I kept thinking about what would happen if a message board only had one slot. One message, front and center, until someone pays to replace it.
That's the entire product. You pay the current message's decayed value plus a penny to take the homepage. Message values drop over time using a gravity-based formula (same concept HN uses for ranking), so a $10 message might only cost a few bucks to replace a day later. Likes slow the decay, dislikes speed it up.
The whole thing runs on three mini PCs in my house (k3s cluster, PostgreSQL, Redis Sentinel). Is it overengineered for a message board? Absolutely.
I genuinely don't know where this goes. Curious what HN thinks.
Archive of past messages: https://saythat.sh/history
nickvec34 minutes ago
Reminds me of https://milliondollarhomepage.com/ (which is where I assume you got the inspiration from!)
SayThatShop11 minutes ago
Funnily enough, I hadn't even heard of the Million Dollar Homepage until users started mentioning it! The core concept is quite similar though, I do agree :) I think where I've differed a bit is more of the focus on community involvement in message value, with a weighted pricing + (free) discussion/reaction system. A lot of great feedback I got was around the potential for some high-priced message to just kill further interaction, which is similar to what happened once all the pixels were bought up on the homepage.
ilinxan hour ago
It’s a cool concept, but I can’t imagine what would make me want to frequent a message board that was explicitly designed to give wealthy users more of a voice. The wealthy have enough ability to project their influence as it is. The idea is considerably too capitalistic for my taste.
SayThatShopan hour ago
I totally get that! If it helps, my logic behind it is a mix of the following: - The 'big' social media platforms already do this (give wealthy users more of a voice). It's just done in a less transparent and more manipulative way. Between ads and targeted algorithms, you get force fed content by large corporations and have your privacy invaded. - Added based on user feedback, the 'message value decay' helps avoid both the situation you mentioned and more. Regardless of whether it's a politic message or an ad from a large corporation, if people hate seeing it, its value will drop quite drastically based on their reactions. Even an expensive message will be affordable to replace if it's disliked. There's no doubt it's quite capitalistic (on the message submitter's side), but my goal was more focused on making that mechanic fair, straightforward, and respectful of users' privacy when compared to how it's usually done. Of course, I'm extremely open to ideas/feedback on how it can be improved!