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Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

zonemessenger.com

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Re: Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

#121

Post by narrowrail »

fatdog wrote: post #94
mgallowa wrote: post #61

I founded an anonymous social media platform in the past. It can be a real pain because once identity/accountability is removed, people tend to act very poorly. On paper, I like your idea of helping people to form risk-free connections, but it is very possible for your platform to spin out of your control. The small radius location nature of your app will likely mean a lot of negative press and/or police inquiries ab…

Authorities of all sorts love the bully narrative because it legitimizes their demands for compliance. Social media is undermining to them because people don't want to be supervised. The real reason social media sites die without moderation is not because it alienates people who take bullying, it is that when there is no way to become a moderator, people seek status and power elsewhere. Reddit survives because it is…

If any of what you claim is true, I am an idiot and you are a genius.

>when there is no way to become a moderator, people seek status and power elsewhere

This is such an odd way to look at the world, I would need quite a bit more explanation. Not everyone is ambitious and competitive.

>HN survives because of similar aspiration to be seen as that smart person in front of a VC audience

Many of us (you included) participate here without any connection to our 'real' identities.

>Facebook and Twitter are waning not because of trolls, but because they have signaled a nannying supervisory role

I haven't seen this study, and my own anecdotal evidence says the novelty is wearing off.

Re: Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

#122

Post by csydas »

daveguy wrote: post #117

I wonder how this compares to an app like YikYak. I checked out YikYak for a few days (really a weird feeling with a bunch of random anonymous people posting messages). This seems similar except maybe only one-to-one rather than message thread based? Also YikYak seems to have about 5 mile radius zones (8km) rather than 1km.

I haven't used Zone but I know YikYak caught on pretty hard with college aged folk and college campuses, so the discussions and posts tend to be a bit different. I worked at a University in tech and due to the harassment issues with YikYak was told to keep an eye on it and determine if we need to request a Geo-Block from the YikYak team.

I would imagine Zone can probably break free of the age association and maybe grab people with the same sort of "town bulletin board" feel, but it's going to have a lot of conflicting user bases, and probably lots of trouble with harassment in local areas. YikYak had tons of issues with the harassment [0] problem until the user base took on a much more serious approach to moderating. The few times I was told by a student that there was something bad on YikYak, it had already been moderated out of visibility.

I don't know how Zone's posting works or if it has moderation or not, but hopefully the user base takes a similar approach.

[0] To expand on the harassment, it wasn't just nasty messages being written, it was stalker-ish comments tracking individual's activities, threats against persons, calls for vandalism, and so on. On a smaller University campus, it's taken a lot more seriously. We also had issues with student workers abusing access privileges and leaking private information to YikYak, which was dealt with appropriately by the administration.

Re: Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

#123

Post by debt »

A1kmm wrote: post #34

If it is exactly 1 km you could triangulate to find someone's location. A program to do that would do a bisection search along a line (faking coordinates for the location of the device) to find the point on the line where you transition to seeing the person's messages. Then, repeat along other two lines in different directions. Each transition point gives a circle of 1 km radius on which the person is present, and th…

I don't understand the anonymous angle. Why does everything have to be anonymous now? Like, you know if it uses the internet or touches a switch/router/server etc outside of your own home at any point that it's certainly, most definitely NOT anonymous at this point.

Anonymous has become a pointless buzzword in this NSA-era we be living in. Just say it's a hyper-local instant messaging app, because any half woke individual will know that nothing on the internet is anonymous really anymore. A percentage of all our internet activity is sitting on a rack somewhere in the Utah desert.

Get over it.

Re: Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

#124

Post by peterkshultz »

theveloped wrote: post #101
peterkshultz wrote: post #66

That the app is both geofenced and anonymous reminds me of Yik Yak, which was a huge success on my college campus before the company decided to move away from anonymity. Did you develop this as a side project, or is this something you want to turn into a business?

It's indeed a side project that I've been working on for a while. It was mainly the development that interested me. Running/marketing a social messaging app is something others would probably enjoy more. Currently I'm working on a different that, although also a software project, is more closely linked to applications/technologies that I love. It is this project I indeed aim to turn into a viable business.

I'm a big fan of this project. I'd love to talk if you're ever interested in making it something bigger!

