Idea Is Queen!

Let’s get back to the origin of this idea. In Taiwan, BBS (Bulletin Board System) is still a very popular service, especially among high school and university students. The biggest BBS, ptt.cc, is now made of thousands of forums. One of the hottest forums is the “Hate Board”, where users can share their hatred with others. At first, I wonder why this kind of topic can become the most popular one, but latter I understand that maybe in the daily life, you can’t unleash those negative feeling at will (at least, it’s not encouraged…) and because of using anonymous names in the Internet, it’s more comfortable (or safer) for everyone to unleash their anger or bad feelings. So, there are always the needs, and now we see one of the solutions.

Another interesting feature I see in the Hate Board is, feedbacks for each thread of anger are always abundant. No matter the on line users know the original posters or not, they’re usually willing to leave comments, sometimes supports or counter opinions. Maybe it’s the demonstration humanity or… a number of Internet users have nothing better to do…anyway, I believe cyberspace not only connects people together, but also their emotions.

As a result, I think it’s viable to have the function of Hate Board converted into a web-based service. Users submit their anger, set the thread’s reading privilege, public, private, or limited to certain users (for some sensitive issues, and personal attack is not acceptable), and receive some kind of “reward” for each post. (as a token to soothe their negative spirit) The rewards can be abstract scores or real coupons from the site’s sponsors (Here is a monetized model!) However, I believe the best rewords are responds from other readers. They can send feedback on any post, and even rate all the posts! Yes, the same model of Digg.com. How do you feel if your complaint is rated so high that even complaining becomes kind of fulfillment?! How about you hate some products, policy, politicians, or even weather and find that there’s a bulk of others have the same feelings as yours? Or if you find all the comments are from the opposites attitude of yours, maybe it’s a good opportunity to review the rightness of your hatred.

All in all, harnessing love and hatred is a good way to ignite the passion of users, and only passion can lead to continuous interaction among users, and only frequent interaction can lead to successful community, and thus a successful web 2.0 service. This no-hate-no-love model still needs further and more detailed design. It also contains many undiscovered potential opportunities. At the same time, some problems needs to overcome first, especially avoiding chaos and personal attack, or legal issues regarding the content of each hatred…

How is your feeling about this idea?

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