Show HN: I built an active community of trans people online (t4t.social)
A year ago I surveyed the internet and noticed there was only one popular space for trans and gender-non-conforming people to meet; Lex.
Lex is not well liked by its users. Its software feels heavy and it is full of cash grabs and anti-patterns. It was recently acquired and is sure to only become more hostile to its users as it turns towards profit generation.
With this in mind I built t4t, an alternative specially designed for not only queer people, but specifically trans people.
It is an extremely lightweight service. I built it with my most ideal stack: Flutter, Svelte, Supabase, Posthog.
It has grown in the last year to about 4,000 monthly active users. I think it could grow way beyond that this year.
409 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadOn Bluesky they just apply a label and users are free to toggle it as show/warn/hide. At least, this is what I've personally experienced using the site.
A lot of the other thirstposting is, from my experience, very much genuine and heartfelt.
The trans community is often quite open.
I'm personally transgender, monogamous and mostly lesbian, so I'm a bit of a "boring" outlier when it comes to the poly & kink communities. But I spend a LOT of time in trans spaces. Online and offline. Professionally and casually. Younger and older. Political and friendly.
Etc
You need to get out in the world more, that's a very limited locale specific PoV.
68% seems 'mostly'.
As does this map: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/trans-pop...
/ˈməʊs(t)li/ adverb as regards the greater part or number.
The "worldpopulationreview" data has shortcomings. An obvious (for any with a background in data collection) reporting bias for one ..
If not, I'm happy to walk you through some of it - it'd impress more if you can come back with a global average figure for transgenderism and some thoughts on why (for example) Indonesia has such a large population and yet such low official figures (43K IIRC rather than >> 3 million).
Forget the transgender part and think of this as a data exercise.
Even (cis) men have "locker room talk," things you wouldn't say when around most women.
Dunno, if you can't say it around women, at all ever, then it probably doesn't hold up to scrutiny. I'd say you share raunchy stuff with people you know to not have a problem with it, and depending on what it is that might be your guy friends more often, sure. But I know men who are way more stuck up than some women I know, not even a contest. If I was in a big group of guys and there was the expressed or implied statement of "okay, since we're amongst heterosexual men only now, we can say certain things we normally can't say" I would just get out.
That's not a statement on the site OP posted, I just disagree that cis men say stuff amongst themselves they wouldn't around women, while homosexual or bisexual men would never do that. There's bigots and people who can actually own what they say anywhere, no group is purely saint or evil.
Nothing they said implied the 2nd part even slightly. And not because most homosexual and bisexual men are cis.
I immediately saw:
- Someone who wants to be treated as a dog
- Someone who listed their "new experiences" which included "getting fisted", "being fucked with a (fake) knife", "sleeping in a dog crate" and more.
- Someone looking for sex
WTF?
1. The experience is different. I'm not seeing any of that type of content.
or
2. It's not obvious how to "scroll by new unfiltered". If I'm not doing it, I can't see how to do it. I would never do it accidentally.
@t4t :
which is 100% fine.
Just keep PII out of government hands, while verifying users before showing them content.
While you get the NSFW toggling working. I would (for an over abundance of caution) turn off all content previews for non registered users.
typical but also foreseeable. please be responsible
Communities of horny people are indeed weird stuff.
I remember one time when I accidentally happened upon one such community, naively thinking it was just a local bar.
Oh wait, that's every local bar I've ever set foot in.
What community do you live in, and what do they put in the water there? :)
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Disclaimer: what I wrote here is explicitly aimed at the post I replied to. Not to anybody else.
My guess is that if you just scrolled twitter or whatever by new exclusively unfiltered you wouldn’t have that different an experience.
On the one hand I do think there is something interesting about the rawness of this network but also some sort of smart nsfw filtering is clearly needed, and I've been in the bubble of making this long enough to have become a bit desensitized.
I will get that shipped within the week!
