Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime

ventscape.life

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 148 posts

Re: A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime

#81

Post by kryptiskt »

yreg wrote: post #52
HDMI_Cable wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A machine learning algorithm then uses that stuff to recommend content which is similar. If one engages with opinionated stuff, then they'll only get recommended stuff that conforms to their original opinion, forming an echo chamber.

Imagine following some people who talk about houseplants. Maybe you like some tweets with the kind of information you consider of above-average usefulness for you. Maybe you praise someone for a beautiful pic of their monstera variegata. The algorithm decides to show you more high-quality tweets and prettier photos. If you consider that an echo chamber then all right, but I don't think it's a useful definition. Is go…

If it only were that well. In reality, when I follow people who posts on various niche subjects, it turns out the algorithm believes I'm mostly interested in American Politics because quite a few of those posters are into that and that overshadows all the niche subjects.

Looking at the list of things Twitter believes I'm interested in is quite enlightening about the limits of recommendation engines.

Re: A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime

#82

Post by yreg »

konha wrote: post #68
yreg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine following some people who talk about houseplants. Maybe you like some tweets with the kind of information you consider of above-average usefulness for you. Maybe you praise someone for a beautiful pic of their monstera variegata. The algorithm decides to show you more high-quality tweets and prettier photos. If you consider that an echo chamber then all right, but I don't think it's a useful definition. Is go…

Maybe it’s because houseplants aren’t a controversial topic. Take any topic where people hold strong opinions (politics, religion, ...) and start following people you agree with. I guarantee you’ll have to very deliberately look for people on the other end of the spectrum at some point because your feed and your follow recommendations will indeed be an echo chamber.

I agree, that's exactly my point — online communities might be (for sure often are) an echo chamber, but that depends on what content you subscribe to. Specifically on how opinionated-ness-y and on-topic that content is.

Re: A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime

#83

Post by alpaca128 »

mqrs wrote: post #73
apatters wrote: post #25

This is great. It fills the same role as Twitter, but people's posts disappear after a few seconds, making it better than Twitter. I'm serious here. Twitter's a cesspool filled with people venting about random crap. So is Ventscape. We all need to vent sometimes, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But the problem with Twitter is that it preserves and amplifies your venting until the end of time, which is the…

Doesn't the fact that Twitter posts (mostly) stay incentivize conscientiousness, precisely because it doesn't take away the reality that words have consequences? It's still not an excellent representation of how forgiveness and personal development exists in the real world (i.e. we can forget about the details of what's been done in the past, but what we post stays in some database), but without the longevity of Twit…

> without the longevity of Twitter/FB posts, people just wouldn't think twice about what they're saying

You clearly have not yet witnessed the bad parts of Facebook and Twitter. I've seen people calling for genocide on Facebook under their real name and that's not even remotely the worst.

Facebook's content moderation teams are basically getting PTSD[0] by default as they enforce rules that specify under what circumstances photos of things like animal abuse or decapitation are acceptable(!).

The assumption that people behave normally on the internet when they're not anonymous is provably false. You might think that intuitively, but that's because you're a decent person.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/19/facebook-content-moderators-...

Re: A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime

#84

Post by kristopolous »

aurbano wrote: post #63
kristopolous wrote: post #23

I've been wanting to do a tech trash talk site for a while. Sometimes I've got nothing but hate and vitriol for something and it'd be great to have a designated anonymous space where people can brood and lament. You can do things like sort by most capital letters and profanity density or incoherency and spelling errors. Now that I actually typed this out, it sounds really easy to code.

I started https://dotdot.im as a random chat place sort of for this, or for nothing, don't really know... Nothing's stored at this point, chat's only live in memory while at least 1 user is there, and cleared after. Still trying to figure out what I'll do with it

i'm thinking about something that uses pip npm and apt to autogenerate lists of software so there's "topics" and "people" who can either be cowardly anonymous or have a psuedonym.

The author can use version numbers if they'd like and also browse from the command line. You can follow either topics or people, it's very microblogging, I know.

it's not meant to be productive, it's meant to be cathartic for those times where you inherit a project that's using a terrible tool that's 4 versions behind with no upgrade path and you don't have the time or resources to rewrite the code so instead you have to painfully maintain it.

It's for those things you simply disagree with. The gtk-3 filechooser, firefox still having ctrl+q that could essentially be renamed "kill -9" or other things that you need to work around and everyone's gotten the idea that there's no intention whatsoever of accepting one of the many pull requests to fix it that are just hanging out collecting dust.

It's not for the good stuff, it's for the bad stuff that because we live in a world bound by material reality we also have to use.

The banned stuff would be quite different than other places. No proper names might be appropriate - for instance, no witch-hunting or bullying specific people behind the software.

It's an interesting line.

  "God damn it, SimpleAcme must honestly be written by intoxicated people who just pass out on their keyboards and roll their head around in dreams smashing code in to their IDE"
is acceptable. But replace "SimpleAcme" with "Jonathan Q. Coder" and then it's maybe over the line? I dunno ... I should try it out and see what happens

Re: A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime

#87

Post by VentScape »

C4stor wrote: post #72
VentScape wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, creator of the site here, thank you so much for the tip! Unfortunately I'm quite new to full stack. ~1.5 months ago I didn't know a lick of HTML (let alone CSS, JS, any backend framework, AWS, etc), and I'm making lots of mistakes along the way. Currently trying to figure out how to improve my DB performance as Spring's default pagination seems to be quite slow and my site is getting hugged to death at the momen…

Reduce the refresh rate drastically, augment the number of messages fetched at once (let's say 200), and display them slowly. Should reduce 20 times the load on DB while making no sensible difference for end users anyway.

Ok interesting idea. My one fret here would be that it would decrease interactivity on the site. Sometimes people send messages in response to each other, right? But nonetheless I'll experiment with increasing the refresh rate and maybe strike a nicer balance

Re: A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime

#88

Post by mqrs »

alpaca128 wrote: post #83
mqrs wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the fact that Twitter posts (mostly) stay incentivize conscientiousness, precisely because it doesn't take away the reality that words have consequences? It's still not an excellent representation of how forgiveness and personal development exists in the real world (i.e. we can forget about the details of what's been done in the past, but what we post stays in some database), but without the longevity of Twit…

> without the longevity of Twitter/FB posts, people just wouldn't think twice about what they're saying You clearly have not yet witnessed the bad parts of Facebook and Twitter. I've seen people calling for genocide on Facebook under their real name and that's not even remotely the worst. Facebook's content moderation teams are basically getting PTSD[0] by default as they enforce rules that specify under what circums…

I mean, I didn’t sleep through 2016 onwards but people threatening violence still get banned, people with bigoted views still get called out or damage their real-world offline relationships, and it’s possible that there’d be even less people who’d be mindful of what they say without those feedback mechanisms.

Re: A minimalistic site to vent and see others doing the same in realtime

#89

Post by baxtr »

skinkestek wrote: post #78
apatters wrote: post #25

This is great. It fills the same role as Twitter, but people's posts disappear after a few seconds, making it better than Twitter. I'm serious here. Twitter's a cesspool filled with people venting about random crap. So is Ventscape. We all need to vent sometimes, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But the problem with Twitter is that it preserves and amplifies your venting until the end of time, which is the…

> This is great. It fills the same role as Twitter, but people's posts disappear after a few seconds, making it better than Twitter. Also like Jodel it is anonymous[1], which is a good thing whenever possible as has become obvious lately. [1]: wrt other users. Random nutjobs of all shapes cannot easily find you and nobody can verify if Jodel have really banned someone so they can to a larger degree do what they think…

Somehow similar to HN isn’t it?
Post reply on HN