Show HN: Social network where inviting someone makes you accountable for them
chirpper.comChirpper is invite-only. When you vouch someone in, they join your TrustChain. Their behavior affects your TrustRank, and that propagates up the lineage. No moderators. The accountability is architectural, not policy-based. You can be pseudonymous, but you can't be unaccountable. Happy to get into the mechanics in comments. Odd, I got right in. I think it was maybe 5 seconds, didn’t have to do anything. Curious if that’s a bug or if there’s some automated trust or something. Cool concept though, echoes of GPG web of trust days. That was just a coincidence of me checking - yes me personally - a human - the queue of new pre-invite users just around the exact time you got through the sign up. Welcome aboard!! Glad to have you. You might have to create some accounts and fake activity like reddit did when they first started. The trust referral system is like an idea I have had, but never tried to execute, so good idea! :-) I post real content from my own account to seed the feed. That's fair game. What I won't do is simulate fake discourse, fake comments, fake conversations, and fake personas. That's the one thing that would counterfeit the core value of the product. Seeding content is editorial. Faking discourse defeats the purpose of the site. It may make the road to critical mass harder to reach, but it's not worth faking humans to create a human only space, in this world of so many lies everywhere. Interesting concept. What do you foresee would be the long term uses of this? Long, long, long term, if I get really lucky, your TrustChain becomes portable proof of your human-ness. Any site that integrates with us could verify you're a real accountable human without you ever disclosing your real identity. That's the pie in the sky vision anyway. Right now I'm just trying to prove people care enough about talking to real humans to change where they do it. Who is flagging all of the comments? Someone who works for Facebook? Also you say it's the first but doesn't lobste.rs work this way, without the gratuitous blockchain? Oh nice idea. How do you start to get on? Make it to the status page - through the homepage, and chat with me - and I'll add you to my TrustChain. I can't see a status page. Do you mean invites page? You don't see this page? https://chirpper.com/status Okay, so I got an internal server error when I tried to check my status with my codes. Hmm... checking the logs to see what happened. But you should be able to go to the https://chirpper.com/login page, drop your "key" and be taken to your profile. I've already added all signups from HN to my TrustChain, so you should already be a trusted account. Found some janky stuff to do with old versions of the cold start up flow from before I settled on the way it works now. Should be fixed now. Thank you so much for testing it. Love the idea. How well do you think this scales? So how do I get invited? If you go through the homepage, and create a pre-invite account (which is like two button clicks or so) you'll end up on a status page. This is the cold - no invite path. Where I'll personally verify you're human and attach your cold account to an invite :) Otherwise, you'd have to be invited. So my best interest would be to spam a lot of accounts now that'll be personally trusted by you and reflect poorly on you if I use them for spam later? Yes, exactly. I'm most excited that the concept was understood at all. So cool. Thank you. Founder here. The core mechanic: every invite creates a lineage edge. When you invite someone, their trust signals propagate back up the chain. If they behave badly, your TrustRank takes a hit. This is the opposite of how most platforms handle moderation. They ban accounts. We damage lineage. The goal was to make accountability and anonymity coexist. Identity verification doesn't produce accountability, social consequence does. You know this if you've ever had a friend vouch for someone who then embarrassed them. TrustRank isn't content moderation. It's measuring humanity. Your posts, comments, votes, even small actions like adding a username or thanking your inviter, these are all signals. We're not moderating what you say. We're moderating whether you're human. The motto is 'Just Be Human.' Which also means act like you would if you were in the same room with someone. No AI-generated discourse. Humans comment and vote. AI can generate content a human chooses to post, but the conversation layer is human-only by design. Happy to get into TrustScore mechanics, the invite reward model, or why this is structurally different from Lobsters.