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Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/ https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/
https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare/ https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare/
- oraziorillo 4mo agoI love the idea! The next step is to add role play games in town squares.
- Procrastes 4mo agoI was thinking the same thing, or even just little minigames and Easter eggs for people to find.
- cauenapier 4mo agoThat's definitely coming!
- vitorbaptistaa 4mo agoThis is amazing! Congratulations on the launch. Repository link somewhere?
- SpyCoder77 4mo agoIn the footer. https://github.com/cauenapier/TownSquare https://github.com/cauenapier/TownSquare
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- sourcegrift 4mo agoFirst saw this on lobste.rs . Great idea, perhaps allow for a little customisation? I'd like minimal animation, just a counter of present people and a green dot that vibrates when someone is typing. Clicking either opens a chat box with last 20 minutes.
- loloquwowndueo 4mo ago> NOTE: This project has been mostly vibe-coded I deeply appreciate the honesty here. I’ll pass based on the vibecodedness of it but perhaps it won’t be a dealbreaker for others.
- lolptdr 4mo agoIs it the philosophical reason you refuse to engage or is it because you don’t trust the security of this project?
- brody_hamer 4mo agoEasy come, easy go. I find most vibe coded projects are abandonware. Also, in this context, security.
- purple-leafy 4mo agoYeah. I also don’t like the fact the dev posts the link and doesn’t interact with anyone here at all, so the link posting is effectively spray and pray abandonware too. Easy come easy go like they say
- fragmede 4mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cauenapier https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cauenapier shows a bunch of comments from the dev.
- cauenapier 4mo agoSorry! I wasn't present because the post went to the FrontPage while I was at Rock in Rio. Two days of shows, going to sleep at 5 am. The original post didn't get to the FrontPage, but just later it got bumped.
- melvinczyk 4mo agoI like the idea of this like a town square for websites. Nice job
- monkeymeister 4mo agoNeat idea! It's simple but very effective - and I really enjoy the detail of the benches and the tree. Very nice. I wouldn't add it to any of my sites due to the unmoderated nature of it - seeing some fairly unsavory things in your demo - but that's just a little tweak, I'm sure!
- sourcegrift 4mo agoIf your website attracts such elements perhaps there's a reason?
- DougN7 4mo agoThe demo is attracting the HN crowd and it’s getting… well, let’s just say this crowd is about as good as it gets online.
- sourcegrift 4mo agoYou clearly haven't visited any Buddhist forums, or generally non-islamic religious forums
- Planktonne 4mo agoI think the HN crowd might be the worst commentariat on a site that isn't explicitly focused on antisocial behaviour.
- chipsrafferty 4mo agoThe HN crowd is about as worst as it gets. The people here are really bad.
- wahnfrieden 4mo agoopenai has a free moderation endpoint. no reason to not use it. edit: downvoters either know something I don't about its unsuitability, or have outdated info on it and think it's against terms to use it for reasons unrelated to GPT. it's not against terms.
- cyanydeez 4mo agowould make more sense with webrtc.
- lellow 4mo agohaha nice project! I stayed there for a couple of minutes and had such a good time!
- cauenapier 4mo agoI'm glad to hear it! It makes me happy to see that other people are also having a good time in there. That was the goal!
- mkl 4mo agoNot really a square if it's 1D - everyone ends up on top of each other.
- Wolfbeta 4mo agoNot really a highway if it's a series of tubes.
- cauenapier 4mo agoIt has length and height, so it's 2D... Heheh But I get your point.
- lambdaone 4mo agoI just took a look at the page's own 'town square'. At the moment, it's largely full of people saying offensive things for the sake of it.
- dools 4mo agoSo it’s a twitter plugin?
- trollbridge 4mo agoWithin about 300ms I thought “moderation is going to be a problem”.
- wwind123 4mo agoYeah, I had exactly the same thought.
- childintime 4mo agoWhy? Messages disappear after a few seconds. So all messages are self moderating!
