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Show HN: Instant, Self-Destructing Websites

sdnotes.com

242 pointsunfl63 comments

This reminds me of http://txti.es/ (made by the people behind http://motherfuckingwebsite.com).

Oh man, I laugh with that one!

I really love ideas like this (and this one is so nicely done!). Reminds me of when "wiki wikis" first started, and many were publicly editable (ah, simpler times!). I'd love to see a real-time chart of the number of active pages... watch how it ebbs and flows over time.

Also, I started to make a "choose your own adventure" game, but I realized that would be the end of my day's productivity!

Ephemera. I miss living in New York City because of the street art.

The web would benefit from open air ephemerality. Real ephemerality, not "your photos and videos disappear to our digital vault, probably forever." Also:

> Passwords are optional.

This makes me happy.

This sentiment is actually what originally drew me to places like 4chan on the internet. If you miss it, you just miss it. I felt like I legit HAD to be on the board or else I would miss the best joke or thread.

No idea what that's called. Maybe hipsterism? I liked to know that what I'm seeing is authentic, real, and limited (even if it was technically available to everyone in the world).

Immediacy?

temporal uniqueness. Art in a museum is locked in a gated vault, like a website is locked to a version number. Ephemera is when you walk past your favorite street art and a piece of the pasted image was scraped or defaced, or when another artist or rando with a pen or a can added something in response. An ephemeral website is one that you hope will be different when you refresh it. There's an element of chance and the content is the reward. To an extent, aggregators have long embodied this characteristic I feel.

FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out.

Edit: I was going to add "gnostic" but I can't find a dictionary to back up my definition. What I mean is a hierarchy based on secret knowledge.

Conversely, that feeling is what turned me off 4chan (and incidentally snapchat). I prefer to read the cream of the crop on best of 4chan threads elsewhere. Different strokes I guess

This one is my favorite: https://sdnotes.com/facebook

I prefer https://sdnotes.com/scavenger

Haha, that's great. This --> https://sdnotes.com/deadmau5

This is cool! It's like a wiki, but there's no structure imposed and everything's ephemeral. Would be interesting to see what happens over time.

Some feedback for the author: it might be interesting to add a "I'm feeling lucky"-type feature, kind of like StumbleUpon. Or some other fun discovery technique.

I really like this concept, and you've done a nice job stripping away everything except the bare minimum essentials.

That being said, are there any plans to support markdown? Also it may prove helpful to be able to download posts before the site is destroyed.

+1 .. Markdown would be awesome!

Good idea! Currently it supports some HTML elements using Rails' simple_format (<b>, <i>, etc), but Markdown would definitely be an improvement.

oo! Good to know it supports HTML elements. Might be worth adding this into the FAQ!

Not really related, but I just browsed through all the projects on http://unfoundedlabs.com/ and really enjoyed it. You have a unique voice and an artists sensibilities which will now serve as an inspiration to me.

Thanks, appreciate the kind words!

Just a warning that there might be some NSFW content on the websites. The very first site I opened (the one about a collaboration on shirts or similar) has a half naked woman in the first picture.

I'd consider removing <img> support.

It also supports img tags. Being able to write HTML is very powerful. Markdown support would just add feature bloat. Next you will ask for a markdown live preview.

https://sdnotes.com/reddit

>tfw when someone doesn't have a strong password.

I assume a lite site like this doesn't having any kind of rate limiting feature so it would be simplicity to brute force a page's password.

What password is assigned if you inadvertently click "add password" with the password box still empty? If you click "add password" without first entering a password in the box, the site is locked behind an unknown password. You can't login with an empty password, nor with "password"...

This is cool, but seems ripe for abuse. Do you have a plan to deal with that?

Yeah, I had a question around how to stop people from claiming "legit" brands and bashing them? I could easily see someone take a brand like Uber or Airbnb and start creating content that could get the actual brand in legit trouble. Cool concept though! I like the simplicity.

Good question and it's definitely a concern. For now, I'm just monitoring things manually, but certainly would need a more scalable system if the site grows.

Awesome! As long as you're monitoring it. Keep this going!

Or worse like paste in, Bitcoin and other public places people will post urls to terrible/illegal things on the internet. People always find a way to ruin the public commons.

Honestly, a more scarier concern is that there is likely to various illegal things posted on this as soon as enough people get on it.

So how many of the images that have been linked to are child porn?

If the brand has no affiliation with the person who posted the content, how is the brand getting in trouble?

I for one am not too worried about "legit" brands being squatted. No sane person thinks https://sdnotes.com/facebook was made by Facebook.

Facebooks' lawyers are not sane. ^__^

I understand the concern, but I wonder if it's real. I can bash Facebook in this comment right now, lie, but is HackerNews legally responsible for this comment? I honestly don't know the laws. Seems like I should.

There may be minor security problems with some choices of site name. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/20190924064831/https://sdnotes.c...

Love this, really fun idea.

It would be nice to have a setting that prevents a password from being added to the page.

Right now, all it takes to end the fun of an unpassworded page is for a bad actor to add a password (see: https://sdnotes.com/index)

https://sdnotes.com/index

damn beat me to it

Love all the XSS attempts

Be careful when perusing various names. Not all might be SFW.

Man you should really ad "nofollow" to links, otherwise you'll soon get spammed.

ah yes thanks, will add shortly

So does it persist all of the posted content if the page is updated within every 30-day window?

Correct. Perhaps I can make that more clear in the FAQ

I actually love this, hands down amazing for blogs

reminds me of https://itty.bitty.site/

A feed with latest posts would be cool (after adding markdown support)

You can now use it as a chat room! https://sdnotes.com/chat

Love this, particularly that you can view the content without JavaScript as well.

If you can solve the "potential for abuse" problem while maintaining this format, you've got something!

A similar idea that we're working on: https://pocketweb.io/

This is actually very nice. I think discovery can make this site really catch on, like most active, featured, etc.

Apologies for nit-picking, but you might like to fix the typo "defintion" in the FAQ.

fixed, thx :)

but is it as good as pastebin at being a command and control for you botnet :p?

Would be cool if people could comment posts as well, great idea!

At last, a contender for the title of Twitter-killer.

open/GitHub/self-hostable?

https://github.com/eri-b/mini

This is cool for blog posts.

Really cool

Half of the Show HN websites I see use Bulma. Thanks for using it!

lovely idea. really hope it catches on.

This would be nice for paywall workarounds.

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