This might be a good example of where karma can be useful.
Karma for listeners: Highly upvoted accounts can take precedence to talking to newcomers; they've proved that they can listen well, giving new callers a good experience. This will encouraging them to come back or even to sign up as a listener by following the good listener's example.
Karma for callers: If they ever call again, they will be able to talk with newer listeners. Perhaps you need to have enough karma to even be a listener. Why? Listening is a more important quality for the site to be successful. Starting out as a caller lets allows you to follow the top listeners by example, while keeping the trolls away from other callers.
Also, a low enough score can block the account for an X amount of time. Where X increases each time they get blocked. And I think more karma = more weight on your vote could help with regulation. Mostly because voting will take place much less often than on other social sites.
This is an awesome idea though, I hope it catches on.
I doubt it. It's possible to be a troll regardless of whether you're a listener or a caller. Rating individual calls might help somewhat, but that's also possible to game, and by the time you've banned someone, it's too late - the call (complete with laugh track) will already be on Youtube.
I would love it to catch on, but there are massive social/legal/moral issues with it.
Eg 1- someone going through a depressive phase hits up with a troll (ref: case where someone was in a chat room, streaming a video of himself just before he committed suicide, people in the chat room egged him on)
Eg 2- Someone is suffering a depressive/manic episode, but turns to this and is not directed to medical help immediately OR someone has an issue which would require them to go to a professional, but the listener is not trained/aware and hence can't give them critical advice
Eg 3- Young adult who has had a traumatic day turns to this service, gets put in touch with someone who has strong beliefs. (or even mild ones)
Eg 4- High Karma person is taping calls of people talking to them
Yes, I do agree that there will be some edge cases with moral and legal issues. For everyone else with something on their minds, most of the time you just need to talk it out with another human being. It's the emotional side of their problems that they need help with. They shouldn't really be looking for advice here.
Kind of like AirBnB (for example) needing to have both parties be trustworthy, this will also require an element of trust. In the sense of confidentiality and compassion.
Just because the problems aren't immediately solvable doesn't mean we should avoid it though. We should instead try different things. Maybe on different sites or throughout the evolution of this one. But ultimately test to see what keeps the abusers away and also avoids the social/legal/moral issues.
Thanks for the feedback! Right now the app is pretty barebones. I can see what I can do to hack together a better user / presence system when I get some time.
As the Reader's Digest once put it (according to Dale Carnegie): "Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience". This could save people if done well.
Good work! I've had some cool ideas for Twilio projects but so far the pricing has made them all impractical. The Twilio Client is really opening some doors in this respect, being 1/4 the cost of a phone call and a cool feature to boot!
I still hope you have some throttling in place though because 1000 concurrent users will cost you $150/hr...
Hey, I run CompassionPit.com and have built up a sizable, stable community.... (40,000-200,000 unique visitors/month). I would be very happy to collaborate with a like-minded individual. The app is on the node.js stack and I've funded development and hosting entirely. I've released the source for free.