Otherwise you could run afoul of various laws, since technically minors can access it
I would urge you to reread my post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think it's pretty clear what "the flamewar style" means to anyone who's been around internet forums for a little while, but if you want a definition, it could be somewhere in the neighborhood of: conversation that's focused on aggressive/snarky/indignant expression for the purpose of venting and/or defeating opponents, as opposed to curious, respectful conversation for the purpose of learning from each other. These two are mutually exclusive, and on this site we want the latter, not the former. Your GP comment was the former, as for that matter was your reply to me here.
It can in some contexts! For example with friends or close colleagues, or a small group of familiars. But the context is the dominant variable.
In a context like HN (a large, public, optionally anonymous internet forum), sarcasm and satire and snark are likely to come across as cheap attacks. The odds of that are so high that such messages should either be avoided or disambiguated enough that the median reader—someone who doesn't know you or anything about you—can still detect that you're conversing respectfully.
This sucks a bit—it means we're all subject to a certain blandness here. But the alternative is the war of all against all, followed by scorched earth, and that isn't much of a choice.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I said the NSFW text content. Not trans people.
Or is there general consensus that plain body-font sized text is also an NSFW concern?
NSFW text is a thing, there are porn sites that house explicit text for zoophilia, pedophilia, incest, rape, etc. I’m not saying this site has anything extreme or out there, but there are likely laws governing what text can be shown, it’s simpler to just require login, since that will also help protect you against COPPA and other restrictions for minors that are non NSFW related.
I’m all for free speech, but there are laws governing how certain text is handled
Is that true?? In the US?
My instinctive metric[0] for NSFW is: Could a casual passerby see something that falls into a class of designated offensivenesses (e.g. sex of any kind, but not violence unless it's also sexual)?
Text in a giant font could certainly qualify. But I would not think that ordinary-sized body text would be problematic -- if the passerby has to pause and snoop, they are breaking other equally-important protocols to ascertain SFW or lack thereof.
0: I have not run this by an HR department, and I've worked from a home office for more than twenty years, so I may know nothing of which I speak!
I've never lived under such a regime, but all of the trigger words I can imagine at OP's site are also present in generally-SFW discussion forums.
If they check on a site and it's heavy on the NSFW maybe things get looked into with a bit more of a "... is this person browsing porn at work?" attitude
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That may mean users identifying themselves, which seems dangerous. (It should not at all be dangerous, but it is.) All you need is some phobic government official to sue or investigate you, for any reason they can come up with, and demand all your records as part of their lawsuit/investigation.
Perhaps there's a way to do age verification while minimizing privacy risks? For example, verify their age, give them their credentials, then delete the PII? I don't know if that would suffice if your age verification practices were challenged.
(Talk to an expert.)
The whole thing is just moralistic BS anyway. I'm sure most kids can figure out how to use a VPN better than adults.
Yes, and that is exactly why Morality in Media (the right-wing, evangelical group behind these laws) has been proposing them. Their goal is to outlaw pornography (and other "immoral" content) on the internet by making it so difficult to access or provide legally that nobody will bother.
> I'm sure most kids can figure out how to use a VPN better than adults.
You're making the mistake of assuming their goal is to prevent kids from being able to access pornography. It is not. Their goal is to make it so financially impractical to run any service that publishes (or allows people to publish) pornography, LGBTQ content, or anything that they deem "immoral" that nobody even tries. And it's working: many services which used to allow that content before 2017 no longer do, and it is much, much more expensive (and difficult) for the remaining folks to find platforms or hosting providers to continue to do so.
I'm referring to one of several groups that is behind a specific campaign in the US. That doesn't mean that there aren't other efforts to curtail this in other countries or globally.
As mentioned elsewhere, there's a law that's about to go into effect in the UK which is actually way broader and draconian than any that has been passed anywhere in the US. There are more in other countries too.
> There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal.
And yet, when Tumblr and Imgur and Reddit[0] banned pornography, no EU-based competitor emerged to take their place.
