I think this is a really interesting product, but I also find it really weird. Maybe I’m just getting older and this isn’t for me. It wasn’t that long ago that people actually had to have the courage to have a conversation. It kind of breaks my heart to think that a father (or son) wants to connect again but only if the other person does as well. That’s just not how that relationship works.
You're suggesting this is an unrealistic example? The tool is far from elegant enough to facilitate such a reunion, but I can count a handful of such estranged father/son pairs for which the right mediation might help.
No, I don’t think it’s unrealistic. You’re probably right that it would work and could be helpful. We’ve all probably known, or have experienced first hand, a situation where you don’t talk to family for years. I think the only part of it that I am being critical of is that both parties need to engage, opaquely. People are stubborn. I’m no different. I just think it would be unfortunate if a person really wanted to make amends or right their wrongs with someone and never had an opportunity to do that. It’s okay for the other person to have no interest in that, but what if they want the same thing but are too angry to admit that? Maybe I’m thinking about it too much.
I do think some of the other examples are really good though, and I like the possibilities. I think I’m just sensitive to one part of it, and that sensitivity shouldn’t write it off fornwhat it could be.
Maybe this makes you fortunate for having kind relationships throughout your life, or less fortunate for not knowing the difficulty of reconciling a relationship.
One perfect use-case for this is for an adopted person. They don't know their birth mum and dad, and it takes intense bravery to face up to that and reach out and trust them to feel the same way as you. What if you get rejected? Wouldn't you try to make this interaction safer? What if you could even practice it knowing that the communication would be erased in a short time?
Yes, I'm talking about me. And others in my position.
I have been fortunate to have mostly kind relationships. I apologize for my insensitivity. I think you’re right about the use case you’ve presented and there are plenty more, I’m sure. My criticism of an example use case shouldn’t have presented as writing off the whole premise. Presenting it as a way to ask a girl out, or making up after a fight doesn’t present the power it could have.
I couldn't think of any more powerful examples than those. I might wish otherwise, but if Thoughter does become popular it seems like it would be, if I may be blunt, off the backs of teenagers and/or college kids looking to hook up, so Tinder or Snapchat-type interactions. Or maybe it should go in the opposite direction and be used for more frivolous situations? Open to any suggestions.
This has nothing to do with your age or the "kids these days" or social change. Just because you can't see yourself using something doesn't mean there's not lots of people who could use it, or that something is wrong with society.
If I am reading correctly, if person S sends person R a message M bearing hash tag H, if R sends their own message M2 to S bearing hash tag H2, then M will be revealed to R and M2 will be revealed to S, if and only if H equals H2. (S may choose some behaviors, such as revealing their identity, in order to prompt R into sending a message.)
As for your second paragraph:
I like this site's design<1> a lot. I was able to skim it quickly, and absorb enough to answer your question and more. With respect, I think more work has gone into its design than "antiquated" would suggest.
For one example, on mobile the body paragraphs on the right of the screen can themselves be dragged to the left to read all the info, instead of my having to use the tiny fiddly scrollbar. I think that's a smart feature for a mobile site with a fair bit of text (such as on the SQL page.) Consider also that the site uses colors for text, background, and UI elements (body, nav, etc) that neither clash hideously nor strain the eyes with too-low contrast; plenty of old websites don't take that level of care (think a typical professor's academic homepage - now THOSE can get antiquated!)
Bootstrap will get you a "modern"-style site without too much effort, but I don't think it would add anything here.
<1> By design I am waving in the general direction of layout, color scheme, ease of use, etc.
Wow thanks for the compliments on the design. I indeed spent ridiculous amounts of time on the design and making it super simple and accessible, all the while knowing it would mostly get crapped on. :) I appreciate your appreciation!
You're welcome, Doug. I also enjoyed checking out your personal site in your HN profile - that crazy interface seems tailor made for a Mobile user to "explore"! Lots of fun.
edit: usage of Comic Sans (or something closely resembling it) gives me the (wrong) impression that the project is a satire. Bootstrap or something indeed.
* edit 3: now that I think about it I believe the term joke is way more offensive in English than in my first language. Parody or social commentary would have been more appropriate.
Very cool base idea and could become something interesting.
Initial thoughts:
1. Even assuming both person A and person B use the service within a week of each other, the odds that they both use the same hastag are astronomically low. Person A says '#wannaGoOut', but person B says '#IWantToGoOut'. There are way too many possible permutations of a single thought.
2. As another commenter said, the design is clean but feels like it belongs in 1995. It will not get off the ground looking like this. The basic layout is fine, but the colors and fonts need to go.
