Hey HN! Gentle is an app where you write requests about your worries and get (gentle) replies back from strangers. It’s cute, anonymous, and moderated.
I was inspired by:
* My disappointment in how most social media today incentivizes outrage over empathy.
* The growing trend of feel-good experiences like Kind Words, Animal Crossing, Slowly, and more.
I'm interested in getting more people testing it out. Eager to take feedback and/or talk about it. :)
I would like to have a small way to react to a message I receive. Not reply to it, but maybe an emoji reaction or some other “thank you” to the sender.
Hey I love your landing page! Did you design it or used a template? And how is moderation done? I assume they're very private so no person is moderating them... so a machine is doing it? Are you using some sort of off the shelf stuff?
For anybody who comes into this thread in the future, I've closed off public signups for the iOS beta. I've hit a critical mass of testers and want to make sure the app isn't overrun by trolls and predators. Reach out to me if you really want in [0]!
To know what's on the roadmap, checkout my public trello board [1] for more info.
That’s cute and I’ll definitely try it out. I can see it failing to hit the mark for, say, minorities with particular concerns, though, simply due to sympathy versus empathy.
I was just reading through the 'how the app keeps me safe' section. Not trying to be dour, but things like this tend to attract, trolls to put it nicely, if your service expands, you're likely to have some fairly nasty people with plenty of time and ingenuity on their side, who see your service as an opportunity to fuck with people, to put it nicely.
>We moderate the content and provide easy-to-use reporting tools.
This requires exponentially larger numbers of staff as the service grows.
>We use spam and bad word filters.
Easy to get creative around. It's pretty easy to say fairly awful things without using bad words.
>We timeout or ban users who repeatedly or flagrantly break our rules.
Easy to circumvent by changing IP'S, or if you ban by IPS, by abusing multiple accounts.
>Personally identifying information is banned from any messages.
Falls under the above issues.
>All new users agree to community expectations.
Doesn't stop people who don't care.
(Soon) If the app notices that somebody is writing about concerning topics like self-harm, it will privately and proactively offer resources from professionals.
Not really applicable to my worries.
I like the idea of your service, the internet can always use more things dedicated to just being nice, but I also know human nature and unfortunately, there's people who look at things like that as a challenge to be as horrible as possible cor no real reason other than they like being assholes.
Just to make a suggestion, some kind of shadow banning system, similar to hn could be effective here. Having been on the dark side of the shadow bans, they really do keep undesirable things at bay and do tend to be hard to notice for a while. Allowing trolls and assholes to believe they're interacting, while having their posts be invisible to the rest of users could at least help curb repeated account creation and such.
I think the key to understanding the scope for abuse is to understand the opportunity. There will always be abusive behaviour and tools are required to tackle it _but_ the majority of abusive behaviour on the internet comes from a desire for attention, and one-to-one abuse is much less common. Abusive people are typically looking for a platform to broadcast.
I think that the methods outlined on the website will help but I think the concept is inherently anti-abuse.
Context: I worked in community management for many years, dealing with some of the worst of abusive online behaviour.
One piece that will likely help minimize spammy users and multiple accounts is that at launch, it'll be a one-time purchase app.
I do have uncertainties overall, but I'm doing my best to keep the experience clean and safe. If the experience starts to veer towards being a toxic and uncontrollable mess, I'll be quick to shut it down.
Happy to talk more about this because I do see the abuse vectors, and don't take this lightly.
Edit: on your last paragraph, shadow bans are definitely on the table
I noticed your personal website mentions building products with React Native, but in this thread you mentioned Gentle was built with Flutter.
It's been a few years since I took a serious look at mobile, and after trying out NativeScript and React Native then, I ended up just wrapping web views. The bar for app experiences is much higher now, and it sounds like you have been able to iterate quickly without compromising quality. Will Flutter be your tool moving forward? Do you give it the upper hand over RN? Or is the difference just personal taste?
My impression is that my use of Flutter has been successful (especially in an iOS build) because of my heavy use of custom-designed components. There are packages built by the Flutter team to mimic native behavior, but they aren't good enough in my opinion. I'd go with react native if you want something that feels (at least on iOS) native.
