The chat is still there in the corner of this post, with people typing nasty shit into it.
Well have fun delving into programmatic censorship I guess. Or just take it out. If you take the former path and post about trying to fix it here then I'm sure you'll get a lot more free testing of your attempts to enforce civility through regex or whatever. Enjoy learning about the Scunthorpe problem.
Looking at the last few minutes of messages, I get the feeling that all it takes is a handful of motivated (i.e. jobless) malicious individuals to make an entire community or a corner of the Internet look like it has devolved into barbarism.
To get the handful of people to collaborate and hopefully bring their friends. It's currently at 160 and climbing, no longer a handful, so it seems to be working.
From the earliest days of websites allowing text input from users, this has been a thing. The same with any website that allows you to draw things, it will quickly show people drawing crude (in content not skill) objects. This is just human nature. Once people realized you could use these forms as attack vectors, we were off to the races. Now that bots can do it for you, I'd only imagine the time before first bot using the form is in minutes. I have seen all sorts of things suggested as workarounds to mitigate bot form submissions, but eventually, you will be spammed at the least with the feature. Adding something like a bot chat, of course people are going to be abusive to it much more than a simple form field.
For someone to be surprised by this today suggests to me that the person is really really new to managing a website.
I'm mostly curious why anyone would bother with doing attacks like this to some random individuals personal blog, was it one person or multiple people? What was the motivation? Is it just bots crawling the internet to spread hate?
A sad state of affairs, but certainly seems like having a strictly moderated comment section is a better option for a site like this.
Talking about this like there's an "attack" feels very melodramatic. It seems to me like the non-constructive messages are either shitposts or just curious probes (testing whether certain codepoints make it through, testing whether bad no-no words make it through, testing how various things will render, testing whether the input is sanitized...). There's links to God knows what and some walls of inflammatory language, but I'm not noticing anything that could even remotely cause any harm.
I’d suggest one additional heuristic: once your bad word detector has triggered, shut down the chat for 10 minutes. That way waves of assholes don’t monopolize the chat, and when they move on to the next target the functionality returns to your site automatically.
Yeah, shutting down to that specific browser fingerprint would be the better way. Sometimes, being able to recognize a user has it's benefits for good /s
Content moderation and social anonymous behaviour aside, your real-time chat is really poorly implemented UX wise.
I saw the same message appearing more than once, I never saw my own message appear, it has a weird lag/delay feel to it. I didn't really enjoy that experience at all.
You just got yourself a product right there if it works and can market it as Roast me Blog with just trigger filters in your chat to make it healthy roast in place of abuse and highlight top roasters where people could upvote right there in your chat. Negativity turned into positive healthy banter ..
Obviously insults and attacks are unreasonable, but I think the tag injection etc should be an expected one if you’re posting on HN right? Like somebody is going to try it for kicks and I wouldn’t say it’s even necessarily malicious
While that's undoubtedly true, the level of trolling varies a lot so I don't think it's quite as simple as "if people can troll then they will." There's a crazy level of trolling on 4chan, quite a lot on Reddit or YouTube, and much less on HackerNews (cue troll replies to this post :D ).
I suspect that the owner, or the users, of a site are able steer how much trolling there is by incentivizing good conduct and 'policing'. If people actually value the content they won't troll, or they'll actively keep things tidy using the available tools. If people don't really care about the content (or if they only care about their relatively small corner) then they'll happily trash the bits they don't see value in.
This sounds like the kind of feature that ends up being quick to initially implement but takes up way more engineering time to maintain than everything else combined. The author concedes at the end that most genuine uses of the feature are people just saying hello. So maybe the solution here is to disallow unrestricted input and just have a few buttons with fixed things to say.
> The first and most obvious one was a filter of inappropriate words and expressions
I don't think those countermeasures are working because as of this moment, there's plenty of obvious naughty words being passed through in that chat window.
