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
Happy to listen to other feedback or suggestions you might have~
Moderation is based on two things:
1. A spam/bad word filter. It's pretty aggressive and inspired by a variety of OSS tools, but definitely could be better. 2. An easy reporting tool available for any user-generated content. It could be more prominent for requests, so that's something I'll fix shortly.
I hacked together a small dashboard to surface whatever's caught by those two things. For the beta test, it's been working pretty well.
Feel free to ask any followups!
To know what's on the roadmap, checkout my public trello board [1] for more info.
[0] Email beta@gentle.app
I will say one of the "rules" you agree to when you first start is "I know I can’t fix other’s problems, but I can share kindness". I know that's not enough, so it'll be something to keep working on.
The only thing I could think of to cause that is the embedded vimeo iframe. But why? If you're open to share, I'd love to know what browser you're using.
Happy to elaborate if you have followup q's!
>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 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.
I like the idea of the service, and agree with the moderation approach, but I also think trolls are a potential problem.
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
How do you see the system handling someone's answer to "What are you worried about?" being something like "My dad's been raping me for years but I'm worried that if I tell someone he'll get into trouble and we won't be able to carry on paying for my mom's medicine and she will die"?
That could either be someone in really difficult circumstances, or someone who is trolling others to upset them - there's no way to know from one message.
If you shadow-ban the person in difficult circumstances it's not very kind, but if you let the troll through (with identical words), whoever reads it may have an awful day agonising over how to respond.
I wouldn't call something like that toxicity, because it might be genuine distress.
If you made asking for kindness a paying feature but allowed replies from non-paying members. You have the same spam problem but at least it is limited to replies plus it provides a revenue stream. It creates another problem because people want to give and receive (not just give).
The free open model is the best. But it has other problems.
Anyone remember spiritweb.org from early the early 2000s? They had a feature where you would ask a question and a random person would get an email asking to answer a question (but the question was not given you had to psychically guess). Kind of a neat idea but in the end it falls apart because of spam and garbage questions. For a spammer being able to send kindness would be a great opportunity.
I'm not saying this as an anti-religion thing, churches are a great source of community and it's probably the best thing about them, just that this is a very apples-to-oranges comparison.
Also I don't think this is a replacement for anything really. A supplement perhaps.
Love that idea - quite an insightful and healthy approach to technology in our life.
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.
Kids are generally pretty enthusiastic about such things as well until it is socialized out of them.
Do correct me if I'm wrong.
If you're curious where that comes from, the app is built with Flutter, which tries to mimic native behavior. Text editing is something that's not quite there yet, unfortunately, so I'll have to manually make fixes.
Good luck!
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~
I think it would be better to go back to the previous message instead of scrolling through all the messages and then starting from the top. Also the reply button looks like what I’d consider a back button to be.
I'm curious: do you have thoughts on what a "reply" button's icon should look like?
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?
And as a frontend guy I really appreciate the proper use of summary and details elements, haha.
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.
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 see this app was done in Flutter. What was the motivation to choose Flutter over React Native or SwiftUI?
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...
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 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.
- 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.
Good work!
Checkout my privacy policy (and critique it too!) if that's useful: https://gentle.app/privacy
Sorry for the trouble if you were hoping to try it out. If you're interested, you can join the subreddit for updates [0].
A feature I'm hoping to add in shortly is better scaffolding for better content, such as:
1. examples of good requests and responses 2. a brief tutorial that gives you a better sense of what's good/bad
Also checkout the game "Kind Words", which was a big inspiration for this.
(I just don't have an android device to test with right now)
If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to share~
[1] https://flutter.dev/docs/development/ui/animations/hero-anim...
