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Show HN: Forum where posts slowly disappear unless interacted with (disappearing.chat)
6 points by cedricmcdougal 865 days ago
I'm always nervous to post online (this is my very first HN post), so I built an anonymous forum where posts are automatically deleted after 24 hours. Every upvote or comment resets the clock.

Some things I like about this concept:

- The sheer volume of information on the internet is overwhelming - disappearing.chat keeps that volume low

- Unpopular content slowly fades away, so you can visually watch bad takes disappear

- Content is always fresh because even popular things will eventually stop getting interaction

- Takes the pressure off that your content is going to stick around forever

fwiw this just started as a toy project to play around with the Next.js app directory, Tailwind and deploying to Vercel, but I figured I'd get it fully functional and share it.
3 comments
tamimio 865 days ago
Nice concept but I think the beauty of forums is the post can be found useful a decade later, even if it has no replies, I always find those useful posts from ~2004 in linux forums!
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cedricmcdougal 865 days ago
Totally agree. Now that Google has been pushing forum results more recently, I find myself always clicking on Reddit threads instead of other results. It's a treasure trove of information.

It's interesting to think how temporary posts would change the content though. Like, you're probably not going to ask a question if it will get deleted in 24 hours. So it wouldn't become a corpus of information, but maybe it would have a different feeling and culture than the existing social media platforms.

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082349872349872 865 days ago
On first glance it sounds to me like bitrot* with extra steps, but it's cool that you're making the experiment.

* compare how little text we have left from 2500-5000 years ago.

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cedricmcdougal 865 days ago
hah I like that - accelerated bit rot
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briandswartz 865 days ago
Feels like a Slack killer :)

But seriously, we'd solve a lot of issues with internal docs if Slack threads died as soon as they were no longer interesting.

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cedricmcdougal 865 days ago
oooh new idea for a slack store app. maybe instead of just deleting the message it could feed it into an LLM that would insert the information into a company wiki, so you have to go to the wiki to search instead of digging through old slack messages, which always sucks
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