper: https://radiopaper.com/user/K3ST04CaOZV4XwHThdMY3rOY8Rq2 https://radiopaper.com/user/K3ST04CaOZV4XwHThdMY3rOY8Rq2
  • daave 4y ago
    Michael, So glad that you're excited to use the platform. Would you like a custom alias (radiopaper.com/MichaelLeonhard or similar)? At the moment we provision those manually, on-demand. We saw your message to Socrates, I'm afraid he's not around to reply today, so it'll likely remain unpublished.
    • mleonhard 4y ago
      radiopaper.com/mleonhard would be nice. :) I was hoping that https://radiopaper.com/Socrates https://radiopaper.com/Socrates is role-played by a trained living philosopher. That would be fun.
• Crazyontap 4y ago
  This idea is good, design is awesome. Here is a little feedback 1. It needs categories. I don't feel motivated to read most of the conversations but if those were related to my interest i definitely would. 2. users should be able to add some bios, who are these people. 3. where it says you can start a conversation there could be a list of experts in my category i can send the question to, not popular people but people who have posted a lot in that category. this can be quora without the spam!
  • daave 4y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! 1. We're certainly looking into this, and other approaches to content discovery. 2. You can already add bios! Go to to your user page (link in the top-right), and it should be clear how to add a bio. 3. Thanks for the suggestion, we'll definitely think about this more.
    • julianlam 4y ago
      My personal opinion here. We (NodeBB) decided to go with categories from the get go because it was a form of hierarchy that worked well for YEARS, and you don't go breaking things that work fine. IIRC Discourse started without categories. The whole "bucket of messages" shebang. It did not go well, in the sense that I believe people kept asking for categories. There's something special about a curated list of folders to slot messages into, that tags and labels don't quite capture.
      • nomel 4y ago
        Or to put it simply, most people are disinterested in most things. If you present them with most things, they will be mostly disinterested.
        • julianlam 4y ago
          A little defeatist, but correct in its own way. I prefer to look at it as "each person is interested in different things, and they mostly don't overlap with any other one person, statistically".
• BWStearns 4y ago
  Love the design and after reading the post that @duck linked to it clicked. Not sure how to elevator pitch the concept more efficiently but the email interaction mechanism might be viral enough to not have to really sell people on the idea. Super cool, hope it keeps growing and you can't fit in the free tier anymore!
  • daave 4y ago
    Hacker News has definitely pushed us out of the free tier for today, but these services are still impressively cheap. We may have a $5 cloud bill this month.
• linkdd 4y ago
  > The key mechanism that makes Radiopaper different from other social networks, and more resistant to trolling and abuse, is that messages are not published until the counterparty replies or accepts your comment. My mind is blown at how simple and elegant this solution is! Great work there.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    The idea is promising, and the design is good, too. Hoping this works out! In the end, I see this as a feature for discussions / subreddits - not exactly a business. But who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    • ge96 4y ago
      I don't like when I post something and it doesn't immediately show up, like why comment at all Granted I don't expect to write something bad but yeah, I just have this gut reaction I did something bad, like downvotes Like a "shadow ban"
  • bsaul 4y ago
    Had the exact same « owww that’s smart » instant reaction when reading that part. congratulations to the team. Edit : since the founders are reading this, i had an idea once about what an anti-twitter would be like and came to this idea : no message under 1k characters. Do what you want with that idea, i give it to you.
    • aloisdg 4y ago
      AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
      • not2b 4y ago
        You need 957 more A's. Sorry.
      • dane-pgp 4y ago
        Then the rules would require that the text doesn't contain repetition (i.e. doesn't compress well), so people would mash random letters on the keyboard. Then the rules would require that the text contains a minimum percentage of dictionary words, so people would start copy-pasting from Wikipedia articles. Then the site would implement some sort of plagiarism detector, so people would start using GPT-3 to rewrite the articles.
