Not sure how I feel about this. You are either helping or taking advantage of people who are already down.

Why should be excited about or support a mental health startup, who stands to make money when people have poor mental health?

Does anonymized voice interaction help more than it hurts? Do you have any idea what you're doing or are you just doing it? What personally motivates you and your team?

I am doing my best to help people who feel lonely in today's day and age because I have personally been through it during my time in grad school.

I was going through a long-distance relationship at that time, and the workload was tough during my PhD. I did have friends that I hung out and even went to cafes to study together, but once they got girlfriends and boyfriends, they left me... I was not their priority anymore.

It felt incredibly lonely and I could not get the kind of support from my girlfriend since she was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I needed someone that I could talk to and do things with, outside of the romantic boundary. I tried looking, but what I found online were all these dating apps that capitalized on precisely the romantically lonely men and women.

I really did not like how the tools that claim to help people find partners and meaningful connections boil people down to simple profiles consisting of several pictures and bullet points of what they are looking for. I think it honestly creates increasing number of people reporting feeling lonely because all these tools overemphasize on vanity and shallow qualities of a person instead of who they are.

I think the web can be a better place for people to find others who they resonate with, and the current offerings just do not cut it. Having personally experienced loneliness and finding no solutions for my problem back then, I vowed to create an app myself that I think can help people find meaningful connections. So, here I am. I quit my job at Apple last year to dive into this full time as I thought about the meaning in life and what I wanted to leave in this world, and I thought solving the problem of loneliness is the most personal and meaningful problem that I want to take on.

I appreciate the non-vanity aspect of it, and the aspiration to not turn people into bullet points. There's an intellectual honesty in that which, I think, shows that you're different from most people, in that you may be one of the few who just enjoys conversation with everyone without wanting something from them. There is not a great niche on the web for that, anymore. That trait, by the way, probably makes you easy to talk to and less likely to be lonely (in the long run).

Yeah, many people approach loneliness with different motives, and the one we are trying to promote on this platform is genuine connection. Sure, it could develop into a friendship or a romantic relationship, but we think it should start from authenticity. Too many apps focus on superficial qualities, and the world does not need another one!

We did our job of putting this out there. We hope people from different pockets in the world who feel the same come and join us. If it does not turn out well, I think the journey was well worth it.

Not to marginalize your idea, but an app is also just a surface level solution. A quick fix, not useless, but not longterm.

Isn't the traditional solution not just to pick up some hobby's, go out, some cultural events?

It's not easy at times, but especially at events with shared interests it's normally easiest to connect to like minded people, and those connection have a chance of lasting.

Not everyone can do these things. Some people can't afford to start a hobby or go out. Some don't have the time or space. Or mental energy required to go out and be perceived by others. Others may have disabilities that the public doesn't bother accommodating for.

Apps like these offer ways to cope for the time being. There are millions of people treading water and the old coping mechanisms aren't working anymore.

Very well said! That has been a lot of what I heard from talking to the users on the platform. Many people struggle going to venues to meet people because of their anxiety, geographical location, disabilities, and time, to list a few.

Many people suffer in the dark. I hope Bubblic can be some sturdy straws for them to grab on to re-shore themselves.

There are meetups on all kinds of topics all over the world that are free to attend.

If you crave social connections, but dont know how to make them, you havent learned a coreskill for being a human and there are much deeper issues, such as depression, at play. Would be time to look at therapy or other more structural solutions.

An app won't solve your social & community issues.

Thanks for the feedback.

The map feature can help bridge the gap between online connection and real-life connection, in my opinion. If you see that person you are talking to is near you and you hit it off very well, you can decide to meet in real life and form the real-life relationship, whether friendship or romantic relationship. That is the ultimate goal!

I want Bubblic to be the stepping stone for meaningful connections, a means to a real-life connection :)

Good luck! Dont mean to discourage, if people end up meeting in real life would be wonderful.

This was beautiful, thank you for your thoughts on this.

Thank you for your kind words :)

> Why should be excited about or support a mental health startup, who stands to make money when people have poor mental health

I used to think this way about therapy. After all, they stop getting paid from you when you stop seeing them. But then I realized I love programming. It's my favorite thing to do, and I love getting paid for it too.

There are people that love what they do, and they should get paid for it just like anyone else. That being said, getting paid as a therapist is different than targeting infinite growth and profit. So hopefully this app is made by someone who likes the idea and wants to be paid, not someone just looking for a profit.

I resonate with your comment!