The biggest plus for Flutter in my opinion is its great animation system. It's difficult to learn, but it makes things that would have been near-impossible in react native relatively straightforward.
I'd use Flutter again for sure. I'd rate it like an 8/10?
I have long wished for video games based on kindness (as I used to say to my kid, "how about a game where you hug each other?") but fighting seems to be the cultural norm. There are a few exceptions, but they are exceptions.
Honest question: what's interesting in a hugging game? Children are playing games partly because they're competitive, and fighting is a simple way of competing. How can you do this with hugs?
I always wanted to be able to play a version of Red Dead Redemption where you just build a homestead, ride your horse and play through the story with no killing.
Cool landing page. I first thought the tilted elements would be a bit jarring, but then I kinda started to like them. Stimulates your brain a little bit more. Nice trick. Can't really comment on the app itself as I don't have an iPhone. Best of luck to you.
And as a frontend guy I really appreciate the proper use of summary and details elements, haha.
Just tried it and my oh my, the design is amazing and it really makes the whole experience much better. I really love both the idea and the execution and I can’t wait to see what’s coming next. Amazing job! :)
Why do messages in the mailbox disappear? I want them always to remain! Especially when they are so good. Also, grouping responses would be amazing.
I would also like a thank you or a thumbs up emoji or something that makes the person who sent me a message or me feel that we're not screaming into an empty void.
In the reply tab, I was looking to swipe right - like the way cards in Google work. That seems intuitive.
On your first point: scroll down on your mailbox screen to see a history of what you've opened up! Sorry about that. It's a poor design decision on my part to make it so undiscoverable. Will fix it soon.
Reactions of some sort are one of the high priority features I plan to build.
No strong opinion from me on horizontal cards and swiping. It is intentional to add some friction to skipping a message (so it feels a bit more weighty), but I'll play with it!
I'm curious about your monetization strategy here, you mention using a 1 time app purchase + other what looks like 'cosmetics/item' purchases. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding. Have you thought about making this is a subscription based app where 'professional' feedback on worries etc could be a paid feature?
I'm trying to design this product so that it doesn't become a crutch for people, but rather a source of general kindness and compassion. So I think it'd need a lot more thought to figure out if professional support would fit. I'm also wary of providing "official" advice due to potential regulatory and moral issues. But I do see the potential, especially from a business perspective.
If you have any other thoughts or feedback on the app, I'm eager to listen~
This is amazing. Feels so nice. I hope this grows to something awesome. One of my colleagues had the similar idea and we were discussing of creating a webapp for it. Lol, too late now.
it’s never too late — and currently find it hard to believe that there’s more than enough demand/need for purely positive mutually beneficial exchanges, both offline & offline.
My path to using flutter was that I wanted to use SwiftUI because of its native-ness, but found it was too buggy. I know react native well, but I realized that a lot of the interactions I wanted (e.g., animations) would be much more difficult. Flutter was a compromise that's overall been great to work with.
I do feel very at-the-whim of the flutter team's progress (mainly native behavior I can't hide behind custom UI like text editing), but that's not unique to flutter.
If you don't mind a link to reddit, I also wrote a comment about the decision [0].
This works really well, nice! Do you plan iPad support? It’s frustrating that I can’t send my email in a reply, there was a message I’d have liked to give my email and start a conversation. I understand the downside of that, but it’s frustrating to feel I could help someone and not be able to. One other thing, it’s not obvious what the number next to the skip button is about - I assumed it was a limited number of skips and was trying to figure out how they worked at first.
I'll look into iPad-compatibility and see if there's some low-lift stuff I could do. To be transparent, I would probaaaably invest in a webapp before a fully-blown iPad variant.
I hear your frustration about the limitations of what you can share. I stand pretty firmly by it for safety reasons, but I don't totally rule out the potential for a way to connect further.
Thanks for the feedback about the skip button — I agree that it's confusing. I'll work to address it soon!
Happy to take any other feedback or suggestions you might have~
"- We moderate the content and provide easy-to-use reporting tools.
- We use spam and bad word filters.
- We timeout or ban users who repeatedly or flagrantly break our rules.
