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Posted by cauenapier 21 hours ago

Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites(townsquare.cauenapier.com)
https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/

https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare/

177 points | 88 comments
swiftcoder 3 hours ago|
Love 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 2 hours ago|
That was dang if I'm not mistaken.
purple-leafy 6 hours ago||
Moderation 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 5 hours 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.
purple-leafy 5 hours ago|||
No? Especially not in my case where it’s a share artefact that is intended to be shared with others on various platforms.

Having my game aesthetic + slur on a sharing artefact is a great way for people to think my game encourages that crap and to “cancel” the game.

Not that I agree with, or care about, cancel culture - but I don’t want people in general associating my game with slurs.

I’m all for swearing and saying funny things that are not pc, but I draw the line at harmful offensive content.

Do what you wish but do no harm unto others.

ncallaway 5 hours ago||||
Nah, 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 5 hours ago||
[flagged]
ncallaway 3 hours ago|||
I didn’t say they weren’t.

I said they can fuck off from any spaces I have a voice in.

Social pariahs are people. Doesn’t mean I’m going to tolerate them around me.

You choose to be a social pariah, you live with the social consequences of that.

They should have food, water, shelter, and healthcare. They don’t get my attention, respect, or acceptance.

noduerme 1 hour ago||
I agree with getting extremist racists and misogynists, bigots and homophobes out of social spaces! So tell me, how do I make sure that supporters of Hamas and the Iranian government have no ability to write comments online?

Or, do you grasp the nature of the problem of free speech, or don't you?

>> they can fuck off from any spaces I have a voice in.

This also sounds like you (a) don't really have a "voice", since you're only comfortable talking to people you deem acceptable (b) call people racist who you are afraid of talking to (and they're almost certainly not all racist, given your criteria that anyone who disagrees with you is racist, and given that disagreeing with you would almost be required out of pure logic), and (c) are only comfortable in an echo chamber where your opinion, such as it is, has no impact whatsoever.

Cool, got it.

dansmith1919 1 hour ago||||
Technically yes but that doesn’t mean they deserve a podium to spew their hate

edit: on second thought this is way too obvious ragebait

mplewis 5 hours ago||||
racist people don't get to talk in my spaces
aorloff 5 hours ago||
If 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)

purple-leafy 4 hours ago||
Hot-dog-not-hot-dog
michaelmrose 4 hours ago|||
There are people so worthless that the only reason not to put them between 2 buns instead of Bessie the cow is how disgusting they are. We are morally obliged to respect their human rights we aren't obligated to listen to them.
noduerme 1 hour ago||
You are morally obliged to not assume a person's character until you have actually listened to them and their story as a person, even if they seem to be in an opposite political camp, and even if they show hallmarks of being in one you consider evil. Thus I can be a Jew with Israeli family and have had honest conversations with people who had fought with Hezbollah.

If everyone did what you are saying here, peace would be impossible. For in your limited framing, they are racist against me and I against them and so no conversation would be possible.

To judge a person before listening to them is the worst sin of all... and shutting anyone out of the conversation based on your assumption of what you think they think is morally bankrupt and, frankly, the root of all evil.

>> There are people so worthless

You have no clue how to judge that, so assume a position of humility.

SiempreViernes 54 minutes ago||
Oh look, a wondermark sealion.
noduerme 26 minutes ago|||
Are these made up words? Semantic nonsense is your response to a heartfelt plea for humans to treat each other as individuals? Whee, what a great philosophy.
febusravenga 2 hours ago||||
when I entered site, all bubbles contained dicks/balls and combination of these... so... someone found words that are not banned, but still abused forum in most primitive way ..

you're wrong, moderation is needed in ventures like this

starkparker 4 hours ago|||
The demo widget right now is botted with people spamming nonsense to the point of breaking browsers, much less the intended use. "let people talk" is not the same as "give disruptive people the tools to prevent others from talking"
lambdaone 9 hours ago||
I 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.
Mtinie 5 hours ago||
After 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.

purple-leafy 5 hours ago|||
Yes this is the way, give no affordance that they are banned
fragmede 5 hours ago|||
But why not kick them out? Why bother with a shadow site for them?
metamet 5 hours ago|||
If they don't know they're being quarantined, there's no reason for them to find a way around their block. They'll eventually tucker themselves out and move on to whatever their internet equivalent of burning ants with a magnifying glass is.
hopfog 2 hours ago||||
I used to run a small MMORPG. I only had to ban a player once but when I did they made it their life's mission to get around it and spam profanities. They went through every proxy in existence and I had to resort to banning whole IP ranges to keep them out.
sneak 5 hours ago|||
The same reason people get shadowbanned. If they know they are banned they will attempt to work around it.
SubiculumCode 3 hours ago||
One day I'll find out that I've been shadow banned from HN, and all of you were bots all along, lolz
childintime 2 hours ago||
That defines planet earth nicely. Everybody here is shadow banned and has issues to sort out.
trollbridge 8 hours ago|||
Within about 300ms I thought “moderation is going to be a problem”.
childintime 2 hours ago|||
Why? Messages disappear after a few seconds. So all messages are self moderating!
wwind123 6 hours ago|||
Yeah, I had exactly the same thought.
lifeformed 5 hours ago|||
Maybe a really lightweight fast LLM could moderate messages in realtime. Not sure how pricey that would get though.
Jolter 31 minutes ago|||
No matter how cheap per request, someone will figure out a way to DoS that endpoint, and it will be extremely pricy unless you have effective rate limiting.
michaelmrose 4 hours ago|||
Extremely if not behind substantially cheaper anti spam measures.

Further it may still make sense to use human reports to gate some automation even if it slows response.

dools 8 hours ago||
So it’s a twitter plugin?
thatguysaguy 5 hours ago||
The contrast between the example screenshots and the standard internet behavior in the live demo is hilarious
NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago|
To 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.

reddalo 10 minutes ago||
Or even use seemingly innocent acronyms like "HH"
freakynit 6 hours ago||
I 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 3 hours ago|
It 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 2 hours ago||
That'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.

figbert 5 hours ago||
Matt Webb made a version of this (and wrote about it) a while back—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.

afpx 7 hours ago||
There 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

StahlGuo 6 minutes ago||
what a cute project
thih9 4 hours ago||
> A problem repeatedly occurred on 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 4 hours ago|
I’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

dawie 5 hours ago|
I 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
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