Someone has to pay for the servers and put food on the table... right? :P

I won't let profit take precedence over the mission that we started out with: to help people suffering from loneliness. It is personal to me since I have been through it, and I will keep iterating to make this platform the most useful to the people it serves.

I'm kinda with you that the mental health(ish) framing is a bit disconcerting. But it's hard to guess what the audience really is, if there is one. ChatRoulette was a neat idea that disintegrated into a bunch of guys showing their johnsons, so maybe that without video would get rid of the riff-raff and let people go in and have actual conversations. Or not. The truth is, though, there has not been a lot of experimentation in one-on-one, non-group, non-hierarchical stuff in awhile. Apart from its clothing, I don't see why this is any different from a dating site or something.

Personally I don't like talking to disembodied voices (why I don't play multiplayer games with random people) - and I live 5 minutes from a dozen bars if I feel like meeting strangers. But I can't see how it really hurts, if it doesn't become polluted with griefers and perverts.

To share briefly our journey, we started by launching this simple website: https://lonelyworld.info as a mini MVP.

Then we got a tremendous response from various forums including Hacker News and Reddit, that we decided to pursue this idea further and develop into an app.

Our team is me, my wife, and a friend from South Africa that I met on the LonelyWorld website! I realize that had I never launched that mini MVP, I wouldn't have met my friend to work on my mission together! The mantra is right: one should always build in public :)

Cool idea, I tried it and I see the value. Looks like a lot of work for a small team.

How do you ensure user privacy? If someone accessed your data could they link voice messages with email address?

We worked on it for the past 5 months, with me quitting my job at Apple to work on this full time, so it has been quite the journey!

All the voice notes and locations are anonymized, as in, the database for userId and email is separate from anonymized Id linked to the voice and location data.

Specifically, I use AWS Cognito for the email addresses, and DynamoDB for anonymized ID : voice notes and location data.

If you have a better suggestion, please let me know!

If these two are linkable, which they likely are if users can delete their data, the notes and location are pseudonymised instead of anonymised. They could be anonymous to other users (that don’t have access to the other database), but they are pseudonymous to you.

on Apple's website, it talks about 'Data not linked to you', (https://developer.apple.com/app-store/app-privacy-details/#l...) and excerpt is here:

- Stripping data of any direct identifiers, such as user ID or name, before collection. - Manipulating data to break the linkage and prevent re-linkage to real-world identities.

Additionally, in order for data not to be linked to a particular user’s identity, you must avoid certain activities after collection:

- You must not attempt to link the data back to the user’s identity. - You must not tie the data to other datasets that enable it to be linked to a particular user’s identity.

We do not attempt to link the data back to user's identity or tie the datasets to enable them to be linked.

If you have a more technical solutions/suggestions, we are all ears. Thank you very much!

Not affiliated with the app, but this is quite interesting. You mean only the user can access it’s own data. I.e. data is encrypted and the user retains the only key.

Makes me think about if the user looses the key (uninstalls app, etc) what would be the recovery methods, if any?

From the perspective of a user: I believe the idea is nice. But I am concerned about privacy. In this times of deep fakes, authentic voice of someone is a very valuable resource and it needs protection. Of course, you said you protect the privacy of the users and anonymize the data but I believe I need more information in this regard before I can participate. May be an option to automatically delete the voice data after a set period or the option to see all my saved data, delete my data if I decide to do so. Otherwise, it will leave me with some uneasiness.

Yes, you can delete ALL your voice data by going to your account settings in the app, and deleting your account. You have full control of your data.

Meanwhile, feel free to create an account and explore the app, even just by listening to other recordings! And only when you feel comfortable sharing your thoughts with your voice, you can participate.

This is a cool idea, and you seem genuine. One thing I'm not clear about is how you achieve the claimed privacy. You said the user id data is separated from the user voice data and can't be matched. But you also say that if I delete my account it will delete all the voice data. How do you do this unless there is a mapping from the users table to the voice notes table?

So when user deletes the app, it sends two separate messages to AWS: one to the Cognito which stores the user ID and email, and one to the Dynamo database that has user data linked to the anonymized ID. The data are deleted independently, and upon receiving the success message from both of them, the account is fully deleted. That way, the user data in Dynamo DB does not have to know what is happening in Cognito.

I have similar feeling. This could be maybe worked around with some local ai model that modify you voice slightly and randomly.

+/- I have now spent several hours on the app and it's not what I really expected. It's long voicemails. Nothing more or less. It forces you to listen.

This reminds me of, e.g., Eliza or situations that throw you into the role of therapist, or asking for therapy. Or Love Line from the 90s. It's actually quite good because it requires a lot of concentration and thought.