- Personally identifying information is banned from any messages.
- All new users agree to community expectations."
That's all well and good, but fairly par for the course when it comes to social media (except the anonymous part, but there are plenty that do have that). I don't really see anything innovative here around making sure things stay positive.
Not at all arguing that this is novel or innovative — rather my own take on the genre. I'd argue that some aspects of the system incentivize better behavior:
- It'll be a purchased app (not free), so the stakes of being banned are higher. Right now in beta, it is more open for sure.
- The 1:1 message sending doesn't give any feedback to bad actors, so attention-seeking behavior is more limited.
- I'm also hopeful to continue to design an experience that's calm and cheerful, and provides guidance about good behavior (in a way that's more in-your-face than most social media).
Of course, there will always be malicious people, and neither I nor this project are perfect. As I mentioned elsewhere in this post, I'd be quick to shut things down if it got out of hand.
Would be cool to have this app which supports the Universal Declaration of Human Rights... like, acknowledge when you see a right in action, allow you to track when the rights are visibly violated and tie some set of incentives to promoting the values of the UDHR in its usage.
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
I was inspired by:
* My disappointment in how most social media today incentivizes outrage over empathy.
* The growing trend of feel-good experiences like Kind Words, Animal Crossing, Slowly, and more.
I'm interested in getting more people testing it out. Eager to take feedback and/or talk about it. :)
Direct testflight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/tXMfOfOl
[+] [-] tobr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiaolingxiao|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
To know what's on the roadmap, checkout my public trello board [1] for more info.
[0] Email [email protected]
[1] https://trello.com/b/65BxuxBa/gentle
[+] [-] faitswulff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technofiend|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hutattedonmyarm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adam_fallon_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
>We moderate the content and provide easy-to-use reporting tools.
This requires exponentially larger numbers of staff as the service grows.
>We use spam and bad word filters.
Easy to get creative around. It's pretty easy to say fairly awful things without using bad words.
>We timeout or ban users who repeatedly or flagrantly break our rules.
Easy to circumvent by changing IP'S, or if you ban by IPS, by abusing multiple accounts.
>Personally identifying information is banned from any messages.
Falls under the above issues.
>All new users agree to community expectations.
Doesn't stop people who don't care.
(Soon) If the app notices that somebody is writing about concerning topics like self-harm, it will privately and proactively offer resources from professionals.
Not really applicable to my worries.
I like the idea of your service, the internet can always use more things dedicated to just being nice, but I also know human nature and unfortunately, there's people who look at things like that as a challenge to be as horrible as possible cor no real reason other than they like being assholes.
Just to make a suggestion, some kind of shadow banning system, similar to hn could be effective here. Having been on the dark side of the shadow bans, they really do keep undesirable things at bay and do tend to be hard to notice for a while. Allowing trolls and assholes to believe they're interacting, while having their posts be invisible to the rest of users could at least help curb repeated account creation and such.
[+] [-] vegannet|5 years ago|reply
I think that the methods outlined on the website will help but I think the concept is inherently anti-abuse.
Context: I worked in community management for many years, dealing with some of the worst of abusive online behaviour.
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
One piece that will likely help minimize spammy users and multiple accounts is that at launch, it'll be a one-time purchase app.
I do have uncertainties overall, but I'm doing my best to keep the experience clean and safe. If the experience starts to veer towards being a toxic and uncontrollable mess, I'll be quick to shut it down.
Happy to talk more about this because I do see the abuse vectors, and don't take this lightly.
Edit: on your last paragraph, shadow bans are definitely on the table
[+] [-] tropshop|5 years ago|reply
I noticed your personal website mentions building products with React Native, but in this thread you mentioned Gentle was built with Flutter.
It's been a few years since I took a serious look at mobile, and after trying out NativeScript and React Native then, I ended up just wrapping web views. The bar for app experiences is much higher now, and it sounds like you have been able to iterate quickly without compromising quality. Will Flutter be your tool moving forward? Do you give it the upper hand over RN? Or is the difference just personal taste?
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
My impression is that my use of Flutter has been successful (especially in an iOS build) because of my heavy use of custom-designed components. There are packages built by the Flutter team to mimic native behavior, but they aren't good enough in my opinion. I'd go with react native if you want something that feels (at least on iOS) native.
