I'm building sqwok.im, a new open discussion site that mixes real time messaging with news aggregation.
I started building this because I wanted an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics, and other general topics in a modern experience like Slack, with features built for the general user and not enterprise or gaming. I grew up hanging out on aol chat, irc, icq, aim, etc and with those experiences in mind, I'd like sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users.
Currently the site works on both mobile and desktop web and supports multiple concurrent logins. That means you can have multiple tabs open and/or be logged in on a phone and desktop at the same time, and the real time features should work.
The core differentiator for Sqwok is that it's built from the ground up for real time. The site is built around real time conversations that are both ephemeral and long-lived -- all posts include a built-in full-featured chat room.
Have something on your mind or what to discuss the latest news? Simply create a post, share the url with anyone, and they will instantly be able to open it, see the active real time conversation, see who is currently in the conversation, and begin talking with a few clicks. The conversation can be rejoined at any time. It also includes the ability to @mention other users and send them an instant in-app notification to join you.
Recently added is a "follow" feature that allows you to follow another user, and then when they are online and in conversation(s), to both see where they are and join them instantly. This lets you find your friends and join them in conversation at any time.
To keep the site razor focused on actual conversation, I've opted to exclude any form of voting. Instead, relevance for "trending" is based on a combination of real time chat activity and time decay. I have further ideas I'd like to explore here to add options for how people find content, but the goal is to mimic the real world as much as possible, and keep the focus on building rich conversations versus invisible feedback loops.
One particular use case that's come up for this is using it to watch YouTube live streams outside of YouTube, or in the case where the YouTube stream has chat disabled, such as the example below. Feel free to try it out by creating a post and simply include the url for the YouTube stream in the post title.
I don't usually like to comment on design when people post early stage products, because I understand that usually development is focused on core features and, as time goes on, the design will change.
That being said, I feel like the homepage was overwhelming to the point where my immediate reaction was to back out of using the product, so I feel that it's worth commenting on in this case. I'm not trying to nit pick, but if other people had similar reactions, it could affect user acquisition.
There's lots of big bold text and not a lot of use of negative space, so it's really hard to know what to focus on. I feel like a little more vertical space between posts and maybe making the URL smaller or moving it below the post title (or both) could really make the homepage a little less overwhelming with only a few minor changes.
The bold, black text is too much IMO, but I appreciate sites that are high on content, low on unnecessary white space. In fact, I would suggest/prefer experimenting with an interface where:
1) every entry has the exact same amount of vertical space (two lines total), which includes the topic title, link to content, date, and username. Include username and date on the same lines as the other content (not their own line) and truncate long titles to make it work.
2) the links to external content are just the domain name (like HN--you don't currently include enough extra characters for it to be useful to see those extra characters)
This gives the interface more consistency which might help clean up the "messiness" of the look and be more inviting in that way, rather than in a way that cuts down on information density. (Make it a power tool, not a toy.) And as referenced above, playing around with weight and color for all that bolded black would might be helpful.
Thank you for the feedback I really appreciate it!
I like the idea of (1), it would make it more uniform which could increase readability.
For (2) I did truncate it but can see how for many sites it just shows the domain. I didn't want to end up with really long urls being shown either, so maybe extending the truncation a bit could be useful?
I'd like to echo this statement. I found the text was a bit too bold and there wasn't enough whitespace to let the page breathe. I couldn't really get my bearings on what I was looking at. A little bit more tweaking of the design will do wonders to communicate what the "intention" of the page is.
Sites like reddit can get away with a cluttered interface because they've been around for a while, have loads of content, and loads of users, so people put up with it, but for a new site, you have to sell them immediately.
Hey thank you for the feedback! I've received a fair amount of comments on the spacing/font size of the posts list & plan to tweak it. Appreciate the feedback & taking the time to check it out, take care.
Hey thank you for the feedback and for checking it out!
May I ask if you were on desktop or mobile? Definitely could adjust the font sizes and since I've been working mostly on my laptop, I realize I might not be optimizing for other screen sizes.
