Why We Love You – aggregate positivity for your friends

http://www.whyweloveyou.com/

by rfong • 12 years ago

49 27 12 years ago

chadillac4• 12 years ago

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

johnwalker• 12 years ago

The script tags are a nice touch, too!

rfong11• 12 years ago

Haha I think that's my friend who is obsessed with type safety doing bug checks :)

sixbrx• 12 years ago

I was thinking that some people would feel damned by faint praise, after their expectations were raised due to the nature of the site. "Yeah they mentioned X and Y BUT NOT Z!!!??"

jkscm• 12 years ago

Anonymous commenting systems without strong communities and moderators behind them will lead to far more bad than good.

This seems like a great fit to use facebook authentication. But you could just post on their facebook wall. Who wants statistics on their praises anyway?

rfong11• 12 years ago

Haha, that's why I don't display numbers on the bar charts. They're just to get the most important characteristics to bubble to the top. I kept the overall aggregate counts because seeing those large numbers seems to give people a nice quick shot of good feels. What do you think about those?

rfong11• 12 years ago

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.

rfong11• 12 years ago

Clarification of analogy: if a doodle link gets posted to an internet forum (as happened with my example page), it will get spammed, but trollbait pages are irrelevant -- pages which are generated for their intended purpose do not run into that problem by virtue of obscurity.

chadillac4• 12 years ago

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

olav• 12 years ago

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

hablahaha• 12 years ago

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

rfong11• 12 years ago

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

Maria1987• 12 years ago

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

rfong11• 12 years ago

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

zacinbusiness• 12 years ago

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

SeemsBroken• 12 years ago

It seems you can submit empty forms.

rfong11• 12 years ago

Thanks! Added to todo list

kimonos• 12 years ago

Totally love this!

emsasi• 12 years ago

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...

jader201• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

rfong11• 12 years ago

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.

rfong11• 12 years ago

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 :(

Why We Love You – aggregate positivity for your friends

Related Stories