3. Without an app, I think you'll have a hard time gaining critical mass. If someone has a thought and all it takes to get it out onto Thoughter is to (i) open the app, (ii) type, (iii) and send, then it will be way more likely to be used.
4. This feels a bit like Craigslist Missed Connections. Not saying that's a good - or bad - thing, it just does.
5. What if I see a cute girl at a coffee store, we hit it off, but I don't have her email address - or even her name? What then?
Machine learning could probably be used to fuzzy-match the contents (probably removing the need for the hashtag altogether). Of course, false-positives could cause problems.
1. The service will send an email to person A saying "Someone wants to #wannaGoOut". As long as person B doesn't make a typo when copying the hash tag, this problem is solved.
2. Yeah, it's a nod to certain eras of web design, which I like, but other people won't care so I agree.
3. It's email-based in order to make it work for recipients who don't have the app.
5. In 2019, it's probably best to support Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram as recipient addresses... somehow. Although most of those aren't technically possible. Those platforms aren't really great for building services on top of.
> 1. The service will send an email to person A saying "Someone wants to #wannaGoOut". As long as person B doesn't make a typo when copying the hash tag, this problem is solved.
That's only one of four possible settings, and using it breaks half of the examples: it works great for #reunite, not so great for #breakup
> 1. Even assuming both person A and person B use the service within a week of each other, the odds that they both use the same hastag are astronomically low. Person A says '#wannaGoOut', but person B says '#IWantToGoOut'. There are way too many possible permutations of a single thought.
> 3. Without an app, I think you'll have a hard time gaining critical mass. If someone has a thought and all it takes to get it out onto Thoughter is to (i) open the app, (ii) type, (iii) and send, then it will be way more likely to be used.
Totally agree. An app would also allow the service to avoid email, and allow encryption on the client-side without the server seeing any plain text at all. Definitely a goal.
> 5. What if I see a cute girl at a coffee store, we hit it off, but I don't have her email address - or even her name? What then?
Good question! I don't have an answer unfortunately. Guess you gotta do things the old-fashioned way. :)
Would you be open to piggybacking on existing encrypted messengers, like Telegram and Signal? Maybe even WhatsApp (not sure how their API works). You could also build bots on Matrix.
This really does fit perfectly with Snapchat’s MO of plausible deniability in messaging; and could be exactly what they need to gain an edge against Instagram.
How would I go about that? I'm just a clueless engineer. What little I know of how the world works, is that they would just steal the idea if it were really attractive to them, and maybe give me a free T-shirt. Am I too jaded?
A Snap engineer could theoretically see this post and steal the idea. It’s usually useless to go around trying to guard an idea. However, if you develop the service enough so that it would be inefficient to rebuild it completely from scratch, then they might pay you for the concept and the technology, which is real IP and can’t be ripped off quite so easily.
You should consider a Progressive Web Application: requires SSL, and you can place this on the Apple and Google app stores. You just have to do a small and fair amount of JS witchcraft.
To get the most out of a native app, I would want to do client-side encryption/hashing (right now the server sees plaintext for a millisecond, just like most servers treat passwords), and use mobile notifications instead of email, for the communication mechanism. Not saying a PWA wouldn't fit the bill, but unfortunately it's a bit beyond just wrapping it in a WebView and packaging as an app. I suppose as an MVP maybe? Just go get on the stores?
font-family: 'AytwitHeaderFontEmbedded', 'AytwitHeaderFontFromUrl', Comic Sans MS, Comic sans-serif;
I would reconsider this decision.
Edit: To be clear, a font sets the tone for the content of a page and unless your project is an invitation to a clown orgy then Comic Sans sets the wrong tone.
Thank you for taking the time to do that. I hope you don't mind, I may have to steal some of that when I eventually do some tweaks to make it more modern. :)
Yup email support was just the proof of concept. Definitely agree that it will need to go beyond. In fact if I make a native app then mobile notifications can be the communication medium itself.
I don't like this for the reason that it pushes people to use technology instead of hard conversations and personal contact, because it's so much easier.
I don't understand how Tinder is the example of that.
If I have time to meet a woman tonight and it's 4pm, what exactly is Tinder replacing? The hell of cold-approaching women at bars until one of them seems to like me? Mine my depleted social circle for a date? Wank off in my bedroom because I don't have any new prospects and be happy with that?
The whole point of Tinder is to find new face to face interactions.
A lot of people are not comfortable with confrontation in the first place. And it is entirely normal. It just how people are wired and expecting them to change themselves drastically is not fair on them. It should be a gradual process and a thing like thoughter is a great use for "getting started". End goal is of course to confront.
