Maybe it's due to lack of experience, but I guess I didn't consider adoption from a business perspective when designing the initial experience.
Do you think a separate landing page or series of blog posts on Medium could lead to a better first impression? That way I could direct new users to specific tags and bypass the default channel altogether.
I disagree. Growing up I've had plenty of positive experiences with various anonymous communities online.
I do think that giving IDs to individual messages (instead of individual people) and not having an upvote/like system will go a long way in reducing the kind of toxic behavior you have in mind though.
I'm still experimenting with finding the right balance between convenience and making users conscious of the decision to censor others. For now you can use the settings in the sidebar to filter words and message IDs.
I don't think content will be an issue if sharing is handled through linking to specific tags (hashtags.chat/NotReallyPrivate instead of hashtags.chat) because of the built in lack of discoverability.
I really appreciate your feedback because you're approaching this from a perspective I hadn't considered.
If you're interested in my thought process going into this project, I've gathered my thoughts in a short Medium post:
https://medium.com/@hashtags_chat/online-communication-and-t...