I don't know if it will take off. I don't have high hopes. But I think it would be great if it did. It has the exact type of trade-off and waiting/thinking period prior to response that is so missing from all of the current social platforms. You can respond, but you must listen and respond thoughtfully.

Maybe part of what I'm appreciating is that it has an inherent anti-bot mechanism, which is that it's all just human voice.

It's touching and sweet, as well. It's hard to define what I mean by that, but this piece of code has soul that almost everything these days lacks.

In the past few hours I've exchanged voicemails of support with people from Malaysia to Seattle, and it's surprisingly normal, like being the 3rd guy down the bar to throw in a piece of advice, but you can actually talk to people because you gotta listen to them. It's almost one of those things that's so stupidly brilliant, it's incredible no one thought of it before.

I hope it takes off.

This made me tear up a little bit :') Thank you for your kind words!

I think you really get the intent of our app. We think there is a big chunk of humanity missing from all the app offerings out there that unfortunately tend to amplify misinterpretation and distrust all for the sake of eyeballs on screen.

And I also agree with your sentiment that this might not take off. I think apps with sexual and stimulating aspects that give instant dopamine hit would have a better chance of going viral, to be honest. But, in the world of fast-food apps, we want to create a whole-some app that people can get spiritual nourishment from. It might take a while, but we believe it is the right and the good thing for humanity :)

I love the intention and at the same time I have many questions about this. Let me think out loud for a minute: I think loneliness is a symptom and the cause could be many things. Some of the causes require clinical attention. Thinking about depression for example: it is a delicate matter how to talk to someone with depression, what to say or what not to say, and helping someone with depression requires some sort of training. How to make sure people who want to support and join this website will not unintentionally do harm? One thing that comes in mind is to remind the support members about certain things, have them to read few articles, maybe even point them to some online training sessions (which can be hosted on this app as well) The other thing is lonely people. This app might need a way to connect the group that might need clinical help to right people.

Also I think HN is good to get technical advice from but in this case getting advice from mental health experts is definitely needed.

Wish you the best :)

Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I think it is a good idea to include helpful resources within the app so that supporters can support better and lonely people can decide the appropriate help they need depending on the severity of it.

We will refer to some mental experts for this part. Thanks again!

The app is well-executed, and I love the vision. But personally, when I'm feeling lonely or generally unhappy, I'm not sure reading through an endless sea of other people's misery is the best thing for it.

Thank you for your kind words and feedback. I think you would be surprised by browsing on r/lonely on Reddit and see how many people want to vent and ask people to talk to them. It can be incredibly lonely when you feel like you are never heard by anyone, and I think this platform can be very helpful to those people.

And there might be a time where you feel you need to be heard, or even find someone who might be going through the same thing that you previously went through, and you can offer help!

Plus, this is the first iteration of the app. We do envision creating a platform for the general public not just for lonely people to discover meaningful connections that you wouldn't have been able to with other apps or just by bumping into strangers in real life.

Hey, this is a great idea! I’ve found myself using dating apps for this kind of purpose and I think this could be a better approach, especially from the support side. (I’ve had a few instances where being supportive but not wanting a romantic relationship with that person to be really frustrating for that person (which is understandable given the context of a dating app))

A feature that would be great here though is to have realtime conversations, I think you can connect a lot more when it’s realtime. Also supporting text replies could be really helpful.

Anyway, love what you’re building here and hope it goes well!

Thank you for your kind words, and thank you for sharing your past experience on dating apps! It is interesting that you have used them to support people, I have never heard of anyone use it for that purpose, but that is very altruistic of you haha

In fact, we tried making real-time conversation feature in our previous mini-MVP, and the difficulty there was that 1. people were too hesitant to jump in a phone call 2. people were never online at the same time 3. conversations could not be enjoyed by other listeners in different times.

I have tried using Clubhouse for a while, and did not like the dynamics there, where you would only have a few speakers talking at the same time like MCs while the audience can only listen. I think by focusing on asynchronous voice messages, this platform can help individuals make connections with other individuals, which is not offered by any platforms out there.

I hope you continue to enjoy using it! And we would appreciate any feedback you have :)

How are you handling moderation and community safety?

There has not been a need to step in to moderate content so far. I think it is by nature self-policing to an extent more than a forum based on texts because people have to speak with their voice and also share their approximate location.

We do have moderation functions available already by the way of individuals reporting the abusers.

It doesn't work to sign up with Google on Android. The app enters a loop where I am unable to create an account or log in, even after uninstalling and clearing it's cache/storage.

