Show HN: Wheesper – Start an anonymous discussion with a link

35 28 2 days ago

adrianwaj2• 2 days ago

Great to be able to keep data storage local.. see my recent comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48967684 .. so basically P2P chat from within the browser.

Also, like many paste-bins, perhaps avoid asking for emails in sign-ups and be able to set expiry times on chats. Dead-man switch expire? Another idea would be to accept emails as a way to post into a discussion without viewing the site and enabling rss to keep track of new comments.

It'd be weird if someone could forward an email of a long discussion and have it format correctly for public web-viewing. Smartdox? I guess the LLMs would like slurping it all up. As long as names could be auto-redacted, it may end up being used - confidentiality agreements are the issue. Maybe as an email backup for important threads with the public thing as an option?

Once an email is received a reply is sent asking for micro-payment. EmailStash. SeedyBackup. DoxNation. DoxNow.

cyberclimb• 2 days ago

This looks cool but why do I meed an email to start an "anonymous" discussion?

Also no mention on whether this is end to end encrypted, can you comment on that?

whatdoyouthink27• 2 days ago

Hey! How do you suggest I should do the permissions for creating a discussion? Nothing at all?

steeleduncan• 2 days ago

There are no need for permissions if the link per discussion is obscure and you use HTTPS. In that case the link is the password

128byte3• 2 days ago

I'll vibe code a better one that's actually anonymous and stores nothing on disk, then open-source it.

lardosaurusrex• 2 days ago

E-mail.

... anonymous?

uh.

whatdoyouthink27• 2 days ago

Check now :)

128byte3• 2 days ago

No encryption, proprietary, wants an account, don't trust it!

whatdoyouthink27• 2 days ago

No need for an account. Try it again. Cheers.

128byte3• 2 days ago

Nothing with Cloudflare is truly anonymous. Open source it or I'll make my own and open source that.

Izmaki• 2 days ago

You may not use Wheesper to:
break the law, facilitate illegal activity, or violate another person's rights;
threaten, harass, stalk, exploit, or seriously harm another person;
share child sexual abuse material, intimate imagery without consent, or sexually exploit any person;
publish another person's private or identifying information without a lawful basis;
impersonate someone, commit fraud, deceive participants, or conduct phishing;
infringe intellectual property, confidentiality, privacy, or other proprietary rights;
distribute malware, harmful code, spam, or unsolicited bulk messages;
probe, disrupt, overload, scrape, reverse engineer, or bypass access controls, rate limits, bot protections, or security measures, except where applicable law expressly permits security research; or
help another person do any of the above.

---

...then what the heck do we need this service for?

(Obviously, this comment is meant as a joke.)

khurs• 2 days ago

Created a link, I am the new dang!!

https://wheesper.com/d/w8vGpMUenFR_rQCd2XJlNsKCWNUzmbCmkitmA...

oldandboring2• 2 days ago

I'm all for free speech and privacy. But in the 30+ years I've been online, the actual trendline I've observed is that anonymous, uncensored forums evolve quickly into a vector for delivering speech that promotes hate, violence, anti-consumer agendas and anti-democratic politics. And if I had an alternative to propose, I would do it, but I don't. I'm not (at all!) saying all internet discourse should be in censored forums. I'm just saying that when people spread lies and make threats with no accountability, the people most likely to defend that behavior are the ones who don't, themselves, feel threatened and/or might even believe the lie. And that's before we get into how these things become platforms for bots.

NickNaraghi3• 2 days ago

Unfortunately it is a necessary compromise, because free speech is essential to a working civilization.

DennisP• 2 days ago

It'd be interesting to see how that works in various languages, because there may be some selection bias. Most English-speaking countries have decent protections for all but the most abhorrent speech, and people who don't find their speech constrained may not bother with anonymous platforms. In non-democratic countries with more restrictions on political speech, maybe we'd find anonymous platforms full of pro-democracy dissidents.

Maybe something that would help these platforms is some kind of distributed or federated moderation, so you can avoid the icky stuff yourself even if it's still out there.

oldandboring2• 2 days ago

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I hadn't considered that angle (English- vs. non-English-speaking countries, and democratic- vs. non-democratic countries).

Maybe something that would help these platforms is some kind of distributed or federated moderation

In practice I think this would end up functioning as an extension of how the dialog functions: dogpile up/downvoting and bots.

NickNaraghi3• 2 days ago

This is awesome! Feedback would be to increase the visual density of the posts / replies (taking from HN or Reddit) because right now there's a lot of space between each line.

whatdoyouthink27• 2 days ago

Is it better now? Cheers for the feedback man.

NickNaraghi3• 1 day ago

I would put Reply and Report on the same line as the poster anon username, to condense even more

sebnado• 2 days ago

I think it would benefit from having a upvote type of feature to surface opinions/comments that people agree with. if you have many people with the same insight in your thread, there is no point in restating the same point over and over to show you agree

anoop_kumar• 2 days ago

I am confused. What is this for again? IS it for AI Agents to start discussion or humans?

Oxodao• 1 day ago

idk but seeing as OP answers he might be an AI too

frizlab2• 1 day ago

What is it with website not following the system’s dark mode setting? Yes, there is a switch but the default choice should be “system,” not “dark.” (And it should not be a two-choice setting either.)

whatdoyouthink27• 1 day ago

Thanks for your feedback. I didn't know that. Now it defaults to system. Cheers.

frizlab2• 1 day ago

Thanks for the fix!

Show HN: Wheesper – Start an anonymous discussion with a link

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