So I actually had this idea years ago. People were joking that people can "sync" up so much on twitter that the next evolution is just thinking thoughts to each other.
Even bought the domain thottr.com for this back in 2011. Hilarious
Woah crazy! How much you selling that domain for? ;)
There's actually a patent from the mid-90's that basically describes the same idea that we both came up with: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5117358A/en. I found it after I had finished the first version and was crushed that someone had thought of my genius idea first.
Good idea but it needs some work. I get the reason of having hashtags is to only reveal the attempt to connect when the intent matches, but with arbitrary syntax allowed you will get a lot of false negatives when your chances of people even matching their timeframes are low as it is.
Instead offer a few predefined categories of tags, and the user can select one or more of them. That also improves the UI as you can now offer autocomplete in that field and lower the barrier of entry (removing option paralysis).
Agreed in full. I was thinking a dropdown of common hashtags. It's sort of a chicken and egg problem so far though, in that I don't know what common hashtags would be. Maybe I'll just use those that are examples on the front page to start.
Thanks to everyone checking this out. I know it's kind of a weird project, but that's the idea! I've been kicking this project around since college in 2003 when I was afraid to ask a girl out even though I was pretty sure she liked me too. Instead of just asking her out I tried to come up with a way to fix my anxiety with software, and thus Thoughter was born. Don't worry I'm a bit wiser now. :)
You can read more about the back story at https://aytwit.com/blog/thoughter_origin_story and why it took so long for me to complete. Hint: I cared too much about privacy, before it was cool!
I actually built this specifically for the breaking up use case. It was called CleanBreak. I forget the numbers, but at least a few hundred people used it. I think it'd actually work if you started locally (e.g. get covered in a campus paper).
Nice! The comments on that thread are valuable, thanks for sharing. Do you happen to have an instance of it still running somewhere, or screenshots? I would be interested in some specifics of how you approached it since people seem pretty favorable in that thread.
just spun it back up on PythonAnywhere, http://mritchie712.pythonanywhere.com/, pretty sure most of it won't work, I didn't start the database, but you'll get the general idea.
Sweet thanks for that. I like it, very straightforward and to the point. I'm considering how I can "subdivide" Thoughter into little special purpose utilities like for breaking up, hooking up, etc. Maybe I just need to make hashtags more standardized, with a dropdown or something. Much appreciated.
I don't like the idea since it essentially kills hope. Hope that a relationship might work out when the time is right. Putting a timer on hope is a bad idea.
A chat bot would probably be a neat interface: 2 people on Telegram/Facebook Messenger/Whatsapp/Instagram/Snapchat, so no app install needed. You can still collect the email address, but that could get around the initial hurdle of accessibility.
Forgot to reply to this initially. Those links are much appreciated. Thoughter can be used for this kind of thing right now, although the UI/UX needs improvement to facilitate such "list matching" use cases.
Once in college I got an email from (I think) ecrush.com, saying "someone has a crush on you", and on the site you could enter email addresses of people you had crushes on and it would spam them that same thing, anonymous until there was a match. (Personally, I suspect it was bootstrapping by sending fake initial "someone has a crush on you" emails to scraped emails, but I didn't dig in too deep.)
Thanks for your comment. I recognize your username and enjoy reading your comments.
https://aytwit.com/thoughter#hints sort of solves the adoption problem, in that you wouldn't necessarily need a critical mass of people for the service to be useful. Even just one patron could initiate a thought with another.
I will suggest that maybe you need to move the "Hints" section or otherwise highlight it in some fashion. If they have the thought "Eh, no one even knows this service exists. Why bother?" before they get to the Hints section, this could be a barrier to adoption.
Definitely not your bad. I've been in the game long enough to know people don't read things! (No offense to you personally).
I tried linking to that "hint" anchor tag in the first paragraph but even that is expecting too much. I'll give a think about how I can highlight the whole hint/adoption thing more since it's a main point of feedback. Thanks!
Free suggested edits that you can use as you see fit (or not at all -- whatevs):
Sometimes you want to ask someone a question or tell them a secret and you suspect or hope they're thinking the same thing, but it's uncomfortable to bring up. This is what Thoughter is for!
And they don't even have to know Thoughter exists. You can send them a Hint. But more about that later.
Let's say it's the holidays and you and a loved one had a fight a while back. You aren't sure they would welcome hearing from you. You can send a Thought like "I miss you #reunite" that lasts one week. If your loved one sends the same sort of thing with a matching hashtag, you each get the other's email. If not, nothing happens.
