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Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes

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Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes

#161

Post by esperent »

feross wrote: post #2

Hey folks! I built Virus Cafe to help you make a friend in 2 minutes! My goal is to help people stuck indoors because of COVID-19 (or police curfews) to make meaningful connections with strangers. Here's how it works: 1. You are matched with a random partner for a video chat 2. You're given a deep question to discuss. You have 2 minutes! 3. The only rule is: no small talk! Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission…

> Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission to eradicate it.

Small talk is like two computers establishing a connection across a noisy network. Before you send real data, you need to establish some things like:

* Whether the other person speaks your language

* What their name is

* Whether they are feeling ok

* Whether they are interested in a conversation

* Whether they are someone you want to invest time and effort in talking to

* What (if any) common interests you share

... And so on.

When you use a platform like Virus Cafe to establish a connection with another person, you can bypass all of that. But in normal life, small talk is important.

Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes

#163

Post by inakarmacoma »

johnfn wrote: post #74
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission to eradicate it. To me small talk is the lubricant that makes conversations flow smooth with strangers. You can hear inflections and humor and irony all in a relatively safe, unemotional topic. Also, since your philosophical side is not needed, your emotional intelligence can be more engaged. For example, just by seeing how someone responds to a comment on the weather, y…

This is really well put. I've also noticed that, while not really relevant here, small talk is a good way to gauge people's interest in having a conversation at all. If you dive right into big topics like hopes and dreams right off the bat, the other person might not be engaged, but if you ease your way in with small talk and receive a lot of energy back, that can be a positive signal to get to the deeper stuff.

Or the person is interested in deep conversations but was turned off by the small talk?

Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes

#164

Post by inakarmacoma »

gk1 wrote: post #156
superhuzza wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I will give the same answer I have given 1000 times. If I'm just meeting you, it's new information to me, regardless of how many times you've said it! And that opens the door to more interesting conversation. Maybe I do something very related, or are interested something about that job, or whatever. Or maybe it leads nowhere. But that's how smalltalk goes, you dance around until you find a mutually interesting topic…

> ...it's new information to me, regardless of how many times you've said it! Reminds me of a joke: — "What's your name?" — "Damien." — "Oh, you don't hear that name every day!" — "Actually, I do."

Where's Bill Hicks when you need him. "little Damien"... Relentless, Revelations?

Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes

#165

Post by cambalache »

shlant wrote: post #148
cambalache wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet you are here, using text.

He said nothing can REPLACE it (as in doesn't provide the same experience), not that he is refusing to use anything BUT it

But that is true in the trivial(uninteresting) sense. Of course not a single city in the world can replace Paris if the experience you want to provide is visiting Paris(except for some Chinese and Las Vegas copycats, heh), but that is not the point.The point here is that if your objective is to communicate and discuss things, watching the other person is not needed as demonstrated by the existence of this site (and the radio, and the phone, and IM , and the Internet, and.. and... and). You may argue that you lose things in the process and maybe you are correct, but that is highly debatable. I, for one, think that for the strict sense of discussing ideas, text is a far better medium for different reasons: it gives time to think and formulate better arguments, it helps to avoid miscommunication due to misheard words and it provides a quite environment so it helps to reflect on the content better. Another important thing given human nature is that text communication helps to avoid the trap of prejudging a person argument based on their race/sex/age/etc. At the end, of course, is a matter of personal preference and probably due to the eternal division between introverts and extroverts.

Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes

#166

Post by aframe »

Accacin wrote: post #142
aframe wrote: post #118

Don’t want to sully the conversation here, but I want to raise an important point - so @feross, please stick with it. I gave my daughter (6) my iPad for ten minutes this morning and put her on a site to draw minecraft skins. I took a call and took my eyes off the device (but not daughter) for about five minutes while I paced around the room. When I sat back next to her, she somehow ended up on virus Café and was in a…

Well it must have been in your web history, I very much doubt she typed the URL in. You could have been visiting anything and she could have accidentally navigated there. For me, it's a very odd solution to a problem that we have to answer a question before allowing our webcam to be used. I would never set my webcam and mic to be allowed by default, and if I ever give my laptop or device to anyone to search for somet…

To confirm, it’s not allowed by default, it’s set to always ask by default - which was just a case of clicking allow or not.