[0] Reddit's ban wasn't a total ban, but it was enough to effectively shut down many groups (which was the goal).
> These bills didn’t originate from some evangelical PAC or conservative think tank. Their actual origin was, ironically, The Howard Stern Show. [0]
While it seems like everyone has overwhelmingly sided against free speech advocates (ACLU) and porn sites, there are some interesting points about access/addiction. I'm less impressed if it's purely evangelical driven (at least now), but I'm sympathetic to arguments about access for minors (or their ability to post under-age content). I don't have the answer.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-on...
As someone who's been following this for over a decade, I can assure you it is, in fact, what I expect.
That article is absolute nonsense, which you can tell by the fact that it claims the clock starts in 2021, when these bills have actually been introduced multiple times before then.
Furthermore, the article contradicts its own narrative, first claiming that a Howard Stern spot "started" it, then admitting two paragraphs later that the legislator was inspired by that radio show to contact... an anti-porn lobbyist that she had already known about for years. That's a really... interesting definition of "origin" that they're using.
I don't follow your point about contradiction.
How is contacting a single-issue ally (who's on the opposite end of the political spectrum at that -- and not a "GOP Think Tank" or "evangelical") changing the origin? The person she reached out to is a pro-abortion, radical feminist. That is strengthening the article's key conclusion by a lot. It's a surprising turn for an origin story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_verification_system#United...
Sure, they're major culprits but let's not let the left get off the hook entirely on promoting moralizing censorship of porn too. There are segments of it, especially those in certain feminist camps that hate pornography with a victorian near-evangelical level of scorn and they have a loud voice of their own under different flags and reasoning.
Meanwhile the organised and well-funded evangelicals and right-wingers ignore the constant stream of SA and CP convictions among youth pastors and other supposed moral authorities.
The stats don't necessarily prove that religious states consume more porn, but porn is an existential problem for evangelicals in a way that it isn't for most progressives.
A Virtual Private Network is a private network such as a Local Area Network created virtually on a Wide Area Network such as the internet. Tailscale, SoftEther, or Hamachi for the old boys are examples of VPN implementations.
A proxy is a server that accepts and forwards traffic from clients through it, lending its IP address to clients as the traffic origin if desired.
A proxy can exist in a private network, but it is not a requirement.
That is, does the ISP have access to the information that's being accessed via the proxy?
It was my understanding that proxies tending to mask where a request came from but does nothing significant with the data between it and the requester.
It could, but it's not a hard requirement. A proxy server is just like any other server, encrypting the data en route is as desired.
A VPN encrypts data as a part of securing tunnels, but it's not a hard requirement there either. As long as two computers can communicate over private IP address ranges on a WAN, it's a VPN. The Private in VPN indicates the scope of the network, not whether any data within is immediately accessible.
See also: "Private" and "Public" IP address ranges.
>does the ISP have access to the information that's being accessed via the proxy?
The ISP providing internet to the proxy server will know what the proxy server requests and receives.
>It was my understanding that proxies tending to mask where a request came from but does nothing significant with the data between it and the requester.
Correct. Again, whether the data a proxy server receives and forwards was encrypted is tangential to the task of forwarding data.
VPNs are better (as in more ergonomic) in practice, since large sites tend to block access from known hosting providers (looking at YouTube not rendering video when accessed from a Hetzner server).
I suspect the root of the problem is that over time, "proxy" has become strongly associated with application-layer protocols like HTTP, and after that shift it wasn't obvious what to use for something lower-level that encompassed a wider range of protocols/endpoints/conversations. In principle, "tunnel" would probably have been better (and a legible metaphor to boot), but that's just not how things shook out in practice.
First, system that forwards traffic behind its own IP address is called proxy if it works on application level, and NAT if it works on IP level. So we have socks proxy, but home router with NAT.
