Hi PH 😸, I'm Izzy 🤘.
For the last 6 months, Ari, Lexi, Sara, Georgia, and I have been building Trill. Trill is an anonymous and secure social network that allows everyone to freely express their opinions.
We started out by forming a team to participate the in the Technovation Challenge. Technovation is a worldwide competition that challenges high school girls to build apps tackling a problem in their communities. Disillusioned with our own sense of "privacy" in our own lives and on social media, and horrified by the stats on gen z mental health, we knew that we wanted to address those.
To see if there would be interest, we started out by asking the question "What would you tell the world if no one knew you were telling it?" on Tumblr and Instagram. A bit clunky? Perhaps, but it got our message across, and we immediately received tons of submissions to a Google form. Solely through our own efforts of messaging accounts on Tumblr/IG, and those accounts in turn helping us spread the word, we reached 10,000+ email signups in around 3 weeks, and began our beta.
For the last month, we have been adding more users to the beta, listening to feedback, and iterating the app. We may have built Trill, but our users are the driving force behind many feature requests, such as PMing and integrated emergency resources in the app.
Feel free to ask any questions, either Ari or myself should hopefully be here throughout the day answering whatever you've got 😊.
@izreiff Wonderful initiative, congrats on launching! I recently saw the CEO of mental health charity Mind state that only tiny a fraction of people who need professional help for dealing with mental health issues get it -- what kind of support do you plan to give in the longer term, particularly for the most vulnerable people in your community?
@abadesi Tysm! Right now we have an "Emergency" section built into the app, in partnership w/ Astra Labs, that offers immediate support through crisis hotlines for different topics, i.e. suicide prevention, domestic abuse, lgbtq+ support, etc. In the future we are thinking of ways to recognize "dangerous" posts, or patterns of posts in a user, and 1.) provide relevant support and education within the app, and 2.) recommend that they schedule an appointment with a professional, or suggest a crisis call, so they don't have to actively seek it out themselves, which not everyone is ready or willing to do. We're also super open to ideas, so if you're thinking of anything else my dms are open!
Awesome initiative.
Suffering from depression, I am now starting to realize the need to share stuff with people without them judging us back. I hope to regain my mental health in the future, and wish the same for the rest of the lot.
Any reason you guys went with just the iOS version? Plans for release on Android? A web-based variant maybe?
@graciousgarg Hi Garg, thank you so much. We went with just the iOS version because we wrote the app ourselves, like we outsourced basically none of it, and none of us have Android experience. Previously, and right now, we don't have the funds to hire an Android developer to remake the app on Android for us, and we don't think anyone would do that for free (and rightfully so!).
Android is definitely hugely requested and it's in our future plans, it just depends on having the money to comfortably hire an Android dev and also keep updating the iOS app at the same level we have been.
EDIT: Totally missed your web ask, that's also something we've thought about, but are less sure of.
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This is a great idea for an even greater cause! I'm still curious, though. What criteria do you use to subdivide these communities? Can users create communities that they don't see? And with the number of communities growing, how will moderation be managed?
@hasan_liou Thanks! 1) They are pretty much random but are based off of the tags a user follows. 2) No. 3) We only allow the number of communities that we feel as though we can moderate sufficiently.
@antonybearpark it should be! thanks for letting us know, we'll get on that asap!
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Could you elaborate about the business side of the project?
How does it plan on monetising, what kind of information is collected/moved and how does the app intend on surviving?
Congratulations on the great launch.
Hi @lyomdhur. Sure and thanks! So we have created Machine Learning Models, trained from posts on Trill, that our moderators use to keep Trill safe. These models determine if a post suggests that a user wants to harm themself, someone is harming a user, or a user plans to harm others. We plan to create an API and/or license these models for developers and tech companies to use, which will allow Trill to sustain itself.
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@arisokolov that's a really sharp biz model - may I ask what tool you are using for machine learning - Tensorflow perhaps?
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Hi, was very excited to download and start with the product.
However, soon after downloading, I have been facing issues signing up. Could you please fix this bug?
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