Show HN: Discuo – Anonymous discussions with infinite branching and 24h lifespan (discuo.com)
I built Discuo, a unique discussion platform that combines:
- Infinite thread branching: conversations evolve naturally in multiple directions
- 24h post lifespan: all content auto-deletes after 24 hours
- No account needed: just start posting or commenting instantly
- Complete anonymity: no tracking, no personal data collection
- Minimalist design: distraction-free, focused on pure discussion
Originally created for developers to share progress and discuss code, it evolved into a platform covering various topics while maintaining its minimalist essence.
77 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadedit: I guess if it took off, you'd incur storage costs :thinking:
Thanks!
Do your thing and ignore some randoms replies online. Including this one.
UX nit: "post anonymously" looks like a button, and I pressed it a couple of times before understanding it's just a switch.
Thanks for your comment, I'll fix it
- The 24 hour horizon means you could get away without namespace functionality like categories entirely, especially when self-hosting for a small-to-medium-sized group.
- It's tiring to read sites with all monospace fonts. I can see how it might be useful if most posts contain a lot of code, though.
- Do you expect this to be open sourced?
To me this sounds like building your own db but worse.
Of course you'll have to choose the right data structures in memory, but that can be ad hoc to your app, so considerably less complex than a general purpose database.
The only problem is when you go out of memory, but if you have an eviction strategy (i.e. a 24 hours life per post), you don't need to scale for a long time.
Subject to visitor country as the captcha is a Cloudflare captcha and they aren't legally allowed to serve just whatever internet visitor
The fastest rapid fire message boards are also the most chaotic, with the lowest signal-to-noise. There's a certain comfyness in smaller places, outside the containment imageboards, that you won't have if you just clone slash pol slash and force the conversations to be even shorter and meaningless that they already are over there.
Also, the point isn't to be a regular human being, it's to be a hacker, or engineer, or, [other]. Why be boring (regular) when you can be good at something instead?
Besides all of that, it makes the web more usable in most cases. Not more functional, more usable. I don't want your site to hijack my browser scroll, nor do I want your modal popups to interrupt me. Plus, I like knowing the level of competency of the site's developers. If it doesn't function at all without enabling a half dozen external scripts/sites, even if I still want to use your site. Which is then unlikely, I know to lower my expectations about how much I can trust you or your site.
I'm against bloated apps and ads, in favor of using forms and HTMLs strengths, but JS is the tool and not the cause of poor design. A web developer that doesn't use it is offloading their identity based allergy onto the users bandwidth.
Plus you can make modals without JS
Show me a single site that uses js in this way. But, and here's the trick... it has to *actually* use less network bandwidth. My issue isn't with js as a web development tool. My issue is with js when it's the wrong tool.
> A web developer that doesn't use it is offloading their identity based allergy onto the users bandwidth.
That's an interesting hypothetical, but I'd be willing to be more user bandwidth is consumed by needless JS scripts, than by all the engineers that you'd call "allergic" to js.
> Plus you can make modals without JS
Show me one that triggers when I scroll too far, or move my mouse outside of the window that doesn't use js?
All of your claims lack evidence... there's plenty of things that sound great in theory, but have been toxic and user hostile every time someone has actually tried to apply said theory.
Lots of sites use JS that way. This was the default way of doing it with JQuery. Yeah, an object with a couple fields is going to use less bandwidth than loading the whole page, in the case of a row.
I agree that you can absolutely find people overusing JS, but your original position was the web is better off without JS. In fact, you implied developers using it weren't competent, but now you've changed it to "actually it's okay if it's used right" which is what I said.
> All of your claims lack evidence.
Nothing I said lacks evidence, in fact they're pretty basic things you can verify? It seems like you want me to prove the entire Internet is using JS how you like. I'm sorry, bad sites are always gonna suck with or without JS
You gave an example that I agree with, that would be a useful use of JS. Does that exist, or is that just a theoretical example? Theoretically, a lot of stuff is good. Theoretically, amphetamines could be over the counter... everyone just needs to use them responsibly!
1) Web is much faster.
2) Often JS makes continuous CPU load, raising speed of CPU fan to noisy levels.
3) Sometimes JS is used for animations, i hate animations on web pages.
4) Sometimes JS is used to auto-play videos (although recent Firefox with proper settings ca block that even with JS enabled in most cases), i hate auto-play videos. That was my primary reason to switch to disabled JS in the past.
5) Often cookie and other pop-ups are implemented with JS and do not show when JS is disabled (while the web still works).
6) Most ads disappear even without ad-blocker.
Sorry for the rant, I just really hate how much of a buzzword anonymity has become when nearly every claim of it falls on its face.
The system balances legal compliance with user privacy - I can assist investigations through hash matching while maintaining technical inability to reverse-identify users. This is not about avoiding compliance, it's about responsible data minimization. The architecture ensures I can't provide what I don't have, while still maintaining effective moderation capabilities.
Genuinely curious as I think anonymous discussions are awesome but hate the kind of stuff that comes along with other anonymous image boards. Truly hope this is successful and results in a wonderful thriving community.
Some thoughts:
- I'd fix the breadcrumbs so it's not /ai but /tech/ai.
- Seeing the crowdflare captcha gives me the ick. There should be different GDPR-compliant solution other than giving crowdflare all our info.
- Maybe tie the 24hr deletion period to the number of upvotes for a certain post. If a post gets many upvotes, add another day to its lifetime and so on