Second, VPN is just a fancy name for an overlay network over WAN. Overlay network is overlay network even if it only contains two nodes - your host and a remote router providing internet access.
I do not have direct experience with these VPN services, but i would guess they work on IP level and not on application level. So they are just ISPs providing service through overlay network (VPN) instead of access network or physical network.
Just google "VPN" or "How do I access Pornhub in Alabama?" All of the results refer to "VPNs" as I was using the term.
The culture of over-reaction to danger that has taken over the political domain is creating a nanny state where it's impossible to avoid crosssing red lines and doing something wrong. It's paralyzing society by instilling inaction as the only safe path.
Parents give their kids access to guns and we all know how that ends. If we can't hold parents accountable for their children's violence, I seriously doubt we can do anything about parents failing to parent their kids on this topic.
What are we going to do? throw the single mom with 2 jobs and 5 kids in jail because she didn't pay $20/mo for parental controls on her kids devices?
If she wants to have children out of wedlock or with a man who are not financially capable of being a provider, then she and her children should bear the consequences of that, not everyone else who know has to have government take over the internet and mandates identity disclosures for perusing adult content.
Kids that discovered porn at an early age will not understand how to process it properly and this will impact their relationships in the future. It is their future partners that suffer along with the kids and family.
If the kid is living with single-income grandma, b/c parents passed. Do we throw grandma in jail for not blocking the content properly?
Unless you never let your child near any slightly older child with a phone, you as a parent cannot individually control this.
> The culture of over-reaction to danger
Which is it? Is it that parents haven't protected their children enough, or that children don't need protection from watching pornography?
...are you implying kids are having group jerkoff / porn sessions? Seems like a pretty absurd claim.
Also, on your second point, you seem to be almost strawmanning -- I see no claim from the person you're replying to that they think kids need more protection.
They're stating that parents are actively giving their kids devices, and have a lot of tools to restrict usage of those devices. Whether they literally limit physical access, oversee use, or install filtering software, there's a lot that can be done to restrict access in an authoritarian manner to those kids, and exclusively within the household without having to affect and restrict the overwhelming majority of society: grown adults.
(I also personally believe education is more important than any sort of restriction, and am always against censorship or surveillance policies in general. I definitely agree with them on but I'm trying to mostly restrict my post to what that person almost definitely had in mind, rather than soapboxing my own views).
> ...are you implying kids are having group jerkoff / porn sessions? Seems like a pretty absurd claim.
Pre-internet, there was a fairly common trope of a kid discovering a dirty magazine, often hidden in the home by an older sibling, and showing it to their friends. Nothing actually happening, they were just sharing the images. GP seemed to just be suggesting that updated for the internet age.
Just anything. Beheading videos. Whatever. I can't imagine anyone not realising this is a virtual certainty for some older kids to show younger kids.
> I see no claim from the person you're replying to that they think kids need more protection.
They called it "danger".
> there's a lot that can be done to restrict access in an authoritarian manner to those kids
But not to their kids' friends' older siblings. If you're not talking about that then I don't think you're particularly replying to my comment.
> I also personally believe education is more important than any sort of restriction, and am always against censorship or surveillance policies in general.
I think in this case this fights against the idea that some concepts or experiences are not appropriate for certain ages, and some of them are not currently curatable by parents in a way that they always have been throughout history.
You have to not let your child near any older child with a non-child-safe phone. This is the parents' responsibility.
Does this really even work? The law isn't "if the user's ip address appears to be from this state, then you must require id".
Properly enforcing georestrictions like this costs money and destroys businesses, but that is kinda the point.
2/ request GPS location from the device.
3/ request WiFi location from the device.
4/ require billing address to be out of state. (States collect sales tax based on billing address, not where the service or product is bought. So I think this is fair.)
1/ if the company can’t meet the regulations, it can’t exist.
2/ if there is wiggle room of “as long as you tried your best, then it’s ok”, then requesting gps location, nearby wifi nodes, and banning traffic from data centers, then that would be better.
