The website will self-destruct if you don't engage with it.

It's been a rough month for me, and I'm sure it has for a lot of people. So I figured, lets create a nice cozy place online where you can write about the issues you're having.

Please feel free to read some of the messages that have been left so far, and send one yourself.

--

A little more information about the thought process behind making this, and some of the process after the initial release.

I acknowledge this is about as little of a 'game' as it can come.

I'd initially come up with the self-destructive website that requires interaction. Then I was imagining how we could turn that into a game. My first thought was that this reminds me of something like entering the numbers in Lost, but is more interactive.

I was thinking through interesting things people could do to interact with it. I'd love to do something that requires getting to a particular location, or performing some tasks. First I was thinking the system could verify these via an API, but anything interesting that was gamey seemed to go against social distancing guidelines.

Then, I was considering something closer to the Taskmaster #hometasking tasks. If you're not aware, there have been tasks every day or two where you have between 5 and 30 hours to complete some task, and take a 20 second video of it. It's been a really positive, joyful thing to watch a ton of 20 second clips of people performing silly, funny, entertaining tasks like 'turn your bathroom into a fun place to hangout.'

But after some reflection, they've got that covered. And I encourage you to check it out.

What I realized the best thing I could do with the idea, even if it might make it seem less like a game, is to encourage people to write openly and honestly about their lives in a completely ephemeral space.

Honestly, that was my theory, but I wasn't sure how well people would respond to it, but the responses have been amazing. I've read stories that have been heartbreaking, encouraging, kind, compassionate, and hilarious. Some people just want to give the website a bit of love, but many many more than I ever could have expected have used it to share something honest.

--

A couple of developer notes and design decisions:

The Heart button really does record hearts/likes, but this is just kept on the backend. I'd considered exposing that data, but I don't think encouraging any kind of 'like-hunting' behavior is necessarily what I'm going for here. I just want an outlet for sending positivity. And I think that a broken button doesn't feel as honest as a real button that's really doing something.

The self-destruction mechanism works by checking every page-load that it hasn't been 24 hours since the last post. If it has, it immediately deletes all the records in the database. The counter at the top of the page reflects the real time remaining, and is updated every 90 seconds, so it'll tick back up after someone posts a new letter.

Initially, I'd planned on only letting you 'Read a message' after sending a message, but shorty after I started testing I realized that it was nice to come back and read a message later. I could have kept a cookie on someone's computer, but that felt more invasive than this should be.

I've had to build a small moderation tool, since about 5% of the responses are generally hurtful. I'm not filtering via word choice, since I think it's reasonable to want to use expletives right now. Instead, I'm manually reviewing the messages as they come in.

Thanks so much for reading.