Re: Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

#126

Post by theveloped »

sjm wrote: post #93
anotheryou wrote: post #26

Can you make the zone adaptive so there are always at least a few people there?

Funny that you mention this, as I've literally just submitted this exact app to Apple and should hopefully be launching in the next few days. The app is called hoody ( https://hoody.im ) and I can't wait to post it to HN. I was actually a bit bummed to see this as I figured they had _just_ beaten me to the post, but in fact our apps are slightly different. It's anonymous, with auto-generated nicknames as well, but th…

Looks sweet! I've used today's traffic to play around a little with the range on zone messenger. And do believe a dynamic range is the way to go, at least while it's gaining traction.

All the best! and looking forward to your launch on HN

Re: Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

#127

Post by ToasterOven »

I put a decent amount of work into something similar and had a fairly polished mobile app with a good number users in a few concentrated communities using it. And it was a disaster.

Anonymity plus a shared reference point of being near each other (mine was 400ft) produced either random attempts at discussion that never matured into a conversation, or focused vitriol at real people.

We ended up discontinuing the app as it was hard to overcome the double network effect (needing people you actually want to chat with, and needing them to be nearby), and the only times where it did was because of a pretty reprehensible use case.

Re: Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

#128

Post by theveloped »

peterkshultz wrote: post #124
theveloped wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's indeed a side project that I've been working on for a while. It was mainly the development that interested me. Running/marketing a social messaging app is something others would probably enjoy more. Currently I'm working on a different that, although also a software project, is more closely linked to applications/technologies that I love. It is this project I indeed aim to turn into a viable business.

I'm a big fan of this project. I'd love to talk if you're ever interested in making it something bigger!

As described I'm most likely not going to take this project much further on my own. I'll definitely reach out to you if I decide on growing it with a team or maybe as an open-source project.

Re: Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

#129

Post by bo1024 »

theveloped wrote: post #58
A1kmm wrote: post #34

If it is exactly 1 km you could triangulate to find someone's location. A program to do that would do a bisection search along a line (faking coordinates for the location of the device) to find the point on the line where you transition to seeing the person's messages. Then, repeat along other two lines in different directions. Each transition point gives a circle of 1 km radius on which the person is present, and th…

Due to the fact that distance matching is done server side the application doesn't have any knowledge with regard to distance. The only knowledge one has is whether or not one receives messages from an other user. Using triangulation to pinpoint an other users location would therefore require to move in and out of range (while the targeted user is continuously sending messages). Thus significantly more difficult than…

I can't tell how it works from the site, but a good approach is to randomize the distance threshold a bit each time. For example: if users are within 1km, always connect; if more than 2km apart, never connect; 1.xkm apart, connect with probability x.

That kind of thing combined with some rate limits (how often one can attempt to connect to a user) should be effective.

(edit) Actually, I think I like mseebach's suggestion even more: For each user, pick a random location about 100m away from them, then pretend they're there until they've moved far enough away, then repeat.

Re: Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius

#130

Post by ItsDeathball »

debt wrote: post #123
A1kmm wrote: post #34

If it is exactly 1 km you could triangulate to find someone's location. A program to do that would do a bisection search along a line (faking coordinates for the location of the device) to find the point on the line where you transition to seeing the person's messages. Then, repeat along other two lines in different directions. Each transition point gives a circle of 1 km radius on which the person is present, and th…

I don't understand the anonymous angle. Why does everything have to be anonymous now? Like, you know if it uses the internet or touches a switch/router/server etc outside of your own home at any point that it's certainly, most definitely NOT anonymous at this point. Anonymous has become a pointless buzzword in this NSA-era we be living in. Just say it's a hyper-local instant messaging app, because any half woke indiv…

There is a difference between the NSA being able to trace your identity vs. a profit-driven corporation being able to connect your identity to your online speech, location, and contacts. The first is governed by due process and need-to-know, the second is essentially public knowledge if the ad-tech revenue is sufficiently tempting.

Even in a pseudonymous environment where the venue operator presumably knows who you are (like HN), the assumption that other users cannot easily trace your words to your IRL identity reduces friction in communication. Environments where everyone publicly posts under their real identity, with those posts retained forever, tend towards low-information social signaling.

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