Libre – An anonymous social experiment without likes, followers, or ads
105 comments
·August 23, 2025schrodinger
I've always thought that a problem with sites like Reddit and Hacker News is that a very small percentage of users engage with "new"; most people only see the posts that have been curated by that small minority which creates _some_ sort of bias (arguably, a positive one).
I've wanted to try something like a Hacker News where your homepage shows a random smattering of posts where the probability you'll see any particular one depends on its number of likes.
In other words, rather than having a firehose of "new" posts from which a few are elevated to the home page (masses), give everyone a dynamic home page which is mostly items that have been liked by many, but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet. Maybe instead of pure likes it could be a ratio of likes to views.
But the point is some way to engage everyone in the selection of what makes the homepage. It could even be as simple as "keep HN as is, but include 5 posts randomly chosen from recent submissions and tag them as such."
Dang, has anything like this been considered?
Induane
Curation IS arguably one of the most critical factors. A library is useful because of what it doesn't contain, not because of what it does contain. The hypothetical "library of all possible books" isn't useful to anyone.
That's a long way of agreeing with you that there is positive in the duration bias of HackerNews and other sites.
Of course anything can be hijacked, and metrics proverbially tend towards becoming targets (and hence a dumb arms race), but the general concept of the value of curation is sound.
progval
> The hypothetical "library of all possible books" isn't useful to anyone.
That's an archive, and it has its own uses for researchers, especially historians.
hexaga
In the spirit of the library, which contains both your comment and mine:
> The hypothetical "library of all possible books" isn't useful to anyone.
That's not an archive, and has no uses even for researchers, especially not for historians.
schrodinger
Thanks -- totally agree that curation is essential, and I suspect my original point may have come across as advocating against curation, which I wasn’t.
My goal isn’t to randomize the homepage or flatten quality, but to involve a broader swath of users in the curation process. It’s currently dominated by the few who browse “new”, essentially a self-selected minority of curators.
Concretely, I was imagining something like: * Every new post is shown to a small % of users as part of their regular homepage (not in a “new” tab they’d have to seek out). * Posts that get engagement from that slice are shown to more users, and so on — a gradual ramp-up based on actual interest rather than early-bird luck.
So it’s not removing filtering; it’s just moving from a binary gate (past the goalpost = homepage) to a more continuous, probabilistic exposure curve.
Curation still happens, but more people get to participate in it, and the system becomes more robust to time-of-day luck or early vote pile-ons.
Anyway, I mostly wanted to clarify that I’m not against filtering -- just having a thought experiment about how we might make it more adaptive and inclusive.
Does that clarify my point? Any thoughts? I appreciate your engagement!
sixtyj
Randomness is an underdog.
Serious question is how often would you tolerate if those randomly displayed posts are absolutely out of your interests? Would you click or skip? Plenty of fish (Canadian-based dating site), programmed by Markus Frind, had a function: during onboarding you could choose types of people you think you prefer (e.g. brunette/blond etc.) and if you haven’t clicked later on them, algo had started to show different results…
schrodinger
Interesting anecdote on Plenty of Fish. It’s definitely interesting how people aren’t really good at telling you what they like; empirical evidence is far better. I believe Paul Graham has an essay on a similar topic where if you ask people if they like an idea you have for a product, they are likely to say yes even if they wouldn’t actually use it. But if you ask them how much they would pay for access, or if they’d pay a certain amount, you’d get a more accurate response.
FWIW, I wasn’t suggesting pure randomness though, it’s more like probabilistic randomness. Rather than a binary threshold a post must pass to make the homepage that divides the community into curators and consumers, this would show you posts with a degree of randomness with a probability proportional to the likes it’s garnered.
Btw, I’m not sure what you meant by randomness is an underdog? Are you implying it’s a nice goal but it rarely works out in practice, perhaps because people actually do fall into natural curator / consumer buckets?
schrodinger
Actually, isn't this a bit like TikTok and why it allows low-follower profiles to rise to the top on occasion?
lossolo
Yes, TikTok uses similar algorithm to push new content, that's why anyone can go viral there.
asim
Every attempt at anonymous social fails terribly. Unfortunately without good moderation tooling this doesn't work. You have to limit the blast radius of what people put out there because on the internet, without repercussions, a lot of people say terrible things. After having tried a few things like this, it's clear identity matters. Yes you can find clever ways to get around it and surface the best content or have pseudonyms and all that, but essentially you must verify individuals. People need to know you can't just say anything aka you can't say terrible hurtful things without repercussions. You need a unique identifier per browser, per device, etc, and then you permaban anyone who uses vulgar language, racial slurs, or anything of the sort immediately. You use AI before the fact to actually moderate and check things, and anything that is attempted gets a warning.
