Show HN: I made a website that makes you cry

6 days ago (cryonceaweek.com)

Hi everyone! Thank you so much for your appreciation for the site (except that one guy who hated it). Pretty awesome to see this little side project make it to the front page on here.

I'm working on a new project called Feel (https://www.feelapp.io) which is an app that helps you feel all emotions on demand. It goes beyond just crying and helps you navigate and shift your mood in real time. It can make you cry too though. Or feel joy, awe, confidence, serenity, or even process difficult emotions like anger or fear when you need to.

This isn't an ad or shameless plug I promise - I'm actually looking for a creative developer to join the team and help us take it to the next level. Please reach out if this resonates with you or share with your creative coder friends: johnny@feelapp.io

  • Not gonna lie, this whole "Feel - Emotions on Demand" thing sounds like a slightly dystopian scifi concept. Maybe like a Black Mirror -style parody of how even emotions can be manufactured nowadays.

    • I get that reaction and see how it could sound a bit Black Mirror ish. It's literally just art and curated audiovisual experiences designed to help you feel and process your emotions though.

      We’re already living in a scifi dystopia where our emotions are constantly being manipulated by social media, algorithms, ads, etc. Feel is an attempt to offer an intentional alternative. It's not about manufacturing emotions. It's about moving through them more consciously with greater awareness and emotional intelligence.

      I appreciate the comparison and feedback though. I welcome it all.

      7 replies →

    • Sounds like the "Penfield Mood Organ"[0] from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Characters "dial" emotions, from basic to extremely specific (e.g. "481. Awareness of the manifold possibilities open [...] in the future", or "888 [...] The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it")

      [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penfield_mood_organ

      1 reply →

    • Wait till you learn about art, where other humans use audio visual mediums to evoke feelings. It's going to blow your mind.

    • That is… nothing new? At least for me, music does the same. It can make me cry, make me happy or make me angry. I can spin up a CD and get in each mood I desire. Or, and that’s the great thing about it, get out of it.

      1 reply →

  • Would be a shame if someone picked those up and surreptitiously inserted them in feeds of their social network to manipulate the users' emotions- I mean, "maximize engagement"...

Well the site definitely works.

Currently going through a extremely difficult time at the moment with my amazing cat that is dying of CKD/CHF.

First video this site showed me is "A scene from the movie A Dog's Purpose (2017). A family's dog reaches the end of his life."

Now I cant stop crying.

  • When my cat passed away I wept like a baby. He was my friend and companion when we travelled across the country for 10 years. It’s been 5 years since and I still tear up whenever I think about him.

    Sending virtual hugs in your direction.

  • Losing a pet is heartbreak on a whole different level. Wishing you and your cat peace and comfort in whatever time you have left together

  • Our cat died last year due to blood clots in has back legs. He was a good cat.

  • I still miss my guy five years on. It's rough. Make the most of the time while you have it.

I've been collecting videos for years that make me shed tears. I don't easily shed tears if it feels a little too manufactured. Usually what works best for me is just seeing actual genuine unprompted emotion, though sad scenarios without any emotion can do it if the sentimentality is balanced well.

Tried maybe 5-6 videos on the site and none of them worked. :/ Just watched one of my old videos, boom, instant tears.

Don't know about the health implications of crying once a week or anything, but sometimes if I'm feeling a little out of touch with life, watching something sad does help.

  • Sorry it didn't work for you! Everybody is different and I tried to include a variety of universally tear-inducing videos. But of course it won't work for everyone. I've found it works for about 90% of people.

    What videos make you cry? Curious to see how they compare. Also, not all the videos on the site are sad. Some are happy tears.

I probably do need a good cry since my breath does that repeated-hesitation thing when I breathe in sometimes (not sure if there’s a name for it yet, but you also do it for a while after you’re done crying, I call it “aftershocks” then… but this is like, all the time for me now…)

  • Hitching.

    • Yeah. If it isn't actually accompanied by emotions that suggest a cause, you really might want to see a doctor about that. If you also sleep on your side, go for the home sleep study if offered, it's worlds more convenient.

  • Interesting. I'd be curious to know if crying helps it at all. It could be anxiety or stress related. Have you tried breathing exercises?

    • Well, that's probably part of the issue- I seem unable to have a good cry, and haven't had one in years frankly, even when my mom died

      3 replies →

I am (un)fortunate in that I'm a massive softy so don't need to bring out the big guns like this. I cried four times during Superman last week.

  • Oh I was bawling during the Pa Kent scene in the theater yesterday, it was so good. I also cried at the way Superman was distraught over the treatment of the monster, and then also the scene with the kid and the flag.

I haven't investigated the site because I don't want to cry right now, but I think it's a great idea! A good cry can be cathartic, and once a week sounds about perfect. I have a 'songs to cry to' Spotify playlist for precisely this reason.

As an employee of a large enterprise SaaS company I was expecting something different

Is there a website that makes people laugh, I want to laugh once a week?

  • I thought about making that but there are so many comedy sites and platforms already. Funny or Die, Comedy Central, comedians on youtube, memes on social media, etc.

  • My thoughts exactly

    When I’m tired or uninspired I notice laughter gives me energy

    But I would like instant access to it

Made me laugh, thank you! Laughing is healthy, though should be taken more often than once a week. For the record, it gave me https://player.vimeo.com/video/994963176

  • Crying once a week is great but as Charlie Chaplin said, a day without laughter is a day wasted, which I agree with. Happy I was able to help regardless.

  • Definitely thought you were a bit scary at first, but... yeah, that definitely wouldn't have made me cry lol

How can I grab a link for a video to share that specific video?