And it most certainly wasn’t in my history. I’d never heard of it before and it’s my work iPad which she doesn’t know the passcode to.

No, parenting is hard, especially so right now. Every day is a mix of work, and guilt that the kid of a full time working family isn’t getting everything she needs.

Never-the-less, devices are common place now. And it’s not uncommon for children to play on them.

She does have a device that only has age appropriate learning apps on, and parental controls. These apps have the above mentioned checks in place to stop kids getting into the settings.

This site has a very child friendly design; bright buttons, emojis flying around. Isn’t it at least responsible to make sure that young people can’t access it?

Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes

#168

Post by xwdv »

GormHouj wrote: post #89
xwdv wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be recorded anytime anywhere and placed on the internet.

Within your rights, sure. Giving access to a webcam and microphone is different from being being recorded in a public setting.

It's a little better because you know it's happening and have time to prepare.

Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes

#169

Post by ovidiuleo »

erfgh wrote: post #130
aframe wrote: post #118

Don’t want to sully the conversation here, but I want to raise an important point - so @feross, please stick with it. I gave my daughter (6) my iPad for ten minutes this morning and put her on a site to draw minecraft skins. I took a call and took my eyes off the device (but not daughter) for about five minutes while I paced around the room. When I sat back next to her, she somehow ended up on virus Café and was in a…

> I gave my daughter (6) my iPad for ten minutes this morning There's your problem. Just don't do that. But if you can't avoid it, disconnect the internet before you do it.

This reply frustrated me to the core. This isn't a parenting website. The advice you gave is a parenting one, and bad, at that. The story could have just been concocted for the benefit of understanding the urgency of the situation. You should probably read this: https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/04/your-statement-is-10... It'll make you a little wiser. As to why your reply frustrated me? I think the internet is overwhelmed by [...] trying to draw lines where no limit should really be required (please note that I'm referring to your comment, not to the request for any sort of protection on Virus Cafe...). The problem wasn't that he/she gave the ipad/iphone to the daughter, but the lack of security on the site. Better people than us said this is actually illegal, so you see, you're slightly out of line. I wanted to somehow say you're right, but irrelevant. But you aren't even right. Even a 6 yearold should have access to an iphone or an ipad, CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET, as it were. The situation forks: 1 - enable parenting rights on the device ...which would mean that if I just want my kid to experience the iphone for 5 minutes I have to enable a feature that afterwards I need to disable... (this forks again, about 3 ways) 2 - buy one especially for the kid ...I don't even want to start... (this actually forks in volumes and volumes of pros and cons)

So let's just stick to the real problem here: I (and when I say I, I mean a forty smthg yearold) was on the verge of clicking Yes to the question whether I allow Virus-Cafe to use my mic and cam. The pop-up pops up exactly where the pop-up for notifications appears, and as I usually block notifications from websites, I almost clicked No by default. In the very last second did I read the actual text on the pop-up. GDPR is really a thing and, as I mentioned previously, it is illegal to just pop that up. Some information should precede the question. (Forks again, let's not go into it.)

I do apologize both for the length of the reply and for its aggressiveness (if you chose to consider it aggressive).

Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes

#170

Post by vhs001 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #61
feross wrote: post #2

Hey folks! I built Virus Cafe to help you make a friend in 2 minutes! My goal is to help people stuck indoors because of COVID-19 (or police curfews) to make meaningful connections with strangers. Here's how it works: 1. You are matched with a random partner for a video chat 2. You're given a deep question to discuss. You have 2 minutes! 3. The only rule is: no small talk! Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission…

> Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission to eradicate it. To me small talk is the lubricant that makes conversations flow smooth with strangers. You can hear inflections and humor and irony all in a relatively safe, unemotional topic. Also, since your philosophical side is not needed, your emotional intelligence can be more engaged. For example, just by seeing how someone responds to a comment on the weather, y…

This is a good point. However, I think one of the issues of small talk is that many times there is no progression from small talk to "deep" talk. Some people can get stuck trying to find things to say for the sake of conversation. And without getting into something that both parties actually have a passion for, small talk can get very boring very quickly.
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