Slightly aside, if you filter like this for any reason it is safer to check that the request is NOT coming from some other location – that way your main failure mode is accidentally screening someone in a state you don't need to, not accidentally letting someone in that you could face legal action for, though this is a harder check to make.
The blocked people that use VPNs may well appear to be coming from a non-US location too which probably makes the denial slightly safer.
My previous employer used twohat to monitor for content dangerous to underage users, but I don't know if they were any good as it's not my area. It looks like they got bought by Microsoft as twohat.com redirects to a Microsoft product page now
I wonder why trusted third parties haven't sprung up around this very concept to the degree of OIDC (it's almost everywhere), you could have companies that allow uniquely identifying people, without having to manage or even get their PII directly.
Service wants to check age or whether user is banned --> they are redirected to some-identity-platform.com where they can deal with any ID documents and other PII --> some-identity-platform.com gives back a token and a UUID, so all the service really needs is a JSON object with the UUID and whether user is of age (if that was in scope).
That service can also let the user granularly choose what information to return: just the UUID, whether they're of age, or specific data like where they're located, actual PII if needed (e.g. auth with govt. site) etc., the UUIDs could also be service specific, so they cannot be cross referenced across different sites in case of leaks.
Things a bit like that exist, for example here's a few random ones:
It does feel like the privacy problem could be solved in exactly these services, without passing too much information to the service itself. Because currently there are crazy amounts of hate and content out there that I might not want from a certain person on a site I operate, so I could just ban 914582c9-289a-4f8c-9e1c-f4193066e210 and the same person (at least with the same legal identity) could never get another account on my platform. I wouldn't even know that it's John Doe from country X and region Y that's uploading problematic content. Vice versa, I might just sell stuff to 5b9ee810-605b-40ce-9ead-85102e92df74 without ever risking compromising their identity.Assuming services play nice. What if they start sharing UUIDs amongst each other, for example for advertising purposes?
Worse what is stopping companies from creating both service and verifier? Nothing, as Amazon already has both. I do not trust them not to abuse this.
And even if in theory all companies do the respect my privacy. I am one government away, from seeing a law passed, that makes it mandatory to report all UUIDs to the government. The potential for tracking is off the charts.
Right now it takes forever to trace everything. You can realistically only do it for a select targets. If you implement this UUID system, suddenly it becomes much easier to trace everyone's actions.
The problem is that, at least at the moment, simply obtaining a credential like this has a huge chilling effect. You need to mail stuff into some crummy company chosen by the government, which then processes it and takes time. That company might be breached, which identifies you as "a person who is specifically interested in accessing adult content." Many of these problems can theoretically be fixed, but fixing them would have to be the goal of the authorities -- and I suspect it is not.
Or at more risk, a person interested in trans content.
Is it really a good idea to paint a bullseye on this group in the US right now?
And tbh now more than ever I think it’s important for communities like this to exist.
The new administration in the US is openly hostile, and a lot of damage could be done to peoples' lives if, say, the community was hacked and private email addresses (or other PII) was leaked.
And I also agree with you -- now's the time for those of us who can afford it, to fly our ally flags as loudly and proudly as possible.
OP: Please make sure your secure coding and operational security practices are excellent and meet the challenge here.
If it is possible on Supabase I would like to eventually obscure emails and oauth info.
Offer to do a "code review".
You failed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"no good deed goes unpunished" comes to mind
If I were in the US, and particularly in one of the seriously intolerant red states, there's no way I'd want and of my details in their database.
I don't think it's catastrophising to consider there may well be very real risks to being openly trans in the US in the near future. Risks of not only blackhat 4chan hackers, but also from government and legal system attacks on sites like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676944
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548
I would dead man switch the storage's Azure instance. Mayybe the whole thing. Mayybe shouldn't be on azure.
Or just basic ISP, or other provider, logging domains visited per user.
