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Show HN: Forum where posts slowly disappear unless interacted with (disappearing.chat)

6 points by cedricmcdougal ↗ HN
I'm always nervous to post online (this is my very first HN post), so I built an anonymous forum where posts are automatically deleted after 24 hours. Every upvote or comment resets the clock.

Some things I like about this concept:

- The sheer volume of information on the internet is overwhelming - disappearing.chat keeps that volume low

- Unpopular content slowly fades away, so you can visually watch bad takes disappear

- Content is always fresh because even popular things will eventually stop getting interaction

- Takes the pressure off that your content is going to stick around forever

fwiw this just started as a toy project to play around with the Next.js app directory, Tailwind and deploying to Vercel, but I figured I'd get it fully functional and share it.

6 comments

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tamimio
Nice concept but I think the beauty of forums is the post can be found useful a decade later, even if it has no replies, I always find those useful posts from ~2004 in linux forums!
cedricmcdougal
Totally agree. Now that Google has been pushing forum results more recently, I find myself always clicking on Reddit threads instead of other results. It's a treasure trove of information.

It's interesting to think how temporary posts would change the content though. Like, you're probably not going to ask a question if it will get deleted in 24 hours. So it wouldn't become a corpus of information, but maybe it would have a different feeling and culture than the existing social media platforms.

briandswartz
Feels like a Slack killer :)

But seriously, we'd solve a lot of issues with internal docs if Slack threads died as soon as they were no longer interesting.

cedricmcdougal
oooh new idea for a slack store app. maybe instead of just deleting the message it could feed it into an LLM that would insert the information into a company wiki, so you have to go to the wiki to search instead of digging through old slack messages, which always sucks
082349872349872
On first glance it sounds to me like bitrot* with extra steps, but it's cool that you're making the experiment.

* compare how little text we have left from 2500-5000 years ago.