Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites

Moderation moderation moderation . It’s a big problem

I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed

The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol

So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere

I just took a look at the page's own 'town square'. At the moment, it's largely full of people saying offensive things for the sake of it.

Love it, also love that there's one HN visitor just hanging out typing "dick and balls" over and over again. That's unmoderated anonymous public squares for you

Oh how fun. Sadly I went there and someone has botted it with “dick and balls” constantly being spammed by multiple people. But that’s to be expected when something gets attention. On other sites I can see this being nice addition. And a great concept.

The contrast between the example screenshots and the standard internet behavior in the live demo is hilarious

This is really cool. Is there anyway to keep some people off my small part of the webverse?

Having read some of the comments, I'd happily use if there was a way to blast (prefarably with a Doom shotgun) some of the miscreants from appearing, but only on my site, and maybe some filters (slurs, etc) that auto-ban them that I can set. Other people could moderate as they will but I'm kind of tired of the toxic people ruining everything.

I'm interested in trying a moderation scheme that puts the power in the receiving client, with opinionated defaults. Let the client filter for itself, mute users for itself, and make users invisible to itself. Have default settings that make sense for the app, but let the user override them.

Use a cheap purpose-built LLM like OpenAI's free moderation endpoint to classify the text and send the original text plus the classification to clients, and let clients choose what to do with it, with opinionated defaults appropriate to the app.

Maybe you still need to identify persistent bad actors rather than acting only on content. But still, allow clients to decide what to do with that information.

I suppose my thinking is that strong default automatic moderation that's invisible to offenders is a requirement for a project like this to be able to offer a welcoming experience to users, but putting the power in an LLM and fixed filter lists feels very wrong. So my thought is to use those things to give the client power. But maybe that makes no difference if nobody changes settings away from defaults anyway.

I messed around some, talked to two people. Watched the birds fly.

I did the "go to next town" It worked, but then I got to (https://emilesilvis.com/) and got stuck. The Town Square is in 1/2 the page, so you can't get to the two ends to be able to go to the next town.

I made something similar last year: A p2p chat popup (that sits on bottom right of the page as a bubble) that allows all visitors to chat with each other. It had simple keyword based moderation in-built (can be easily bypassed though).

Was planning to add github oauth to get a known identity and persistent messaging so visitors can chat with each other across sites.

Instead of a webmaster adding script to their site, it was a browser extension.

The intent was two folds:

1. Get to know other people having similar interests,

2. Try something on the lines of a decentralized chat/messaging system.

There was a thing from the 90s kind of like this called Third Voice. It was a cool idea, but I remember there being a lot of backlash from brands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice

Matt Webb made a version of this (and wrote about it) a while back—Cursor Party: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party

I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.

I love the idea, but it’s a real shame how people are using it. I wonder if AI can moderate it for offensiveness and spam prevention

Love the idea. Could use some filters and stale (sleeping) clients could get removed quicker.

Also, it seemed to be disconnecting quite often, maybe a hug of death thing.

Neat idea! It's simple but very effective - and I really enjoy the detail of the benches and the tree. Very nice.

I wouldn't add it to any of my sites due to the unmoderated nature of it - seeing some fairly unsavory things in your demo - but that's just a little tweak, I'm sure!

> A problem repeatedly occurred on https://cauenapier.com/

People are flooding the channel with messages, causing the widget to use too many resources on ios; and the website is being endlessly reloaded.

Any idea how to fix this? Bonus points for user friendly non technical solutions, ie is there a way to design an online social space where people want to collaborate and their first thought isn’t trolling?

In case you wanted a comment section but less civilized

> NOTE: This project has been mostly vibe-coded

I deeply appreciate the honesty here. I’ll pass based on the vibecodedness of it but perhaps it won’t be a dealbreaker for others.

I've always wondered if we could find a way to add content website's content without it turning into a shitshow. MLS listings / Zillow is an interesting use-case. A realtor might describe something as "sun-filled" but omit that the home is next to a 24/7 dump truck repair warehouse.

Make a MapleStory-like one where each website can design their own room, and you can kill mobs and bosses and stuff. It would be neat if the characters and items persisted between.

Edit: a super smash brothers-like would be fun too. Maybe the page itself could be the platforms.

I love the idea! The next step is to add role play games in town squares.

This is so cool, gonna add this to my game website. This can easily help to get me multiplayer matching in the game.

Built something like this for the v1.0 launch of RedwoodSDK in March; but it's a popularity graph (like the time scrubber on YouTube). I figured that it could be useful to myself, and others, to aggregate the information that people find most useful.

https://rwsdk.com

rather interesting, except the spamming of the inappropriate messages.

I've been playing with presence too...! I def am thinking about using it more for real-time motion communication (which is largely missing from web) rather than text (which is very overrepresented, and where most moderation comes in).

I was toying with the idea of making a little crowd representation sticky at the bottom, like watching a screen together :)

Regardless, I love concepts like this. Thanks!

This was actually a lot of fun. Not as much trolling as I anticipated. Surprising amount of normal chit chat.

this is a very clever concept. I'll keep it in mind for the future - when my app site has persistent amount of visitors. Are there some rules/settings for stop words to prevent some types of abuse? Or is it planned?

This is great! Thank you for sharing it. Fun to use and already customizable.

This is amazing! Congratulations on the launch. Repository link somewhere?

I love the atmosphere with the benches and the tree

I enjoyed the design.

Really cool but should limit # of people shown when there are too many. Currently it gets really laggy

yay i just added it to my site signupdoggy.pages.dev thanks so much

interesting. i'm appearing as a grey guy not the orange guy like your blog says

Oh what the heck? That's super cool! Awesome idea. Possible future enhancement: some basic day/night (or even weather?) design elements that match the timezone of the person whose site it is? Still, doesn't even need it, it's really cool as-is!

I could see it being used as some avenue for saying toxic stuff, so I'm suddenly feeling like the only allowed actions should be ones that can never be harmful (like text interactions are just choosing from a pre-set list)..

I like the idea! congrats!

Neat idea, but there seems to be zero defense against spammer scum. One jerk with a bot script seems able to make it totally useless for everyone else there.

Maybe adding rooms will be a good move

In the "this is why we can't have nice things" category, the first thing I saw was someone calling themselves "dick and balls". :(

Looks good!

what a cute project

I like the idea of this like a town square for websites. Nice job

cool idea!

haha nice project! I stayed there for a couple of minutes and had such a good time!

This is actually really cool. We’ve needed this concept everywhere in technology. Something like this would have prevented the isolation and loneliness technology and the internet has created.

I don’t know all the answers, but joining people together, and reminders there are real people still there as we’ve moved from the physical world to the virtual world is an important part of the progression. In 50-100 years we will either have this epiphany or we will fail miserably.

Not really a square if it's 1D - everyone ends up on top of each other.

would make more sense with webrtc.

First saw this on lobste.rs . Great idea, perhaps allow for a little customisation? I'd like minimal animation, just a counter of present people and a green dot that vibrates when someone is typing. Clicking either opens a chat box with last 20 minutes.

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