Show HN: Bubblic – end loneliness together using the power of your voice

by jaybhum • 3 years ago

68 71 3 years ago

We have gotten over 1000 voice messages left by the users of our platform.

We take privacy seriously, so all data are anonymized and are not sold to anyone.

So far, we had a user who said that 'had it not been for Bubblic, I might not be here today'. This gives us so much drive to carry on with our project!

We'd appreciate any feedback you have :)

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

To share briefly our journey, we started by launching this simple website: https://lonelyworld.info as a mini MVP.

Then we got a tremendous response from various forums including Hacker News and Reddit, that we decided to pursue this idea further and develop into an app.

Our team is me, my wife, and a friend from South Africa that I met on the LonelyWorld website! I realize that had I never launched that mini MVP, I wouldn't have met my friend to work on my mission together! The mantra is right: one should always build in public :)

SamPatt2• 3 years ago

Cool idea, I tried it and I see the value. Looks like a lot of work for a small team.

How do you ensure user privacy? If someone accessed your data could they link voice messages with email address?

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

We worked on it for the past 5 months, with me quitting my job at Apple to work on this full time, so it has been quite the journey!

All the voice notes and locations are anonymized, as in, the database for userId and email is separate from anonymized Id linked to the voice and location data.

Specifically, I use AWS Cognito for the email addresses, and DynamoDB for anonymized ID : voice notes and location data.

If you have a better suggestion, please let me know!

jbotdev• 3 years ago

As a user this seems like a nice way of connecting with people online.

As an engineer I wonder if/how you would open this up to a wider audience (behind “lonely” users). Moderation is the first issue that comes to mind, but I’m guessing that’s already a concern with the current audience.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Definitely, opening up to a wider audience is the plan :)

We first wanted to attack the 'hair on fire' problem as Paul Graham states it, creating solutions for people who really need this connection platform that is different from others because they would tolerate it even if our platform is sucky!

Moderation is easier on this platform I think, and so far we did not have to moderate any content. I think it is self-policing by nature because people need to speak what they want to share and also share their approximate location.

SamPatt2• 3 years ago

Do you have a sense for what motivates "support" users?

Already in listening through what is on there, a few people were clearly depressed, and lending support to those people is awesome, but also difficult to sustain (for any given individual).

multiplegeorges• 3 years ago

How are you handling moderation and community safety?

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

There has not been a need to step in to moderate content so far. I think it is by nature self-policing to an extent more than a forum based on texts because people have to speak with their voice and also share their approximate location.

We do have moderation functions available already by the way of individuals reporting the abusers.

sinuhe692• 3 years ago

From the perspective of a user: I believe the idea is nice. But I am concerned about privacy. In this times of deep fakes, authentic voice of someone is a very valuable resource and it needs protection. Of course, you said you protect the privacy of the users and anonymize the data but I believe I need more information in this regard before I can participate. May be an option to automatically delete the voice data after a set period or the option to see all my saved data, delete my data if I decide to do so. Otherwise, it will leave me with some uneasiness.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Yes, you can delete ALL your voice data by going to your account settings in the app, and deleting your account. You have full control of your data.

Meanwhile, feel free to create an account and explore the app, even just by listening to other recordings! And only when you feel comfortable sharing your thoughts with your voice, you can participate.

aggsigme• 3 years ago

This is a cool idea, and you seem genuine. One thing I'm not clear about is how you achieve the claimed privacy. You said the user id data is separated from the user voice data and can't be matched. But you also say that if I delete my account it will delete all the voice data. How do you do this unless there is a mapping from the users table to the voice notes table?

pzo• 3 years ago

I have similar feeling. This could be maybe worked around with some local ai model that modify you voice slightly and randomly.

routerl• 3 years ago

I'm getting stuck in a login loop.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Hm.. what do you mean? Did you press 'Enter Bubblic' at the end of the onboarding pages?

spongebobstoes2• 3 years ago

It doesn't work to sign up with Google on Android. The app enters a loop where I am unable to create an account or log in, even after uninstalling and clearing it's cache/storage.

I do really want to try it out though, it seems like a great idea and I'm excited by the stories I hear and I want to contribute.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Hey there! I am sorry that is happening to you... I just tried on my Pixel 4, and it did not seem to have the problem. Can you try skipping the sign up on the first onboarding page, and try signing up after you are in the app by clicking the top left 'B' icon?