Someone else said, let's go a step further and not post at all. You know what, YES. We have X, we have Facebook, we have many tools where you can create an account with any random email address, with any random name, and say anything you want. Let's leave behind the two decades of public social and go back to the real world e.g maybe there's a world in which you own what you say, its there forever and you have to be thoughtful before you say it, but we also put it in an appropriate place, in a category of communication that makes sense. Blogging was way better than microblogging, but obviously opening the door to everyone made social media far more viral and addictive. Adding pictures and video made it even more viral and addictive. It would just be nice to go back to something a bit more real, something that's not going to be horribly abused and it feels like part of that might mean, less public social.
throwaway19340
> You have to limit the blast radius of what people put out there because on the internet, without repercussions, a lot of people say terrible things
And yet those same repercussions are the reason why social media is full of inoffensive slop. No one wants be the one who get fired for leaking their employer's unethical practices, after all.
Pseudonymity is not enough, sadly. Given enough time, you'll leak enough data points to be identified.
> Let's leave behind the two decades of public social and go back to the real world
The idea that the "internet" and the "real world" are separate has been outdated for a long time.
ceroxylon
Interesting, but after my initial impressions I predict the results of the experiment will be "this is why we can't have nice things"
tombert
I feel like this experiment has already kind of been run with 4chan and 8kun, which are sort of famous for their awfulness.
null
delusional
The first post in my feed was "Kill all Jews" I feel like we're already there.
barbazoo
> There are no 'likes', no followers, no algorithms here. There is only the freedom to express yourself with radical anonymity and connect purely.
> Start being FREE
Love the concept, let’s go one step further. No publishing at all. Only you can see what you wrote. No need to connect to anything, even if it’s “pure”.
jibal
Indeed. I'm already free to express myself with radical anonymity. Am I now free due to that site to do so and have it reach the people I want it to reach? No, not at all.
rododecba
I recently launched Libre , a small side project and social experiment. It’s not a social network, but kind of the opposite:
No profiles, usernames, or followers
No likes, trending topics, or algorithms
No ads, no data collection
Just anonymous thoughts from people around the world. Curious to see how it evolves and what kind of conversations happen when metrics are removed.
roscas
To be anonymous you cannot use gstatic.com because this way you're just telling google I was there. Also tailwindcss and unpkg call sell data to others and there you go zero anonimous. I'm sure you can fix this.
Hoodedcrow
Thankfully, Ublock Origin in advanced mod can block those requests by default. It's just very irritating and I'd say disrespectful when you HAVE to unblock them for the site to work.
rododecba
i dont know any other way to show where the msg was sent if not
colesantiago
You might as well not use the web / internet at this point.
Unless you use busybox or an esoteric OS to browse the web, almost every browser or OS (macOS, Linux, Windows) will ping to Google or some other bad spyware website.
null
48terry
Your site about "pure freedom of expression" and "raw thoughts" stops me from posting about buying new golf balls because of a badwords.js word filter.
Why are your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy a collection of empty bullet points?
rkomorn
How can you comment this without including the post content that triggered the filter?
48terry
Literally just try it: "golf balls".
The badwords.js isn't even particularly hidden if you check the page's source: https://libreantisocial.com/badwords.js
jibal
No value--people want content that is focused, accurate, curated, reliable, relevant, high quality, etc.
Also no freedom, with all your content restrictions.
petralithic
To the first point, could there not be an algorithm that nevertheless still works without followers, likes or ads? TikTok seems kind of similar, at least when it initially started. It seems its core algorithm doesn't need likes, it can detect whether you engage with a video via other metrics like time spent watching the video.
I suppose you'd want to allow people to self select based on topics, and then, well, you essentially get Reddit.
mindcrime
people want content that is focused, accurate, curated, reliable, relevant, high quality, etc.
That is trivially disproven by observing that massive numbers of people use Twitter, Facebook, etc.
incone123
You can follow accounts which is a form of curation. I dropped all social media except this one because it was a time-sink but I did used to find following resulted in a useful feed on Instagram.
jibal
It's a fact so it can't be disproven. Your response is a fallacy of denial of the antecedent.
rododecba
i cant make a site with 100% freedom, beacuse of obvious reasons, that would be like utopic i think
jibal
Then don't call it that.