> I feel like a little more vertical space between posts and maybe making the URL smaller or moving it below the post title (or both) could really make the homepage a little less overwhelming with only a few minor changes.
I will experiment with this further. The vertical space should be easy, the urls are part of the text of the title, so maybe either shrink them slightly or a more muted blue?
> maybe either shrink them slightly or a more muted blue?
Yeah, I think either or those (or both) could work. Looking at it again, a lot of the issue I'm seeing is that the URL and the title are equally prominent and fighting for my attention. I'd take the one you think is less important (probably the URL, imo) and visually make it clear that it's less important, similar to what you did with the user and time it was posted.
I feel like for this kind of product, it's all about the design, and not so much the tech. The design should be given first class priority, in my opinion.
I agree, the design is a crucial part of it! I was originally inspired by Slack, and later Discord, having used irc growing up etc. Thanks for your feedback!
I feel like this gives too much weighting to the discourse around a topic or article (Ironic, given I'm doing the same thing in this thread). One of the reasons I loathe twitter and reddit is the conversations and comments in threads are just plain awful a lot of times. This seems to create the potential to amplify that while reading an article or watching a video in real-time, creating a competing interest of consuming media vs opinions.
This is critical feedback, but I don't think this solves the problem around propagation of misinformation, bad actors, or opinion vacuums. The reason I dislike the modern web is that conversation and engagement are the key drivers for a site, the content second. This has, in my opinion, created the worst-case scenario in which the value of an opinion of statement is so commodified that the only way to create value from discourse is to have a lot of it, and most of it ends up being toxic and terrible because people seem to only create negative discourse en masse, or at least the current system has been gamified to do just that.
Reddit and Twitter are toxic in large part due to the drive to accumulate fake internet points. Sqwok doesn't seem to have a voting system, so maybe it won't attract the type of person who likes to provoke others just for the endorphin rush that comes with upvotes.
hey thank you for checking out sqwok and giving feedback, I appreciate it.
> This is critical feedback, but I don't think this solves the problem around propagation of misinformation, bad actors, or opinion vacuums.
I certainly agree that it isn't going to solve all of these problems. The genesis of this project actually goes back to ~2015 and predates the current social medial landscape. But the challenges will be there and have to be addressed, while balancing building something people enjoy enough to use and help grow.
One problem I see with sites like Twitter, is that there isn't _enough_ discourse. Anyone can make a statement, go viral, and there isn't a true "conversation" around it. There are threaded comments but it's not the same, and the idea here is to explore building real time conversations around those statements, and allow more critique. I'd like to explore building ways to reward messages that are relevant such as letting users nominate a message if it adds value.
Additionally there should be basic features such as muting/blocking people you don't want to see, and am openminded to hear other ideas people have.
I will say that HN is a shining example of how to keep a certain level of civility on a discussion site, but as it's been mentioned before, scaling that to a much larger size may be very difficult.
>One problem I see with sites like Twitter, is that there isn't _enough_ discourse. Anyone can make a statement, go viral, and there isn't a true "conversation" around it.
I think understand your point, but I disagree with it to an extent. The platform has to put a value on contributing extended discourse, and incentivize users to contribute more than hot-takes. I think what you're suggesting is that you want to create even more discourse to further devalue commentary to the point where it doesn't go viral?
>Additionally there should be basic features such as muting/blocking people you don't want to see, and am openminded to hear other ideas people have.
Agreed, part of the problem I have with twitter and reddit, is that my mute and block lists end up filtering legitimate, valuable content. Secondly, I want to be aware of what folks on the other side of the aisle are talking about, but I don't want to give platform to folks who routinely act as intentional bad actors who peddle in disinformation and conspiracies (Dan Bongino immediately comes to mind). Twitter and Reddit both fail in some regards:
* Reddit doesn't allow me to hide subreddits from the front page, so even if I don't actively subscribe to something, there is a chance I'll see content from it. the_donald being a great example of that in 2016. Yes, if I just stay on my home, these subreddits won't show up, but there is a finite amount of content in my own feed before I wander off into the engagement-land of /r/all, or /r/popular.