- jumbo1111 4mo agoAI can moderate given specific instructions to prevent anything that can damaged the brand's image.
- Mtinie 4mo agoAfter having been a moderator for a number of communities over the years—BBCs in the 90s, niche forums during the 00s & 10s, Reddit boards in the 20s—I’ve come to believe that running shadow services where disruptive individuals can comingle may be the best way to handle this. The advent of LLMs really opens the door to shunting off these “community members “ who’d rather contribute in misanthropic ways for the lulz than either leave or not contribute at all. They can take part in an interactive echo chamber that gives just as well as they can. You don’t even need a powerful model so the overall costs to the community are probably lower than the alternatives of trying to coexist with community-arsonists. I spent years trying to find ways to bring people productively “into the fold” but eventually realized that it is futile in some cases because there’s zero value to the individual or the community to find a middle ground. They want to see things burn, and the community simply wants them out.
- patcon 4mo agoI've been playing with presence too...! I def am thinking about using it more for real-time motion communication (which is largely missing from web) rather than text (which is very overrepresented, and where most moderation comes in). I was toying with the idea of making a little crowd representation sticky at the bottom, like watching a screen together :) Regardless, I love concepts like this. Thanks!
- amatecha 4mo agoOh what the heck? That's super cool! Awesome idea. Possible future enhancement: some basic day/night (or even weather?) design elements that match the timezone of the person whose site it is? Still, doesn't even need it, it's really cool as-is! I could see it being used as some avenue for saying toxic stuff, so I'm suddenly feeling like the only allowed actions should be ones that can never be harmful (like text interactions are just choosing from a pre-set list)..
- vitorbaptistaa 4mo agoNintendo does this on Mario Kart, just allowing text from a pre-set list. It's very limited, but works.
- cauenapier 4mo agoThaaanks! I've thought about weather , but I loved the idea for day/night! I'll definately implement that soon! It already has block/ban and block word list, but unfortunatelly I haven't added them in the settings for the landing page before HN made it front page.. Opsy
- mirkofr 4mo agoMaybe adding rooms will be a good move
- zhxiaoliang 4mo agoI enjoyed the design.
- cauenapier 4mo agoThaaanks :D
- hallman76 4mo agoI've always wondered if we could find a way to add content website's content without it turning into a shitshow. MLS listings / Zillow is an interesting use-case. A realtor might describe something as "sun-filled" but omit that the home is next to a 24/7 dump truck repair warehouse.
- afpx 4mo agoThere was a thing from the 90s kind of like this called Third Voice. It was a cool idea, but I remember there being a lot of backlash from brands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice
- ArcaneMoose 4mo agoReally cool but should limit # of people shown when there are too many. Currently it gets really laggy
- cauenapier 4mo agoThere is actually a limit, but I think it was too high. Currently the limit is for the deployment, but your comment gave me the idea that I should give this option to the site owner.
- winddude 4mo agointeresting. i'm appearing as a grey guy not the orange guy like your blog says
- cauenapier 4mo agoYou can change your color by clicking in the pencil icon.
- simondanerd 4mo agoLove the idea. Could use some filters and stale (sleeping) clients could get removed quicker. Also, it seemed to be disconnecting quite often, maybe a hug of death thing.
- cauenapier 4mo agoYeah, I'll definatelly improve that! I wasn't expecting HN crowd :sweat
- freakynit 4mo agoI made something similar last year: A p2p chat popup (that sits on bottom right of the page as a bubble) that allows all visitors to chat with each other. It had simple keyword based moderation in-built (can be easily bypassed though). Was planning to add github oauth to get a known identity and persistent messaging so visitors can chat with each other across sites. Instead of a webmaster adding script to their site, it was a browser extension. The intent was two folds: 1. Get to know other people having similar interests, 2. Try something on the lines of a decentralized chat/messaging system.