• formerkrogemp 4y ago
  I really like the idea. I really hope this and signal expand enough to kill Facebook.
• jchook 4y ago
  Couple quick notes: 1. Your sign-up email hides the confirmation link in text/plain. 2. IMHO the big :::::::: header at the top is visually distracting.
  • youngnh 4y ago
    1. oops. thanks for the report, we'll look into it 2. that's kind of our thing, we're gonna stick with it for a while longer :)
    • jchook 4y ago
      Thanks! Congrats on cultivating such a promising project!
• a_t48 4y ago
  Is it possible to add font selection here? On my Ubuntu 20 system this very "fancy" looking font renders quite poorly.
• zeckalpha 4y ago
  How do you plan to balance troll resistance with the perception of cancel culture, censorship, and anti-free speech that are echoing through the main social networks at the moment?
  • giantrobot 4y ago
    Does the perception of those things actually matter? From my entirely unscientific anecdata it seems people concerned about being "canceled" are toxic assholes that can't believe other people don't want to deal with their shit. No one is owed a platform to be a toxic asshole. Trolls don't deserve a response on someone's platform. They're all free to go start their own platforms and pay for the privilege of broadcasting their bullshit.
    • zeckalpha 4y ago
      Yes, it almost led to a hostile takeover attempt of Twitter.
    • jeegsy 4y ago
      > toxic assholes that can't believe other people don't want to deal with their shit To use Twitter as an example, there has been the "block" and "mute" buttons for quite a while. I dont know why ppl dont use these more. To me its far more likely that the cancellation intent is to prevent the so called troll from speaking to others.
    • sacrosancty 4y ago
      Pretty sure it's not assholes but rather people with opinions that the others hate. Or is that what "toxic assholes" means to you? Is expressing an assholey opinion in a polite respectful way is still toxic assholery? If that's the case, then you need to step back and work out how you decide what opinions are assholey.
      • giantrobot 4y ago
        To use an extreme example, a polite Nazi is still a Nazi. No matter how respectful they might seem they are still at their core awful pieces of shit. There's also toxic assholes just due to their obnoxious behavior. Neither inherently deserves to be heard or be amplified. Nobody needs to put up with their shit.
• bloopernova 4y ago
  This is fantastic, the best of luck to you!
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  > The key mechanism that makes Radiopaper different from other social networks, and more resistant to trolling and abuse, is that messages are not published until the counterparty replies or accepts your comment. Advocate here. The Devil is my boss. Don't hate, please. But I'd like to mention... So an idea isn't valid until the person being "challenged" signs off? That might mitigate trolling but there's also (likely) collateral damage. It could also accelerate (?) echo chambers. What, off the top of my head, makes sense is sonething simalar to Google's image-based CAPTCHA. That is, does X idea make sense? Is it factual and correct? Leaving the "challengee" in control feels subject to bias and "reverse trolling". I'm certainly pro an alternative to the usual social media suspects, but people are going to be people. For better and for worse.