This used to be done much more naturally back when people routinely lived in close-knit communities. People would ask a friend a question and that friend would ask their friend. Word traveled by the grapevine, which helped sort things out.
But in our increasingly mobile world, a lot of grapevines have basically died. This is your modern grapevine, now with Encryption!
Move: "The first project out of Aytwit's software research labs." to much later. Like close with it or something. It's important to you. It mostly isn't important to the process of getting adoption. Making it the first sentence amounts to "noise."
Woah great feedback, I will definitely use some of this. I'll ping you again privately when I make some changes, just so you know I'm not blowing smoke. ;)
The opening line "The first project out of Aytwit's software research labs." is making me cringe now lol.
This post has driven the only real usage since I finished this about a year ago, and I'm guessing most of the connections so far are people just testing it out.
If you send hints like "someone wants to #reunite" I'm sure the recipient will accept just to find out who the person is regardless of what their offline intentions are. Since your identity is revealed anyway I don't see how this saves you from the perceived embarrassment of just asking the person directly.
In the past I've often desired and tried asking for things subtly or in a round about way so as to hunt at what I want without the risk if rejection. In my experience it's not a great path to take.
If the fear of rejection outweighs the potential benefits and you can't bring yourself to ask (for a date, raise, reunion, etc.) then maybe you just don't want as much as you think you do.
When you want something deeply enough you'll ask for it without fear or embarrassment.
Based on what I understand from a cursory read of the site, you can't choose to "accept" just based on getting a hint. You have to actually guess the identity (email) of the person requesting to receive the full message...
> If you send hints like "someone wants to #reunite" I'm sure the recipient will accept just to find out who the person is regardless of what their offline intentions are. Since your identity is revealed anyway I don't see how this saves you from the perceived embarrassment of just asking the person directly.
The way hashtag-based hints work is that the recipient would only see that someone had a thought with that hashtag, not who. I don't know if that addresses your point exactly, but the recipient in this case doesn't necessarily know who wants to #reunite, it's not revealed just by clicking or anything. If they suspect someone specifically then it's up to them to guess essentially.
The recipient of the hint #reunite has to guess the identity of the person who sent the hint. It is never simply revealed in this case. To add to the confusion ;) there is another type of hint that only reveals the identity and not the hashtag.
That sounds like both a good way to both monetize and rate limit spam guessing. I'm not seeing where OP suggested this idea, so I'm crediting you! Thanks. Or maybe I'm OP?
> If the fear of rejection outweighs the potential benefits and you can't bring yourself to ask (for a date, raise, reunion, etc.) then maybe you just don't want as much as you think you do.
> When you want something deeply enough you'll ask for it without fear or embarrassment.
It sounds to me like you are not an introvert and judge who is by "not wanting things enough". It's not as simple as you think.
As an introvert, I disagree. Being introverted does not mean you lack the ability to be assertive, it simply means you don’t draw your energy from social stimulation (quite the opposite).
I'm definitely not an extrovert. I think I've come to realize over time that I'm always making cost / benefit or risk / reward decisions with my actions.
If I want a raise, I have the potential for a reward and a potential risk of letting my boss know that I'm not happy with my current salary. I think that fear of asking is really that fear of rejection or fear of disconnection.
What I'm saying is that this tool won't always be there and we need to find ways on our own to minimize the fear / risk of asking for what we want in life.
Sure, you might get lucky a couple times with this app, but life will keep throwing you more awkward situations.
Interesting concept! This could also be cool for missed connections.
In lieu of the missed connection's email address, you could provide a few specific details about the encounter (choosing from prewritten options):
Time (options provided in 3-hour blocks ie 9am-12pm), name of neighborhood, city, your ethnicity (or some other easy personally identifying feature).
If the other person also goes on the site to submit a missed connection within a few days of yours and fills out the same details, they'll be prompted to answer the detail about your personally identifying feature to receive your message and relay email to respond to.
(Yes this would only work well if the website became widely known as the place to go to for private missed connections.)
Probably a few loopholes with this, just thinking out loud.
Wow I had thought briefly of the "missed connection" case but never could work out the details. Your post makes me think there could be a way, if there were some standardized version of a "thought" that goes beyond the hashtag. Interesting. Thank you for jogging my brain a bit.
This will get abused by spammers, even with email confirmations. Be prepared. I had a side project get killed because the utility of it couldn’t quite match the spam hassle.
Further, if I received an email from this site, I would assume it was a scam and delete it. I get dozens of emails from services pretending I’ve signed up to them or that they have real content from me.
> This will get abused by spammers, even with email confirmations.