* Reddit doesn't allow me to block users unless I report them for something, such as spam. Though, I admit the block works effectively once completed.
* Twitter allows me to Mute users, but their engagement algorithm will still show these Muted users in my timeline as hidden tweets. Of course I'm curious if someone I follow RT's something as mysterious as a hidden tweet, so of course I click it. A muted user, in my opinion, is someone I am personally shadowbanning. I want no trace.
* Twitter doesn't allow me to mute keywords in bulk. Sure, maybe I could script this out, but I do not enjoy that twitter intentionally makes it difficult for me to filter out content that I don't. Additionally, the same problem happens in the previous point. For example, I mute references to Donald Trump and Joe Biden to keep my twitter feed somewhat reasonable, but more often than note, those "mysterious" hidden tweets seem to pop up.
>I will say that HN is a shining example of how to keep a certain level of civility on a discussion site, but as it's been mentioned before, scaling that to a much larger size may be very difficult.
Agreed. It's the only social-site I don't mind backing up with my own real-life identity as I find this to be highly valuable content. Content moderation has a lot to do with it, as I believe it sets the standards and generally attracts an audience that is civil (Though reddit was also like this in its early days, but that may just be rose-tinted glasses), but given a large enough audience, a platform becomes perceived as right more than privilege, and moderation becomes a battle against people thinking they're being censored, rather than moderated.
One of the reasons I enjoy hacker news is that the discussions on many posts are often richer than the post content. This site has managed to maintain consistent, high quality discussions unlike reddit and twitter. Without strict moderation however, is there a proven way to incentivize or gamify rich discussion?
Other sites have an incentive to drive (sometimes hostile) engagement for revenue. Maybe removing that mis-aligmnet with visitors and operators is a good first step
Thank you to everyone who has commented and taken the time to check out Sqwok. It's been a labor of love, and sometimes frustration, and it's really encouraging to see people using it and giving great feedback. It has a long way to go but I'm hopeful to realize the vision of a new alternative for open discussion.
I also wanted to share the first post I made on Sqwok, dedicated to my late friend Thom Simmons. The reason I want to share this is because you never know who you'll meet and what impact they'll have. I met Thom when I was learning python and hanging out in #django on freenode a decade ago. We went on to become good friends and he helped me learn how to program beyond html, while we constantly plotted what our next project would be. He introduced me to Reddit around ~2009 which at the time wasn't nearly as popular or known outside of tech. I had just thought of the idea for Sqwok about two weeks before his passing, but opted not to mention it on one of our last calls because he was going through some personal struggles.
I know he would have been excited for it.
In this crazy year of 2020, I hope more people can find positive connections, however that may be, and that we learn from each other, grow, prosper, and thrive.
When I scroll to the top of a conversation, it automatically scrolls me down. I find this annoying and unintuitive. To me, if I tell the computer to do something, it should do that thing, not immediately disobey me.
Some questions:
Do you intend to put this on the Fediverse with ActivityPub? If not, why not?
I'd like to say that what makes reddit and twitter big and important is not technical sophistication. It is the fact that a lot of interesting people are there — so another person would join to read and interact with them.
So I'd try to build the simplest thing that conveys the idea and provides the experience (twitter was initially a Rails app), and spend most of the effort on getting and keeping interesting people aboard. These trendsetters are the users you want to listen to, and pander to. You went them around. You want their audience around.
I can remember a somehow similar site, only more minimalist, founded like 15 years ago. It was friendfeed.com: link sharing, posting commenting, real-time IM-like updates (it even had a Jabber gateway for some time). It was great, though it never grew huge. Facebook bought them and acquired their most important invention, the "Like" button.
I don't say that technical sophistication is not important! It is. But it becomes important when your social / communication mechanics work, and you have a number of real users. Until then, you want your technology small and easily malleable. Back in the day I've seen a brilliant online community forming around a few hundred lines of Perl scripts. Guys from friendfeed first came with a schemaless DB, and only later with the high-performance Tornado server (in Python still). Guys from YouTube first found the area where their site was useful (not their initial dating, but video publishing and discovery), and later came up with advanced video delivery solutions. Same likely applies to your site.
