4 ms·

Interesting idea. So it's like an anonymous tweet-stream associated with a particular geographical location? Comments: a) It took me some time to understand w

by hugh3 15y ago

Interesting idea. So it's like an anonymous tweet-stream associated with a particular geographical location? Comments: a) It took me some time to understand what it was. I certainly didn't get it from the first paragraph, I had to scroll down. "Anonymized local layer on your reality"? Nobody is gonna understand what you mean by that. Really work on simplifying the product description so my mother could understand it. b) It'd help if you provided some examples for things that you think people might use it for. All I see is some partially-obscured examples like "bread hot" and I'm curious as to what the hell ends with "bread hot" and is an appropriate thing to say. c) You seem to be perfectly aware that trolling, griefing, pranking and general being-a-dick are likely to be a problem. It seems like it would be easy for bad content to drive out good. This seems like another good reason to provide more examples of what good content might look like.

kposehn 15y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We'll incorporate this on the home page...we posted this so we could get the hacker take on it :)
jtheory 15y ago
My first thoughts echoed some of these -- what are people thinking that I'd actually want to read? Most thoughts that people (myself included) have are better off left in their heads... I worry this would be something like the experience of sitting at a restaurant near one of those people who speaks every thought that comes into their heads. Now make it anonymous... I think there'd be a few large categories of thots, based on the motivations that would drive people to stop walking and type in the text of a thot... attempts to shock, attempts to be profound/fascinating, and simple brain dumps. The actually interesting content would unfortunately be pretty rare, I'd guess, but I'm admittedly curious to know how it goes. It could help to have some kind of crowd-sourced moderating approach, possibilities of flagging/banning the shockers/spammers, and/or ways to highlight users with frequently-liked thots. But still, filtering down the comments of the masses by the masses still gives you the quality of YouTube comment content. Possibly better approach -- some way to let users self-categorize, and prioritize thots in the right category? It'd be interesting to crunch numbers out of the thots based on number of spelling errors, vocabulary range, like profiles, icon/mood/emoticon associated by the thot-thinker, etc., and let different users get differently-prioritized streams. *edit: make slightly less curmudgeonly-sounding
- kposehn 15y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I think we've accounted for this with the stream and how likes/dislikes work. By taking into account how people react, we want to make what resonates more visible. Kind of like HN (but I had never touched HN when I came up with this). As for flags, the threshold for nuking a Thot with a flag varies - it is a bit of our secret sauce as to how we optimize. For self-categorization, that is coming in version 1.2 or 1.3. We know that as more people use it, content needs to get personalized. Definitely heading down that path quickly. Quality content and the people who make it need to shine :)
  - jtheory 15y ago
    The thing that facebook has taught me with a vengeance is that the definition of "quality content" is extremely subjective and personal. With my close friends, we often have a lot of overlap. But once I'm out of that small circle (into the larger & more intellectually diverse group of "everyone who has ever friended me for whatever reason"), there are tons of things people post that get lots of likes from their own circles of friends that I find trivial/boring/irrelevant, misguided/false, or even ideologically repugnant. I'm not sure what kinds of content people are going to be posting as thots -- I'm curious about that (hopefully you'll post some data, like the okcupid data analyses at some point?), but I suspect that's going to be tricky to navigate. Something like HN with a technical focus is safer ground -- but if people are making political "jokes" etc. in their thots (or thotting humor that treads the line of offensive), you could have a decent percentage of content that resonates greatly with some folks and really irritates others.

by hugh3 15y ago

kposehn 15y ago

Thanks for the feedback! We'll incorporate this on the home page...we posted this so we could get the hacker take on it :)

jtheory 15y ago

My first thoughts echoed some of these -- what are people thinking that I'd actually want to read? Most thoughts that people (myself included) have are better off left in their heads... I worry this would be something like the experience of sitting at a restaurant near one of those people who speaks every thought that comes into their heads. Now make it anonymous... I think there'd be a few large categories of thots, based on the motivations that would drive people to stop walking and type in the text of a thot... attempts to shock, attempts to be profound/fascinating, and simple brain dumps. The actually interesting content would unfortunately be pretty rare, I'd guess, but I'm admittedly curious to know how it goes. It could help to have some kind of crowd-sourced moderating approach, possibilities of flagging/banning the shockers/spammers, and/or ways to highlight users with frequently-liked thots. But still, filtering down the comments of the masses by the masses still gives you the quality of YouTube comment content. Possibly better approach -- some way to let users self-categorize, and prioritize thots in the right category? It'd be interesting to crunch numbers out of the thots based on number of spelling errors, vocabulary range, like profiles, icon/mood/emoticon associated by the thot-thinker, etc., and let different users get differently-prioritized streams. *edit: make slightly less curmudgeonly-sounding

kposehn 15y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I think we've accounted for this with the stream and how likes/dislikes work. By taking into account how people react, we want to make what resonates more visible. Kind of like HN (but I had never touched HN when I came up with this). As for flags, the threshold for nuking a Thot with a flag varies - it is a bit of our secret sauce as to how we optimize. For self-categorization, that is coming in version 1.2 or 1.3. We know that as more people use it, content needs to get personalized. Definitely heading down that path quickly. Quality content and the people who make it need to shine :)
- jtheory 15y ago
  The thing that facebook has taught me with a vengeance is that the definition of "quality content" is extremely subjective and personal. With my close friends, we often have a lot of overlap. But once I'm out of that small circle (into the larger & more intellectually diverse group of "everyone who has ever friended me for whatever reason"), there are tons of things people post that get lots of likes from their own circles of friends that I find trivial/boring/irrelevant, misguided/false, or even ideologically repugnant. I'm not sure what kinds of content people are going to be posting as thots -- I'm curious about that (hopefully you'll post some data, like the okcupid data analyses at some point?), but I suspect that's going to be tricky to navigate. Something like HN with a technical focus is safer ground -- but if people are making political "jokes" etc. in their thots (or thotting humor that treads the line of offensive), you could have a decent percentage of content that resonates greatly with some folks and really irritates others.