Hi Product Hunters !
As a team of college students we found that large event apps only focus on what's happening in the future, but not right now!
So - we created flare :)
Flare fills the gap and allows you to post real-time events seen by your entire community, all in real-time, anonymously.
Post a flare as easily as a tweet, and chat with users at local flares. We've seen flares for everything from study sessions to house parties and can't wait to see what else people use flare for.
Right now we're looking to build out profiles while still retaining anonymity - a tough task that we'd love your feedback on!
Let us know what you think, and feel free to ask me anything! :)
See you on flare !
@bradenream, love the general idea behind the app! How do you reconcile anonymity wth Facebook sign-ins? What techniques are you implementing behind the scenes to ensure anonymity? Also, how do you moderate anonymous content?
@playgraph Thanks David!
Right now we're pushing into what we like to call partial-anonymity. We've found from other fully anonymous apps that people use it to sometimes harass or belittle others which is something we didn't want to happen in our community. So, we opted for an anonymous username that's still attributable to a person. You're anonymous to regular users, but we hope that by logging in with facebook people know that they are still accountable for their actions! We realize it may not be the perfect strategy as some people want total anonymity, but our end game goal is allow people to get together in their communities spontaneously and we feel this approach best suits that goal!
As for moderation - right now we're relying on community moderation as the userbase is small and manageable but pending things scaling up we're ready to implement iBM's visual recognition API which will be able to flag blacklisted keywords as soon as the flare is posted - allowing us to quickly check to see if it's OK!
Thanks David - hopefully I answered your questions!!
Braden
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Downloading it now. Any thoughts on if or how you encrypt a Flare user? I can see the app being useful for posting protest demonstrations, but could also be used for illegal activities. The ability to protect a user's privacy as well as to meet law enforcement requests is something you should probably mention in your docs and TOS.
@riptide360 Hey Stephen! Yeah I agree entirely!
Right now we haven't focused on that aspect as much but we've given it thought before. We're going to push harder on optional total anonymity once we offer multiple login options including a pure flare account as opposed to Login with Facebook!
Let us know what you think when you're in :)
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Nice angle ! I also created a couple of months ago a project that can be used to check'in and count attendees with a special focus on speed and anonymous sessions. Have a look and good luck ;) https://www.producthunt.com/post...
Created fully anon app like this in 2011. Think there is so much potential if fully anon, not much different than a location based FB if not. No logins or anything. Use downvoting logic to downvote post visibility and eventually banning.
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