Hey! So the backstory here is pretty simple. I was going through a rough patch earlier this year and I kept thinking about how weird it is that we have all this technology for connecting people but most of it makes you feel worse not better. And I had this moment where a friend left me a voice note, just a short one, and it genuinely shifted my whole day. Something about hearing someone’s actual voice, the tone and the pauses and all that, it just lands differently than text.

So I built this. You record a voice note between 5 and 60 seconds saying something kind, and it goes into a pool. A stranger somewhere presses play and hears you. Thats it. No accounts, no profiles, no sign up. Completely anonymous.

The moderation side was the interesting engineering problem. Every note gets transcribed by Whisper then a second model classifies it into kind/unsure/unkind/not_a_note. Only “kind” notes ever get served to listeners. I made the decision to run moderation inline during upload rather than batching it, so theres never a window where unmoderated audio is just sitting around waiting. The whole lifecycle gets logged in an append-only event table with request IDs so if something weird slips through I can trace exactly what happend.

Its a pretty standard Next.js + Postgres + S3 setup otherwise. Nothing too clever on the infra side, the interesting stuff is all in the moderation pipeline and figuring out what “kind” actually means when you’re trying to get a model to judge it reliably.

One thing I’m really curious to get feedback on: after you record you get a “ripple link” which is basically your only receipt. You can come back and see how many people heard your note and any anonymous reactions they left. I’m not sure yet if this is compelling enough or if I need to build more of a feedback loop there.

The site is live, you can record or listen right now. Zero friction. Would really love this community’s feedback on the product and the technical approach.

Pretty sure if this gets any traction at all, it will immediately turn into a mix of Chatroulette and crypto scams.

See also Mythic Quest's discussion of TTP.[0] User Generated Content is only your friend if you have the resources to moderate it.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_xqyIMwbew

I love this because when I've been down in various periods of my life, after sharing a problem with someone close, one thing they said made all the difference. This has happened to me many times after getting kind words from family and friends. I agree that this will be ruined if it gains traction, but it should be great if it remains not too well known (ironically).

Nice Project! You can also keep track of the recordings that the user already listened and pick the random from the ones user hasn't listened yet.

Cool project! It would be nice to have a way to listen to more recordings of specific persons. And maybe have personal profile with little bio.

Nice one. I was working on something similar, but then dropped it. The idea was to create a database of diverse voices for AI voice tools to train their models. Of course, it will have user consent. Only those who want to see their voices used in AI models can submit a voice sample.

The first "Show HN" submission I've seen that has made me feel good. I wish more people would see it.

This desperately needs more publicity. Commenting in hopes it somehow influences the HN algorithm

This is one of those projects where the benefits outweighs the risks

I wonder how much a thing like this get abused by kids playing around

Very nice project. I hope it will not be misused by bad actors.

Fantastic. So nice to hear kind words from a stranger.

This is a surprisingly wholesome idea. I'm curious do people tend to leave longer messages, or mostly short encouragements?

It doesn’t play rn on iOS 16 safari („tap to hear their words“ might also just confuse me to the degree of non-usability)

A bit like…

Https://www.crowdwave.com

This is so good! How did you get the first messages onboard?