I just took a look at the page's own 'town square'. At the moment, it's largely full of people saying offensive things for the sake of it.
Within about 300ms I thought “moderation is going to be a problem”.
Yeah, I had exactly the same thought.
Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
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Re: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
#32I made something similar last year: A p2p chat popup (that sits on bottom right of the page as a bubble) that allows all visitors to chat with each other. It had simple keyword based moderation in-built (can be easily bypassed though).
Was planning to add github oauth to get a known identity and persistent messaging so visitors can chat with each other across sites.
Instead of a webmaster adding script to their site, it was a browser extension.
The intent was two folds:
1. Get to know other people having similar interests,
2. Try something on the lines of a decentralized chat/messaging system.
Re: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
#33I love the idea! The next step is to add role play games in town squares.
I was thinking the same thing, or even just little minigames and Easter eggs for people to find.
Re: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
#34This is great! Thank you for sharing it. Fun to use and already customizable.
Re: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
#35Oh what the heck? That's super cool! Awesome idea. Possible future enhancement: some basic day/night (or even weather?) design elements that match the timezone of the person whose site it is? Still, doesn't even need it, it's really cool as-is! I could see it being used as some avenue for saying toxic stuff, so I'm suddenly feeling like the only allowed actions should be ones that can never be harmful (like text inte…
Nintendo does this on Mario Kart, just allowing text from a pre-set list. It's very limited, but works.
Re: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
#36this is a very clever concept. I'll keep it in mind for the future - when my app site has persistent amount of visitors. Are there some rules/settings for stop words to prevent some types of abuse? Or is it planned?
Re: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
#37Moderation moderation moderation . It’s a big problem
I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed
The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol
So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere
Re: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
#38This was actually a lot of fun. Not as much trolling as I anticipated. Surprising amount of normal chit chat.
Re: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
#39Matt Webb made a version of this (and wrote about it) a while back—Cursor Party: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party
I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.
Re: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
#40I just took a look at the page's own 'town square'. At the moment, it's largely full of people saying offensive things for the sake of it.
After having been a moderator for a number of communities over the years—BBCs in the 90s, niche forums during the 00s & 10s, Reddit boards in the 20s—I’ve come to believe that running shadow services where disruptive individuals can comingle may be the best way to handle this.
The advent of LLMs really opens the door to shunting off these “community members “ who’d rather contribute in misanthropic ways for the lulz than either leave or not contribute at all. They can take part in an interactive echo chamber that gives just as well as they can. You don’t even need a powerful model so the overall costs to the community are probably lower than the alternatives of trying to coexist with community-arsonists.
I spent years trying to find ways to bring people productively “into the fold” but eventually realized that it is futile in some cases because there’s zero value to the individual or the community to find a middle ground. They want to see things burn, and the community simply wants them out.