- goobatrooba 4mo agoIt sounds like a nice idea, but probably only one of those things that work only once at scale - with hundreds of millions of pages, you will only meet others on the most common ones unless the extension is already very popular?
- freakynit 4mo agoThat's true. Site-local chat was meant to be the default way. But, was not restricted to that. People could keep whitelisted list of sites that they are open to get pings/DM's from. I was still not able to figure out the privacy-focused, and local, interest matching part since it was meant to be p2p (without any server storage), and local storage can easily be tweaked. If this was solved, my plan then was to automatically suggest people who may have similar interests depending on the sites they browse, for how long, and the messages they generally send. Kinda like tinder, but, you don't have to sign-up and install no app.
- cr125rider 4mo agoThe network effect is HARD
- Procrastes 4mo agoThis is great! Thank you for sharing it. Fun to use and already customizable.
- cauenapier 4mo agoThanks! And more customizations are coming!
- ameon 4mo agothis is a very clever concept. I'll keep it in mind for the future - when my app site has persistent amount of visitors. Are there some rules/settings for stop words to prevent some types of abuse? Or is it planned?
- cauenapier 4mo agoThanks!! :D Yes there is already rules/settings to stop words and ban people. I'm also improving overall moderation and banning mechanisms.
- purple-leafy 4mo agoModeration moderation moderation . It’s a big problem I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere
- sneak 4mo ago…or you could just let people talk? People who engage with social features generally do so because they want to talk to other people. That carries some inherent risks.
- ncallaway 4mo agoNah, drive those horrible people out of social spaces. I want to talk to other people without racist assholes bumbling around. Being a racist asshole carries some inherent risks too, like people choosing not to let you enter their spaces.
- javascripthater 4mo ago[flagged]
- mplewis 4mo agoracist people don't get to talk in my spaces
- aorloff 4mo agoIf the history of the internet is to be any guide, it won't be the slog of racism that will shut something like this down, it will be a firehose of penis pictures. Somewhere, someone will figure out how to create a bot that floods this with penis pictures, and that will be the end of it (or the beginning of the end, where a short period of anti-penis-pic defensive patches will be made until the software maintainers just give up)
- zdc1 4mo agoThis was actually a lot of fun. Not as much trolling as I anticipated. Surprising amount of normal chit chat.
- cauenapier 4mo agoWhen you go to a nice website and encounter people with similar interests reading the same thing, the experience is awesome!
- figbert 4mo agoMatt Webb made a version of this (and wrote about it) a while back—Cursor Party: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.
- aetherspawn 4mo agoMake a MapleStory-like one where each website can design their own room, and you can kill mobs and bosses and stuff. It would be neat if the characters and items persisted between. Edit: a super smash brothers-like would be fun too. Maybe the page itself could be the platforms.
- tonyrice 4mo agorather interesting, except the spamming of the inappropriate messages.
- cauenapier 4mo agoThe spamming and trolling was just an issue during the HN traffic spike. Now things are much calmer and more interesting. Additionally, I'm also adding more moderation and counter-bot mechanism.
- dawie 4mo agoI love the idea, but it’s a real shame how people are using it. I wonder if AI can moderate it for offensiveness and spam prevention
- cauenapier 4mo agoWell, this is the behaviour of the crowd. Before HN, or even if you go to other websites that are using TownSquare, it can be quite fun. A hade a lot of very funny and meaningful interaction with people visiting the sites
- thatguysaguy 4mo agoThe contrast between the example screenshots and the standard internet behavior in the live demo is hilarious
- NitpickLawyer 4mo agoTo paraphrase, there's no scheme for moderation / censoring / filtering that survives contact with the Internet. It simply can't be done. People take it as a challenge, and you can't design a system that handles it while remaining useful. If you ban words, people will introduce typos / different spelling. If you ban concepts people will change the concepts (see the "unalive" thing that's popular now). If people want to be miserable, they will be miserable. And they'll invent new words, or use euphemisms to get their point across.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- blooalien 4mo agoNeat idea, but there seems to be zero defense against spammer scum. One jerk with a bot script seems able to make it totally useless for everyone else there.
