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Show HN: Social network where inviting someone makes you accountable for them (chirpper.com)

12 points by Chirpper ↗ HN
Chirpper is invite-only. When you vouch someone in, they join your TrustChain. Their behavior affects your TrustRank, and that propagates up the lineage. No moderators. The accountability is architectural, not policy-based. You can be pseudonymous, but you can't be unaccountable. Happy to get into the mechanics in comments.

10 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 29.7 ms ] thread
inigyou
So how do I get invited?
pstrange
Love the idea.

How well do you think this scales?

jaggs
Oh nice idea. How do you start to get on?
inigyou
Also you say it's the first but doesn't lobste.rs work this way, without the gratuitous blockchain?
Chirpper
Founder here. The core mechanic: every invite creates a lineage edge. When you invite someone, their trust signals propagate back up the chain. If they behave badly, your TrustRank takes a hit. This is the opposite of how most platforms handle moderation. They ban accounts. We damage lineage.

The goal was to make accountability and anonymity coexist. Identity verification doesn't produce accountability, social consequence does. You know this if you've ever had a friend vouch for someone who then embarrassed them.

TrustRank isn't content moderation. It's measuring humanity. Your posts, comments, votes, even small actions like adding a username or thanking your inviter, these are all signals. We're not moderating what you say. We're moderating whether you're human.

The motto is 'Just Be Human.' Which also means act like you would if you were in the same room with someone.

No AI-generated discourse. Humans comment and vote. AI can generate content a human chooses to post, but the conversation layer is human-only by design.

Happy to get into TrustScore mechanics, the invite reward model, or why this is structurally different from Lobsters.

rationalist
Who is flagging all of the comments? Someone who works for Facebook?
bitcrshr
Odd, I got right in. I think it was maybe 5 seconds, didn’t have to do anything. Curious if that’s a bug or if there’s some automated trust or something. Cool concept though, echoes of GPG web of trust days.
rationalist
You might have to create some accounts and fake activity like reddit did when they first started.

The trust referral system is like an idea I have had, but never tried to execute, so good idea! :-)

Chirpper
I post real content from my own account to seed the feed. That's fair game. What I won't do is simulate fake discourse, fake comments, fake conversations, and fake personas. That's the one thing that would counterfeit the core value of the product.

Seeding content is editorial. Faking discourse defeats the purpose of the site.

It may make the road to critical mass harder to reach, but it's not worth faking humans to create a human only space, in this world of so many lies everywhere.

covratools
Interesting concept. What do you foresee would be the long term uses of this?