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I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

blog.danpetrolito.xyz

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Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#241

Post by Dylan16807 »

f3b5 wrote: post #37
thedanbob wrote: post #24

> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like. Hah, I'm also building something lik…

While this is a pretty cool hardware project, I would be quite annoyed to be your partner. No offense, but it almost reads as satire that you want to flash LEDs in every corner of the house if your wife doesn't look at her phone notifications quickly enough.

Can you explain why it's worse than normal landline phones that you can hear in the entire house?

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#242

Post by Dylan16807 »

sgarland wrote: post #74
f3b5 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is a pretty cool hardware project, I would be quite annoyed to be your partner. No offense, but it almost reads as satire that you want to flash LEDs in every corner of the house if your wife doesn't look at her phone notifications quickly enough.

They said a status board on top of their monitor, not every corner of their house. This seems like a very unobtrusive signal to me. Plus, some people like to hide or obscure their phone from their field of view during work, to minimize distractions. Honestly, the only person I immediately check my phone for is my wife. If I could have a priority indicator along with that, I’d love it. There are some things I need to…

> They said a status board on top of their monitor, not every corner of their house.

No, that was someone else.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#244

Post by Spooky23 »

donatj wrote: post #20

Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew. There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.

Inreally enjoyed that, especially on ICQ. My first real job was a night operations role at a reservation services company, managing incidents and doing database maintenance work.

There was alot of waiting involved, and I would chat on icq with a lot of random people in Europe. I ended up meeting one person!

The problem is… people are people and do nasty things. I have a good friend who is a few years younger. She found herself on the “information superhighway” at 13-14, blue collar parents who had no idea what she was doing alone on AIM or what that was. She find herself meeting this charming guy… who happened to be in his 30’s.

Learning about how common that was was very sobering… as this thing that represented fun and friends to me ended up being malevolent to many.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#245

Post by Nition »

RugnirViking wrote: post #93
nemomarx wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet used to be semi literally a place you went - a desktop in the corner of some room, not central on a desk, not in your pocket. And with a ritual to access it on top of that and the dial up sounds and all. It's more present but also more invisible now, yeah.

honestly ive been thinking about this stuff too. a hypothetical forum you could only log on to read if you idled on a certain page for 15 mins or something would probably have a lot higher standard of discussion and be a lot better for peoples lives, for example. The most minute of barriers requiring you to deliberately and consciously join and leave...

The SomethingAwful forums have been $10 to join since 2001. If you get banned, that's another $10 needed for a new account. Has worked pretty well for 24 years.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#246

Post by elendee »

catigula wrote: post #121

It strikes me: is anyone else sick of people calling developing software "building"? Even as a software developer, it feels very supercilious.

I think there's a difference between software and scripts too. Unrepentant scripter4lyfe here

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#247

Post by Leo-thorne »

I really like this idea, especially the music quiz and birthday reminder. I've been wanting to build a bot for my friend group that shows up now and then when things go quiet, just to gently remind us of something warm. It doesn’t interrupt anyone, but quietly adds a bit of connection to the group.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#248

Post by haiku2077 »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #176
DrillShopper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner is disabled, and my home office is far enough from the bedroom/her work desk that I sometimes can't hear her when she could use, wants, or needs help. These very different priorities make messaging me difficult for her sometimes, not to mention that I can't know what the urgency is if she messages me over SMS/Signal/etc. As a result, we were looking into a very similar system where we each have an LED sign…

Or just get a $5 radio doorbell. You know, when it's 'urgent, right now' you don't want to learn what you are too late because for whatever reason internet/wireless/cellular wasn't working.

Or a lamp, an RGB bulb, and a quick app to make a widget to set the color for the low-urgency requests.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#249

Post by aspenmayer »

dbcoopr wrote: post #239
hn_acc1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I don't even want my computer to send data / check email unless I tell it to. And I ESPECIALLY don't want it sending telemetry / receiving ads asynchronously.

This is basically how computers in the 80s and part of the 90s worked. I wonder if we could really bring back modems and BBS. How could we make that happen again? I feel like with modern internet, we’re stuck in this streaming TV, social media daze.

They never really went away, just sort of evolved, but a lot of the old ways were lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System

Impulse: We Resurrected Underground 1990s BBS Software in 2025.. With Docker [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44422006

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#250

Post by ethan_smith »

kadhirvelm wrote: post #143

Wow so cool, I feel like if I had a light near by desk that turned on every time a friend was on discord voice, I'd be so much more likely to hop in for a few minutes over getting an notification. Something about the physical affordance feels harder to ignore

Check out Philips Hue or Govee lights with IFTTT integration - they can already do exactly this with Discord webhooks, no need to build it from scratch.
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