I do really want to try it out though, it seems like a great idea and I'm excited by the stories I hear and I want to contribute.

Hey there! I am sorry that is happening to you... I just tried on my Pixel 4, and it did not seem to have the problem. Can you try skipping the sign up on the first onboarding page, and try signing up after you are in the app by clicking the top left 'B' icon?

Or, can you try signing up by creating a user ID? We do not sell your data, and your email is NOT linked to your voice notes (they are in separate database and the user IDs are anonymized by hashing). I would really love for you to try it out!

I can skip and experience the app, but signing up doesn't work in any way from this point. The sign up page does not load, so I cannot choose another option. It opens the web view, but the web view closes without rendering anything, and I am back at the first screen in the app. This is true even if skipping and going through the top left button, or if uninstalling the app, or if opening the web view in Firefox (which does nothing)

edit: hope this helps. I'm on a pixel 5 and use Firefox as my browser including for app webviews

ah shucks.... Could you change your default browser to Chrome temporarily and try the sign up process again, while we still work on fixing this issue?

Sorry that we did not catch this earlier :(

A point about the UI: Starting the first time on my iPhone, it oddly reported: no connection, please restart. Odd, because I’m connected. And bad, because there is no UI-element to try again, not to mention of an automatic reconnection. An ordinary user might not know how to restart an app.

Thank you for letting me know! We will make appropriate update to prevent that from happening, at least less often. I think it happens when the websocket fails to make connections on the first several tries, which is quite annoying...

As a user this seems like a nice way of connecting with people online.

As an engineer I wonder if/how you would open this up to a wider audience (behind “lonely” users). Moderation is the first issue that comes to mind, but I’m guessing that’s already a concern with the current audience.

Definitely, opening up to a wider audience is the plan :)

We first wanted to attack the 'hair on fire' problem as Paul Graham states it, creating solutions for people who really need this connection platform that is different from others because they would tolerate it even if our platform is sucky!

Moderation is easier on this platform I think, and so far we did not have to moderate any content. I think it is self-policing by nature because people need to speak what they want to share and also share their approximate location.

Do you have a sense for what motivates "support" users?

Already in listening through what is on there, a few people were clearly depressed, and lending support to those people is awesome, but also difficult to sustain (for any given individual).

I am not sure, but I was actually very surprised by how many supporters actually consistently came on the platform to leave supporting messages to lonely people. At one point, there were more supporters wanting to support than lonely people needing support haha

And a couple of very interesting occasions were when the people who initially reported 'lonely' decided to become 'supporters' because they wanted to give back to the community for the support they got, and wanted to help others who are in need more than themselves. I found that very touching :')

Do you plan to implement E2EE for private voice messages?

We do not have private voice messages yet. All voice messages are public, as in, everyone can listen to them. This way, people who are hesitant to speak can still listen to other people's conversations, and also learn from them.

In the near future, we plan to implement private messaging functions, which will be end-to-end encrypted. Upcoming feature! :)

Seems pretty good so far. Is the source code for this open-source? Verifying what data the app collects from me gives me a sort of peace of mind.

Best of luck on your app!

Hey there, the app is closed-source for now. Thank you for using the app!

What is your business model? How are you planning to monetize this?

Do you use uploaded voice messages to train AI models?

Do you share any data uploaded by users (either in raw or aggregate form, including "anonymized") with third parties?

What identifiers do you collect during signup and with your phone apps?

Are you GDPR compliant? Where is your formal privacy policy? A single-sentence promise doesn't cut it.

Who is actually behind this? "Mountain View, CA" is not an address, despite what your website claims.

With a service like this one, privacy is the elephant in the room. The information you currently provide on that topic is nowhere near sufficient.

Here is our privacy page: https://bubblic.co/privacy/

We do not use it to train any models or share the data with ANYONE.

I currently work from home with my wife, we are not incorporated yet. I live in Mountain View, CA right now. Do you suggest that I put my home address there?

We are GDPR compliant. We do not sell or share users' data and we let them know what kind of data we collect for what purposes. Plus, users can delete their data COMPLETELY from our system with a single button within the app. No emailing or calling a number shenanigans.

The only ethical 'business model' I could see here is a donation-based non-for-profit that keeps the lights on. It might be worthwhile partnering with a non-for-profit that's already in the mental health space. They can funnel grant money into this, and probably have enough advertising budget and brand to get much broader reach. Otherwise it's fine to keep it small as your passion project and not exploit your users for growth.

