_aaya

Thank you--you've given me a lot to think about over the next few days before I decide what tradeoffs to make.

I really appreciate your feedback because you're approaching this from a perspective I hadn't considered.

If you're interested in my thought process going into this project, I've gathered my thoughts in a short Medium post:

https://medium.com/@hashtags_chat/online-communication-and-t...

I think it's a little different in the sense that identities are tied to individual messages instead of individual people.

When there's a conversation going, you can't tell how many people you're talking to, so the experience is a bit different in an important way.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Maybe it's due to lack of experience, but I guess I didn't consider adoption from a business perspective when designing the initial experience.

Do you think a separate landing page or series of blog posts on Medium could lead to a better first impression? That way I could direct new users to specific tags and bypass the default channel altogether.

I disagree. Growing up I've had plenty of positive experiences with various anonymous communities online.

I do think that giving IDs to individual messages (instead of individual people) and not having an upvote/like system will go a long way in reducing the kind of toxic behavior you have in mind though.

I decided not to include editing or deleting to encourage users to think a little bit before sending a message.

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm still experimenting with finding the right balance between convenience and making users conscious of the decision to censor others. For now you can use the settings in the sidebar to filter words and message IDs.

Thanks!

I used firebase for the back end which made the implementation pretty straightforward.

I think this was due to keeping all loaded messages in the DOM.

I've made it so that only the most recent messages are kept if you're scrolled to the bottom, so it should be better now.

react and firebase~

Thanks! Glad you find it fun~

I'll look into different highlight colors and other ways to improve the UX.

Yeah I need to look into that lol.

Yep, I'll experiment with it this weekend!

Hmm maybe.

I don't think content will be an issue if sharing is handled through linking to specific tags (hashtags.chat/NotReallyPrivate instead of hashtags.chat) because of the built in lack of discoverability.

Thanks! And yeah, I definitely need to look more into filters.

Anonymous to other users, I guess.

Everything is public, but tag discovery is limited to the default list, specifically searching for a tag, or directly linking to it.

I'm planning to replace the default section with a trending list though.

Yeah the main channel is pretty chaotic. You can filter links, gifs, emojis, and any words you don't want to see by using the settings.

If you try other tags and play with the settings, it shouldn't be as bad.

Wow that looks pretty cool

You can click the icons on the side to show/hide the sidebar - sorry I haven't published all the features and how to use them.

The concept I was going for is discussion without identities. Maybe anonymity wasn't the right word.

Yeah, sorry about that. For now it's only for desktop, but if there's interest, I'll look into making mobile apps.