HN Explorer

Show HN: hipchan, an anonymous sharing site built with 1 page js

9 points by Charuru ↗ HN
URL: http://hipchan.com/

The story: after seeing this on HN http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1940089 and seeing a comment about 4chan, I decided that I could build something that embraces the 4chan idea. Even though the story today is 'social' I really think that anonymity will continue to have a place in future communities.

It was supposed to be a weekend hack, and it was! 95% of the features were worked out in the weekend following, but somehow testing lasted till today...

Primary feature: The ability to have * boards. For example: http://hipchan.com/#hn

The Tech: Mongolab/jquery/pusherapp There's only 1 html page and everything is done via ajax.

For the niche I'm targeting/Branding: Still a little uncertain how that's going to work out or how it'll be in general. Advice on this would be great.

You should try out the site: http://hipchan.com/

10 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 34.5 ms ] thread
Skywing
i never understood the appeal of these sites.
zackfern
It would be a great open source project. What is your plan for the site? What "niche" are you targeting and what is your goal with the site?
Charuru
I'm not sure, my first thoughts just were, I want to build this, and then I wrote a bunch of javascript.

Currently the site domain makes a reference to hipsters, but I don't know if that's a worthwhile niche.

I'm not sure what to do now, this is just entirely a hack without direction.

Anyone have ideas? What would you do if you were in charge of this?

Thanks.

bricestacey
Found out the hard way: This is not safe for work.
signal
Nothing chan is ever safe. Chan means fired (unless you work at a chan).
Charuru
You're right sorry, it was work safe when I posted it. But now... :S
signal
What's it going to cost you to host this thing if it replaces 4chan?
Charuru
Order of magnitude cheaper than 4chan I think, since there's very little going on server side. At least for right now.

The most expensive thing will probably be the pusherapp subscription. Right now it's free but tbh it looks expensive. I'm always investigating alternative solutions, there are several services that look way cheaper that I would switch to whenever pusher starts charging.

blacksheep
Huh, I had a somewhat similar idea with: Shoble.com. Big emphasis on the ability to file your post under an arbitrary number of subforums via tagging, though. Threw it up a few months ago, but I couldn't figure out how to get a userbase and so I never added the features I intended to.

I definitely agree with you that anonymity's never going away, and _something_'s going to eat 4chan's lunch at some point in the future, in light of moot's complete lack of interest in improvement and features.