  • All the videos are linked on vimeo which you can copy and share. But be sure to share the site as well :)

  • The Vimeo logo in the video is a link to the video on vimeo.com.

    • The first video I got didn’t have the vimeo logo in the controls. I guess the play size was too small? Others have had it, but I can’t seem to find that first one at all.

      1 reply →

Bandai Namco made a (Japanese-only) DS / Mobile game that did the same thing, 99 No Namida. Got a tiny bit of western media coverage due to the absurdity.

  • Interesting. I haven't heard of that before. The idea for the site was actually inspired by a Japanese researcher who teaches people how to cry once a week.

Works for me. Most reliable SaaS (Sadness as a Service) I've seen in the past years.

I have a collection of clips that worked on me specifically which I used to gauge my state - not crying is a cause for concern, but over the years I got desensitised to them.

I'm almost afraid to ask: are Japanese Toyota ads in there?

We doomscroll all week, maybe it is time we schedule a cathartic cry like it's a dental appointment

  • More like going to a massage parlor. I used to work opposite one of those. Believe me, whatever you think you can imagine on the faces of men as they walked out that door, you really have to have seen it. Even I couldn't find the heart to catcall abuse, not even at the men who'd already put back on or never taken off their rings.

Well, I was reassured I'm just a cynical old bastard, so that's worth something, I guess. To me all the videos I saw, around a dozen, were all (by accident?) emotional cheap-shots, the low-hanging fruit of manipulation. For example: When I see a clip of Brooks Hatlen, the elderly librarian from The Shawshank Redemption, make his final voyage after being released, I get shown an old man take his own life (spoiler! but the movie is 30 years old now, so c'mon). That itself is somewhat sad, yes, but the feelings come from the context of the movie and what the viewer is shown before. So the clip falls flat, even with knowledge of the movie/book. Simply getting shown sad things does not make me cry, especially in short clips out of context.

I want this in literally every other emotion, except for anger, because there's already a site for that called reddit.com

  • IT here. I don't need a website; I have users.

    • I've been in SWE in non-enterprise for decades and right now I'm seated with IT and operations because our two teams total less than 15. The amount of users who open tickets with "I have this issue" and then send a screenshot of some error in a browser with absolutely no context... Not even the full browser image, just a small snapshot of the completely meaningless error... As though they expect the IT support people to just know what they were doing? My twin todlers who haven't learned to speak yet are still somehow better at telling me what is wrong when something is wrong.

      I'm always amazed at how friendly the IT support people manage these things.

    • this is a you problem. Worked in IT over 20 years, never been angry. Perhaps you should change careers.

  • What's a good subreddit for crying? All I get is ragebait and recycled punchlines

I watched this with my girlfriend. I can confirm that your domain name is completely accurate.

I was like this website isn't going to make me cry.

Then it shoves a knife through my heart with a montage of that dog movie. Well done.

It'll not be long before the UK gov add crying to the online safety bill, so enjoy this while you can, people of the UK.

If you ask AI to recommend or gen a video to make you cry, it may just show you a video of someone cutting onions.

Can I "upvote" / "downvote" the videos? I got "unlucky" and the two I saw didn't made me cry.

  • Yeah they showed me ET, which I first saw at a very young age. While it might have been a tearjerker for some, it was one of the first horror movies I watched and just watching the clip was a trigger. What kind of sick bastard designs a horrifying alien instead of a cutesy one for a kids movie?

> Studies show crying can relieve stress for a week.

Correlation, causation, etc?

I.e. I can easily imagine that, if something is seriously weighting on your mind, opening up about it and even crying would reduce stress.

It might even be the other way: That once people get a moment to de-stress and get a chance to mentally process some devastating event, they will cry.

I find it much harder to believe that just crying about some random, unrelated thing will magically make you more relaxed.

Alternatively, you can watch one episode of Violet Evergarden once a week.

  • Ep 10 has reliably gotten the tears going 3 out of the 3 times I've seen it from 2019 on, but if I watched it any more frequently, nah. I find this site distasteful.

Seems that website is hosted on cloudflare and doesn't open in Russia, which blocks all cloudflare traffic. This makes me cry, thanks! App works 100%

  • the fact that it doesn't open in russia makes me happy, to be honest

    • Yes, of course. Russians are, in fact, not people and do not deserve to view Western sites, media or actually any web service hosted by Western nations.

      What kind of a take is this? If you strategically block an entire nation from viewing our sites and media, you're handing the state-run media there more power.

      4 replies →

    • I'm currently in Russia trying to get a US visa for my CS PhD. Because I do CS, I got into a thing called administrative processing. For 95% of people, it takes days -- weeks, tops. Because of the colour of my passport, it has already lasted for 3 months. I know people who are waiting for 2 years to pass it.

      Why do you think I shouldn't have access to this website in Russia?

Is that what they mean by cryotherapy? ;)

Anyway, this seems to be a covert ad for https://www.feelapp.io/.

"Furiko (Pendulum), a Japanese short film about the passing of time."

Well that was fun.. :)

Didn't make me cry, but came close. I don't know if i feel stress relieved. It made me feel even more aware of my own mortality and mistakes i made/make in life. Don't feel particulary happy or relieved.

So i clicked again

"A scene from the movie Steel Magnolias (1989). A woman mourns the loss of her daughter. (6:44 min)"

Oh hell no..

Third and last attempt

"A scene from the movie Bambi (1942). Bambi mourns the loss of his mother. (02:47 min)"

You sure this is about stress relieving? :)

This is bad. If you want some emotional art therapy, go actually watch something, whether it's something you already appreciate or something new that you are willing to try. Content poaching wrapped up as pseudoscientific wellness product is just exploitative.