Could you elaborate? I have vague worries since there's not a captcha or anything. But I can't think of an attack or abuse beyond a DoS-type thing, and I don't know why someone would do that beyond trolling. I know my naïveté probably sounds painful but I would appreciate more feedback here.
Would a captcha be enough? My concern there is that I'm being super paranoid about privacy (https://aytwit.com/about#privacy) and wouldn't want to incorporate Google's captcha if I don't have to.
You’re letting anyone with an email address send mail (through your service) to another address. It looks like the spammer wouldn’t be able to completely control the contents of the message, but they could still send unsolicited junk emails from your email provider or server, which might get your email or IP address blacklisted by spam filters and prevent legitimate users’ emails from being delivered.
I would implement heavy rate limiting and maybe come up with a basic captcha that would stop most spammers.
Oh, and by the way: if you want italics there can’t be a space between the asterisk and the phrase to be italicized (like * this * versus this).
You have a form on your site where someone can set a destination email address and a hashtag message. Am I missing something or can someone put target@domain.com and a private thought of a spam message or abuse or anything like that? Trolls will hit it and as soon as bots find it, you are going to get more spam than users by some stretch. If people report you, you will be blacklisted very quickly and your host will get stroppy. I'm speaking from experience, but in my case it was a tinyurl-type site.
Even if you require approval from the sending email before pushing the thought, someone can still use Mailinator/similar for that.
Personally, the combination of solution-in-search-of-a-problem and this sort of hassle would make this a non-starter for me. I can't think of a single time someone would realistically use any of the modes the site lists. If they used a hashtag, there's no way to handle knowing which email address someone might've used (personal, work, etc).
The first-date example had me checking for April 1.
"It's all up to Lisa now. If she really wants to get out of there she might check for a bunch of variations like #wannaGetOutOfHere, #letsBounce, #notFeelingThisPlace, #wannaGo, etc."
What are the chances that two people on a date use their phones long enough and are both aware of an obscure site to make more progress than just saying "Well, this is very formal. What do you think?"
There is at least a confirmation email step. Otherwise hehe your worries on spam do echo mine. So far I've just been ignoring that aspect and leaving it open. Honestly I don't know how any web service that ultimately sends transactional email really deals with it, beyond brute-forcing it down to an acceptable rate. Even Google's captchas can be defeated by bots nowadays AFAIR, and they're the best. My thoughts are that ultimately you have to hope that it doesn't happen to you. I would appreciate other people's opinions and experience here as well. Thanks for your comment.
If you send a hint about a difficult conversation (#reunite, #breakup), what are the odds that the recipient won't be able to guess who sent it and the gist of the secret? Is this any better than just having the conversation directly?
If you don't send a hint, it seems extremely unlikely that the other person will use the service with the exact same hashtag, as another commenter pointed out.
Great question. One answer is that it gives the recipient plausible deniability (I think I'm using that term right, sorta). They have the power to not respond even though they probably know who the sender is. And if they don't try to respond then hey they can never be 100% sure of who the sender is. And the sender can never be 100% sure their message was even received. So basically it gives both party's ego/pride some breathing room.
As far as the "no hint" case, well yes the service would need to be in the zeitgeist in order to have utility. Who knows maybe one of the big social networks will steal the idea. They can go for it! Just remember little ole me in the credits section somewhere, is all I ask. :)
The hint, "Give them the exact hashtag that you use" seems rather easy to brute force. Maybe I am just young, but there are only a small number people who would send me hashtags like "#reunite" or "#wannaGoOut".
As others have mentioned, without this hint hashtags are rather sparse.
Note that hints can also simply be "who sent the thought" and not the hashtag or anything. Doesn't directly address your point, just another way to use the service. See https://aytwit.com/thoughter#hints for the different hint types.
Edit: realized from your comment you probably read that section already, apologies!
Doesn't this leak too much information if both parties aren't being honest? E.g. you could just submit spouse + every likely hashtag--#breakup, #haveKids, etc.--and then see what ends up matching.
Right, but suppose I know or suspect that a specific person is trying to send me a hashtag, but I don't know what that hashtag is: let's use the example given in the posted website of a new romantic partner wanting to take things to "1st base", "2nd base", etc. Can't I just post all four bases and see what matches? That would reveal their preference without revealing mine.
Ah but one can argue you have revealed your preference, namely that you have no preference, that you'll take the highest base on offer! :)
And note that the other party can check if you sent those other thoughts out if they wanted, so it's socially risky for you to do so ("Ew what a creep, he blasted out all four bases!"). This stuff is fun to think about.
I really like this idea, and I think that exposing the underlying SQL schema (especially in literate programming style like that) is the next level in technical transparency.
