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by w10-1 944 days ago
It's a great idea. It pretty directly re-humanizes the web.

Some marketing to consider...

Both "staring" and "strangers" gives it a disconcerting vibe, amplified by the dark background and the naked request to enable the webcam.

What about "See someone" or "See someone seeing you" or "See someone seeing you for a second", with a blue sky to start?

Then instead of emphasizing staring, just say something like "blink to leave".

Thus: "The webcam will show only your face, and then you will see someone seeing you. Blink to leave."

Also, in the detailed explanation, you might add that it is peer-to-peer, and no images are captured or stored anywhere else.

The "buy me coffee" link makes the site seem... incentivized, I guess. If you instead add that prompt to the information panel about you, I think you would still capture the appreciative few without putting off the many now triggered by pervasive tipping (kind of like early google text ads vs yahoo banner ads).

3 comments

Thanks for the feedback! I'll think about what you said about the buy me a coffee link.

The vibe of the website is intentional though; I wanted the website to feel like a weird little hole in your computer that someone was staring at you through. You're totally right that there's a different version of this website that produces a very different vibe (and I am probably going to experiment with more ideas in this space), but this one is supposed to be disconcerting.

> The vibe of the website is intentional though

I like it. Keep it like this

I like it, too, but the "What is this?" text should be displayed on the home page, not after clicking. It would assuage most of these types of concerns.
it is displayed (or at least it's supposed to be displayed) at the same time that the "enable webcam" button is[1] - if it's not that's definitely a bug! Are you on mobile? Would love to fix whatever you're seeing.

[1] they should both fade in as soon as the facial recognition stuff loads

I definitely clicked off for this reason, the vibe and lack of explanation. Was wondering if this is some kind of biometrics capture ploy.
Not everybody wants your data, only I do.
I feel like "gazing" is a better choice than "staring" without losing too much of the humanistic sense of it. It is a little uncomfortable. It's supposed to be. That's okay because we are all human.

"Stranger" reminds us that we really don't know these people, yet we do know we share a human experience regardless.