I like how minimalist the UI is, but I might want a little bit of padding on the sides? I feel like HN does that part pretty well even though it's a little more decorated than this.
Also it wasn't obvious to me that the website is sort of a "preview" of the front page and the app is the main platform, i'll have to check that part out too.
The site serves mostly to allow people to share public posts and profiles from the app.
(Also, for those who were confused by 2S - "Two-spirit". That one's new to me in terms of adding it to the acronym list)
Cultural appropriation is learning about things only from people like you, not from the people outside your culture who created it and who may have jarring perspectives and expressions of them.
For example - just something I recently saw - lots of 1950s-60s rock musicians like Elvis and the Rolling Stones appropriated music from black musicians and cashed in on it with legions of white teens. The teens never heard the original musicians or music; they got sanitized, safe, and familiar forms of it - they never encountered much of the original culture or heard from the original people. Apparently some RS performances were note-for-note, vocal-riff-for-vocal-riff copies. (To be fair, the RS apparently often toured with some of the original musicians as opening acts.)
I dont even think 'Cultural Appropriation' describes like, what we ought to do about that in any specific terms. maybe nothing. it more just identifies a problem
What more would you like? These notes have been played this way before, therefor no other group will ever play them again?
Yes, the exploitation of other (especially minority) cultures is an issue. And that's very much not how "cultural appropriation" is used any more - it's very specifically used as "this belongs to that other group, nobody else can have it". And thus precludes any learning.
It is, in its common use, asking for fully siloed cultures. I don't think humanity benefits from those siloes.
Nonsense. Whoever told you that was projecting.
Nothing precludes respectful collaboration and learning, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHgdrzgtBik and numerous other examples.
Worthy of note here is the Rolling Stones learnt about US "black music" from UK record stores, many run by former post WWII US servicemen who preferred the UK to the US South and Jamacian and Trinidadian musicians from the former British slave colonies.
They attended "black" clubs and jammed with black musicians .. they had an experience uncommon in US.
For example, imagine if today people of East and South Asian descent were excluded from SV. Then white developers stole their ideas and code, changed a few things and put their own name on it, and cashed in.
Art has many more cultural consequences than for-profit software, of course.
Just like how people complain that 'crypto' now only means cryptocurrency, or people complain that the new star wars movies 'killed their childhood' etc, having something that you have a strong connection to have its meaning distorted sucks.
Imagine if seeing a holy cross, the first thing you thought of wasn't the religious meaning but that it was the logo for some company.
One of many terms that got taken way out of context and abused by lots of people, some with good intentions and some not
It is; they're just tax exempt and have their own country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Obviously this is just secondhand anecdotal evidence—I'm sure someone who has personally used the app could chime in and correct me if I am wrong.
1) Mainstream dating apps are full of very profit driven patterns, and feel manipulative and corporate. A fair followup would be why would t4t not eventually become like this? I think probably the main differentiator is that t4t is written to run extremely cheap, and my goals for it are mostly just for it to support me financially. I have gotten quite far as a single person team, and currently I am using something like 2% of the processing power within my payment tier on Supabase. There is huge growth potential with little cost increase.
2) Probably the bigger issue is that there is a generational divide between "old queers" and "young queers", and the divide does seem to fall largely on trans comfort. Many older gays feel like their space is invaded, and many younger ones feel discriminated against. I think this pattern plays out regardless of gender. It is helpful to set intentions from the start, and so the intentions of this app from the start are to be most friendly to the "new school" way of seeing things.
3) Finally, these apps are all pretty explicitly sexualized. I know that might sound funny given how sexual the app I created can get, but I am not really pushing that. This is just a free and open community space nothing more. You can use it for whatever you like. You can date on it but you can also just share hot takes and thoughts.
This is the one thing that doesn’t scale. There’s a bunch of T&S advice and best practices out there.
Get a press kit ready. Be clear on what is and isn’t allowed.
