Hi Hacker News,

After our bootstrapping story that we wrote on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222522), TechCrunch wrote about us, and we're really excited to finally reveal our product, View, to the public.

We hope you guys are excited about this as we are!

Thanks for all the support, Hacker News! (And also, thanks to the beta testers--you guys rock.)

-Felix and Zac :)

Do you have your own site for people who boycott tech crunch links? ;)

Here you go.... http://view.io/

I'm going to sound harsh but please don't take it the wrong way. Take it for the literal words.

This has to(almost) be the worst user interface I have ever seen.

I can understand the Yes/No but if a user says No I do not have a smartphone, you STILL need to show them your product.

Otherwise you're alienating a possible future customer, and more importantly you're leaving a bad taste in someone's mouth and I'm going to go tell 3 friends who are going to tell 3 friends. You understand the rest I'm sure.

you know your right.

you get two guys in a room coding all day for months, and as much as we try to step back and walk through it again, we always seem to miss something so obvious. beta testers bypass this screen so we never got input.

thanks!

Changed it! thanks for the input.

fixed.

Are you guys going to be at SXSW by any chance? Love to buy you a beer and convince you to get started on a native Android version. ;)

Yes we are, we're launching at SXSW. Shoot me an email - felix@view.io

What's the international story? I'm in the UK, so don't have a zip code - does that matter?

This seems abusable... imagine photoshopping a picture to reflect poorly on a competitor, spoofing the GPS and then getting fake accounts to vote it up.

This is not a unique criticism - all social media is subject to attack cases like this - the difference here would be that pictures tend to carry more weight than a simple textual message.

Moderation takes care of it (everyone is a moderator in a way similar to Reddit). Enough irrelevant clicks and it's gone.

The relevancy algorithm also solves it partly when you upvote and downvote enough things and the system build can build up some profile vectors for you to improve ranking for yourself.

We did some really through analysis and built a bunch of statistical models and tests. We think we can handle the problem makers and still try to maintain highly personal relevant and realtime posts wherever you are at.

As a test, we scrapped 4chan and dumped posts of that scum at random intervals. Beta users killed it really fast and quality didn't suffer. Turned it into a game a little bit and it reveled our early evangelists.

The trick is doing all this relevancy matching without crippling scaling issues when we turn up the dial on users. Really fun engineering problem.

Haha I love it, 4chan as a spam testing tool.

Yep, it's very hard to prevent spam, But I think eventually there are ways to control it (We're actually learning a lot from Quora)

Any good links? On http://setformarriage.com we've gotten rid of about 95% of spam by using CloudFlare, country blocking, and the Facebook Registration Tool, but it sure would be nice to get that last 5% down as small as possible.

That seems like an awful lot of work for something that would only be viewable for a radius of a few miles

Thats a cool idea. I'd never heard of location-relevancy before, but it sounds way more useful to me than locations other big startup area: 'tell me where my friends are'.

Very cool. I could see myself using this. Really hope an android-native version is on its way