[HN Gopher] Show HN: Pressn't - a site where you can only have a...
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Show HN: Pressn't - a site where you can only have a single post
Today's internet is filled with dopamine wells of content. I wanted
to steer away from that and foster meaningful writing. So I made a
site where you can only have a single post. The intention is to
encourage thoughtful posts like the blogs we all love here at HN
(Paul Graham's, fasterthanlime, Bartosz Ciechanowski's, etc). For
now posts are only markdown, but I intend to make some markdown
extensions to make posts more dynamic.
Author : DanielVZ
Score : 98 points
Date : 2022-12-29 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (app.pressnt.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (app.pressnt.net)
| kshay wrote:
| One nitpick about the responsive design--between width 1535 and
| about 1920, the Comments box appears in the left rail but it's
| partly obscured. Seems like you should either adjust the media
| query to keep it at the bottom until there's room to show it, or
| make the box itself a variable width.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Thanks for articulating that. I'm not a web dev, so all I
| noticed was that on my phone, the left-edge text was truncated,
| and zooming didn't fix it.
| jrib wrote:
| Nice idea.
|
| The color for links seems to be the default in most browsers:
| blue for links and purple for visited links. These colors are
| extremely hard to read against the site's background color. Are
| you able to style links so they are easier to read against the
| site's background color?
| jspash wrote:
| Aha! I was wondered why people were commenting how the default
| link colour - which has been in existence for what, 30 years
| now? has suddenly become unreadable.
|
| It's dark mode! The abomination that will never darken my
| doorstep, nor my monitor.
|
| I'm definitely in a minority on this one.
| samstave wrote:
| Actually, I prefer 100% of my sites to be in dark mode!!!
|
| should be 'dark mode first'
|
| https://i.imgur.com/NopbI8t.png
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Eqjxo1U.png
| wakamoleguy wrote:
| Specifically, the site seems to follow the system's preference
| for light mode or dark mode. The link style against the dark
| mode background is very difficult to read.
| yreg wrote:
| what it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/KGfQzva
| DanielVZ wrote:
| Yeah, my dark theme is broken right now :( I'll try to fix it
| later today
| dt3ft wrote:
| I am building something similar (https://20-things.com) where the
| idea is to have the frontpage only display 20 things. No paging,
| no endless scrolling. Good luck with your project!
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Technically this is not really a post, but more like a static
| page. If you call it a post that assumes I can create new ones,
| it has a sense of repetition and being part of a series.
|
| There's also a CSS issue with links in the content, they are not
| readable with the default blue color.
| wayeq wrote:
| Maybe it should be called a 'PUT' as it is idempotent?
| dexterdog wrote:
| Yeah, the home page when I loaded it had comments from the left
| column stretched over the page where I couldn't read it. They
| when I went to the join most of the text was white-on-white so
| I couldn't read it. I think finger has a better interface at
| this point.
| flir wrote:
| I'm reminded of two things: (1) XKCD's IRC channel, which had a
| bot that kicked you (with an exponential timeout) if you ever
| repeated something someone else had said before. I think the idea
| was to encourage originality. (I suspect it actually encouraged
| strings of random numbers on the end of sentences).
|
| (2) Finding the perfect journal - the right cover, weight of
| paper, lines, everything - then never writing in it because it's
| too good to write in. "You only get one chance at this" is a high
| bar to clear. I like it, though.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I kind of wish it didn't have editing. Or could only be appended,
| never revised. But still have upvotes or likes or whatever.
|
| You have one shot at making a highly upvoted comment. go!
| bitwize wrote:
| Remember when this was called .plan? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| PSA: dark mode is kinda broken. I'll work on it later today. The
| site respects system preferences so this is why it appears broken
| to some. Sorry about that.
| mmphosis wrote:
| I was wondering why I couldn't see the labels. If I double
| click to highlight the text, I can make out each one at a time.
|
| https://app.pressnt.net/register/
|
| I managed to join. https://app.pressnt.net/post/26/
| [deleted]
| jadbox wrote:
| Do comments get cleared when you edit? Otherwise the connect
| context gets lost, right?
| DanielVZ wrote:
| That's a good one. Context will indeed get lost...
|
| I'll consider clearing comments after edits
| khet wrote:
| I like people trying stuff like this. The web is too large and
| too broad for everyone to hangout in the same place. There should
| be communities and sub communities that are distributed. We used
| to have forums, but maybe it'll end up being thousands of niche
| social media sites like yours. Kudos on the launch!
