January 21, 2018
The strange launch of Hackers Chat
I recently launched Hackers Chat as an experiment to build the community site that I wish existed : public chat room based communites, pseudonymous users, transparent moderation logs, an open source code base and a site that is welcoming to non-technical users. I launched it as a single chat room for all discussions and support for user created chat rooms will be added shortly. An analogy might help : Reddit for chat rooms.
I originally launched the site under the name Bored Hackers , on the 1st of January, 2018 to an underwhelming response. The site didn’t get traction in any of the communities where I posted, yet what followed was an interesting series of events. Someone noticed that the chat room didn’t have basic anti-spam measures and posted a link to 4chan asking for help in spamming the chat room. Soon, the trolls and spammers showed up and started posting links to porn, messages about Hitler and other offensive content.
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