Hey, yes most companies would not want to self host, and for them there are plenty of options, but we do have companies that opt to self host. There are few reasons we have seen so far
- Operating in a regulated industry, we have customers who cannot send customer data to 3rd party services (in financial services, healthcare) and need to self host for that reason
- Existing solutions are too expensive for their business model, we have Kenyan, Brazilian and Mexican consumer focused companies from other countries spin up and use the self-hosted solution
- Cost savings and Philosophy, believe it or not there are some companies which like to self host software if possible, and have dedicated dev ops resources already maintaining software and spinning up another solution is not that much incremental work.
Beyond that there are other reasons to want to open source a solution like this. Anyone can add communication channels and integrations for example. And lastly its fun to work on an open code base!
Hey yes you can self-host for free. our small team just can't provide support for free users.
We offer enterprise level support for self-hosting users in the paid plan, and they can use future features in our ee (enterprise) folder (which is empty right now)
except that means theres an perverse incentive to make things as difficult as possible so customers are incentivized to pay for support because they actually need it. And then someone comes along and offers easier setup as a product, along with competing support, for cheaper.
Hey great question, a lot of services present themselves under the customer engagement banner so it can be hard to differentiate!
Chatwoot is a great tool, but is more in the customer support space. It offers a chat widget in your saas app / website and a shared interface to respond, which can then get routed via email, sms etc to the person who asked the question.
Laudspeaker is more of tool to send 1) one off messages (informational, promotional) to segments of users you define, 2) automate message sends like a drip campaign, 3) trigger automatic real-time messages based on specific activity users take in your app or site, eg on add to cart, or on sign up
The users of chatwoot would be customer support / success, the users of Laudspeaker would be growth, marketing, product
The architecture of both applications are quite different. Laudspeaker needs to be able to quickly message millions of users, ingest real time events, and create references to large sets (millions) of users.
We actually used chatwoot for support a while back, and have a customer who uses both Laudspeaker and chatwoot in production!
This is impressive work, especially for a one man show!
One thing that stood out to me was the graph of the sentiment analysis over time, I hadn't seen something like that before and it was interesting to see it for Rust. What were the most positive topics over time? And were there topics that saw very sudden drops?
I also found this sentence interesting, as it rings true to me about social media "there seems to be a lot of negative sentiment on HN in general." It would be cool to see a comparison of sentiment across social media platforms and across time!
Thanks! Yeah I'd like to dive deeper into the sentiment aspect. As you say it'd be interesting to see some overview, instead of specific queries.
The negative sentiment stood out to me mostly because I was expecting a more "clear-cut" sentiment graph: largely neutral-positive, with spikes in the positive direction around positive posts and negative around negative posts. However, for almost all my queries, the sentiment was almost always negative. Even positive posts apparently attracted a lot of negativity (according to the model and my approach, both of which could be wrong). It's something I'd like to dive deeper into, perhaps in a future blog post.
The sentiment issue is a curious one to me. For example, a lot of humans I interact with that are not devs take my direct questioning or critical responses to be "negative" when there is no negative intent at all. Pointing out something doesn't work or anything that the dev community encounters on a daily basis isn't an immediate negative sentiment but just pointing out the issues. Is it a meme-like helicopter parent constantly doling out praise positive so that anything differing shows negativity? Not every piece of art needs to be hung on the fridge door, and providing constructive criticism for improvement is oh so often framed as negative. That does the world no favors.
Essentially, I'm not familiar with HuggingFace or any models in this regard. But if they are trained from the socials, then it seems skewed from the start to me.
Also, fully aware that this comment will probably be viewed as negative based on stated assumptions.
edit: reading further down the comments, clearly I'm not the first with these sentiments.
Speaking from experience, debate is easily misread as negative arguing by outsiders, even though all involved parties are enjoying challenging each other's ideas.
You may be right, a more tailored classifier for HN comments specifically may be more accurate. It'd be interesting to consider the classes: would it still be simply positive/negative? Perhaps constructive/unconstructive? Usefulness? Something more along the lines of HN guidelines?
Just one point of note : people are FAR more likely to respond and take to writing to something negative than positive. I don’t know the exact numbers but it just engages people more. People just don’t pick up the pen to write how good something is as much.
I did something related for my ChillTranslator project for translating spicy HN comments to calm variations which has a GGUF model that runs easily and quickly but it's early days. I did it with a much smaller set of data, using LLM's to make calm variations and an algo to pick the closest least spicy one to make the synthetic training data then used Phi 2. I used Detoxify then OpenAI's sentiment analysis is free, I use that to verify Detoxify has correctly identified spicy comments then generate a calm pair. I do worry that HN could implode / degrade if there is not able to be a good balance for the comments and posts that people come here for. Maybe I can use your sentiment data to mine faster and generate more pairs. I've only done an initial end-to-end test so far (which works!). The model, so far is not as high quality as I'd like but I've not used Phi 3 on it yet and I've only used a very small fine-tune dataset so far.
