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Show HN: Discusslr.com
- owainlewis 11y agoA tool I made to quickly start and discuss things online. The idea is to quickly setup a conversation about something, share the link and start talking. Comments can be public or anonymous.
- visakanv 11y agoI'm always interested in conversation and in supporting people trying to have good conversation. Some hopefully constructive thoughts: There's nothing about the landing page that makes me want to sign up. Could you show me an example of how it works, what it looks like? Ideally I think you'd want to seed it with pre-existing conversations, so that new users don't feel like they're signing up for one more thing that doesn't have any obvious value. Chicken-egg problem– Quora, Reddit, and I'm sure HN itself all started with a small group of people who were having interesting conversations.
- owainlewis 11y agoThanks for the feedback. Really appreciate it. Perhaps a video demo might be a good idea for the homepage to explain the concept. The basic idea is that you create a conversation about anything (making it open to public discussion or anonymous comments) and then just start talking. Kind of like a low friction way to start talking with other people about something online. I decided to push it out early to get some feedback. There is a lot of work to be done. The next feature will be to add private conversations.
- anacleto 11y agoTotally agree. > There's nothing about the landing page that makes me want to > sign up. Could you show me an example of how it works, what > it looks like? Stop using Unsplash images. Please, don't do it. +1 like the idea.
- owainlewis 11y agoThanks. Haha I take your point about the images. I'll look into getting some higher quality and more relevant material on the homepage to explain the concept a bit more.
- owainlewis 11y agoThat feels like the hardest problem initially. Like you said it's difficult to really explain the concept until there is more content and discussion happening. Adding the ability to post "anonymous" comments was partly motivated by people who might not want to sign up. If a conversation is "open" then anyone can start commenting without having to sign up.
- visakanv 11y agoThis might seem sneaky but some people do this by literally having conversations with themselves, using multiple IDs. Sleazy, but hey, if the conversation is great, I'd be more tempted to join in.
- th0br0 11y agoHave a look at adhocracy: https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy and http://adhocracy.de http://adhocracy.de You can drastically reduce the actual adhocracy functionality to a simple pro/con discussion platform.
- owainlewis 11y agoInteresting thanks. Will take a look.
- jgrahamc 11y agoMy instant reaction to the name was that this had something to do with 'cussing' not 'discussing' because I put the emphasis (in my mind) on cusslr and read it as dis-cusslr. Others might have the same reaction.
- owainlewis 11y agoThat's interesting. I never would have thought of that. I just started with the word "discussion" and tried to find an available .com. It's so difficult to find domains for new products.
- mrmondo 11y agoWell done for making something and having the guts to share it with the world. A bit of critical feedback: 1) the image of a girl on the beach doesn't seem to have much relevance or am I missing something? 2) how is the data stored and backed up? (Details on encryption, backup regularity etc...)
- owainlewis 11y agoHi. Thanks for the feedback. Being honest this is a really early stage idea and basically I just wanted to get some nice photography on the home page. Data is currently stored in RDS on Amazon. When moving to doing private discussions (the next major feature) then I'll really focus in on security and possibly encryption on the messages. Privacy is an interesting topic actually. Making sure private conversations are "unreadable" is something I'm very interested in.
- owainlewis 11y agoI was a bit hesitant to release it this early to be honest but thought it was better just to "get it out there" and start getting feedback even if it is rough around the edges.
- owainlewis 11y agoI added a discussion for product feedback and improvements that should be open without any need to sign up. https://discusslr.com/discussions/8 https://discusslr.com/discussions/8
- daniel-levin 11y agoYour discussion has been hijacked by somebody posting /r/spacedicks type pictures.
- owainlewis 11y agoYeah I disabled images for anonymous comments. Should have guessed that would happen.
- phaed 11y agoGood god, why the hell did I open that link.
- owainlewis 11y agoShould be fixed now.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Kiro 11y agoThe site is broken for me. I don't see any text. It's just white and blue boxes with a background image of a girl.
- owainlewis 11y agoHey. Which browser are you using out of interest?
- zatkin 11y agoI'm having the same issue on Arch Linux, Chromium, Version 42.0.2311.90 (64-bit)
- th0br0 11y agoHuh. Works for me with Fedora, Google Chrome, Version 42.0.2311.81 (64-bit) and 43.0.2357.37 (64-bit)
- owainlewis 11y agoWill have to spin up an Arch box and take a look. Don't have access to one at the moment.
- mijoharas 11y agoexactly the same for me on Arch Linux Chrome (note chrome rather than chromium), Version 40.0.2214.115 (64-bit).
