I'll have to be honest here man, yeah no shit. I can't think of any good reason of why you would add something like this. A standard comment section is typically bad enough, and at least you're able to moderate that. An anonymous real-time chat embedded within your own blog? That's just asking for issues.

The chat is still there in the corner of this post, with people typing nasty shit into it.

Well have fun delving into programmatic censorship I guess. Or just take it out. If you take the former path and post about trying to fix it here then I'm sure you'll get a lot more free testing of your attempts to enforce civility through regex or whatever. Enjoy learning about the Scunthorpe problem.

Well, you've just painted a big target on your blog. This is the internet, after all.

"Every input is hostile until proven otherwise": you said it yourself. One of those sad things that somebody new learns on the Internet every day.

lol hate speech (fun speech lbh) drives traffic

TL;DR: this is a toy example, so it doesn't require BEAM VM

Hard to take this seriously without the loadtest with the the large number of concurrent users.

For a number of users concurrently reading a long-tail blog post - you will get good results even using DotCom era HTTP polling.

I was watching porn recently and the particular site I was on had recently added a real time chat widget too! Aside from scam bots trying to lure users off onto telegram, the last few messages were guys talking about Montey Python's The Life of Brian.

So that’s what’s beneath the usual HN tech bro libertarian veneer.

Oh my bad are yall under the impression that HN is not the majority of the traffic right now lmao

The homepage design is nice, and I think anonymous chat is fun too. Even though the programming topic probably has a pretty clear target audience, I'm surprised that kind of hateful chat still shows up.

The obvious solution is shutting it down it does offer nothing.

Short of that shadow ban everyone everyone sees their own messages, and add a few fake ones every now and then.

This should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody.

But hey traffic is traffic I guess.

Reminds me of Maria Abramovic Rythym 0 performance art.

1: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/3/30/maria-abramovic...

What if he filled the chat with bots and is using all of this as stealth marketing?

This sounds like the kind of feature that ends up being quick to initially implement but takes up way more engineering time to maintain than everything else combined. The author concedes at the end that most genuine uses of the feature are people just saying hello. So maybe the solution here is to disallow unrestricted input and just have a few buttons with fixed things to say.

I’d suggest one additional heuristic: once your bad word detector has triggered, shut down the chat for 10 minutes. That way waves of assholes don’t monopolize the chat, and when they move on to the next target the functionality returns to your site automatically.