In the EU, you would need to be able to provide access to appeals if you cross a certain size (VLOPs).
I mention this because you are a 1 person team.
And you get spammed dickpicks by the hundreds. Even if you explicitly say "I DON'T WANT DICKPICKS AND I WILL REPORT YOU IF YOU SEND ME A DICKPICK" and then you receive a dickpick? And point to the report thing?
You get sent another dickpick by the same person at a different angle.
Happens to me almost daily.
Almost nothing I do works. No moderation settings, no report features, no profile texts.
Grindr is best for gay men and bi men. Trans women, trans men and non binary people are not treated as first-class citizens by the values they care for the most.
That sounds kind of odd to me. I don’t have any experience or insight to people’s experiences here but I would assume that most trans people are trans because they want to be the opposite sex, not because they want to be trans specifically. This statement here suggests they’re identifying as trans more so than the gender they’re transitioning to.
Where am I mistaken?
In this case, she's talking about her preferences which can be any identity, sex etc.
For example, a trans person may prefer to date other trans people because they will have more common experiences and there will be less explaining if how things work on their body etc. Others might have preferences based on primary or secondary sex characteristics. Others may only date people who like a specific type of cheese.
It sounds surprising to me that trans people broadly prefer trans people is all.
Plus as a gay dude I don't even really use it bc it's just a vain wall of abs and conversations about the most inane meaningless things on there.
There aren't even really that many actual geeks in the "geek" tribe. Just pretty dudes who think they're a geek bc they play fifa on their xbox.
the original joke was that despite being called /LGBT/ like 80 percent of all threads were about trans topics for a while at the start, with wlw and mlm general threads kinda on the side
so "trans trans trans trans"
Let’s say this network continues to grow; how do you anticipate funding its future operations?
I think I have engineered it all to scale well, and I don't anticipate costs increasing. The plan right now is to not run ads, and to make almost all features free for all users in perpetuity.
The "science experiments" he ran to "support" his "theories" aren't quite Philip Zimbardo levels of unethical quackery, but I'm still not sure how attaching electrodes to people's genitals and making them watch porn is a sensible way to categorise anyone, even ignoring the fudging required to make his experiments show the "correct" results.
> the excruciating process of transition
I have only ever seen people describe transition with words like "excruciating" for two reasons:
• Social barriers, e.g. medical gatekeeping, transphobic bigotry.
• Believing in the Blanchard or 4chan classification systems, and constantly judging themselves accordingly.
Please don't hold onto this so tight. It's not healthy, and there's zero evidence that it's even remotely true.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to base your understanding of the world on data rather than anecdata, here.
Considering you've replied to 3 different threads starting the same flame war (and are apparently unwilling to accept actual data), I am very skeptical of your ability to move on.
OT: What do you mean by that? I know Popper, I can guess what you mean, but what do you mean?
I'm pretty sure this is in The Open Society and Its Enemies, but I can't remember. I do know that it's in this webcomic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/285
> If your theory is capable of "explaining" every possible piece of evidence, it's not a scientific theory.
Do you mean, if your theory is not falsifiable? If your falsifiable theory is not (yet) falsified, if you magically know it never will be falsified, isn't it still a theory?
(If it's just a matter of wording on an Internet comment, then sorry to bother you - I don't mean to play gotcha.)
