I post real content from my own account to seed the feed. That's fair game. What I won't do is simulate fake discourse, fake comments, fake conversations, and fake personas. That's the one thing that would counterfeit the core value of the product.
Seeding content is editorial. Faking discourse defeats the purpose of the site.
It may make the road to critical mass harder to reach, but it's not worth faking humans to create a human only space, in this world of so many lies everywhere.
Long, long, long term, if I get really lucky, your TrustChain becomes portable proof of your human-ness. Any site that integrates with us could verify you're a real accountable human without you ever disclosing your real identity. That's the pie in the sky vision anyway.
Right now I'm just trying to prove people care enough about talking to real humans to change where they do it.
That was just a coincidence of me checking - yes me personally - a human - the queue of new pre-invite users just around the exact time you got through the sign up. Welcome aboard!! Glad to have you.
Founder here. The core mechanic: every invite creates a lineage edge. When you invite someone, their trust signals propagate back up the chain. If they behave badly, your TrustRank takes a hit. This is the opposite of how most platforms handle moderation. They ban accounts. We damage lineage.
The goal was to make accountability and anonymity coexist. Identity verification doesn't produce accountability, social consequence does. You know this if you've ever had a friend vouch for someone who then embarrassed them.
TrustRank isn't content moderation. It's measuring humanity. Your posts, comments, votes, even small actions like adding a username or thanking your inviter, these are all signals. We're not moderating what you say. We're moderating whether you're human.
The motto is 'Just Be Human.' Which also means act like you would if you were in the same room with someone.
No AI-generated discourse. Humans comment and vote. AI can generate content a human chooses to post, but the conversation layer is human-only by design.
Happy to get into TrustScore mechanics, the invite reward model, or why this is structurally different from Lobsters.
Found some janky stuff to do with old versions of the cold start up flow from before I settled on the way it works now. Should be fixed now. Thank you so much for testing it.
Hmm... checking the logs to see what happened. But you should be able to go to the https://chirpper.com/login page, drop your "key" and be taken to your profile. I've already added all signups from HN to my TrustChain, so you should already be a trusted account.
LOVE IT! Seriously, that was a great UI and a great read on my project in like 30 seconds. I'm impressed, and actually going to work on it's suggestions now :)
I wanted to reframe it and wrote this blog post. I still am wondering if anyone really cares about whether they're talking to bots instead of humans when they comment.
Okay? I mean, if you say so. All I hear from those companies is how much we need more bots, but I don't use Microsoft - anything - so maybe we just have different worlds :)
Honestly you might be the exact person this is built for. You've clearly already mentally checked out of the existing platforms. "The only way to win is not to play" says it all.
It's okay to be negative, we're talking about a major commitment that I really need to believe in, and I'd rather get the truth before I commit to that than to have false hope.
Seeding content is editorial. Faking discourse defeats the purpose of the site.
It may make the road to critical mass harder to reach, but it's not worth faking humans to create a human only space, in this world of so many lies everywhere.