|
| FYI, Got a 500 server error on
| https://app.pressnt.net/post/create/#edit-here-to-create-you...
| DanielVZ wrote:
| Can you try again? You may have had bad luck as I broke
| something for like 5 seconds earlier today
| khet wrote:
| How did you know about my bad luck? :)
|
| It did work this time.
| cryptonector wrote:
| So... finger?
| khet wrote:
| I used this for a bit and I really like it. This could take off.
| It's fun!
| beaned wrote:
| I think this is potentially a good idea for a blockchain app. You
| could use the Ethereum blockchain as your backend rather than a
| database. That way you don't have to host it, and it wouldn't go
| down. You also wouldn't have to store usernames and passwords,
| users would just authenticate using their key pair through
| something like MetaMask. Users would also need to pay a small fee
| to send a transaction to update their post, possibly making their
| content more meaningful.
|
| I only have this idea because the Ethereum "hello world" app I'm
| working on is something similar but even more reductive: just a
| single shared blob of text that anyone can update. I don't think
| it has utility, it's just to learn the technology.
| m-i-l wrote:
| See also /now pages[0] (a federated version of your gist points 1
| and 2, i.e. creating and updating a post about what you are doing
| now)?
|
| [0] https://nownownow.com/about
| permo-w wrote:
| I don't think this solves one of the huge problems with culture
| on the internet right now, which is stacks vs queues
|
| with only a few exceptions[1], all social media, including HN,
| present information to you in a stack, most recent first, mostly
| with no option to change that. this forces everything to be
| shallow, surface-level and understandable to beginners, otherwise
| you don't attract new viewers or followers
|
| even beyond losing their attention spans, people are being
| trained out of learning things in depth. of building upon
| knowledge. it's sad and it's probably going to be damaging in
| years to come
|
| [1] - youtube playlists are the only exception that jumps to
| mind, but even youtube is driving hard in the other direction,
| removing "sort by oldest" from channels and heavily pushing
| shorts
| aj7 wrote:
| I had hoped Elon would work on things like this.
| joshlemer wrote:
| Could you expand on this? I struggle to think of how a site
| like HN or Reddit could work in a first-in-first-out fashion
| while also taking into account vote score. Perhaps you mean
| that a post's score should not decay over time and fall off the
| front page, or at least should do so more slowly? Or it should
| be able to be bumped to the front if there's new activity
| (comments/votes)? Would be interest to hear your thoughts
| Bonooru wrote:
| Not OP, but you could have a priority queue where you
| acknowledge each element as up/down/neutral and the change in
| score that you provide would affect it's location in other
| people's queues.
| fnord77 wrote:
| site doesn't render right on FF
|
| https://i.imgur.com/6N8j3SH.png
| DanielVZ wrote:
| Lol that's interesting. Turns put my dark theme is broken. I'll
| try to fix ot after work today.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| This is what .plan files we're back in the day.
| aj7 wrote:
| So lies will disappear, to be replaced by more ... ?
| angry_octet wrote:
| People have compared this to .plan, but seem to forget that back
| then people often wanted to cram more and more in their plan. I
| had a job that would cat new data every 10 seconds, rotating my
| calendar and other info.
|
| I don't like that information in general would be ephemeral (and
| screencast everywhere sucks), persistent URLs are one of the
| great things about the web (and archive.org...) but maybe you
| could show different visitors different URLs? (I'm reminded of
| jwz's site sending HN referrals somewhere different.)
|
| To borrow another idea: choose your own adventure. The articles
| you've read (up/down voted?) previously alter the ones you get
| next time. Heck, feed every article into GPT and ask it to tweak
| it for the reader.
| xg15 wrote:
| Sorry to say it so bluntly, but this sounds like classic "tech
| solution to a people problem" to me.
|
| At least to me, the restriction "only one post, but you can
| update it" seems pretty arbitrary to me. It's not clear to me why
| updating a post should lead to more meaningful content than
| creating a new post - or why following a stream of updates should
| somehow be less of a dopamine treadmill than following a stream
| of posts.
| exolymph wrote:
| I think this is more of an experiment, or even an interactive
| art piece, than an attempted competitor to the mainstream. It
| doesn't need to be perfect, just thought-provoking.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| More than anything, is what I'm spending my free time in. It
| does have some sort of "agenda", but for the time being it's
| nowhere near mastodon, twitter or even neocities.
| [deleted]
| kasajian wrote:
| People are okay with contributing content that's temporary as
| long as it doesn't take them a lot of effort, i.e. not all that
| meaningful, such as typing a sentence in a chat.
