[HN Gopher] Show HN: Sqwok - A low-cruft, minimalist alternative...
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Show HN: Sqwok - A low-cruft, minimalist alternative to Reddit and
Twitter
Author : holler
Score : 73 points
Date : 2020-12-18 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sqwok.im)
(TXT) w3m dump (sqwok.im)
| paxys wrote:
| Minimal doesn't automatically equal functional or appealing.
| Designing a good UX is very hard work, and "simple" is always
| harder.
| Tipewryter wrote:
| Two Tips:
|
| 1: Opensource it. The type of person who would be an early
| adapter probably wants to have the option to improve / self host
| it.
|
| 2: Make a Twitter account to keep interested people informed
| about your progress.
| holler wrote:
| hey thank you for the comments!
|
| 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
|
| Thank you!
| isakkeyten wrote:
| Tbh it's very hard on the eyes.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| 2.18mb loaded for pure text design. Low-cruft? Minimalist?
|
| Sorry, but please use descriptors with discernment, this
| discrepancy alone has made me withdraw from looking any further
| at this project.
| krick wrote:
| 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.
| dvh wrote:
| Vanilla webview on android 10:
|
| The webpage at https://sqwok.im/ could not be loaded because:
| net::ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED
| jan6 wrote:
| I think the site probably just died because it couldn't handle
| HN storming in to all the chats ;p
| holler wrote:
| 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!
| abhinav22 wrote:
| I was on my iPhone and it looked pretty cool, albeit fonts
| slightly large.
|
| I wasn't able to sign up - page kept freezing.
|
| Otherwise I think this has great potential and wish you the best
| of luck
| holler wrote:
| Thank you I really appreciate it!
|
| 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.
|
| Thanks again!
| heleninboodler wrote:
| 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.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| The navigation is somehow fucked up
| holler wrote:
| 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.
|
| thanks!
| superkuh wrote:
| You get navigation? All I see is a binary string of mangled
| characters. It's not even a valid website.
|
| > ~= y-%:J.GW9WIJ&2UIN ~-HrbOa[uI>(O(6:Bff_ 78*IE...
| webdog wrote:
| 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.
| ballenf wrote:
| 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.
| holler wrote:
| 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.
| pkamb wrote:
| 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.
| holler wrote:
| hey thank you for checking it out! I realize that the back
| button is misleading and I plan to change it.
|
| I was thinking to make it behave more like a back button,
| perhaps with some context sort of how it works on e.g.
| instagram?
|
| Thank you for the feedback and checking it out, I appreciate
| it!
| pkamb wrote:
| I'm using the native swipe-back gesture on my phone, not the
| back button in the top left (which I don't really even think
| you need).
| holler wrote:
| ah ok gotcha, yeah right now there isn't any swipe
| functionality so I will need to investigate implementing
| it, thanks again for the feedback!
| Nkuna wrote:
| That name (or its spelling rather) is... unfortunate.
| BGthaOG wrote:
| 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.
| cvhashim wrote:
| 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
| holler wrote:
| 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!
| jen729w wrote:
| Meta question: why are we at v350.06680? The numbers nerd in me
| needs to understand.
| holler wrote:
| 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
| jen729w wrote:
| It does, thanks.
|
| 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!
| allenu wrote:
| I'm guessing the build/deploy stage sets that up in the
| environment, so it's not actually committed in the repo.
| holler wrote:
| yep that's it, it's created in the build stage and passed
| into the app!
| jan6 wrote:
| uninformed guess: every commit is a version bump, every push to
| master is a major version bump?
| tsherr wrote:
| On mobile. I like the layout and font size. Looks like something
| I'd use daily.
| holler wrote:
| thank you for the feedback and for taking the time to check
| sqwok out, I really appreciate it! have a nice day
| swivelmaster wrote:
| 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!
| rattray wrote:
| I'm enthused!
|
| 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.
| holler wrote:
| hey thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it!
|
| 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!
| holler wrote:
| Hello HN,
|
| 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!
| hisham_hm wrote:
| The #1 question to any social network: how do you handle
| moderation?
| fortran77 wrote:
| How do you handle moderation when you're just walking about
| in public?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Public has
|
| - Fewer people that can reach a given point at low cost to
| themselves
|
| - No sockpuppets (i.e. is relatively immune to Sybil
| attacks)
|
| - If you piss someone off enough, you are putting yourself
| in a position where immediate bodily harm could come to
| yourself
|
| And yet, walking about in public is still moderated by
| police.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Hopefully they learn from the reddit mod experience, and
| don't let anyone moderate anything.
| every wrote:
| Or, perhaps they can learn something from MetaFilter[1]
| which has been successfully moderated for over 20 years...
|
| [1] https://www.metafilter.com/
| hisham_hm wrote:
| > relevance for "trending" is based on a combination of real
| time chat activity and time decay
|
| How do you plan to prevent this from essentially devolving into
| "flamewars get promoted"?
| holler wrote:
| That's a great question and concern!
|
| 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!
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
|
| Good luck!
| Nkuna wrote:
| > 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.
| vijaybritto wrote:
| 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.
| krimpenrik wrote:
| Are you missing the real-time part?
| holler wrote:
| 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!
| ajsfoux234 wrote:
| Is any monetization planned?
| holler wrote:
| 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.
| superfrank wrote:
| 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.
| torgoguys wrote:
| 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.
|
| Overall, I dig the concept!
| iagovar wrote:
| I felt the same.
| allenu wrote:
| 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.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Interesting! I thought the opposite; could do with less
| whitespace and smaller fonts.
| holler wrote:
| It is a challenge to get something optimal for _most_
| people! But I'd like to hear feedback and adjust if
| necessary. Thank you!
| holler wrote:
| 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?
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| superfrank wrote:
| > May I ask if you were on desktop or mobile?
|
| I was on desktop.
|
| > 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.
| holler wrote:
| ok gotcha, I'm marking that down as a UI enhancement,
| thank you for your feedback!
| highmastdon wrote:
| 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
| holler wrote:
| 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!
| appleflaxen wrote:
| For anyone looking to host their own instance, this is not open
| source.
|
| lemmy is an option with similar functionality that is, IIRC.
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(page generated 2020-12-18 23:00 UTC)