Product Hunt Chat - Talk with your fellow makers directly inside Product Hunt 😺💬

@vesln @rrhoover woot woot! 🙌 Congrats on the launch Ryan and PH team! - What where the main reasons / triggers that made want to build a chat? - Does it have any unique features that other chats don't have? - What's your chat stack? I see GraphQL queries… any off the shelf 3rd party solutions running behind the scenes? Or did you guys develop everything from scratch?

@ksaitor good Q's! There are a couple reasons why we built this now: 1. Product Hunt has matured as a community and "social network" of sorts. We want to double down on this and give people more opportunities to connect and collaborate. Chat is key for this. 2. We're working on some other big projects that will benefit from Chat. Here's one of them, currently in private beta. 😉 As for the technical implementation, I'll let @vesln chime in.

@vesln @rrhoover if I could upvote this hunt twice, I would. I've already connected with a fellow dev to work on combining forces on similarly inspired products we've built. Product Hunt has officially become a collaboration platform.

@rueter LOVE hearing that!

@vesln @rrhoover I'm so glad to finally see this implemented. Probably the one PH feature I've wanted since I first got into a conversation with someone else here on a product page.

@itsthisjustin looks like you can control who messages you in settings 👇

@itsthisjustin much-needed feature for sure. Re: your concern around spam, about half of the development work went into anti-harassment/spam and user privacy controls. As I shared in the blog post announcement, we invested in tooling to give users the ability to: 1. Report chats. If someone is sending unwanted messages, reporting will notify our team and close the chat. 2. Adjust Chat settings. In your settings, choose whether you’re open to messages from everyone, only people your follow, or nobody. 3. Manage inboxes. You’ll find an “other” inbox, similar to what Facebook Messenger and other communication apps provide, to filter potentially unwanted chats. We also have many throttles and checks behind-the-scenes to automatically detect and prevent potential abuse. Would love feedback/ideas on this topic, especially once you have more time to play around with it. 😊

@rrhoover You rock. Always awesome to see a team building user first features and thinking about the long term with a major release like this. You're killing it. Can't wait to see how this shifts PH into a more central hub of conversation.

@mrcalexandre Haha, thanks, Alexandre. I think the Cat Lovers chat is private. Sshhhhhh. 😊

@levelsio 😏

@dave_poly two pray hands! 🙏🏼🙏🏼