However, that was itself me being lazy, because Blanchard's typology does make concrete predictions about what sorts of people exist. The assertion that people can be classified into "attracted to women" and "not attracted to women" is refuted by the Kinsey Reports (and many better studies besides); the assertion that being trans is a sex thing is refuted by the existence of certain ace trans people; the assertion that transition is about imitation is refuted by the existence of certain non-binary people…
Of course, Ray Blanchard himself bolts on new categories whenever he can't fudge the analysis to fit a pre-existing conclusion – last I checked, he had around 10 categories – but most adherents treat the original two categories as dogma. (The lengths to which people will go for a gender binary…)
Really, I should say that if you're cis and relying on thought experiments, Blanchard's typology is unfalsifiable: you will simply not be able to observe any evidence that refutes it. I myself (not then having much contact with out trans people (if we discount Reddit)) had to do a lot of introspection (could I rule out self-deception? wishful thinking? how?) before I concluded that either my internal subjective experience refuted the typology (and its variants), or I was too insane to be capable of reasoning. This tendency towards solipsism did not do me many favours (and was ultimately quite harmful, for reasons I will not discuss here), but it did at least prepare me for the many other academics who talk out of their arses about things they have no legitimate claim to expertise in, save for being among the first academics to study it. (Or, in Ray Blanchard's case, among the first academics to study it after the Nazi purge.)
Thought experiments, unless something provable like mathematics, are worse than useless, they are deceiving. There is an evil demon that deceives us, that we cannot overcome.
The only source of knowledge is to go out and ask, 'what do you mean?' Thanks for answering!
I wouldn't quite say that thought experiments are always deceiving (Albert Einstein found them quite useful, for example), but they are very parodiable. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/183
> "Did he just… not see any of us?" "Rationalists are terrible at seeing stuff. He probably just tried to deduce who was here from reason alone."
Really, purely curiosity. At first, one thing I was wondering was if some new theory might have caught hold in some corner of academia, for example. Then I wondered if I misunderstood falsification myself.
> Einstein found them quite useful, for example
He is why I made the exception for math. His 'experiment' used math (exclusively?) - and wasn't relied upon until confirmed empirically.
False. The clinically accepted typology is 'Gender Dysphoria', as under the DSM-5. The only place AGP is referenced in the DSM is as a subtype of 'Transvestic Disorder' (Transvestic Disorder With Autogynephilia), which is marked explicitly as crossdressing and imagining oneself as a woman solely for sexual purposes. The two diagnoses (Gender Dysphoria and Transvestic Disorder) are distinct from one another and not related.
I think most cis women-who-love-women do like trans women, but they just have more options.
Trans people are part of biology. It's what happens when you are exposed to cross-sex hormones.
Personally, I tend to view (my own) transition as embracing an intersex condition with medical intervention.
Not implicating anything in particular, other than that biology is ridiculously complex. I can only speak from personal experience.
Before I transitioned, I noticed there was a pattern in my life where cis lesbians were interested in me, I've even dated a lesbian cis girl _as a boy_ when I was about 15 or something like that.
Biology is very strange.
I personally use the word "soul" for this kind of stuff. But that's nonsensical in the end.
https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html
This is what keeps most people from hosting user content. It's very easy to do, but it opens you to massive personal liabilities.
Your site has young trans people, sexual content, and would also be a target for grooming from chasers. The risks, for you, are very high.
Is the creator in the UK? Or do they visit regularly? It wasn't mentioned in the original post.
The app publishing didn't exclude the UK, it probably should.
The law applies if you're in the UK or in a country the UK can persuade to extradite you.
The way that some people on HN so casually demand someone to build something and then completely give it away never ceases to disappoint. Thankfully the fact that this community is growing tells me this is not how most people think.
Realistically, you will always need a minimum amount of trust, just don't misplace it.
Also, compiling and verifying software updates is pretty easy for typical application programs. I do it for cryptocurrency software, you just look over diffs and make sure it matches up to the changelog.
The build and what’s hosted have to be the same.
- The API keys are obtained using flutter_dotenv, and omitted from the Git source but trivially extractable from the Play Store APK (using a rooted phone).
- After installing the .env file and building t4t locally, I was unable to log into the Android app using a Gmail account; every attempt left the app in a not-logged-in state. The same thing happened after replacing my local app with the Play Store version? (EDIT: After restarting the app I was able to proceed?)
- (nitpick/observation) When I tap a post, the app opens the user's post history, and I try scrolling the list, the view lags behind my finger. Can't tell if it's latency, dropped frames, or both together.