• voidhorse 4y ago
  Love the aesthetic
• kazinator 4y ago
  > The notification emails contain context that explains that if you reply to the email, your message will be published on https://radiopaper.com https://radiopaper.com This (or this part of it) is not so radically different from the concept of posting to a mailing list, and having that show up on the web archive. Also, if you write to a moderated mailing list, your conversation is initially between two people: you and the moderator. > more resistant to trolling and abuse, is that messages are not published until the counterparty replies or accepts your comment. While that's certainly resistant to trolling, it's not resistant to the abuses. Certain users can favor certain other users and promote their comments while suppressing other comments. If we think about HN for a moment, that's completely opposite; here you cannot even be downvoted by the counterparty to your comment (the user to whom you are responding). There is a good reason why it is that way. Being able to veto people replying to you sounds like a good recipe for the nucleation of echo chambers. I don't believe there is any magic formula that eliminates trolling, yet respects everyone's freedom. The closest thing is the model of Usenet, with personal kill files. Everyone has a right not to read what they don't want: what they find disruptive, annoying, offensive or whatever. Everyone also has a right not to have someone else prevent them from reading what they want. The only way to achieve that is for everyone to have their own personal filter. You get shadow banned when you annoy everyone, ending up in everyone's kill file. That is fair; you cannot point fingers at an unfair moderator. You were talking at a group of people, each of whom preferred not to listen. The weak spot in this idea remains, of course, uthentication; users changing their identity to evade being blocked by others. An interesting concept might be bayesian filtering. Every forum participant has their own filter. Instead of blocking/killfiling users, you indicate to the system that some content is unwanted, and that trains your filter against that sort of content. A troll who uses multiple identities cannot evade that filter as easily, because to do that they have to change their content and style. And anyway, if thereby they cease trolling, that may well be fine. Finally, even the perfect scheme still has the problem that people may be harming themselves if they shun whatever they disagree with. What is a "troll"? Sometimes it's actually just a bearer of an uncomfortable truth, perhaps without the best of manners. But are the manners the real reason you want to block the troll, or the uncomfortable truth?
• riffic 4y ago
  > If you want to start a conversation with someone, enter their email address and type your message I feel this may be abused in some form. good luck!
• ilc 4y ago
  Cool idea... But how do you deal with sock puppets?
• Kiro 4y ago
  A common discussion "technique" on reddit is to block the person you're arguing with right after your last message, when you feel you're done with the conversation. That way they will never be able to reply and you always get the last word. Unfortunately this feels like an amplification of that. However, I guess the dynamics will prevent the frustrating feeling when that's the game you're singing up for. Intriguing idea anyway. Looking forward to seeing how it pans out.
  • dubswithus 4y ago
    When this first happened to me I assumed it was a reddit error until I looked at the response code.
    • Kiro 4y ago
      Same. It was extremely frustrating because I had written a long response with several references to support my argument and I was just unable to post it, getting a generic "Something went wrong" error message. I thought it was a temporary error and saved the comment but after trying several hours later getting the same thing I realized they had actually blocked me.
      • pell 4y ago
        Maybe it’s worth creating a throwaway account and posting the message that way to make sure your point has been made.
        • Kiro 4y ago
          I've honestly considering it but I'm afraid they will just say "lol you created a new account just to say that? pathetic" or something.
          • pell 4y ago
            I think if you address the coward blockage from the get go you’ll keep the upper hand.
• julianlam 4y ago
  How will you stop competitors from stealing your "secret sauce"? It seems fairly straightforward to program this into another more well-entrenched forum stack. You could, for example, say that you could compete on other feature sets, but the same argument applies. Reply-by-email? NodeBB has this (via SendGrid) and probably Discourse too. Extensibility? Lots of forums support plugins. Theming? Many forums are very customisable (or at least themeable)
  • VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
    I don't think it's important to worry about competitors stealing anything
    • julianlam 4y ago
      I'm simply asking because if someone were to do a feature comparison between forum software, it usually comes down to how many checkboxes you can hit. If your differentiating factor is something that is simple (and even mind blowing), it's especially easy for it to be stolen.
• allears 4y ago
  All I get is a totally blank screen for any page on your site. Probably some script blocker or other security plugin. I'm using Waterfox. Does your site require a more "modern" browser?
  • jen729w 4y ago
    I have my content blocker - 1Blocker - hiding comments for me by default. The site works, but the reply functionality does not. I’m on iOS so can’t easily test, but I assume that your reply div has a class or id containing the word ‘comment’. Entirely my fault, not yours OP, but just FYI.
• wbobeirne 4y ago
  Just a heads up, apostrophes in names get encoded: https://i.imgur.com/DaJIxLF.png https://i.imgur.com/DaJIxLF.png
  • youngnh 4y ago
    oh snap! really appreciate the bug report. we'll fix it.