- cauenapier 4mo agoActually, there was. But I haven't added all of them to the landing page. I wasn't expecing making HN front page :sweat (opooops) But there is already some basic moderation and ban/kick functionalities. However, there is still lots of room for improvement.
- thih9 4mo ago> A problem repeatedly occurred on https://cauenapier.com/ https://cauenapier.com/ People are flooding the channel with messages, causing the widget to use too many resources on ios; and the website is being endlessly reloaded. Any idea how to fix this? Bonus points for user friendly non technical solutions, ie is there a way to design an online social space where people want to collaborate and their first thought isn’t trolling?
- purple-leafy 4mo agoI’m not on pc so can’t inspect it, but make it a sandboxes iframe so it can’t interact with the parent site. Is there a way to throttle iframe cpu usage ? You could probably queue messages, cull old messages, cap concurrent connections. That may be the issue is too many peers
- cauenapier 4mo agoNobody trolled it before the HN FrontPage. Whatever it is, if something hit the crowd, you will end up with people trolling. No matter how much moderation you add. You can check it now and things are much calmer and friendlier. The same if you go to other people's websites using TownSquare. Regaring the mobile resources usage, I'll need to fix it. I'll be working on it next.
- ljcoco 4mo agocool idea!
- jedberg 4mo agoIn the "this is why we can't have nice things" category, the first thing I saw was someone calling themselves "dick and balls". :(
- cauenapier 4mo agoYeah, but don't lat the HN crowd spoil the thing. You can check the other sites that are using Hackernews and you might have a great experience! I've been chatting with a lot of people with similar interest and had a lot of very nice interactions!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- iJohnDoe 4mo agoThis is actually really cool. We’ve needed this concept everywhere in technology. Something like this would have prevented the isolation and loneliness technology and the internet has created. I don’t know all the answers, but joining people together, and reminders there are real people still there as we’ve moved from the physical world to the virtual world is an important part of the progression. In 50-100 years we will either have this epiphany or we will fail miserably.
- swiftcoder 4mo agoLove it, also love that there's one HN visitor just hanging out typing "dick and balls" over and over again. That's unmoderated anonymous public squares for you
- childintime 4mo agoThat was dang if I'm not mistaken.
- joegyoung 4mo agoThat person is still spamming the service even after 21 hours
- cauenapier 4mo agoMost of it were bots programmed to be saying silly things. I have already implemented some better counter-actions to that. This are much calmer now that the HN post is not on front page anymore.
- pistoriusp 4mo agoBuilt something like this for the v1.0 launch of RedwoodSDK in March; but it's a popularity graph (like the time scrubber on YouTube). I figured that it could be useful to myself, and others, to aggregate the information that people find most useful. https://rwsdk.com https://rwsdk.com
- msafi04 4mo agoI like the idea! congrats!
- cauenapier 4mo agoThaaanks :)
- VaradD09 4mo agoLooks good!
- siriuslv 4mo ago[flagged]
- anirbanhere 4mo agoThis is so cool, gonna add this to my game website. This can easily help to get me multiplayer matching in the game.
- cauenapier 4mo agoCool! Let me know when you add it! I'll like to make a blog post about it :)
- anirbanhere 4mo agoI added it in my game website: Ghostfleet.in, check it out. There is a need for moderation in the player names too, chat moderation may not be sufficient and names can be swear words too!!
- StahlGuo 4mo agowhat a cute project
- aweiher 4mo agoI love the atmosphere with the benches and the tree
- cauenapier 4mo agoGood! The idea was to give a lovely calm atmosphere. I also allow site owners to customize the scene as they want.
