[EFFALO]

Three Kind Words (https://threekindwords.com)

It’s a small vending machine on the internet where people anonymously send a friend three postcards, one word at a time. The first two cards are unsigned, and the last one reveals who sent them. It’s meant to be a slow, kind surprise in the mail.

I shared this on HN a while back, and it gave us a quiet little push. Since then, we’ve sent 246 out of the 300 postcards we set out to deliver this year. Things have slowed down lately, but the whole thing is automated, costs almost nothing to run, and has been a lot of fun to work on!

[stevage]

Just some feedback, I think this would be much more compelling with better choices of messages. It feels like the first two words are setting something up and the third should have some kind of payoff, but a lot of the messages don't work like that. The third word is usually predictable and obvious and something of a letdown "Never give....up".

There's really nothing in that list that is interesting enough to send to anyone in my life. I'd be wanting to send something very specific like "Remember cycling Iceland?" or "Soy chicken success" or something.

I get your concerns about "writing something inappropriate" but you could probably let people choose 3 words from a list of a few hundred pre-vetted words?

[collingreen]

Or just moderate them - 100 three word sentences a year is a very very achievable pace.

[EFFALO]

thanks for this genuine feedback, it's really helpful insight. i like your idea of pre-vetted words and imagine there is something i could do with an LLM to moderate user generated messages.

"soy chicken success" hits close to home :D