• stavros 4y ago
  This looks like a nice idea, though I can't really wrap my head around the UI. How do I tell people how to discover me? I signed up and my username was my email, I changed it to my name but the URL didn't change, and now I don't know if my email is set to something unusable (or, if not, where to find it).
  • daave 4y ago
    We don't have usernames! You can log in with OAuth, or by Email. You can change your _display name_ on your profile page, and that's what appears publicly on the site (your email doesn't appear publicly, even if you log in by address!). Today to get a custom profile URL like radiopaper.com/Dave, you just need to ask and we'll create an alias for you. There isn't a self-serve alias mechanism available today, but we're thinking about how to provide one. Any profile can be linked by the URL radiopaper.com/uid, for instnace my profile can be reached at https://radiopaper.com/user/AwQLwnOgQFdyDfNoYfNCSSsVdx43 https://radiopaper.com/user/AwQLwnOgQFdyDfNoYfNCSSsVdx43, "Dave" is just an alias. Clearly having separate concepts of login method vs display name vs profile URL is all a bit confusing, this is helpful feedback!
    • stavros 4y ago
      Ahh okay, thanks! Could I have the username "Stavros" then please? I am currently https://radiopaper.com/user/U2goL6aTrtYs38S1l0kMkJuMwMm1 https://radiopaper.com/user/U2goL6aTrtYs38S1l0kMkJuMwMm1 Also, having a section in the profile where I could change my login email address would help with the UX.
      • daave 4y ago
        Done - https://radiopaper.com/Stavros https://radiopaper.com/Stavros Being able to change your email address is a known gap, sorry about that. For now if you want to use a different email you'll need to make a second account. We plan to make account merging possible in the future. A short-sighted technical decision on my part: we use the Firebase Auth UIDs as our internal user IDs, but Firebase Auth does not allow you to have multiple email auth-providers on a single account. So we need to add a layer of indirection in our data model.
• civilized 4y ago
  > It's possible to interact with Radiopaper entirely by email, and never log-in interactively. You guys are gods.
• rhaksw 4y ago
  I just posted this here [1]. Is moderation reviewable? One issue with other platforms is you often cannot see what they have removed. On reddit they show you your removed comments as if they're not removed when you're logged in. This can lead to parties where everyone thinks their voice is heard all the time when in reality it's sometimes filtered. The biggest trolls in this scenario are the mods. Secret removals can contribute to mods manipulating the conversation through what Peter Pomerantsev calls "consensus cracking" in his book "This Is Not Propaganda". -Author of Reveddit [1] https://radiopaper.com/conversation/46ERO4T8dF9hmx156gmm/0oVbqRNhqtAOQaFlgqBG https://radiopaper.com/conversation/46ERO4T8dF9hmx156gmm/0oV...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dimal 4y ago
  This is a fantastic idea. My only suggestion would be to make those features that are not immediately apparent more apparent. Even a simple “About” or “What is Radiopaper?” page would help a lot.
  • daave 4y ago
    https://radiopaper.com/about https://radiopaper.com/about It's helpful feedback that this isn't as discoverable as it should be. If you hover your cursor towards the bottom of the explore page, some links show up.
• tomatowurst 4y ago
  pretty cool but will never use it until enough blue checkmarked twitter handles I follow are on it. If anything it will probably be replicated by existing social networks. Good work and its a neat idea
• daniel-cussen 4y ago
  This is fucking cool. I love radio, and I love paper, what's not to like with radiopaper?! How much was the domain, $30000?
• alimov 4y ago
  > * The key mechanism that makes Radiopaper different from other social networks, and more resistant to trolling and abuse, is that messages are not published until the counterparty replies or accepts your comment. . Does this mean if someone doesn’t agree with your comment they can ignore it entirely, and nobody else in the conversation will ever know the comment was made? If that’s the case then wouldn’t it be possible to manufacture a sense of agreement (in the thread) by dismissing all unfavorable comments? Edit: Also if enough people of the same ideological leaning (or an army of bots) did this and engaged only with themselves, it could give the illusion that the general sentiment of users of your service is aligned in some belief or system of ideals or w.e? Idk, maybe I’m just spewing nonsense.. I like the overall idea and I wish your team the best of luck.
