I wrote the exact same thing about 3 years ago, according to HN timestamps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2102790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21

I wrote the exact same thing about 3 years ago, according to HN timestamps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2102790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2102790 I also had an arbitrary chat radius, initially. After feedback and testing, I made it so that the radius shrank as more people were online. So, if 1 person was on the site the radius was non-existent - it'd show the next few people regardless of location. As enough people opened the website, the radius would begin to shrink based on your own location to include at least 1 other person as close to you as possible, down to a minimum of like 20 miles. This way, if 10 people were online in San Francisco, but I was building the thing in Dallas, then I could at least join in the discussion in San Francisco until more people in Dallas joined in. Looking back, to call my old thing a start-up in that post was hilarious. I also learned that my concept, being real-time location-based ephemeral anonymous chat (buzzwords jeez), has a severe chicken and egg problem. It's damn near impossible to reach critical mass for long enough for the chat radiuses to create any opportunity for local discussion. I also learned that it really needed to be a native mobile app, instead of a website. Only tech savvy people really knew what was going on, in regards to enabling location services in browsers. In the end, I had wished I just made some sort of non-realtime location-based tagging service, instead. Instead of real-time chat, just have location-based notes that you can leave somewhere in a very small precise proximity. That way there's no need for a critical mass of users all at the same time. Edit: it looks like by the time I posted it to HN even, I had began changing to the non-real-time version. it originally was purely real-time chat. the code is on github: https://github.com/ryancole/geohello.com https://github.com/ryancole/geohello.com