Thanks! I spent a lot of time on it for just that reason, being as transparent as possible. Here's the link in case others are wondering what you're talking about: https://aytwit.com/sql
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[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadYou're suggesting this is an unrealistic example? The tool is far from elegant enough to facilitate such a reunion, but I can count a handful of such estranged father/son pairs for which the right mediation might help.
I do think some of the other examples are really good though, and I like the possibilities. I think I’m just sensitive to one part of it, and that sensitivity shouldn’t write it off fornwhat it could be.
One perfect use-case for this is for an adopted person. They don't know their birth mum and dad, and it takes intense bravery to face up to that and reach out and trust them to feel the same way as you. What if you get rejected? Wouldn't you try to make this interaction safer? What if you could even practice it knowing that the communication would be erased in a short time?
Yes, I'm talking about me. And others in my position.
Also, layout is clean, but feels a bit antiquated. Bootstrap perhaps?
I think https://aytwit.com/thoughter#hints answers your question.
If I am reading correctly, if person S sends person R a message M bearing hash tag H, if R sends their own message M2 to S bearing hash tag H2, then M will be revealed to R and M2 will be revealed to S, if and only if H equals H2. (S may choose some behaviors, such as revealing their identity, in order to prompt R into sending a message.)
As for your second paragraph: I like this site's design<1> a lot. I was able to skim it quickly, and absorb enough to answer your question and more. With respect, I think more work has gone into its design than "antiquated" would suggest.
For one example, on mobile the body paragraphs on the right of the screen can themselves be dragged to the left to read all the info, instead of my having to use the tiny fiddly scrollbar. I think that's a smart feature for a mobile site with a fair bit of text (such as on the SQL page.) Consider also that the site uses colors for text, background, and UI elements (body, nav, etc) that neither clash hideously nor strain the eyes with too-low contrast; plenty of old websites don't take that level of care (think a typical professor's academic homepage - now THOSE can get antiquated!)
Bootstrap will get you a "modern"-style site without too much effort, but I don't think it would add anything here.
<1> By design I am waving in the general direction of layout, color scheme, ease of use, etc.
edit: usage of Comic Sans (or something closely resembling it) gives me the (wrong) impression that the project is a satire. Bootstrap or something indeed.
edit 2: https://aytwit.com/about#technical_details__the_stack first ikwyt link is wrong https://aytwit.com/about/ikwyt
* edit 3: now that I think about it I believe the term joke is way more offensive in English than in my first language. Parody or social commentary would have been more appropriate.
It doesn't take much poking around to see that the project is in earnest.
Initial thoughts:
1. Even assuming both person A and person B use the service within a week of each other, the odds that they both use the same hastag are astronomically low. Person A says '#wannaGoOut', but person B says '#IWantToGoOut'. There are way too many possible permutations of a single thought.
2. As another commenter said, the design is clean but feels like it belongs in 1995. It will not get off the ground looking like this. The basic layout is fine, but the colors and fonts need to go.
3. Without an app, I think you'll have a hard time gaining critical mass. If someone has a thought and all it takes to get it out onto Thoughter is to (i) open the app, (ii) type, (iii) and send, then it will be way more likely to be used.
4. This feels a bit like Craigslist Missed Connections. Not saying that's a good - or bad - thing, it just does.
5. What if I see a cute girl at a coffee store, we hit it off, but I don't have her email address - or even her name? What then?
2. Yeah, it's a nod to certain eras of web design, which I like, but other people won't care so I agree.
3. It's email-based in order to make it work for recipients who don't have the app.
5. In 2019, it's probably best to support Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram as recipient addresses... somehow. Although most of those aren't technically possible. Those platforms aren't really great for building services on top of.
That's only one of four possible settings, and using it breaks half of the examples: it works great for #reunite, not so great for #breakup
> 1. Even assuming both person A and person B use the service within a week of each other, the odds that they both use the same hastag are astronomically low. Person A says '#wannaGoOut', but person B says '#IWantToGoOut'. There are way too many possible permutations of a single thought.
My hope is that hashtags would become standardized, and hints (https://aytwit.com/thoughter#hints) will also help with this.
> 3. Without an app, I think you'll have a hard time gaining critical mass. If someone has a thought and all it takes to get it out onto Thoughter is to (i) open the app, (ii) type, (iii) and send, then it will be way more likely to be used.
Totally agree. An app would also allow the service to avoid email, and allow encryption on the client-side without the server seeing any plain text at all. Definitely a goal.