That is an interesting point. I feel like there will be people telling me that I am exploiting people's loneliness if I ever make a penny from this. I do not plan to put the current experience behind a paywall ever. This platform should be available to everyone as they need it. But I was thinking of providing cute premium features like stickers to enrich their experience. Would you say those are a no-go as well?

> I feel like there will be people telling me that I am exploiting people's loneliness if I ever make a penny from this.

That would be a silly objection, like claiming restaurants are exploiting people's hunger by selling food for money.

That being said, the moment such a platform makes a single iota of data about their users (even seemingly mundane information such as how many users there are, their geographic distribution, how many messages the average user writes etc.) available to anyone for any purpose – including research and non-profit purposes – I would consider the whole enterprise to have turned unethical. It doesn't matter whether the field of psychology could benefit from it, or what the "greater good" might be. It has to be crystal clear and non-negotiable that the only use for those messages is going to be letting other regular users listen to them.

You should also think about what you will do in case law enforcement demands access to user data. The less information you store, the better. Consider automatically deleting messages after a period of time, or similar proactive measures. And of course, maintain a strict process for disposing of backups, else the "delete my data" function is effectively worthless.

> That would be a silly objection, like claiming restaurants are exploiting people's hunger by selling food for money.

A bit of a broken analogy, but if I were to indulge, it’s similar to denying rice to starving people who’ve lost all worldly possessions in a war-ravaged country because they couldn’t pay up.

There are wellness apps that give a no-questions-asked zero subscription to anyone who says they can't afford the cost. This is potentially one way out. But a freemium model, where paying people get better features of some consequence, is a little demoralizing, and you probably don't want to demoralize people with mental health issues, IMHO

I appreciate your thoughtful input! I agree, if we EVER make an iota of data about the users, that should be included in the terms and conditions of the app. The way we put the app out there to the users right now is with the understanding that we will not make any data, so we will uphold that.

Regarding law enforcement: I think that could be a good idea. Have the data permanently deleted after a period of time and/or ensure backups are deleted completely. Thank you for your feedback!

It would undermine your stated mission imo

> Here is our privacy page: https://bubblic.co/privacy/

Ok. I wasn't able to find it myself because AFAICT, it isn't linked from your homepage. To quote https://gdpr.eu/privacy-notice/ (emphasis added):

"Every organization that maintains a website should publish their privacy notice there, under the title “Privacy Policy,” and it should be accessible via a direct link from every webpage."

> Do you suggest that I put my home address there?

I suggest that you speak to a legal professional to answer that question. You are collecting some very sensitive, highly intimate data from users. I'm not sure whether such an enterprise lends itself to a "run from home" setup. You should definitely get advice from a competent professional as to what regulations apply, and which information you are required to provide.

But you haven't answered my first and most important question: How are you planning to monetize this? As you are no doubt aware, businesses that start out with good (or vague) intentions have a tendency to turn to the dark side once their userbase is big enough to be of interest to data miners. In order to prevent this, you need a steady revenue stream that covers your costs so you can avoid selling your soul to VCs and tracking companies. Where will that revenue stream come from?

I have updated the website now to include that link. Thank you.

As far as monetization goes, we plan to add premium features like stickers, and voice changers. There will be people who do not want to talk with their voice precisely for the reason you mentioned: one can consider it to be a sensitive data. Why do we want to offer voice-alteration as a paid feature? Because, if it is free for all, we fear that there will be people abusing the feature that jeopardizes the authenticity of the platform.

We do NOT plan to sell or share users' data with a third party, or use users' data to train an internal AI model because I think that fundamentally betrays the goodwill that users bring to our platform.

IMO, voice alteration in general would undermine the concept, which is to hear genuine human voices. That seems like the opposite of what you want.

Have you considered limiting the number of voice messages non-paying users can post? As in, free users can post up to 5 messages per month, while paying users can post an unlimited number. Everybody can listen to as many messages as they want. The desire to "get your voice out" can be a powerful incentive to subscribe.

I am not sure if going with limited messages is the right idea. I do want to make this platform available to people to form meaningful connections regardless of their wallet.

I think having voice alteration as a premium feature so that it is not abuse-able but accessible to people who are willing to pay for it for the extra layer of privacy, could be a net boon for the network. Still food for thought :)

Can't login using Google. Access denied

sorry to hear that. We will patch it up asap!

I'm getting stuck in a login loop.

Hm.. what do you mean? Did you press 'Enter Bubblic' at the end of the onboarding pages?

any direct download of the app for those that can't or don't want to sign up with google?

Unfortunately, not for now. We will have some web offerings in the near future. Please stay in the loop! You can follow us on Twitter: @BubblicCo

N

Programmers are cute.

:)