There's nothing about your site that grants me the sort of freedoms I want, including the freedom to locate useful content.
atoav
Ah the good old "freedom to" that totally forgets that freedom also should contain a "freedom of". Free like in a chaotic war zone, where you can commit any kind of horrible attrocity, but if you just want to have a nice time, that isn't an option, because everybody behaves like an idiot. No thanks.
Freedom in reality isn't just a thing that you increase by reducing the rules. There comes a point where less rules result in less freedom. So it is always a balancing act between your freedom to do X and others freedom to not have to be subjected to X. Example: Giving up the freedom being able to murder random people is a little price to pay, if it means reducing the risk to be murdered yourself – especially since decent people wouldn't have the actionable urge to murder each other anyways. If you're a murderer however that may reduce your freedom in ways you dislike. But then, maybe, your freedom shouldn't matter as much.
Maybe I would care more about that specific idea of active freedom if I routinely wittnessed a real repression of any idea that isn't just the mean bullshit of egocentrics who have lost all touch with humanity and just want to see the world burn.
jibal
I didn't say that I wanted a "freedom to" site, I'm just saying that the site is mischaracterized.
listic
There's no way of ever hearing back; being responded to, right?
jandrese
So you launched /b/?
guerrilla
This is what I thought too. It'll go full Nazi in less than 5 hours from now. Anyone want to place bets?
politelemon
The first message is from July 2022. Is it really recent?
rododecba
i launched it 1 month ago aprox
riidom
Could you look into your dark mode please? Thank you!:)
ranger_danger
I highly suggest the Dark Reader extension.
textadventure
As some who loves dark mode, I hate that extension. I get the appeal of forcing every website to be dark mode, but that ends up breaking half of them or just making them look like trash. People need to custom design their dark modes for whatever each design is.
If you don't care about breaking design and stuff looking the way its supposed to, I guess the extension is fine but I rather use something like Stylus where you can use people's custom designed stylesheets for most known sites.
kenjackson
I feel like this kind of how Twitter started. Just text messages to the world. But it’s hard to resist monetization and network effects.
buynlarge
I always thought there was a space for a social media that has upvotes and followers and all that, with the intention of creating echo chambers and segregating users into their own groups and that sort of thing, but with the ability for anyone to go on a 'holiday' into the other echo chambers, to see what those other users experience.
Likes are not one dimensional. Likes flow from one person to another. If you like someones posts, you're more likely to enjoy the things they like. A network of endorsement emerges and the subgroups can become clear.
NoMoreNicksLeft
The important thing would be for moderators to be able to police "what is liked/disliked". Hear me out.
If you've got this space where dozens or hundreds of people all have a high overlap of favorable content, but there's this one turd who comes in and downvotes everything, always... he's not just a little different, and he's not assimilating. He's trying to sabotage. If this was visible to a moderator, that moderator could decide he doesn't belong to the group. I don't advocate that he no longer be able to view the content, but maybe his votes just stop counting. Maybe he's no longer able to post content of his own (would be up to the moderator, I think, perhaps his content was always good enough, but his voting is counterproductive).
I think that on places like reddit they avoided this functionality because it would give moderators too much control over their communities, and outsiders would be unable to come in and eventually take over and force the original group out. Being admins, they could of course have done this anyway, but it would require them to be heavy-handed and obvious.
buynlarge
I think, if you have a saboteur, they're probably not part of your 'network'. The people you've endorsed probably won't have endorsed the saboteur, so the saboteurs activity should not effect your feed in any meaningful way. This is how trust works in real social circles.
Moderators clearly work but it's a shame it relies on single people doing a good thing. It's a shame the moderation can't be done by everyone all the time, unconsciously.
CyMonk
what you describe is called "shadow banning".
null
popcar2
I've always liked the idea of being able to just post anonymously without any votes, but it always quickly devolves into incoherent spam and endless slurs.
The website has been active for an hour and I'm already seeing some of that. It always turns into 4chan.
sunamic
This is very similar to an app I launched a while ago. Anonymity leads to some "interesting" posts. https://speczo.dev/hoot
maxomixa
"Anonymously share" which using an app on an Apple or Google phone, installed via their respective stores.
Seems legit.
busymom0
How is it doing? Did it get any traction?
rafram
This is kind of the same idea as Yik Yak, which was an interesting app. Some good aspects (authenticity) and some bad aspects (lots of bomb threats and bullying).
That's incredible. Within the first 5 posts we've got "Javascript is overrated", "tabs are better than spaces", something about trains/public transit, and a link to a hentai site. Talk about speed-running social media.