
Apply HN: FORUM – A public conversation app - jaktran
getforum.co<p>FORUM is social app available on Android (public bêta) that propose to user to share their thoughts (400 chars max) on any subject they want. The particularity is that each thought can be:<p>- the beginning of a public chat conversation with someone. The conversation will be displayed automatically like it is in a messaging app (whatsapp, messenger, telegram)<p>- the beginning of a long post. If you reply to yourself. The post (or story) will be displayed nicely like a blog&#x2F;Medium post.<p>- the thought can also be a one shot status like it is in a social network.<p>In other words. Forum propose to unify the experience of a social network(public status), a blogging platform (&quot;thoughts storm&quot;), a messaging app throught just one feature. Everything is a thought, even a comment is a thought.<p>The other particularity of Forum relies also on how the thoughts are classified and accessed within the platform.<p>- Indeed each post can be considered as a mini-website: The user has to write his single thought and reference it with 3 tags before he sends it in the network.<p>- All the community will receive the thoughts of everyone in a Tinder-like stack and will swipe them up or down. (up to upvote, down to pass) This system (tag + swipe) is a crowdsourced way to rank all the content each one of us produce.<p>Which means that the search engine will allow you to find the best thoughts according to the community on any tags combination you want.
Search [#movie] [#sf] [#2015] and you&#x27;ll find the best thoughts&#x2F;stories&#x2F;conversations according to the community on this subject.<p>Lastly on Forum, you can follow &quot;tags&quot; (rather than people) and define different stacks of cards based on your tastes.<p>Thanks a lot if you have spent a little moment to read the presentation of my project :-)
Don&#x27;t hesitate to check the site where I explain more in the details the vision I have behind FORUM.<p>I will be happy to anwser all your question,<p>Jak
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jaktran
Here is a 2/3 min demo video of this app :
[https://youtu.be/Ft7JvfzoF2Q](https://youtu.be/Ft7JvfzoF2Q)

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brudgers
How will Forum address the chicken/egg problem commonly faced by new social
networks?

What painpoints of Twitter, Facebook, etc, does it address?

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jaktran
Here is a more convenient way to understand this project
[https://youtu.be/Ft7JvfzoF2Q](https://youtu.be/Ft7JvfzoF2Q)

it's a 2/3 min demo video of Forum

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brudgers
Thanks.

Perhaps at this stage, a diagram mapping swipes to actions, might more clearly
orient a person unfamiliar with Forum with it's functionality and operations.

Because the linear format of video can struggle to convey the spatial
component of an application's architecture and interaction.

Keep in mind that the video shows an expert user and new users will be novice
users.

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jaktran
Got it, thanks for this feedback Brudgers

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vit05
I like the initial idea, but I think this could be too similar to Reddit.

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jaktran
Hi vit05, thanks for your comment, I will try to explain why Forum is very
different from Reddit.

actually most social networks (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook...) offer more or
less the same functionalities (post content, comment/like content, follow
people, chat, create groups, search content...). It is ofen hard to explain
the difference between those three, but once one try each once, the
differences appear to be obvious. And it is all about the experience and how
those functionalities interact with each other.

Forum proposes the same functionalities than those social networks but
differentiates itself by the way those functionalities are assembled together.
I would be very thankful if you can give a try to the app or have a look on
the few articles I wrote about this project : [https://medium.com/the-genesis-
of-forum](https://medium.com/the-genesis-of-forum) maybe you will see that it
is very different from Reddit.

\--------------

One thing about the experience of Forum is that it aims to be a publishing
platform like Medium, where you can published long stories, simply by posting
'thoughts' (or comments) successively. Even if you can do that on Reddit, the
UX between a Medium Story and a Reddit long post is definitly not the same.
Forum aims to provide the UX experience of a Medium Post in a more "mingle"
way.

A second thing is: Imagine you can read other's people chat between 2 peoples
not in a "comment" UX way but in a "messaging" way like Whatsapp, Messenger,
Telegram, Kik... While Reddit doesn't provide this experience, Forum provides
it.

Hope this is helpful

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vit05
I will give it a try. It really looks more smooth.

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jaktran
Thanks, I have just made a 2 min video demo, maybe you can check it :
[https://youtu.be/Ft7JvfzoF2Q](https://youtu.be/Ft7JvfzoF2Q)

