[HN Gopher] I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 peo...
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I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log
their locations
Author : bubblic
Score : 18 points
Date : 2023-01-30 18:45 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lonelyworld.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lonelyworld.info)
| demarq wrote:
| The location data is not anonymous it pinpoints down to the
| specific street!
| bubblic wrote:
| the algorithm works this way: The geolocation acquired by the
| webpage is in the form of latitude and longitude. Let's say it
| is lat: 10.123456, long: 30.123456
|
| I want to approximate it to 3 mile accuracy (diagonal of a box,
| so in one dimension, would be sqrt(3^2 /2) = 2.12 mile in lat
| or long. 3 mile, in geographical coordinate would be equivalent
| to : 3 mile / 3960 mile (Earth radius) * 180 deg / pi rad =
| 0.0434 degree. I divide each dimension by 0.0434, and round it
| to a whole number (essentially, mod 0.0434). Then, I multiply
| that number by 0.0434 and save that as the location.
|
| This means that a user's location can lie anywhere inside a box
| with 3 mile diagonal length at that geolocation.
|
| If you see inconsistency in my logic, please let me know.
| mikestew wrote:
| EDIT: doh! Gotta turn on location services for Safari.
|
| Looks great, would like to give it a whirl. But under "Share with
| the World", I can't get the button to become enabled with
| something other than "Loading...". Turned off the pi-hole in case
| there was a DNS query getting blocked, no joy. Safari 16.2, macOS
| Ventura 13.1.
| bubblic wrote:
| Do you see the green message after you submit your location? If
| you keep seeing the red message, then it means the location has
| not been submitted, so the survey would not be available.
| Please keep me posted here if you keep experiencing it so I can
| solve it for you and future users :)
| bubblic wrote:
| The idea is that knowing there are lonely people out there can
| help you cope with loneliness a little. This is a minimum "viral"
| product for my upcoming project that allows meaningful
| connections between anonymous people using audio. With such
| fantastic response, I think I got a form of validation that there
| is a market demand for connecting the lonely souls.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| One thing that always bothered me is how much wasted potential
| there is in tools like Omegle or chatRoulette. On paper they
| sound amazing, and a few years ago back when they started and
| not everyone was aware, I remember having two or three
| _amazing_ (and entirely SFW) interactions with some random
| people from around the world. It was genuinely exciting in a
| super legit way. And then, yeah. It turned into what it is
| today. I wonder if there is any way to ever do it right.
| bubblic wrote:
| I totally feel you. There is magic in connecting people from
| all over the world with the power of the internet, but it
| gets ruined by the few who spam and abuse the platform. I
| hope to prevent this by not offering any vanity feature right
| now (no pictures or cam) and by making it super open, instead
| of a 1:1 chat. The holy grail would be to put this behind a
| paywall and only those who need this service the most would
| pay to use it, guaranteeing some standard of behavior
| sameers wrote:
| I think you need some moderation technique for any community
| - mores are not inherent in a society, they are formed
| through dialogue and enforcement. Digital communities are not
| immune to this dynamic. The digital tools could help you
| enforce rules more efficiently but someone still has to
| formulate the rules and adjudicate tricky situations.
|
| The good thing is that the prior experience of lesser-known
| and more-famous online communities/media outlets has given
| the next entrant in this space plenty of accumulated wisdom
| to capitalize on.
|
| Paywalls are part of the solution but they can't be the only
| one because there's always the tradeoff there between making
| the cost high enough to weed out the majority of bots and
| fly-by-night spammers, but also low enough that it's not a
| significant barrier to entry for community growth.
| bubblic wrote:
| You get me. I am torn between releasing cool features to
| help people feel connected and holding them back until I
| have established some sort of code of conduct. Move fast
| and break things along the way, or try to do it right,
| especially when the people on the platform would bias
| towards the vulnerable ones. The engagement I am seeing
| right now feels magical, and I am afraid if I don't move
| fast enough, people would lose interest and not come back.
| bubblic wrote:
| Someone had a very good point that the wording seems to only
| imply that the loneliness is caused by lacking the listed
| qualities when in fact, some are lonely because of their strong
| attributes (good looking, smart, wealthy). I made an update so
| that all future messages will "attribute" to these qualities,
| instead of these qualities 'holding them back'. Thank you,
| anonymous user!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| (off topic)
|
| This is a nice visual framework, can I ask what it is?
| bubblic wrote:
| Thanks anigbrowl! I used a pre-built template from Tim for
| visual front end: https://www.creative-tim.com/templates/react-
| free . For hosting front and backend, I used AWS serverless
| architecture https://github.com/aws-samples/websocket-api-
| cognito-auth-sa...
| blakesterz wrote:
| I'm reminded of tired.com for some reason. There's not much
| there, but there's been some really interesting stories about
| them over the years
|
| https://slate.com/culture/2004/07/the-perplexing-success-of-...
| bubblic wrote:
| Thanks for sharing the link! This stood out to me the most:
| "Correspondents rarely confess to the sort of skanky, self-
| destructive behavior found on Group Hug ("I slept with someone
| I work with. He's married. I'm friends with his wife."). And
| why should they? There's no guilty thrill of public catharsis.
| Tired.com isn't another outlet for exhibitionists. It's an
| unexpected invitation to quietly complain about the same old
| same old to a stranger who might actually listen."
|
| Complaining to strangers who might actually listen, instead of
| seeking the guilty thrill of public catharsis... Something I am
| definitely taking note on
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(page generated 2023-01-30 23:01 UTC)