File is here though: https://huggingface.co/lukestanley/ChillTranslator
I've had no feedback from anyone on it though I did have a 404 in my Show HN post!
Anecdotally, I think anyone who reads HN for a while will realize it to be a negative, cynical place.
Posts written in sweet syrupy tones wouldn’t do well here, and jokes are in short supply or outright banned. Most people here also seem to be men. There’s always someone shooting you down. And after a while, you start to shoot back.
(Without wanting to sound negative or cynical) I don’t think it is, but maybe I haven’t been here long enough to notice. It skews towards technical and science and technology-minded people, which makes it automatically a bit ‘cynical’, but I feel like 95% of commenters are doing so at least in good faith. The same cannot be said of many comparable discussion forums or social media websites.
Jokes are also not banned; I see plenty on here. Low-effort ones and chains of unfunny wordplay or banter seem to be frowned upon though. And that makes it cleaner.
I've been here a hot minute and I agree with you. Lots of good faith. Lots of personal anecdotes presumably anchored in experience. Some jokes are really funny, just not reddit-style. Similarly, no slashdot quips generally, such as "first post" or "i, for one, welcome our new HN sentiment mapping robot overlords." Sometimes things get downvoted that shouldn't, but most of the flags I see are well deserved, and I vouch for ones that I think are not flag-worthy
I wonder how much of a persons impression of this is formed by their browsing habits.
As a parent comment mentions big threads can be a bit of a mess but usually only for the first couple of hours. Comments made in the spirit of HN tend to bubble up and off-topic, rude comments and bad jokes tend to percolate down over the course of hours. Also a number of threads that tend to spiral get manually detached which takes time to go clean up.
Someone who isn't somewhat familiar with how HN works that is consistently early to stories that attract a lot of comments is reading an almost entirely different site than someone who just catches up at the end of the day.
some of the more negative threads will get flagged and detached and by the end of the day a casual browse through the comments isn't even going to come across them. eg something about the situation in the middle east is going to attract a lot of attention.
I think it's the engineering mindset. You're always trying to figure out what's wrong with an idea, because you might be the poor bastard that ends up having to build it. Less costly all round if you can identify the flaw now, not halfway through sprint 7. After a while it bleeds into everything you do.
> Anecdotally, I think anyone who reads HN for a while will realize it to be a negative, cynical place.
I don't think this is particularly unique to HN. Anonymous forums tend to attract contrarian assholes. Perhaps this place is more, erm, poorly socially-adapted to the general population, but I don't see it as very far outside the norm outside of the average wealth of the posters.
Really? Mmm i think hn is a place with on avarage above intelligent people. People who understand that their opinion is not the only one. I rarely have issues with people here. Might be also because we are all in the same bubble here.
its so interesting that in Likert scale surveys, I tend to see huge positivity bias/agreement bias, but comments tend to be critical/negative. I think there is something related to the format of feedback that skews the graph in general.
On HN, my theory is that positivity is the upvotes, and negativity/criticality is the discussion.
Personally, my contribution to your effort is that I would love to see a tool that could do this analysis for me over a dataset/corpus of my choosing. The code is nice, but it is a bit beyond me to follow in your footsteps.
Great work! Would you consider adding support for search-via-url, e.g. https://hn.wilsonl.in/?q=sentiment+analysis. It would enable sharing and bookmarks of stable queries.
Lol what a typical comment for today's HN. Condescending ("just plain wrong") with a jab ("this isn't a hugbox") placed in just to remind you that not only are you perceived to be wrong but you've provoked anger. No proof to provoke the jab, no feedback to help fix what you perceive as wrong sentiment analysis. Just thoughtless condescension and anger. Why is the sentiment wrong? Is this a data analysis trap the OP fell into? Nah let's insult the OP instead.
In my experience having run a bunch of different sentiment models on HN comments, HN comments tend to place around neutral to slightly negative as a whole, even when I perceive the thread to be okay. However I've noticed a huge bump in negative sentiment on large HN threads. I generally find that absolute sentiment doesn't work in most corpuses because the model reflects its training set's sentiment labels. I generally find relative sentiment to be a lot more useful. I have yet to do a temporal sentiment analysis on HN but I have a suspicion that it's gotten more negative over time. I agree with another poster that I think HN needs to be careful to not become so negative that it just becomes an anger echo.
Relative sentiment on this site between topics is something I've done and the obvious results show. Crypto threads are by-and-large negative, most political and news related threads are also highly negative.
Cynicism is perceived as more intelligent [0]. I personally find the HN brand of discussion to be difficult to bs my way into. But no matter your level of competency you can always find something to criticize and feel you've contributed. I wonder if academia or even "more intelligent" discussion in general would be counted as more negative.
