Nobody believes it's real

[noahlevenson]

Broflake has quickly joined the ranks of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and American presidential elections, in the sense that nobody believes it's legit.

Overwhelmingly, we receive the following feedback:

"Is this real? Am I really connected to people in Iran and China right now? Is this actual data? No way!"

@oxtoacart suggested that getting our open source act together and publishing the code could help here, and @myleshorton added that we should point to said code via a question added to our short FAQ -- e.g.:

Q) Is this for real?
A) Yes! Check out the open source code. If you really want to dig in, open developer tools in your browser and look at the IP addresses connecting to you. You can look up their location here.

FWIW, my opinion is that the UI just lacks the usual visual information which signals to users that they are participating in a live network with other human beings.

I think adding one of the following things could help here:

If we could add IP addresses to the visualization somehow -- like, it would be brilliant if we could somehow get each connected user's IP address attached to the arc it's associated with -- I think this would help quite a bit. I think that even many nontechnical users understand that those 4 numbers are sort of like your internet P.O. box. And I think that nontechnical users think, "Well, if they're showing addresses, then I'd assume that technical users can check their receipts, so this must be real?"

Alternatively, I think the other device which signals THIS IS A LIVE NETWORK are usernames. In multiplayer gaming, messageboards, and other p2p applications, the presence of people's online handles is what communicates that there are real people at the other end of the line. Usernames help make the concept of real human beings more concrete through the abstraction of a computer screen. And if you reload the application a few times, you'll see all kinds of different usernames, and the dynamism of the content helps prove that this isn't a scripted Potemkin village.

Broflake actually already supports usernames (they're called "Tags," and we previously used them to label topological graphs via the netstate module). It sure would be a heavy lift to get all of our censored users to add a Broflake handle, though.

A weird hybrid might be to auto-assign anonymized Broflake handles, using dictionaries of adjectives and nouns, by interpreting IP addresses or some bitrange in your Lantern ID. For example, my client would be known on the network as "Radiant Yellow Dinosaur," based on indexing into 3 word dictionaries using the first 12 bits of my Lantern ID.

This naming scheme could go both ways, so the widget user would also be made aware that they have an anonymous online handle. If I'm a widget user and I know that I'm known as "Radiant Yellow Dinosaur" on the network, and I see similarly comprehensible anonymized names attached to each of the arcs, maybe I start to grasp that I'm participating in a real -- albeit anonymized -- peer to peer network, with real human beings running real clients halfway across the world?

Come to think of it, it might be psychologically helpful in other ways if widget users had a persistent anonymized identity like Radiant Yellow Dinosaur. If every time I load the widget, I see the same unique username associated with my account, I feel like I'm getting "credit" for the help I'm providing, and I have more of a sense that this is real, and I really matter?