Or, can you try signing up by creating a user ID? We do not sell your data, and your email is NOT linked to your voice notes (they are in separate database and the user IDs are anonymized by hashing). I would really love for you to try it out!

spongebobstoes2• 3 years ago

I can skip and experience the app, but signing up doesn't work in any way from this point. The sign up page does not load, so I cannot choose another option. It opens the web view, but the web view closes without rendering anything, and I am back at the first screen in the app. This is true even if skipping and going through the top left button, or if uninstalling the app, or if opening the web view in Firefox (which does nothing)

edit: hope this helps. I'm on a pixel 5 and use Firefox as my browser including for app webviews

lexandstuff• 3 years ago

The app is well-executed, and I love the vision. But personally, when I'm feeling lonely or generally unhappy, I'm not sure reading through an endless sea of other people's misery is the best thing for it.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Thank you for your kind words and feedback. I think you would be surprised by browsing on r/lonely on Reddit and see how many people want to vent and ask people to talk to them. It can be incredibly lonely when you feel like you are never heard by anyone, and I think this platform can be very helpful to those people.

And there might be a time where you feel you need to be heard, or even find someone who might be going through the same thing that you previously went through, and you can offer help!

Plus, this is the first iteration of the app. We do envision creating a platform for the general public not just for lonely people to discover meaningful connections that you wouldn't have been able to with other apps or just by bumping into strangers in real life.

p-e-w4• 3 years ago

What is your business model? How are you planning to monetize this?

Do you use uploaded voice messages to train AI models?

Do you share any data uploaded by users (either in raw or aggregate form, including "anonymized") with third parties?

What identifiers do you collect during signup and with your phone apps?

Are you GDPR compliant? Where is your formal privacy policy? A single-sentence promise doesn't cut it.

Who is actually behind this? "Mountain View, CA" is not an address, despite what your website claims.

With a service like this one, privacy is the elephant in the room. The information you currently provide on that topic is nowhere near sufficient.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Here is our privacy page: https://bubblic.co/privacy/

We do not use it to train any models or share the data with ANYONE.

I currently work from home with my wife, we are not incorporated yet. I live in Mountain View, CA right now. Do you suggest that I put my home address there?

We are GDPR compliant. We do not sell or share users' data and we let them know what kind of data we collect for what purposes. Plus, users can delete their data COMPLETELY from our system with a single button within the app. No emailing or calling a number shenanigans.

h0l0cube2• 3 years ago

The only ethical 'business model' I could see here is a donation-based non-for-profit that keeps the lights on. It might be worthwhile partnering with a non-for-profit that's already in the mental health space. They can funnel grant money into this, and probably have enough advertising budget and brand to get much broader reach. Otherwise it's fine to keep it small as your passion project and not exploit your users for growth.

p-e-w4• 3 years ago

Here is our privacy page: https://bubblic.co/privacy/

Ok. I wasn't able to find it myself because AFAICT, it isn't linked from your homepage. To quote https://gdpr.eu/privacy-notice/ (emphasis added):

"Every organization that maintains a website should publish their privacy notice there, under the title “Privacy Policy,” and it should be accessible via a direct link from every webpage."

Do you suggest that I put my home address there?

I suggest that you speak to a legal professional to answer that question. You are collecting some very sensitive, highly intimate data from users. I'm not sure whether such an enterprise lends itself to a "run from home" setup. You should definitely get advice from a competent professional as to what regulations apply, and which information you are required to provide.

But you haven't answered my first and most important question: How are you planning to monetize this? As you are no doubt aware, businesses that start out with good (or vague) intentions have a tendency to turn to the dark side once their userbase is big enough to be of interest to data miners. In order to prevent this, you need a steady revenue stream that covers your costs so you can avoid selling your soul to VCs and tracking companies. Where will that revenue stream come from?

Kosto• 3 years ago

Can't login using Google. Access denied

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

sorry to hear that. We will patch it up asap!

acyou• 3 years ago

Not sure how I feel about this. You are either helping or taking advantage of people who are already down.

Why should be excited about or support a mental health startup, who stands to make money when people have poor mental health?