  • LightHugger 4y ago
    I can't believe this would be described as a selling point. Negative replies are necessary for the usefulness of any community. Unless the intent is just to maximally echo chamber the network, protect con artists from unfavorable replies and so on. Until someone takes a screenshot of your post, and posts their reply as a new root, and the point has been defeated...
    • alimov 4y ago
      I completely agree
    • rectang 4y ago
      Frankly, I'm so tired of the pervasive low-grade harassment and de facto exclusion of disenfranchised communities on HN, that I've been looking for an alternative for a long time. Innovation is desperately needed in this space. I've experienced a similar commenting system to RadioPaper in use on the Gawker properties, and it's not bad. It is siloed. But just because there's a single silo at HN doesn't mean everybody sticks around in that silo.
      • alimov 4y ago
        > “Frankly, I'm so tired of the pervasive low-grade harassment and de facto exclusion of disenfranchised communities on HN…” Would you care to elaborate? I am genuinely interested, in part because of curiosity and also because I haven’t experienced this personally.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• refulgentis 4y ago
  This is a fantastic idea. I wish you all the best of luck. One of those once in a decade "it's obvious when you hear it, but no one said it before" ideas for a big problem.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  I always liked the "pay a penny a post, in advance." In advance means you buy 1000 posts in advance for $10 or so. This would make armies of spambots uneconomic.
  • gambler 4y ago
    Have you tried Locals? Not a penny a post, but $5/month per board. Can't say there aren't any trolls, but it's definitely more "real" than most social media.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      Thanks for the tip, I know nothing about Locals. $5/mo for unlimited use is a different incentive structure.
  • georgia_peach 4y ago
    For spam prevention, what is the advantage of hard currency over a proof-of-work algo? I prefer to manage as few 3rd-party services (and fees!) as possible.
• daenz 4y ago
  About 14 years ago, I also tried to tackle the public conversation troll problem and created a forum that got quite a bit of traction. While Radiopaper takes the carrot approach ("write things people want to engage with"), I took the stick approach: "anyone can ban anyone else for a non-trivial amount of time, but you must reply to their post, and people will see that you banned them." It was a probabilistic method to filtering out the trolls, and it worked well. Trolls wanted to ban, but they themselves became the more-frequent targets of bans. Eventually, they would get frustrated with the bans and leave. The people that remained, stayed civil to not become a clear target of a ban. There would be brief chaotic behavior, but it never lasted. Cooler heads always prevailed. Radiopaper mentions that there is a lot of room for exploration in this space, to try different models for creating emergent social behavior and productive conversations. I hope we see more of it!
  • Theory42 4y ago
    Smart. Tit for tat is often a winning strategy.
  • kamikaz1k 4y ago
    Sounds like it worked? What happened with the project? Not enough mass of attention?
    • daenz 4y ago
      It was growing steadily but there was no clear way for me to monetize it. From a business perspective, I didn't know what I was doing. 4chan founder Chris Poole reached out to me at one point and we had a call (I was a bit star-struck!) to talk about it and some new project he was working on (I don't remember the name). But money was really tight for me and I couldn't afford to run it anymore, so I had to shut it down.
      • pooper 4y ago
        How much did it cost to run? Did you have any money coming in at all?
• akomtu 4y ago
  "Email as ID" is a great idea. But will it survive the pressure to monetize the service? If you ever want to sell the business, buyers will want more reliable IDs. One big thing I've been wanting from such a service is subscription to users I find interesting. Someone has posted a great insight? I add the user to my list and my daily email now includes whatever that user has posted yesterday. The email has links to unsubscribe from users. As a side effect, this breaks echo chambers: unusually motivated users won't be able to spam your subscriptions, and won't be able to ban you - the only ban is when others unsubscribe from you.
