I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
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Re: I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
#2The 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.
Re: I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
#3The 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.
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.
Re: I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
#4The 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.
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 to…
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
Re: I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
#5(off topic)
This is a nice visual framework, can I ask what it is?
Re: I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
#6I'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-...
Re: I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
#7(off topic) This is a nice visual framework, can I ask what it is?
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...
Re: I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
#8I'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-...
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
Re: I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
#9The 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.
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 to…
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.
Re: I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
#10Someone 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!