For the curious ones, this thing runs on Flask with MongoDB and Consul. I'm using Prometheus to collect some basic metrics and Grafana to visualize them. And yes, I'm going to open source it soon.
Yep, commenting is a must-do. I am still not entirely sure how. Having 100% anonymous comments would be cool, sure, but you can't really have a conversation with somebody if you are not sure whether two comments are from the same person or not. I think that commenting will require some sort of identification: to start with, it can be the browser session, in the future I might add the ability to register accounts.
This was inspired by apps like DevRant. Problem with those apps is that everything you post is linked to your account. What if you post a story, somebody you know reads it and recognizes you? That person would know all your secrets and shouts.
I wanted to create something where I could post without worries: no accounts, no censorship, automatic expiry (so things don't stay forever and you can have no regrets).
Regarding spam: that's a hard problem for sure. To stop bots, I'm thinking about adding a captcha. To stop spammy humans, there's already a "flag" button below each post. I'm thinking about adding a machine learning module that maybe can learn from the flags and then identify spam automatically. We'll see how it goes. If this thing gains some attraction, I'll surely add moderators from the community around it.