• icosa 4y ago
  Radiopaper is both empowering and requiring every user to be a content moderator. Let's say Alice and Bob sign up and start holding interesting conversations. Then Nasty McNasterson starts sending hate mail and death wishes to Alice and Bob. Alice and Bob can stop Nasty's messages from showing publicly, but first they have to see the never-ending stream of abuse. What can they do to stop this? Can they block Nasty from sending them messages? If enough people block Nasty, can Nasty be kicked off the platform? On the other hand, if Nasty and an army of sock puppets (or a brigade of chat buddies) block Alice and Bob, will they get kicked off instead?
  • daave 4y ago
    Adding a feature to block specific accounts is on our short-term roadmap. We'll also endeavor to block accounts from the platform that violate our policies (https://radiopaper.com/policies https://radiopaper.com/policies).
• arcbyte 4y ago
  The next social media unicorns will be baser around user controlled moderation.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• blondin 4y ago
  this is the first modern social network i immediately signed up for. great job! i am kinda confused on the email thing. when i use the email of someone i know and they are not on the network, do they still get the message in their email?
  • daave 4y ago
    Yes! They will receive an email with the message, and some boilerplate explaining that it was sent from Radiopaper and that if they reply to the email the message will be published. They'll also receive a link to view the post on the site if they prefer.
• groby_b 4y ago
  As others have argued, this has still many opportunities for abuse. I believe that the major problem all online social media faces isn't individual comments - it's that it's incredibly hard to have persistent consequences for bad actors. Most of them, you just sockpuppet around. Yes, you could enforce "real" identities, and that comes with a whole host of different problems. I love you're experimenting in the space - we desperately need improvement. I just think you still have a few experiments ahead of you (and I hope some of them center on the idea of community instead of individual interactions)
• namecheapTA 4y ago
  I don't get it. As if echo chambers weren't already bad enough.
• tartakovsky 4y ago
  Really interesting concept. I think the previews on the thumbnails shouldn't be the beginning of the message. My reason is that it oftentimes contains longwinded introductions and I believe there could be more compelling text. Maybe that's just my impression, but I think one workaround is to use some "AI logic" to automatically summarize the thread. Just Duck Duck Go to "text summarization apis" and see.
• gelatocar 4y ago
  This is really interesting, one question that comes to mind is whether popular discussions will become stressful for the original two people as others create new threads off certain comments. It seems that you would either have to ignore those new threads or inevitably end up having to keep track of a potentially deeply branching, difficult to follow discussion - having to make the same points in parallel to multiple people. Some way to fan in the conversation and allow multiple participants as points converge could solve this but it sounds like it would be rather complex to get right.
  • davidschaengold 4y ago
    Thanks for this question. It's one we've given some thought to. You're absolutely right that the ability to make new threads allows for the possibility of heavily branched conversations, which could be tricky to follow in their entirety. Our thinking about this was that we want to make it as easy as possible to follow a conversation between two people, however long and involved the conversation gets. So, while conversations can branch endlessly, it's always easy to follow what any two people are saying to each other. In the longer term, we might also add some features around seeing an overall conversation branching structure, but it's not on the short-term roadmap.
• zestyping 4y ago
  Hi Evan! Wonderful idea, and a beautiful implementation. I conceived this idea independently some years ago (just the core of it: that all replies must be approved by their immediate parent) and am delighted to see it realized! For a long time, I've been bewildered at the lack of innovation in online discussion. It's time for something new! There are so many ideas we haven't tried — see here for a list of just a few I've been thinking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28231904 > Requiring each comment to be approved by the author of its immediate parent > (so you can disagree with each other, but you have to be kind) Have you considered any other ideas for helping people engage in meaningful conversations? I wish you the best of success! Let a thousand flowers bloom.