> I'd like to say that what makes reddit and twitter big and important is not technical sophistication. It is the fact that a lot of interesting people are there — so another person would join to read and interact with them.
Adopting Twitter's user acquisition strategies does not, in hindsight, seem all that smart considering Twitter's growth relative to its peers? I believe this led to their current predicament where all but the early/'power' users enjoy the vast majority of attention on the platform whilst new users scream into the ether and finally give up on the platform.
Yes, one can gain a huge following with the time investment involved but for the average user, even hitting a 1K following is a pipe dream. Contrast that with TikTok.
I would say that twitter is built around the concept of a vast space into which everyone can equally talk, not as a great listening or discovery experience. This is why out-of-platform fame is such an important way to discover people there. The platform itself offers few and weak tools to discover interesting feeds to follow. Basically you might notice someone's interesting reply in a random thread, and want to check the user's feed.
Facebook is great at discovering people I might already know. Maybe it's important to reunite with old friends, etc, but it's not really important to me. Facebook does a seriously better job presenting communities I may be interested in; there I could encounter interesting people. It also helpfully shows posts liked by people I follow, which is the best form of curated discovery I've encountered so far.
Personally back in the day I joined Google Plus (remember that social network?) mostly because Linus Torvalds and Rob Pike were already there, and wrote something interesting. So I think having luminaries on your network is helpful. Having one's friends is also helpful; often a loose cluster of friends migrates to your platform because it helps them communicate the way they prefer.
Here's my 2c. All these clever ranking algorithms are irrelevant technicalities in chatting platforms. What matters is the type of people that constitute your audience.
Reddit chooses to cater to emotions: their front page encourages low-effort posts that invoke strong emotions (outrage, etc.) and those emotions nudge their audience to argue with each other and spend more time on the site. This particular type of people - emotional and combative - are good for their revenue model, so reddit specifically caters to them.
HN is the other end of the spectrum: it caters to audience that values dry precise knowledge. HN's (or rather YC's) business model revolves around this type of people, so HN is carefully designed to attract its audience and repel everyone else. The HN's primitive design isn't a flaw, but a carefully designed feature with that goal in mind.
If you're designing a new platform like that, the number one question is "what audience do I want on my forum?" Once you have an answer, you can design the UX and various technicalities: it may be a super-dry arxiv-style forum if you want scientists or a flashy and colorful site leveraging emotions. The common mistake is to try to design a general-purpose forum where people of all types would figure it out among themselves how and what to talk about. That's not gonna work because a Joe-the-redneck can't have a meaningful conversation with a Joe-the-scientist: either the former will start a fight, or the latter will leave. For example, from your description: "an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics <...> sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users." See, you're trying to mix science with politics with non-tech users and so on.
Edit: using words from the Thiel's "zero to one" book, you need to find your niche where you can differentiate from competitors, win that local competition, and only then expand.
> but a carefully designed feature with that goal in mind.
Was it carefully designed? That implies a very direct, conscious decision. Or was it designed by someone to whom design is not vital, and it worked out because everyone similar tends to think the same?
1) I've been focused on building it and hadn't thought much about open source or what that would look like until recently. I'd like to understand how similar projects that went open source did it and what the challenges were etc.
2) Definitely agree, I created it but haven't posted, today is probably a good day for that! I will make a post shortly! https://twitter.com/sqwokapp
Yeah, it seems that some people mistake minimalism for "it took me 10 minutes to build and I didn't care about the visual design". It's heavy, clunky, and even though it's text-only, it has some pretty awful typography.
But, anyway, thinking that social media is about the GUI is silly. If GUI is suboptimal, people just make alternative clients and browser extensions to visit your platform despite them disliking the interface. People use Reddit or Twitter because of community, because of network effect, because other people use Reddit or Twitter. And to a smaller extent, because content format suits them. Clean UI helps to get traction, but it's never the main selling point nor the real reason why people stay.