> 5. What if I see a cute girl at a coffee store, we hit it off, but I don't have her email address - or even her name? What then?
Good question! I don't have an answer unfortunately. Guess you gotta do things the old-fashioned way. :)
I agree email is so five minutes ago, but it was the easiest path to get started.
Seconding talking to Snap.
Build an app, get it out there, see whats up
Something like Berkanan, a physical proximity-based messaging app that uses Bluetooth, may help.
https://berkanan.chat/
I would reconsider this decision.
Edit: To be clear, a font sets the tone for the content of a page and unless your project is an invitation to a clown orgy then Comic Sans sets the wrong tone.
Seriously though the font put me off at first glance, people who just visit it might not hang around long enough to become a user.
Edit:
Compare the current version: https://i.imgur.com/W8stZVf.png
...to the same thing with a couple of quick styling tweaks I added in dev tools: https://i.imgur.com/RJhLz7B.png
Still offbeat, much less "child's keyboard color scheme" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007YW3CL6).
My guess is that this would appeal most to a younger audience but how many teenagers communicate via email?
I think it'd be a hit if it could somehow integrate with social media or even just SMS.
If I have time to meet a woman tonight and it's 4pm, what exactly is Tinder replacing? The hell of cold-approaching women at bars until one of them seems to like me? Mine my depleted social circle for a date? Wank off in my bedroom because I don't have any new prospects and be happy with that?
The whole point of Tinder is to find new face to face interactions.
A lot of people are not comfortable with confrontation in the first place. And it is entirely normal. It just how people are wired and expecting them to change themselves drastically is not fair on them. It should be a gradual process and a thing like thoughter is a great use for "getting started". End goal is of course to confront.
Even bought the domain thottr.com for this back in 2011. Hilarious
There's actually a patent from the mid-90's that basically describes the same idea that we both came up with: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5117358A/en. I found it after I had finished the first version and was crushed that someone had thought of my genius idea first.
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Thot
Instead offer a few predefined categories of tags, and the user can select one or more of them. That also improves the UI as you can now offer autocomplete in that field and lower the barrier of entry (removing option paralysis).
Thanks to everyone checking this out. I know it's kind of a weird project, but that's the idea! I've been kicking this project around since college in 2003 when I was afraid to ask a girl out even though I was pretty sure she liked me too. Instead of just asking her out I tried to come up with a way to fix my anxiety with software, and thus Thoughter was born. Don't worry I'm a bit wiser now. :)
You can read more about the back story at https://aytwit.com/blog/thoughter_origin_story and why it took so long for me to complete. Hint: I cared too much about privacy, before it was cool!
https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/4287xp/i_built...
Lovegety and other "proximity matchmaking devices"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovegety
Online questionnaires for couples that only yield matching answers:
https://mojoupgrade.com/
https://www.weshouldtryit.com/
https://www.letsexperiment.xyz/
Once in college I got an email from (I think) ecrush.com, saying "someone has a crush on you", and on the site you could enter email addresses of people you had crushes on and it would spam them that same thing, anonymous until there was a match. (Personally, I suspect it was bootstrapping by sending fake initial "someone has a crush on you" emails to scraped emails, but I didn't dig in too deep.)
This is a classic chicken-and-egg issue: No one will want to use it unless/until enough people are using it to have some hope of a reply.
Any plan for how to address that issue?
https://aytwit.com/thoughter#hints sort of solves the adoption problem, in that you wouldn't necessarily need a critical mass of people for the service to be useful. Even just one patron could initiate a thought with another.
I will suggest that maybe you need to move the "Hints" section or otherwise highlight it in some fashion. If they have the thought "Eh, no one even knows this service exists. Why bother?" before they get to the Hints section, this could be a barrier to adoption.
I tried linking to that "hint" anchor tag in the first paragraph but even that is expecting too much. I'll give a think about how I can highlight the whole hint/adoption thing more since it's a main point of feedback. Thanks!
Sometimes you want to ask someone a question or tell them a secret and you suspect or hope they're thinking the same thing, but it's uncomfortable to bring up. This is what Thoughter is for!
And they don't even have to know Thoughter exists. You can send them a Hint. But more about that later.
Let's say it's the holidays and you and a loved one had a fight a while back. You aren't sure they would welcome hearing from you. You can send a Thought like "I miss you #reunite" that lasts one week. If your loved one sends the same sort of thing with a matching hashtag, you each get the other's email. If not, nothing happens.
This used to be done much more naturally back when people routinely lived in close-knit communities. People would ask a friend a question and that friend would ask their friend. Word traveled by the grapevine, which helped sort things out.