| jahnu wrote:
| Made me think fondly of the days I would update my .plan
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)
| kristopolous wrote:
| I can't tell whether it's a coincidental invention and the
| author doesn't know about finger or it's a clone and an
| intentional omission.
| fortyseven wrote:
| Considering how long it's been since plan files have been
| relevant, the former is far more likely.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's well documented even in popular tech books like the
| Doom book.
|
| Direct experience isn't needed.
|
| Related story. I had read extensively about Xerox Alto,
| Bravo, smalltalk-80 etc and it wasn't until my late 30s in
| Seattle at CHM that I actually saw one of the machines in
| real life. It was like meeting a celebrity I knew
| intimately about. All the things I had read about were
| there. Really marvelous.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| I've heard of finger and remember finding it cool. The memory
| might've lived in my subconscious while making this site, but
| it wasn't something I had in mind while making this site.
| [deleted]
| adolph wrote:
| Did finger make it past the days when identity was by machine?
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1288/
|
| The copy installed on recent MacOS is: $FreeBSD:
| src/usr.bin/finger/finger.c,v 1.36 2005/09/19 10:11:46 dds Exp
| $......
| john-radio wrote:
| [dead]
| mooneater wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of a social network concept of mine from years
| back: "Karachter"
|
| "Imagine a social network where you only need, in fact you are
| only allowed, one friend. Imaging a messaging service so
| personal, so patient, and yes, so damned meaningful, that it only
| transmits one single character, to your one friend, each day. "
|
| http://randomfeelsgood.blogspot.com/2014/02/announcing-karac...
| catapart wrote:
| There was a short-lived site that I was presented, back in 2015,
| that had a similar idea. A user's 'home' page was a simple 4x4
| grid and in each of the cells you could add pretty much any kind
| of content you wanted. Long form posts (truncated, on the home
| page, but could be clicked through to read in full in a modal),
| images (or galleries), videos, embedded content, etc. You had
| full agency to change any of the 16 things at any time.
|
| There was also a "feed" page which just showed any cells that had
| been updated by users you follow, which made the feed page pretty
| much like any other social media.
|
| I found it kind of charming that you had this very limited number
| of things you could be "saying" at any one time. You couldn't
| represent yourself with your entire history, but you could be
| quite expressive with just 16 cells of freedom.
|
| I don't remember the site, nor can I find anything that seems to
| be what I remember, now. For some reason, I have the idea that it
| was killed off in a wave of "ephemeral" apps failing. But I don't
| know why I think that, so /shrug.
|
| In any case, I find your idea to be charming in a similar way. I
| do like the idea of ephemeral representations, as opposed to a
| historical ledger of your entire usage with a site. And I also
| like the idea of, essentially, controlling your "headline" to
| such an extent that there are no (or very few) other options for
| people if they want to engage with your content at all. It's like
| "This is what I'm interested in, today. Please talk about it with
| me.", with an implication of "I can't focus on stuff from last
| week, even if you're only discovering it today, because of my new
| post."
|
| For me, at least, that's a reasonable offering that I hope gains
| some traction!
| jadbox wrote:
| Isn't this (basically) what geocities was? A single "post"
| (webpage) that you can edit? Users were able to browse and
| search for other geocities pages.
| catapart wrote:
| I mean... you're eliding a lot of stuff with that
| "basically", but I suppose you could contrive that analogy?
|
| Geocities didn't do a "global" or "following" feed with every
| user's content updates being represented as a reading list.
| Nor did it simplify the site's content management with
| "article"-based fracturing so that only relevant changes were
| presented to relevant parties.
|
| Geocities is "basically" this other site in the same way that
| a peanut butter sandwich is "basically" a hamburger. Apps, as
| with entrees, can be so different as to be unrecognizable,
| just in their expression, much less their
| contents/functionality. But, by all means, if the Geocities
| framing helps you contextualize it better, more power to you!
| breckenedge wrote:
| You could have multiple pages on Geocities and push updates
| via FTP.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| And it lives on _in design at least_ through NeoCities [1]
|
| [1] - https://neocities.org/
| kurtle wrote:
| Was this site you were thinking of (linking to avc post since
| it's been shuttered for a while)? https://avc.com/2015/06/pegg/
| [deleted]
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Be Real
|
| Minutiea (founder is on HN sometimes)
|
| we'll see which one of these concepts really pick up
|
| yes, there is a burgeoning trend of rejecting the digital social
| dopamine addiction as well as posting more authentic things. I
| think its a travesty that founders have to identify both the
| problem and the solution as if they are clairvoyant geniuses in
| both regards. But good luck.