- Kiro 11y agoChrome, Windows 7.
- owainlewis 11y agoThanks I'll take a look into that. Haven't really done a huge amount of cross browser work on this. Appreciate the help.
- Kiro 11y ago
- trilce 11y agoI dont know what it is
- dutchbrit 11y agoThis is a very basic product, don't get me wrong, basic is a good thing. Some feedback: Registration is very nice, simple steps. However, log in with Gmail/Facebook/Twitter might be a nice option in the future too. How do you handle links? I didn't check this since I'm on mobile but nofollow would be a good idea to prevent spammers. Maybe even add Google's recaptcha to prevent spam bots for anonymous users/on registration? For groups/companies, it might be nice if we can register a sub domain and allow others to post new discussions in there to keep it all grouped. But that would mean there'd have to be a moderation option (?).
- owainlewis 11y agoHi. Thanks. I suppose the who idea is to keep it simple but some new features will be added for private conversations, better link handling as you mentioned. Will definitely need to start thinking about handling spammers on anonymous comments. i had to turn off images for that very reason. I'll change it so that only logged in users can post images from now on.
- owainlewis 11y agoI love the idea of private group/companies. Keeping track of many conversations is another big thing that needs to be tackled. So for instance a dashboard to keep track of discussions you're involved in and any notifications around a discussion.
- owainlewis 11y agoLinks are not actually auto-linked at the moment for that reason. They just show up as plain text.
- lcnmrn 11y agoHow is this any different than https://sublevel.net https://sublevel.net?
- owainlewis 11y agoI've never seen sublevel before. Looks interesting though.
- tux 11y agoI've tried both of this sites. https://discusslr.com/discussions/29 https://discusslr.com/discussions/29 https://sublevel.net/tux/ https://sublevel.net/tux/ Discusslr is more like chat and allows you to register without captcha and to reply you don't need to register. SubLevel you need to enter captcha and be registered to comment, it also looks more like Twitter. But SubLevel provides more features like RSS feed of your recent posts.
- Mithaldu 11y agoHow is this in any way different from ... forums?
- Trombone12 11y agoA big part of a forum is the centralization and interconnection of all the threads, this is explicitly removed in this product, with all the discussions happening in their own and very separate context. So I guess the use case would be to share a link on social media and then have the discussion in something that is not as awful for real discussions as facebook threads or twitter conversations.
- Mithaldu 11y agoI'm not sure making a forum that simply has only one board and no public index is a useful enough differentiator for this project to survive at all. You could do the same thing with secret github gists, AND at the same time already have a much more fully-featured everything.
- owainlewis 11y agoI'd see this being more useful to a non technical person who doesn't use Github for example and just wants to start a quick conversation. They can create a discussion and open it up to the world. Given a bit more time there will be more features to keep track of mentions and notifications that lift it up from it's currently very basic state.
- owainlewis 11y agoThat's a good way to look at it. The motivation is basically when you want to have a quick discussion about something but email or twitter aren't suitable. Like you mentioned twitter isn't great for real focussed conversations. It's also far more general than a forum, kind of like a forum to talk about literally anything.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- owainlewis 11y agoThat's a fair summary. One of the use cases for discusslr is just to throw up a topic online and get a discussion going without needing anyone to sign up. You might want to get feedback on an idea or product for example.
- owainlewis 11y agoOver the next few months we'll add some more features to discusslr. It's pretty basic at the moment. Next up are private conversations, better media handling and a dashboard to track user conversations and interactions. Would love to hear any ideas on improvements or features.
- xtrumanx 11y agoSubmit button below the comment box is an <input type="submit" /> but missing a value so it says "Submit Query" on Firefox. Probably should change that.
- owainlewis 11y agoThank you. A few people have raised this. Will roll out a fix now. Stupid mistake. Sorry about that.
- brenfrow 11y agoSounds similar to my domain http://discusr.com http://discusr.com
- owainlewis 11y agoNice. Looks like a neat tool. How did you come up with the name?
- brenfrow 11y agoI wanted to use medium.com but it was closed invite, so I made my own website and then added readability like viewing options. The name came from a previous website that was for people of different religions to discuss on a facebook like feed system. However I scrapped that idea.
- anton_tarasenko 11y agoowainlewis, I think you could increase signups if you'd add a few screenshots of the discussions. Or let new visitors read them without registration.
- owainlewis 11y agoThat's a great idea. I think the homepage probably needs some more work around explaining the product and screenshots would be a good move. I'll take a look at improving it today.