Does anonymized voice interaction help more than it hurts? Do you have any idea what you're doing or are you just doing it? What personally motivates you and your team?

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

I am doing my best to help people who feel lonely in today's day and age because I have personally been through it during my time in grad school.

I was going through a long-distance relationship at that time, and the workload was tough during my PhD. I did have friends that I hung out and even went to cafes to study together, but once they got girlfriends and boyfriends, they left me... I was not their priority anymore.

It felt incredibly lonely and I could not get the kind of support from my girlfriend since she was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I needed someone that I could talk to and do things with, outside of the romantic boundary. I tried looking, but what I found online were all these dating apps that capitalized on precisely the romantically lonely men and women.

I really did not like how the tools that claim to help people find partners and meaningful connections boil people down to simple profiles consisting of several pictures and bullet points of what they are looking for. I think it honestly creates increasing number of people reporting feeling lonely because all these tools overemphasize on vanity and shallow qualities of a person instead of who they are.

I think the web can be a better place for people to find others who they resonate with, and the current offerings just do not cut it. Having personally experienced loneliness and finding no solutions for my problem back then, I vowed to create an app myself that I think can help people find meaningful connections. So, here I am. I quit my job at Apple last year to dive into this full time as I thought about the meaning in life and what I wanted to leave in this world, and I thought solving the problem of loneliness is the most personal and meaningful problem that I want to take on.

noduerme3• 3 years ago

I appreciate the non-vanity aspect of it, and the aspiration to not turn people into bullet points. There's an intellectual honesty in that which, I think, shows that you're different from most people, in that you may be one of the few who just enjoys conversation with everyone without wanting something from them. There is not a great niche on the web for that, anymore. That trait, by the way, probably makes you easy to talk to and less likely to be lonely (in the long run).

beebmam• 3 years ago

This was beautiful, thank you for your thoughts on this.

toshk3• 3 years ago

Not to marginalize your idea, but an app is also just a surface level solution. A quick fix, not useless, but not longterm.

Isn't the traditional solution not just to pick up some hobby's, go out, some cultural events?

It's not easy at times, but especially at events with shared interests it's normally easiest to connect to like minded people, and those connection have a chance of lasting.

noduerme3• 3 years ago

I'm kinda with you that the mental health(ish) framing is a bit disconcerting. But it's hard to guess what the audience really is, if there is one. ChatRoulette was a neat idea that disintegrated into a bunch of guys showing their johnsons, so maybe that without video would get rid of the riff-raff and let people go in and have actual conversations. Or not. The truth is, though, there has not been a lot of experimentation in one-on-one, non-group, non-hierarchical stuff in awhile. Apart from its clothing, I don't see why this is any different from a dating site or something.

Personally I don't like talking to disembodied voices (why I don't play multiplayer games with random people) - and I live 5 minutes from a dozen bars if I feel like meeting strangers. But I can't see how it really hurts, if it doesn't become polluted with griefers and perverts.

hn92726819• 3 years ago

Why should be excited about or support a mental health startup, who stands to make money when people have poor mental health

I used to think this way about therapy. After all, they stop getting paid from you when you stop seeing them. But then I realized I love programming. It's my favorite thing to do, and I love getting paid for it too.

There are people that love what they do, and they should get paid for it just like anyone else. That being said, getting paid as a therapist is different than targeting infinite growth and profit. So hopefully this app is made by someone who likes the idea and wants to be paid, not someone just looking for a profit.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

I resonate with your comment!

Someone has to pay for the servers and put food on the table... right? :P

I won't let profit take precedence over the mission that we started out with: to help people suffering from loneliness. It is personal to me since I have been through it, and I will keep iterating to make this platform the most useful to the people it serves.

sinuhe692• 3 years ago

A point about the UI: Starting the first time on my iPhone, it oddly reported: no connection, please restart. Odd, because I’m connected. And bad, because there is no UI-element to try again, not to mention of an automatic reconnection. An ordinary user might not know how to restart an app.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Thank you for letting me know! We will make appropriate update to prevent that from happening, at least less often. I think it happens when the websocket fails to make connections on the first several tries, which is quite annoying...

mdwalters• 3 years ago

Seems pretty good so far. Is the source code for this open-source? Verifying what data the app collects from me gives me a sort of peace of mind.

Best of luck on your app!