| [deleted]
| samsquire wrote:
| Thanks for creating this website and well done.
|
| I journal in long form documents rather than create lots of small
| files, so this website is suitable for me. I use GitHub's
| markdown editor or IntelliJ Markdown editor to update my journal.
| I use markdown headings and number them. Each journal entry goes
| to the bottom. GitHub's website has a table of contents button in
| the top left of README.md. You can search the headings which I
| think is helpful.
|
| I think people could use this approach of markdown headings for
| each journal entry when updating posts on Pressn't
|
| When I get to an arbitrary number of entries, I create a new
| GitHub repository and repeat the process and append an
| incremented number to the repository name. Then I share that
| repository of journal entries online and that journal only
| receives updates or occasional rewriting but never new entries. I
| link to old entries from future journal entries within the
| document (GitHub headings are linkable, if you hover over them
| you can copy a URL) or across repositories.
|
| (Links in my profile)
|
| Do you generate anchor links for each markdown heading? This
| might be useful to link into long form documents.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| I just read through some of your "Ideas" repo. Congrats on
| being so prolific.
|
| You can make a table of contents by using [TOC], and you can
| make a link to any heading using it as a #id link:
|
| https://app.pressnt.net/post/4/#so-the-tldr-here-is
|
| The markdown is based on python-markdown. Here's the
| documentation on the TOC extension I'm using:
|
| https://python-markdown.github.io/extensions/toc/
| samstave wrote:
| Thats pretty-damn creative
| Kye wrote:
| .plan files as a service
|
| This is great.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Does the like count reset when you update? Seems like that could
| be a little dangerous if it doesn't.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| Yeah you are right. I'm still trying to get my head around what
| the best ranking algorithm is. So far the factors I've thought
| of are:
|
| - Update time
|
| - Unique Visitors since last update
|
| - Upvotes
|
| - Upvotes since last update (I didn't consider this one so
| thanks!)
| RELAXESS wrote:
| [flagged]
| mfoy_ wrote:
| "Blogging websites also exist but there's just too much noise."
|
| https://xkcd.com/927/
| encoderer wrote:
| Looks terrible on my phone. Social happens mostly on phones.
| bragr wrote:
| Oof, you are not wrong.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| Yep, I agree. I'll probably spend the next week improving
| mobile and Dark mode css.
| aczerepinski wrote:
| Same, half the text is off screen.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| It's probably because someone made a post with a huge title
| lol.
|
| I'll add ellipsis overflow later
| eternalban wrote:
| I wouldn't mind seeing a trend of BlogHN added to the ask, show,
| and tell posts.
| dusted wrote:
| I want to like this, but there's something conflicting about
| "thoughtful content" and being forced to throw it away (or have
| your post become extremely long).
|
| If I put thought and effort into writing something relatively
| long-form (otherwise, is this just single-post twitter?), I don't
| want it to disappear, I want it to be archived when I post
| something new.
|
| Still, doing stuff is cool, so great job! Also, I like the design
| of the site :)
| smitty1e wrote:
| If the site has some git repo backing, it can remember the
| past.
| isitmadeofglass wrote:
| [dead]
| version_five wrote:
| Reading and writing on HN, I see (not always obviously) some
| very good and thoughtful posts. Most of these are relevant to
| the present in which they are written, and quickly get buried
| under new stuff. So I don't think it's a big stretch to just
| have old ones disappear
| DanielVZ wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words :)
|
| I get your point, but the idea is to strike a balance between
| something being meaningful and relevant. As the user, you are
| in charge of that - deciding what to keep and what to delete.
| That adds a taste of FOMO to the site that in my opinion makes
| it even more interesting.
| klyrs wrote:
| > That adds a taste of FOMO...
|
| If your aim is to avoid the dopamine, I think encoraging FOMO
| is a bit self-defeating.
|
| Perhaps limiting posts to daily, weekly, or monthly might
| make sense? Letting people work on a queue with scheduled
| posts could encourage thoughtfulness.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| It's writing. A text file. Archive it yourself.
|
| Or do you mean archive it but leave it visible? That seems to
| not be the point of the website.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| This is a really interesting idea to me. I've considered a site
| where you can only post once per day or per week, something like
| that - but this seems like a better approach. One interesting
| feature to add later might be the ability to see change history
| on other people's posts.
|
| I wish pg or John Carmack had a page here so I could check what
| their post was.
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(page generated 2022-12-29 23:01 UTC)