Found via monsterhugger. We were both shocked that the blogger didn’t anticipate something like this, so for anyone else who wouldn’t have thought about it, let this be a warning about how these features can be abused.
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Heh, sad for them - but I can’t think of anything else that would happen as a result 
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Once again, the Hacker News crowd proves to be one of the most toxic on the internet.
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In principle it seems pretty solid. What harm could a box that only broadcasts plain, ephemeral text do to me? You’re thinking the same thing I was, I’m not crazy, right?
Must be really nice to have so much unexamined privilege that this is a surprising experience and not a typical Tuesday.
I hoped that this experience would prompt him to empathize with marginalized folks who have to be hypervigilant online, but the conclusions sadly don’t mention anything of the sort.
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Every input is hostile until proven otherwise.
Yes, exactly. I’m glad he got to the countermeasures, because while I was reading the first part, with every issue, all I could think is, “How did you not see this coming?” People are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. Not everyone is, but enough are to make the rough generalization valid.
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I have anonymous comments enabled on my site. I am prepared to take down the comments’ visibility very quickly - the comment section is a separate server and all comments will cleanly disappear if that server goes offline. A simple command line argument will let me relaunch the comments as read-only once the spam has been cleaned.
I cannot imagine writing a warning post like this if I ever got flooded with spam though. It’s pretty much inevitable. I’m counting on my own lack of popularity to keep the thing viable for now.
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Any space with loose or absent moderation will go through this: we’ve all seen it (or I thought we all had). The prevalence of mean anon asks on Tumblr back in the day (2013-2018 for me) comes to mind. And those weren’t automatically posted publicly on the target’s blog!
Most people using your website might not be dastards, you just need a minority to realise that they have a vector for their hate and then they will abuse your site as much as they can.
You just need to be prepared.
Atabook comes to mind as a service with some pretty robust moderation tools. You can ban IPs, you can pre-screen guestbook comments or turn comments off altogether, and they allow you to create a blacklist of banned words. I’m sure there are ways around these tools, but the more friction you create for users, the less likely you are to get bothered by spammers and haters.
Right, moderation and pre-screening tools are essential if you’re going to go that route.
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