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Hey there, the app is closed-source for now. Thank you for using the app!

thomasskis• 3 years ago

Hey, this is a great idea! I’ve found myself using dating apps for this kind of purpose and I think this could be a better approach, especially from the support side. (I’ve had a few instances where being supportive but not wanting a romantic relationship with that person to be really frustrating for that person (which is understandable given the context of a dating app))

A feature that would be great here though is to have realtime conversations, I think you can connect a lot more when it’s realtime. Also supporting text replies could be really helpful.

Anyway, love what you’re building here and hope it goes well!

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Thank you for your kind words, and thank you for sharing your past experience on dating apps! It is interesting that you have used them to support people, I have never heard of anyone use it for that purpose, but that is very altruistic of you haha

In fact, we tried making real-time conversation feature in our previous mini-MVP, and the difficulty there was that 1. people were too hesitant to jump in a phone call 2. people were never online at the same time 3. conversations could not be enjoyed by other listeners in different times.

I have tried using Clubhouse for a while, and did not like the dynamics there, where you would only have a few speakers talking at the same time like MCs while the audience can only listen. I think by focusing on asynchronous voice messages, this platform can help individuals make connections with other individuals, which is not offered by any platforms out there.

I hope you continue to enjoy using it! And we would appreciate any feedback you have :)

valuecreator99• 3 years ago

noduerme3• 3 years ago

+/- I have now spent several hours on the app and it's not what I really expected. It's long voicemails. Nothing more or less. It forces you to listen.

This reminds me of, e.g., Eliza or situations that throw you into the role of therapist, or asking for therapy. Or Love Line from the 90s. It's actually quite good because it requires a lot of concentration and thought.

I don't know if it will take off. I don't have high hopes. But I think it would be great if it did. It has the exact type of trade-off and waiting/thinking period prior to response that is so missing from all of the current social platforms. You can respond, but you must listen and respond thoughtfully.

Maybe part of what I'm appreciating is that it has an inherent anti-bot mechanism, which is that it's all just human voice.

It's touching and sweet, as well. It's hard to define what I mean by that, but this piece of code has soul that almost everything these days lacks.

In the past few hours I've exchanged voicemails of support with people from Malaysia to Seattle, and it's surprisingly normal, like being the 3rd guy down the bar to throw in a piece of advice, but you can actually talk to people because you gotta listen to them. It's almost one of those things that's so stupidly brilliant, it's incredible no one thought of it before.

I hope it takes off.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

This made me tear up a little bit :') Thank you for your kind words!

I think you really get the intent of our app. We think there is a big chunk of humanity missing from all the app offerings out there that unfortunately tend to amplify misinterpretation and distrust all for the sake of eyeballs on screen.

And I also agree with your sentiment that this might not take off. I think apps with sexual and stimulating aspects that give instant dopamine hit would have a better chance of going viral, to be honest. But, in the world of fast-food apps, we want to create a whole-some app that people can get spiritual nourishment from. It might take a while, but we believe it is the right and the good thing for humanity :)

em-bee• 3 years ago

any direct download of the app for those that can't or don't want to sign up with google?

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, not for now. We will have some web offerings in the near future. Please stay in the loop! You can follow us on Twitter: @BubblicCo

mrwnmonm• 3 years ago

Programmers are cute.

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

realclayman• 3 years ago

I love the intention and at the same time I have many questions about this. Let me think out loud for a minute: I think loneliness is a symptom and the cause could be many things. Some of the causes require clinical attention. Thinking about depression for example: it is a delicate matter how to talk to someone with depression, what to say or what not to say, and helping someone with depression requires some sort of training. How to make sure people who want to support and join this website will not unintentionally do harm? One thing that comes in mind is to remind the support members about certain things, have them to read few articles, maybe even point them to some online training sessions (which can be hosted on this app as well) The other thing is lonely people. This app might need a way to connect the group that might need clinical help to right people.

Also I think HN is good to get technical advice from but in this case getting advice from mental health experts is definitely needed.

Wish you the best :)

jaybhum32• 3 years ago

Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I think it is a good idea to include helpful resources within the app so that supporters can support better and lonely people can decide the appropriate help they need depending on the severity of it.

We will refer to some mental experts for this part. Thanks again!

Show HN: Bubblic – end loneliness together using the power of your voice

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