But in our increasingly mobile world, a lot of grapevines have basically died. This is your modern grapevine, now with Encryption!
Move: "The first project out of Aytwit's software research labs." to much later. Like close with it or something. It's important to you. It mostly isn't important to the process of getting adoption. Making it the first sentence amounts to "noise."
The opening line "The first project out of Aytwit's software research labs." is making me cringe now lol.
If you send hints like "someone wants to #reunite" I'm sure the recipient will accept just to find out who the person is regardless of what their offline intentions are. Since your identity is revealed anyway I don't see how this saves you from the perceived embarrassment of just asking the person directly.
In the past I've often desired and tried asking for things subtly or in a round about way so as to hunt at what I want without the risk if rejection. In my experience it's not a great path to take.
If the fear of rejection outweighs the potential benefits and you can't bring yourself to ask (for a date, raise, reunion, etc.) then maybe you just don't want as much as you think you do.
When you want something deeply enough you'll ask for it without fear or embarrassment.
The way hashtag-based hints work is that the recipient would only see that someone had a thought with that hashtag, not who. I don't know if that addresses your point exactly, but the recipient in this case doesn't necessarily know who wants to #reunite, it's not revealed just by clicking or anything. If they suspect someone specifically then it's up to them to guess essentially.
> When you want something deeply enough you'll ask for it without fear or embarrassment.
It sounds to me like you are not an introvert and judge who is by "not wanting things enough". It's not as simple as you think.
There is wisdom in the phrase carpe diem.
If I want a raise, I have the potential for a reward and a potential risk of letting my boss know that I'm not happy with my current salary. I think that fear of asking is really that fear of rejection or fear of disconnection.
What I'm saying is that this tool won't always be there and we need to find ways on our own to minimize the fear / risk of asking for what we want in life.
Sure, you might get lucky a couple times with this app, but life will keep throwing you more awkward situations.
In lieu of the missed connection's email address, you could provide a few specific details about the encounter (choosing from prewritten options):
Time (options provided in 3-hour blocks ie 9am-12pm), name of neighborhood, city, your ethnicity (or some other easy personally identifying feature).
If the other person also goes on the site to submit a missed connection within a few days of yours and fills out the same details, they'll be prompted to answer the detail about your personally identifying feature to receive your message and relay email to respond to.
(Yes this would only work well if the website became widely known as the place to go to for private missed connections.)
Probably a few loopholes with this, just thinking out loud.
Further, if I received an email from this site, I would assume it was a scam and delete it. I get dozens of emails from services pretending I’ve signed up to them or that they have real content from me.
Could you elaborate? I have vague worries since there's not a captcha or anything. But I can't think of an attack or abuse beyond a DoS-type thing, and I don't know why someone would do that beyond trolling. I know my naïveté probably sounds painful but I would appreciate more feedback here.
Would a captcha be enough? My concern there is that I'm being super paranoid about privacy (https://aytwit.com/about#privacy) and wouldn't want to incorporate Google's captcha if I don't have to.
I would implement heavy rate limiting and maybe come up with a basic captcha that would stop most spammers.
Oh, and by the way: if you want italics there can’t be a space between the asterisk and the phrase to be italicized (like * this * versus this).
Even if you require approval from the sending email before pushing the thought, someone can still use Mailinator/similar for that.
Personally, the combination of solution-in-search-of-a-problem and this sort of hassle would make this a non-starter for me. I can't think of a single time someone would realistically use any of the modes the site lists. If they used a hashtag, there's no way to handle knowing which email address someone might've used (personal, work, etc).
The first-date example had me checking for April 1.
"It's all up to Lisa now. If she really wants to get out of there she might check for a bunch of variations like #wannaGetOutOfHere, #letsBounce, #notFeelingThisPlace, #wannaGo, etc."
What are the chances that two people on a date use their phones long enough and are both aware of an obscure site to make more progress than just saying "Well, this is very formal. What do you think?"
If you don't send a hint, it seems extremely unlikely that the other person will use the service with the exact same hashtag, as another commenter pointed out.
So, where is the utility?
As far as the "no hint" case, well yes the service would need to be in the zeitgeist in order to have utility. Who knows maybe one of the big social networks will steal the idea. They can go for it! Just remember little ole me in the credits section somewhere, is all I ask. :)
As others have mentioned, without this hint hashtags are rather sparse.
Edit: realized from your comment you probably read that section already, apologies!
But this requires too many assumptions on participants.
And note that the other party can check if you sent those other thoughts out if they wanted, so it's socially risky for you to do so ("Ew what a creep, he blasted out all four bases!"). This stuff is fun to think about.