The biggest plus for Flutter in my opinion is its great animation system. It's difficult to learn, but it makes things that would have been near-impossible in react native relatively straightforward.
I'd use Flutter again for sure. I'd rate it like an 8/10?
[+] [-] gumby|5 years ago|reply
I have long wished for video games based on kindness (as I used to say to my kid, "how about a game where you hug each other?") but fighting seems to be the cultural norm. There are a few exceptions, but they are exceptions.
[+] [-] sz4kerto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masona|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tekkk|5 years ago|reply
And as a frontend guy I really appreciate the proper use of summary and details elements, haha.
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
One of the big problems with the gentle app today is that it's probably not very accessible, which is something I hope to address.
[+] [-] eranation|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepyfran|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yogodojo|5 years ago|reply
Why do messages in the mailbox disappear? I want them always to remain! Especially when they are so good. Also, grouping responses would be amazing.
I would also like a thank you or a thumbs up emoji or something that makes the person who sent me a message or me feel that we're not screaming into an empty void.
In the reply tab, I was looking to swipe right - like the way cards in Google work. That seems intuitive.
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
On your first point: scroll down on your mailbox screen to see a history of what you've opened up! Sorry about that. It's a poor design decision on my part to make it so undiscoverable. Will fix it soon.
Reactions of some sort are one of the high priority features I plan to build.
No strong opinion from me on horizontal cards and swiping. It is intentional to add some friction to skipping a message (so it feels a bit more weighty), but I'll play with it!
[+] [-] puranjay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidajackson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
I'm trying to design this product so that it doesn't become a crutch for people, but rather a source of general kindness and compassion. So I think it'd need a lot more thought to figure out if professional support would fit. I'm also wary of providing "official" advice due to potential regulatory and moral issues. But I do see the potential, especially from a business perspective.
If you have any other thoughts or feedback on the app, I'm eager to listen~
[+] [-] abhishekjha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Endlessly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlivingston|5 years ago|reply
I see this app was done in Flutter. What was the motivation to choose Flutter over React Native or SwiftUI?
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
My path to using flutter was that I wanted to use SwiftUI because of its native-ness, but found it was too buggy. I know react native well, but I realized that a lot of the interactions I wanted (e.g., animations) would be much more difficult. Flutter was a compromise that's overall been great to work with.
I do feel very at-the-whim of the flutter team's progress (mainly native behavior I can't hide behind custom UI like text editing), but that's not unique to flutter.
If you don't mind a link to reddit, I also wrote a comment about the decision [0].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/g3qrkj/gentle_is_a_s...
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
I hear your frustration about the limitations of what you can share. I stand pretty firmly by it for safety reasons, but I don't totally rule out the potential for a way to connect further.
Thanks for the feedback about the skip button — I agree that it's confusing. I'll work to address it soon!
Happy to take any other feedback or suggestions you might have~
[+] [-] _bxg1|5 years ago|reply
- We use spam and bad word filters.
- We timeout or ban users who repeatedly or flagrantly break our rules.
- Personally identifying information is banned from any messages.
- All new users agree to community expectations."
That's all well and good, but fairly par for the course when it comes to social media (except the anonymous part, but there are plenty that do have that). I don't really see anything innovative here around making sure things stay positive.
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
- It'll be a purchased app (not free), so the stakes of being banned are higher. Right now in beta, it is more open for sure.
- The 1:1 message sending doesn't give any feedback to bad actors, so attention-seeking behavior is more limited.
- I'm also hopeful to continue to design an experience that's calm and cheerful, and provides guidance about good behavior (in a way that's more in-your-face than most social media).
Of course, there will always be malicious people, and neither I nor this project are perfect. As I mentioned elsewhere in this post, I'd be quick to shut things down if it got out of hand.
Happy to discuss this more.
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpindar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x8BADF00D|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fit2rule|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grumpy8|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelwilson|5 years ago|reply
Good work!
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapnie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewthebold|5 years ago|reply
Checkout my privacy policy (and critique it too!) if that's useful: https://gentle.app/privacy