Show HN: I built a message board where you pay to be the homepage
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
Discussion Highlights (5 comments)
ilinx
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.
nickvec
Reminds me of https://milliondollarhomepage.com/ (which is where I assume you got the inspiration from!)
SayThatSh
Just wanted to add a small update: I've completed my research on charity donation integration and settled on donating to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)! Mocking up the frontend changes with a dedicated page that will contain quarterly reports on donations, FAQ update, etc. After some further research, settled on personally donating 25% of Say That Sh*'s revenue to the EFF every quarter <3 The standard seems to be something like 5% and that just seemed way too low?
ktoo_
How do you deal with two people bidding to replace the same message? I'm most curious about your development process. This has a very strong feel of being vibe coded, which I have nothing against. And your replies here also sound heavily LLM influenced. I als have no issues with that. I am more interested to know if my instinct about these things is accurate. Has developed in this way, over engineered as you say, essentially because the cost to do so is practically nothing with the advent of LLM coding? Also, has anything ever broken at 3am?
moezd
Oh this has the same spirit as that Washington Redskins episode on South Park. I'm lovin' it.