  • schoen 4y ago
    Hi Ping! Isn't this idea slightly the inverse of the idea you mentioned here? That is, this system requires comments to be approved by their addressees. Suppose you write something to me, and I have something to say in return. In Radiopaper, your comment to me would only be published if I (by posting my reply) consent to having your comment appear. In your system, my reply to you would only be published if you (as the original author) consent to having my comment appear. Or have I misunderstood? (I agree with you that it would be cool to see more experiments about how to make online discussions work better.)
    • zestyping 4y ago
      Oh, I didn't realize it worked that way in RadioPaper. Does that mean all the leaf comments are always hidden? That would seem a bit strange. If you asked me something, and I agreed, that wouldn't necessarily warrant a further reply — but then no one would ever see my expression of agreement?
• jesprenj 4y ago
  Blank page for me on Kiwi Browser.
• gitgud 4y ago
  > more resistant to trolling and abuse, is that messages are not published until the counterparty replies or accepts your comment. So this platform proposes that you must make your comment agreeable to other party, which has its benefits; civil discourse, pleasant rebuttals, less polarising discussion. However it gives the power of censorship to each party, giving a false view of discussion. What really makes a system resistant to trolling is "reputation", this can be in the form of points or even some kind of verification system. The best platforms respect this, and requires you to earn the right to be heard through time and dedication to the community. Points are a way of verifying that the user has had respectful discussion in the past, as users should only earn points through respectful discussion.
• gregwebs 4y ago
  I really like this idea. However, I find the site very difficult to use because there is no subject listed for the conversations.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• derekzhouzhen 4y ago
  It is an interesting concept. Are you going to focus on the people or the topics? If you lean more on people aspect then it will be a social network of some sort. If you focus on topics then it is more like a web forum.
• anonymousadmin 4y ago
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• derac 4y ago
  The login link from the email failed in Firefox (Librefox). Chrome worked. Cool idea! edit: More issues with Firefox and Librefox. :(
• MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
  This seems like an excellent mechanism you have here, and you can tell from the current batch of conversations that you've already achieved good participation. It feels a bit odd and voyeuristic reading it though, almost like I've walked into a high-class party where I don't belong. This may be entirely intentional, and admittedly the sophistication of the conversations is beyond any forum I've seen before. (This might say more about me than your project.) But I do wonder: is there any place for low-brow talk here? Or even quick back-and-forth banter? I just wonder if it's even possible, or if what I'm seeing is simply a result of early testing from your inner circle (who seem waaay classier than my friends, haha!). Even if it doesn't fill every role it seems like a success regardless. Good job!
  • davidschaengold 4y ago
    Thanks for taking a look! We're excited about the mechanism, and about our early enthusiastic users. You're right that the conversations going on now are mostly a bit high-brow or formal. This is mostly an accidental feature of the way we rolled out the site to people we thought would like it. Many of them are professional writers! But absolutely, Radiopaper is also a good place for banter or conversations about whatever (keeping in mind our content policy, naturally: radiopaper.com/policies). Sports gossip, politics, whatever — go for it!
• mariusor 4y ago
  The project reminds me a lot of https://letter.wiki https://letter.wiki
• YossarianFrPrez 4y ago
  This looks very cool; I've signed up. You can tell from both the visual and mechanism design that the founders really care about their product. Also, if the Radiopaper team is reading this... You've probably gotten this from other people, but it is hard to know which conversations to enter -- it'd be helpful if they were organized with a title or topic or a tag.
  • davidschaengold 4y ago
    Thanks for signing up! And thanks for the feedback. It's clear that discoverability is an issue with the site in its current form. We hope to add some features to improve that experience very soon.
• roomey 4y ago
  I just signed up. It looks really nice. I would request some sort of topic subdivision like subreddits or hastags or something similar. It is hard to know what a conversation is about or even how to post about a topic of interest. For example, it would be interesting to see a discussion about being on HN and the impact on the user base
• bambax 4y ago
  Ok, but what would be a widely accepted definition of trolling? Is it voicing unpopular/outrageous opinions that one doesn't zven truly believe in, fot the purpose of enticing third parties to engage in a shouting match? If so, how does the obligation that there is a reply before publishing, prevent trolling? The problem with trolls seems to be that they are very difficult to ignore.