- Jeff9James 4mo agoyay i just added it to my site signupdoggy.pages.dev thanks so much
- justeoghan 4mo agoOh how fun. Sadly I went there and someone has botted it with “dick and balls” constantly being spammed by multiple people. But that’s to be expected when something gets attention. On other sites I can see this being nice addition. And a great concept.
- cauenapier 4mo agoMost of it were bots programmed to be saying silly things. I have already implemented some better counter-actions to that. This are much calmer now that the HN post is not on front page anymore. it is pretty fun when you meet someone on a site and had an interesting conversation
- furyofantares 4mo agoI'm interested in trying a moderation scheme that puts the power in the receiving client, with opinionated defaults. Let the client filter for itself, mute users for itself, and make users invisible to itself. Have default settings that make sense for the app, but let the user override them. Use a cheap purpose-built LLM like OpenAI's free moderation endpoint to classify the text and send the original text plus the classification to clients, and let clients choose what to do with it, with opinionated defaults appropriate to the app. Maybe you still need to identify persistent bad actors rather than acting only on content. But still, allow clients to decide what to do with that information. I suppose my thinking is that strong default automatic moderation that's invisible to offenders is a requirement for a project like this to be able to offer a welcoming experience to users, but putting the power in an LLM and fixed filter lists feels very wrong. So my thought is to use those things to give the client power. But maybe that makes no difference if nobody changes settings away from defaults anyway.
- toofy 4mo agoon the other hand, if someone is making their own site, they may care about the user impression their site gives to visitors. i would think they should have the freedom on the site they build and host to choose the impression they give. and sure, if they choose to let their square be filled with noise rather than signal, that’s absolutely their choice. but they also may choose for it to be filled with signal rather than noise. the key thing is the site owner should have the choice to give whatever impression they want for their creation. again, if they want that impression to be hijacked by noisy trolls, they can choose that too.
- furyofantares 4mo agoIs this related to my comment in a way I'm not understanding?
- toofy 4mo agowell yes, you indicate all of the moderation should be handled on the visitors end. i’m saying if the site owner is specifically intending the visitor to have a certain experience designed by the site owner themselves, then clients choosing their own moderation is the opposite of this. if we limited it to client side only, the creator of the site has lost their choice of how they prefer their site to come across. and for sure, some people may absolutely prefer to send an experience full of noise that overshadows the rest of their site.
- TheAtomic 4mo agoThis is really cool. Is there anyway to keep some people off my small part of the webverse? Having read some of the comments, I'd happily use if there was a way to blast (prefarably with a Doom shotgun) some of the miscreants from appearing, but only on my site, and maybe some filters (slurs, etc) that auto-ban them that I can set. Other people could moderate as they will but I'm kind of tired of the toxic people ruining everything.
- cauenapier 4mo agoYeah, there is kicking and ban features. As well as forbidden words. But I'm also adding more moderation functionalities. Feel free to send me an email with more ideas :D Nevertheless, in general, the sites using TownSquare are much much quieter then the landing page.
- bensyverson 4mo agoIn case you wanted a comment section but less civilized
- AstroJetson 4mo agoI messed around some, talked to two people. Watched the birds fly. I did the "go to next town" It worked, but then I got to (https://emilesilvis.com/ https://emilesilvis.com/) and got stuck. The Town Square is in 1/2 the page, so you can't get to the two ends to be able to go to the next town.
- bschmidt1000 4mo ago[dead]
- llagerlof 4mo agoThis is too cool for the current state of humanity.
- ghtbircshotbe 4mo agoA couple comments - Internal link to blog gives 403 https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/blog/ https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/blog/ Townsquare is probably not the best name - there are tons of things already with that name
- cauenapier 4mo agoOh noo, thanks to mention it! It was working recently. I'll fix it asap. Regarding the name, I'm exploring other ideas, but that's not hard.
- connollystr 4mo agoThis is sick!
- maarudth 4mo agobrilient! i love it.
- cauenapier 4mo agoThanks!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- wallyai 4mo ago[flagged]