As someone who is not an academic myself, but likes to listen to podcasts where academics discuss issues with each other, I often find that the conversations feel contentious, and sometimes they are, but the vast majority of the time the academics themselves feel like they're having a perfectly cordial and productive conversation. So I do think there is something to the idea that academic discussion comes across as being negative.
Sure, there's the 20% of comments that are outright rude, or tie everything back to their pet grievance (job satisfaction, government surveillance, the existence of JS).
But beyond that, the technical conversation has a negative, critical edge. A lot of comments come from the angle "You did something wrong by...", or only reply to correct.
There are still golden comments, and most personal anecdotes are treated respectfully, but it makes for an intimidating environment.
I actually did a blog post a few months ago where I analyzed HN commenter sentiment across AI, blockchain, remote work and Rust. The final graph at the very end of the post is the relevant one on this topic!
It's really unfortunate the HN API does not provide votes on comments: I wonder if and how sentiment analysis would change if they were weighted by votes/downvotes?
My unsupported take is that engineers are mostly critical, but will +1 positive feedback instead of repeating it, as they might for critism :)
This may be a personal style difference, but I find HN to be the least toxic of all social media I’ve tried. LinkedIn would be my example of ultra toxicity – the aggressive positivity there is unbearable. At least on HN people tell you what they think and even use a constructive decently argumented approach to doing so.
HN to me feels like a good technical discussion where people tear apart ideas instead of each other.
But yeah if you put a lot of ego into your ideas, HN must be an awful place to visit.
How did you get from negative sentiment to toxicity? Are those the same to you?
It may be a cultural thing, but I think many people see negative sentiment as a constructive tool and a demonstration of trust and respect among people who recognize each others as robust and capable peers.
Avoiding it is something you do with people who you believe need special delicacy: whether because they've told you so, because they intimidate you, or because you sense something pitiable and fragile about them.
If you can trust that it's given in good faith, and by the guidelines of HN you are asked to, negative sentiment should be seen as an expression that someone thinks you're a fully capable adult and peer. Personally, I deeply appreciate that it's generally so comfortably shared and received here and would never include "toxicity" in one of my critiques of HN.
It's a surprising thing to read someone say!
(Unless you're thinking of the nastiness that can surface on flamewar topics, but there are numerous means by which those get downranked and displaced, and they're otherwise sparse and easy to avoid.)
Negative sentiment is more general than toxicity in my understanding - but it does include it. The fact that the study found HN consistently negative does not surprise me, one of the ways HN is negative (the most disruptive and which makes me post here less often) is indeed toxic comments. But I am still here (in the comments no less) so the benefit still outweighs the pain.
We are building a new, open source suite of software tools to completely handle the "customer journey". You can see our repo here: https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker
We are a small team of 3, had a successful launch on HN a year ago, are backed by YC, and and are now starting to close large companies deploying our software to touch millions of users.
Who You Are:
- You are a very strong senior engineer (5+ years of industry experience) who can work autonomously and can deal with ambiguity
- You are comfortable working at all levels of the stack, from creating new endpoints, and components to deploying our app
- You have great knowledge of working with AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes - You have great proficiency in TypeScript and NodeJs
Bonus:
- Have worked in the product analytics or customer engagement spaces before
- Have taken a SaaS product from 10 to 1000 customers
- Has hacked on mobile sdks before
- Has worked remotely before
About the interview:
Between one and two rounds of phone screens followed by a one month (paid) contracting period. You'll be paid full salary and will be doing the same job as what you would when working with us full time. Contracting can be terminated early if either party feels its not going well.
If this interests you please reach out to the founders, at hey [at] laudspeaker [dot] com
We were considering using https://www.linen.dev/ for our own slack group for this reason - it surfaces information from these chat groups and makes it available via search. Anyone here tried them out?
One of the founders / maintainers of Laudspeaker [1] here! We think its great that there are more open source options in the space and really nice design guys!
Some differences:
a) We have explicitly decided against a DAG approach [2] for our visual editor and use state machines as our model, so you can explicitly create things like loops, and customize journey logic more.
b) Our cloud pricing is not user based, but right now follows a pay as you go model for usage with sliding discounts for larger message volumes [3]. While the mechanics may change we are most likely going to avoid user based pricing models.
c) We support different channels at the moment (email, sms, firebase push, slack, in app modals) and we integrate with databases/ warehouses as well as product analytics services like posthog [4] and CDPs like rudderstack. I'm sure with time we will converge on the same channels/integrations.
d) We think journey versioning / testing is a great idea, and don't yet have that but are rolling out our own.
Some similarities:
a) We also use clickhouse, and at some point will use temporal (our project is supported by one of their executives)
b) We also have a visual editor, segments and templates
c) We can be self-hosted (A few users are self hosting today)
For others checking this out there are also older projects like Mautic [5]. And customer engagement is a large enough category that it includes projects like Chatwoot [6] that focuses more on customer support.
It was interesting to try and figure out what principles alternatives to laudspeaker used. Looks like a few them don't support loops so are probably based on DAGs
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