

Why We Love You – aggregate positivity for your friends - rfong
http://www.whyweloveyou.com/

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chadillac
I hate to be a Negative Nancy but this is like a cyber bully wet dream. There
is no authentication measure to ensure who is who, it gives the user a vested
interest in hearing what good things people have to say about them, therefore
is basically a point that can be easily leveraged to conduct the most
malicious of attacks against someones character and ensure it is seen but more
importantly done in a manner to cut very deep.

As you can see Barak Obama is a kitten killer in your demo.

[http://www.whyweloveyou.com/reesekitty](http://www.whyweloveyou.com/reesekitty)

~~~
rfong
Yup. I deliberately didn't implement any authentication because I wanted it to
operate more like a Doodle -- a link gets generated for a purpose of no
particular celebrity and sent to respondents for low-threshold participation.
I think I will lock down submissions on the example page to make this clearer.

It's pretty fun for users who are using it for its intended purpose, and not
very trollable if you use the default URL randomization.

Also bear in mind I made this in a day. It might be neat to add sentiment
analysis / negative word flagging in order to weed out all-troll submissions.

~~~
chadillac
I get that, but let's say I'm fishing_for_compliments44 and I generate my
link.

I think go to facebook and say "Hey guys! Let me know what you think! [my
link]". Now pseudo_friend21 clicks the link and see's they can say whatever
they want.

"You're fat and stupid, go die in a fire" \- dead_mom_1991

"Take your mom's advice, please!" \- boyfriends_sister13

"Hey guys, don't be so hard on her... she IS mentally retarded after all! lol"
\- long_time_friend19

So now a single user has launched 3 personal attacks that will cause this
person a good bit of personal anguish when they stir up those emotions.

1\. your mom is dead, let's be reminded of that

2\. let's start a fight with your love interest, because his sister is mean

3\. I haven't talked to that friend in a while... but NOW I know how they fell
about me.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, if pseudo_friend21 sends the link posted
to mortal_enemy18 then the proverbial shit will hit the proverbial fan.

edit: good rule to remember when building systems like this.
[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19](http://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19)

~~~
rfong
Btw, many thanks for pointing this case out. I really don't have good ideas on
how to prevent this besides going the brute force route of flagging negative
words.

~~~
chadillac
It's a very hard problem to solve. I've been working in social networks for
many years at this point and there is no silver bullets when opening a
nonexclusive one to many relationship.

Things that seem to prevent abuse like this is linking the user to their
comments publicly. Removing the level of anonymity makes them accountable and
far less likely to tarnish their own reputation for the sake of slandering
another persons, the more removal of anonymity the more this becomes true.
People are far more likely to make a harsh comment on a personally
unidentifiable reddit username than say facebook or a verified twitter account
(e.g. throwaways are popular in subs with less popular social stances...
gonewild, cringe, etc).

Searching for negative words is much harder than you're assuming. Even using a
phonetic library (like soundex) will produce tons of false positives. On top
of that there is no library for assessing context in conversation or the
underlying relationship of the user.

"I love how you always handle Dick at family reunions, it means a lot to all
of us."

That sentence is VERY wtf out of context. So is that an insult insinuating the
user gives hand jobs to their family members? Is it a personal attack because
they're sexually promiscuous? Is Dick the rowdy family Drunk who this user
often keeps in check when they're about cross the line after a few drinks?

To further that idea the underlying relationship between User A and User B
doesn't translate without previous knowledge of their past. I for example am
generally a nice person and friendly, but I've friends from many years and
walks of life at this point. For people I kinda sorta know, I'm polite and
kind, I know the limits of our friendship and expected behavior. For very
close friends and such communication is usually peppered with light jabs and
inside jokes... think "tough love".

"10/10 looks great half naked and covered in mud, could fuck up a mothers
love."

Seems mean, to the person getting that message it likely relates back to a
past shared experience that will bring a smile to their face upon reading it
and in the context of the relationship is par for the course. Coming from a
co-worker in reference to a botched project in regards to installing hardware
in a remote location... not so much.

There is even more to this problem that I won't go into, but by now you should
get the drift, and you can't account for or detect these subtleties in human
to human relationships (if you find a way you'll be a very rich person),
especially coming in blind on an semi-anonymous platform.

This is why places like /b/ are simultaneously some of the best and worst
places on the net.

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rfong
Ok, seems like it's doing pretty well in favor of positivity. I searched some
common nice/nasty words in the DB and I'm seeing on the order of:

\- 25-70 hits for strings containing words like nice/fun/smart/kind

\- 1-3 for dumb/ugly/stupid/boring/fag

\- no incidences of slut/bitch/hate/crap/... (I searched a LOT)

\- one racial slur that I could find

\- surprisingly no negative uses of curse words (one "fucking awesome")

This is a way lower incidence of negativity than anticipated. Due to the
simplicity of the text inputs, I'm going to hold off on preemptive moderation
that would change the feel of the app and see how it works if I just flag
blacklisted words.

~~~
rfong
It is also entirely possible that since I have only posted this to HN and
Facebook thus far, it has not yet reached its ultimate audience of idiot
cyberbully trolls :(

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jader201
I have to agree with some of the risks of cyber bullying with this. And like
you, I don't know of a bullet proof method for mitigating that risk.

Some possibilities that come to mind, maybe using a combination of two or more
of these:

\- Require FB auth. Remove anonymity (to an extent) from the equation.

\- Launch with a canned, relatively small number of broad compliments.

\- Allow only community approved compliments. If new ones are added, block
until they're approved.

\- Allow submissions only until the list (without revealing the recipient's
name) has been approved by multiple community members. Then lock the list
allowing only up votes on existing compliments.

~~~
sdrothrock
> Require FB auth.

This is an instant dealbreaker for me nowadays. I refuse to have a Facebook
account for a number of reasons and know a couple of other people that are the
same.

However, requiring FB auth may not make a large impact on the number of users
registering for the service and/or users like me may not actually be within
the range of users who would be interested in the service.

(Personally, I think it's a really nice idea. A bit of positive feedback can
go a long way on some rough days.)

I'm actually more curious about how the site could handle multiple people with
the same names, or users who don't really think about it and just put in
"John" for the name.

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olav
Strange, I made a very similar thing a few years ago at [http://dankbarkeit-
ist-nicht-erforderlich.de/](http://dankbarkeit-ist-nicht-erforderlich.de/)

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zacinbusiness
Don't let the haters hate. This is awesome.

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emsasi
Fun idea--wondering if there are better (more important, more purposeful) ways
to use it that to pass out complements. As it is, how long will people be
interested in "loving" on each other?

The site has me thinking about aggregating other input info from the
internet...

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hablahaha
You should be able to delete a page so other people can claim it/for testing
purposes.

~~~
rfong
Do you mean that users should be able to delete pages? I can personally delete
them, but you can't.

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Maria1987
Does it work in phones? It's not working in mine...

~~~
rfong
Cursorily seemed fine on my IOS7, but I did not optimize for mobile. What are
you using?

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SeemsBroken
It seems you can submit empty forms.

~~~
rfong
Thanks! Added to todo list

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kimonos
Totally love this!