Hi the design is minimal and simple to understand. I hope this gets traction. But I noticed that you serve 450KB of JS on initial load. This is not required at all for a site with such a minimal design and a single list. Ideally this site should be less than 10kb in total with no js and atomic css. This is loading slow even in desktop. The app loads first and the /posts API response takes a lot of time to load. It could be server rendered for the initial load and served from a CDN.
hey thanks for the feedback, I definitely agree it could be faster, and I'd like to get it there eventually.
Right now the site is rendered using ssr on amazon cloudfront, and for pages that have been cached already, it should load very fast. The api requests could possibly be improved with caching as well.
I share the sentiment you have and appreciate it! So far I've tried to keep the number of dependencies very low and keep things as optimal as possible, but always room for improvement. Thanks for checking it out!
I really hate how there's lag when going "Back" from an article to the topic list (iOS, Safari). It resets the scroll position too, to the wrong spot.
This is a major issue on Reddit too... a huge lag when going Back.
I like that Sqwok looks HN/old.Reddit but with bigger mobile-sized tap targets and fonts. It feels like it works well in a browser. But the back experience kind of ruins the fluid UX.
Personally, I have a hard time imagining using this without upvotes, reacjis, and/or threads – would anticipate far too much chaff to get to the wheat as I scroll through discussions. In a reasonably busy chat room, something needs to indicate what's worth reading or jumping in on, and separating the various streams of chatter.
I definitely agree that there has to be ways to filter out the noise. I've discussed adding a way to "like" messages, and have those end up displayed separate from the main list. I'm open to other ideas as well! Thanks again!
Yeah, it's an artifact of web design from decades ago. Hence known as: The Blue. But with an account there are better, higher contrast choices. I suggest "plain"...
haha! tbh I needed _something_ to be able to track versions for debugging purposes once I had some real users, and I ended up just using the client `v${commit number}.{last 5 commit hash}`
Hope that answers it! thank you for checking out sqwok & have a nice day
I’ve always wondered, how does the commit hash get in to the actual version number? You don’t know the hash before you commit, so now to get the hash in to the public commit version you have to commit again, which changes the hash!
Looks great. Gut reaction on the UI is that it feels very cramped -- the fonts are kind of biggish for the spaces they go, and there isn't enough breathing room between things and somehow it manages to take my whole screen but still give me the feeling I'd like to make the window a lot bigger. (note: viewing on an MBP)
Also, no comment threads? I'd much rather have commenting (hierarchical threads) on a reddit replacement than live chat. Maybe that's just me and maybe that's your entire point. I was just surprised by it and have very little interest in watching a chat stream fly by.
I built an app in this same space (news aggregation, real-time discussions) and hope it is OK to share it as a comment to this post: https://newscussion.com .
Its a little different in that latest news don't come from users posting them but rather are brought in via a third party API.
Really happy to see Sqwok in this same space, as it validates that there are folks interested in ephemeral / real-time discussions around latest news :)
@holler Let me know if you'd like to talk dev stories about building for this space, I'd be down.
I like it. Just have one call out. The text feels too large and too bold on mobile. Any chance it could look like this? Probably the best example of mobile friendly, minimalist content —> hckrnews.com
hey, I do like that very minimal font sizing! Maybe it'd be nice to add a way to shrink the text for people who'd like to do that? thank you for the feedback I appreciate it!
haha! I think there may be an issue around me switching from gzip to brotli compression for some browsers, but I'm not 100% sure if that's the issue. I will investigate, thank you!
I'm not sure why you weren't able to sign up, did it give you an error? This is the most people I've had on the site today so it's possible that a load issue was surfaced.
I’ve had issues on the odd other site, it just freezes at the username entry (can’t switch from username to password). Just something for you to keep an eye on.
Saw your most recent post. You are a good guy —- rooting for you! In 1 year or whenever I am looking forward to seeing this explode into popularity. Keep a journal if it’s not too much of a bother, I’d love to read the full story and growth of your website after it’s all said and done because I really think if you keep at it, you have a winner on your hands.
thank you! I agree that button is confusing, and a few others have mentioned it as well. I'm going to change it to behave like a normal back button. Thanks for stopping by!