• crossroadsguy 4y ago
  This vaguely reminds me of an old social network/forum from the time when Path was around iirc. It was a public question/answer or discussion site with, again iirc, public full ID profiles promoting so called known (famous?) folks/profiles. I call such people the “in folks”. In other words “influencers”. That’s what it seemed. First look gave an impression that those people are highlighted, not the content. Checked it on mobile - a quick check. It also reminds me of reco.com with focus on people like Bill Gates et al as id people who read books just for the pleasure of reading would take recommendations of Bill Gates (okay, this sounds too generalised!). Organic conversation is the last thing that happens on such sites. It might be different and best wishes to people behind it. I can’t remember the name. “Peach” comes to mind for some reason but I checked and Peach is not that. Name was something “get———“.com I think.
• FailMore 4y ago
  Really nice work on RadioPaper. I think I have been building something very similar - https://taaalk.co https://taaalk.co, which is a social network for closed (troll-free), but publicly readable, conversations. I went with a very different design approach - a bit more slapstick; referencing the messaging apps we are all familiar with.
• greatgib 4y ago
  I'm sorry but the whole concept looks stupid to me: I easily guess that there will not be useful conversation there. The system will be entirely controlled by confirmation bias in my opinion...
• 9dev 4y ago
  A question on the services you mentioned: why do you use the premium offerings of Sentry, Mixpanel, GitHub etc already? Which features do you rely on the free plans don’t provide?
• edf13 4y ago
  Doesn’t this also allow conversation censorship? - don’t like someone’s response - simple accept it and no one will ever see the potential counter argument?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • edf13 4y ago
    * of course I meant to type don’t accept
• madrox 4y ago
  I'm not sure you can make a successful social network in 2022 without financial incentives for creators to make good content. Anyone good at making content online is getting paid for it. The novelty of putting things online for free wore off almost a decade ago. Platforms that don't have incentives yield to platforms that do.
• fifticon 4y ago
  Is this vulnerable to sock puppets? What if I run two accounts, post bait on one, reply with my troll reply through the other sock? Have I then succeded in creating 'troll theater' that is visible to 3rd parties (the real targets). I already encounter lots of reddit theater, which seem to be performed to influence 3rd party readers.
• bullen 4y ago
  I still think a forced comment on downvote is the best improvement one could make to the hn comment system. Same for reddit. Using mail is interesting in the long term as I see SMTP replacing all IM protocols.
• nojvek 4y ago
  I must say I love the design of the site. It’s lightweight and optimized for reading. Will their be groups of conversation threads like Reddit? How does one find interesting conversations to follow? Right now there’s a list of conversations that one could browse through but I assume noise:signal ratio will increase as more users make threads.
• nikolay 4y ago
  It's weird that there's no way to pick a username - some users have GUIDs, others - usernames.
• neilk 4y ago
  Have you talked to people who have handled trolling and abuse at scale before? I ask because there seem to be some huge holes in your model. 1) Message sending is already a victory condition If I understand correctly, when someone comments, it's always forwarded to the OP. Many harassers will use that to send vile things to the OP. If accounts can be generated without limit, they'll flood the OP's inbox. 2) Since replies are firstly private, this means others will not have the chance to downvote This deprives the system operator of some potentially valuable signals. Of course they can be brigaded too. 3) Opt-in once and receive a lifetime of abuse It seems like your system allows for individuals to opt-in to displaying replies, but no way for them to opt out. Many trolls will consider it a game to deceive the OP with an apparently sincere reply and then they'll have an unobstructed channel. I'm not even a specialist in these matters. Seriously, there are lots of people who are experts in troll fighting at this time, I strongly suggest you talk to them.