I'll have to be honest here man, yeah no shit. I can't think of any good reason of why you would add something like this. A standard comment section is typically bad enough, and at least you're able to moderate that. An anonymous real-time chat embedded within your own blog? That's just asking for issues.
Most people aren't awful in real life. Seems like a good idea to have a honey pot to just ban everyone in real time that tries to be an awful person on your own blog
My blog posts don't get any replies even when I post them on Hacker News, but everyone wants to communicate with others. I actually think anonymous chat isn't that bad. I think the problem is people who abuse the goodwill of writing. Once you step away from Medium and Substack, you start wondering how to even get comments on your own site.
I was watching porn recently and the particular site I was on had recently added a real time chat widget too! Aside from scam bots trying to lure users off onto telegram, the last few messages were guys talking about Monty Python's The Life of Brian.
The homepage design is nice, and I think anonymous chat is fun too. Even though the programming topic probably has a pretty clear target audience, I'm surprised that kind of hateful chat still shows up.
> What harm could a box that only broadcasts plain, ephemeral text do to me? You're thinking the same thing I was, I'm not crazy, right?
Not right. As soon as I saw the box (when the other article was posted), my immediate thought was that it was distracting, frankly a bit creepy (even just the counter is so), and obviously ripe for abuse. About one second after I had the thought, I saw it happen in real time.
> The goal, I suppose, was twofold: (…) and to make the article look bad in front of the aggregators and networks where it was being shared.
I think you’re reading too much into it. I bet all (or essentially all) the people doing that don’t care one iota about you or how you look to whatever aggregator and network. They’d write those same things on an empty wall if you gave them a can of paint. You gave them an avenue and they used it, simple as that.
Yeah, maximum concurrent clients being 50 is nothing and you're already seeing a large gap. That is the whole point of the BEAM - it scales well with concurrent stuff which is important with web in general and very important for LiveView.
Well have fun delving into programmatic censorship I guess. Or just take it out. If you take the former path and post about trying to fix it here then I'm sure you'll get a lot more free testing of your attempts to enforce civility through regex or whatever. Enjoy learning about the Scunthorpe problem.
If your audience is more than a handful of people, what's the purpose of chat?
For someone to be surprised by this today suggests to me that the person is really really new to managing a website.
A sad state of affairs, but certainly seems like having a strictly moderated comment section is a better option for a site like this.
I saw the same message appearing more than once, I never saw my own message appear, it has a weird lag/delay feel to it. I didn't really enjoy that experience at all.
1: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/3/30/maria-abramovic...
Short of that shadow ban everyone everyone sees their own messages, and add a few fake ones every now and then.
I suspect that the owner, or the users, of a site are able steer how much trolling there is by incentivizing good conduct and 'policing'. If people actually value the content they won't troll, or they'll actively keep things tidy using the available tools. If people don't really care about the content (or if they only care about their relatively small corner) then they'll happily trash the bits they don't see value in.
I don't think those countermeasures are working because as of this moment, there's plenty of obvious naughty words being passed through in that chat window.
But hey traffic is traffic I guess.
Not right. As soon as I saw the box (when the other article was posted), my immediate thought was that it was distracting, frankly a bit creepy (even just the counter is so), and obviously ripe for abuse. About one second after I had the thought, I saw it happen in real time.
> The goal, I suppose, was twofold: (…) and to make the article look bad in front of the aggregators and networks where it was being shared.
I think you’re reading too much into it. I bet all (or essentially all) the people doing that don’t care one iota about you or how you look to whatever aggregator and network. They’d write those same things on an empty wall if you gave them a can of paint. You gave them an avenue and they used it, simple as that.
Hard to take this seriously without the loadtest with the the large number of concurrent users.
For a number of users concurrently reading a long-tail blog post - you will get good results even using DotCom era HTTP polling.
Django LiveView vs Phoenix LiveView: a real benchmark
https://en.andros.dev/blog/80134668/django-liveview-vs-phoen...
Oh my bad are yall under the impression that HN is not the majority of the traffic right now lmao