In the short term I just want to stabilize the site and get it to a point where it's usable for most people. I'd like to solve some UI issues (many suggested via feedback), fix bugs etc.
Eventually I'm hoping to get to a place where there could be an api, a paid plan for extra features, and the ability for users to monetize themselves w/integrations for the site features etc.
Scrolling is horrifying on mobile phone (iPhone 6, iOS 12.4.8). I have to move it instead of letting it slide. Not sure why that is, maybe you’re taking over the scroll, or scroll listeners
hey thanks for the feedback, I haven't tested in ios 6 so not sure what you're seeing, but I am marking that down to investigate this weekend. Sorry that it's not working but thanks for checking it out!
I want to add filtering that determines whether the same people are going back and forth over a certain period of time, and possibly other things like sentiment analysis or silent voting.
It's a real concern and I'm hoping to be able to get something workable, but time will tell!
Hah, I made a political satire idle game called Troll Farm and the first thing you do in the game is make an account on a site called “Squalk.” I guess it was too obvious a joke!
Well, although I was hoping I wouldn't see anything too bad, it's also somewhat not surprising. I think any new discussion site will have to deal with it at some point. This is the mvp release so it is still lacking many features, but it will be addressed.
hey sorry about that, I do plan to add a settings page very soon! right now you could try the "forgot password" link while logged out. Thank you for checking it out & sharing feedback!
hey thanks for checking it out, did you happen to click the left "chevron" and it confused you? Just curious if that's what you're referring to because it's been mentioned a few times, and I'm planning to change how that works to be more intuitive as a back button.
Yes. At least when I land from a link, I would expect that thing to take me to the "home" or "frontpage". There just is no back/history if I just landed.
In general, I would a expect a "low-cruft and minimalist" to NOT mtry to get smart with history. It always fails, e.g. twitter, reddit. Just leave it up to the browser.
Cool thing about HN is that often a downvote can be a signal you missed something obvious. As was the case here. The data returned was compressed using brotli, as indicated by the content-encoding header value "br". Duh.
I'm building sqwok.im, a new open discussion site that mixes real time messaging with news aggregation.
I started building this because I wanted an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics, and other general topics in a modern experience like Slack, with features built for the general user and not enterprise or gaming. I grew up hanging out on aol chat, irc, icq, aim, etc and with those experiences in mind, I'd like sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users.
Currently the site works on both mobile and desktop web and supports multiple concurrent logins. That means you can have multiple tabs open and/or be logged in on a phone and desktop at the same time, and the real time features should work.
The core differentiator for Sqwok is that it's built from the ground up for real time. The site is built around real time conversations that are both ephemeral and long-lived -- all posts include a built-in full-featured chat room.
Have something on your mind or what to discuss the latest news? Simply create a post, share the url with anyone, and they will instantly be able to open it, see the active real time conversation, see who is currently in the conversation, and begin talking with a few clicks. The conversation can be rejoined at any time. It also includes the ability to @mention other users and send them an instant in-app notification to join you.
Recently added is a "follow" feature that allows you to follow another user, and then when they are online and in conversation(s), to both see where they are and join them instantly. This lets you find your friends and join them in conversation at any time.
To keep the site razor focused on actual conversation, I've opted to exclude any form of voting. Instead, relevance for "trending" is based on a combination of real time chat activity and time decay. I have further ideas I'd like to explore here to add options for how people find content, but the goal is to mimic the real world as much as possible, and keep the focus on building rich conversations versus invisible feedback loops.
I've created a post on sqwok for this post on HN: https://sqwok.im/p/TE22DNgTPn5P9g
One particular use case that's come up for this is using it to watch YouTube live streams outside of YouTube, or in the case where the YouTube stream has chat disabled, such as the example below. Feel free to try it out by creating a post and simply include the url for the YouTube stream in the post title.
https://sqwok.im/p/SpGrYgY-vZ0haA
If you have any questions or comments please let me know, thank you!