Live data from Hacker News

I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

en.andros.dev

21–30 of 110 posts

Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

#21
This sounds like the kind of feature that ends up being quick to initially implement but takes up way more engineering time to maintain than everything else combined. The author concedes at the end that most genuine uses of the feature are people just saying hello. So maybe the solution here is to disallow unrestricted input and just have a few buttons with fixed things to say.

Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

#22
I’d suggest one additional heuristic: once your bad word detector has triggered, shut down the chat for 10 minutes. That way waves of assholes don’t monopolize the chat, and when they move on to the next target the functionality returns to your site automatically.

Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

#23

TL;DR: this is a toy example, so it doesn't require BEAM VM Hard to take this seriously without the loadtest with the the large number of concurrent users. For a number of users concurrently reading a long-tail blog post - you will get good results even using DotCom era HTTP polling. --- See: Django LiveView vs Phoenix LiveView: a real benchmark https://en.andros.dev/blog/80134668/django-liveview-vs-phoen...

What is there to take seriously? Sending a ~50 bytes to ~200 listeners over a websocket about once a second is trivial even for a Raspberry Pi.

It pretends to be serious with 5 tables / charts:

Django LiveView vs Phoenix LiveView: a real benchmark

https://en.andros.dev/blog/80134668/django-liveview-vs-phoen...

Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

#25

I was watching porn recently and the particular site I was on had recently added a real time chat widget too! Aside from scam bots trying to lure users off onto telegram, the last few messages were guys talking about Monty Python's The Life of Brian.

It's interesting to hear a story about 'Life' in the very place where 'Life is created.'

Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

#26

The obvious solution is shutting it down it does offer nothing. Short of that shadow ban everyone everyone sees their own messages, and add a few fake ones every now and then.

Hah, or burn lots of GPU cycles for an LLM-enhanced echo-chamber of one... (For each troll an echo chamber/an LLM troll responder)

Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

#27

The chat is still there in the corner of this post, with people typing nasty shit into it. Well have fun delving into programmatic censorship I guess. Or just take it out. If you take the former path and post about trying to fix it here then I'm sure you'll get a lot more free testing of your attempts to enforce civility through regex or whatever. Enjoy learning about the Scunthorpe problem.

Looking at the last few minutes of messages, I get the feeling that all it takes is a handful of motivated (i.e. jobless) malicious individuals to make an entire community or a corner of the Internet look like it has devolved into barbarism.

Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

#28

The chat is still there in the corner of this post, with people typing nasty shit into it. Well have fun delving into programmatic censorship I guess. Or just take it out. If you take the former path and post about trying to fix it here then I'm sure you'll get a lot more free testing of your attempts to enforce civility through regex or whatever. Enjoy learning about the Scunthorpe problem.

Neuralink will hopefully filter that out client side /s If your audience is more than a handful of people, what's the purpose of chat?

To get the handful of people to collaborate and hopefully bring their friends. It's currently at 160 and climbing, no longer a handful, so it seems to be working.

Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

#29
You just got yourself a product right there if it works and can market it as Roast me Blog with just trigger filters in your chat to make it healthy roast in place of abuse and highlight top roasters where people could upvote right there in your chat. Negativity turned into positive healthy banter ..
Post reply on HN