[HN Gopher] Minus
___________________________________________________________________
Minus
Author : fredley
Score : 254 points
Date : 2021-09-06 18:10 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (minus.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (minus.social)
| [deleted]
| a9h74j wrote:
| Read a bit, good idea.
|
| Will be followed by some copycat's Minus++, which will be
| montetized.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| In an effort to get people to look into each other's eyes
| more, and also to appease the mutes, the government
| has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred
| and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings,
| I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant
| I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the
| new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
| proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest
| for you. When she doesn't respond, I know she's
| used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you
| thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on
| the line and listen to each other breathe.
| Jeffrey McDaniel, "The Quiet World"
| spoonjim wrote:
| Wonderful
| saagarjha wrote:
| I always wondered why the poem wasn't one hundred and sixty-
| seven words long. Perhaps this was all he could save for us.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Or the other 42 were for us to give the ones we love.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 42 words remain.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| This was the first comment I favorited on HN, many years ago.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Love this. People are craving a different social media experience
| or at least quite a few articulate and imaginative ones do.
|
| But while the failure of the current crop is evident (well not in
| terms of shareholder value), what should be a "good" replacement
| is not all that obvious. Even beyond sustainable business model
| issues, there are so many configurations, platform features,
| constraints, user incentives etc. There are two general
| principles I can think of:
|
| * Let a thousand flowers bloom (in a fediverse context) and let
| evolutionary trial-and-error determine what works
|
| * Source some insights from the surveillance capitalists as they
| are the ones who have accumulated the largest empirical factbase
| about what we should _definitely_ avoid 8-)
| vezycash wrote:
| Monetization strategy: $10 for 100 more posts.
| guerrilla wrote:
| That'll shut the poors up.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Reddit needs this but for upvotes. Tons of low quality posts
| starting with a barely funny joke that goes 15 replies deep with
| almost the same joke but less and less funny. If you only have
| say 5 upvotes a day, you won't contribute garbage to a barely
| useful thread.
| ok123456 wrote:
| This is how slashdot does moderation.
| Jaxkr wrote:
| Hugged to death :(
| lord_and_xavier wrote:
| Yeah wordpress doesnt scale. hug of death
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I don't like Wordpress either, but correctly configured it's
| not _that_ much worse than a static site.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| But the sites that are slow or performance sensitive often
| aren't just static sites. If it's more than just a simple CMS
| to you, you need to be enough of a WordPress expert that you
| probably don't need WordPress in the first place (or you're
| just using it for the themes or plugins). Weird WP
| performance cliffs are hard to avoid for dynamic content and
| "correctly configuring" either means rolling a custom
| solution or getting neck deep in your infra--both of which
| smell a lot more like engineering than not.
| Tomte wrote:
| Correctly configured it is a static site with a minimal stub
| in PHP.
|
| And if you want to go further you can bypass that stub and
| serve the static pages directly from your web server.
|
| Best of both worlds, really.
| vmoore wrote:
| > Correctly configured it is a static site with a minimal
| stub in PHP
|
| Maybe there's a 1001 plugins being used which means the
| Wordpress site has to make boatloads of requests to the
| backend. Many Wordpress sites make that mistake. I keep my
| plugin count to at _least_ five plugins. And they 're
| obviously plugins which I _really_ need, and they 're not
| chatty in any way.
| toast0 wrote:
| I've only run one wordpress site (and reluctantly), but I
| found it very hard to configure correctly. I was very happy
| when I was able to convince my boss to replace it with a much
| simpler blog system that only supported exactly what we
| needed.
| noahtallen wrote:
| A raw HTML file won't scale if it's served from a potato. ;)
| This probably has more to do with the host & servers than
| WordPress.
| zuppy wrote:
| you couldn't be more wrong. wordpress is one of the easiest
| apps to scale, put a varnish in front of it as you mostly have
| static content. you can go even further, move the comments to
| an external tool and you can have a very long cache.
| lucideer wrote:
| All your comment has communicated is that Varnish can scale.
| Wordpress is not Varnish.
|
| The gp isn't "wrong": putting Varnish in front of WP is a
| possible solution to the fact WP doesn't scale, not a
| disproof of the fact.
|
| Furthermore it's a highly limited solution: WP is only static
| if you limit it's use to its static features, and configuring
| Varnish for the unholy mess of 3rd-party
| dynamic/interactive/form-handling WP plugins is nightmare
| territory.
|
| Wordpress doesn't scale.
| kortilla wrote:
| Producing cache friendly output is how you scale easily.
|
| A content management system that doesn't produce cacheable
| html isn't scalable and one that does is. It's not the job
| of the content management system to serve the cached pages.
| That's what CDNs, browsers, and caching layers in general
| are for.
| jsuqo wrote:
| "Jira scales. You just need to put a varnish in front and
| move the comments to disqus"
| rpastuszak wrote:
| That's such a lovely idea. Reminds me of a game made by one of my
| friends: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1-chance/id1529736678
|
| The game itself seems pretty trivial. What makes it really
| interesting is that you get only one chance to play it.
| silisili wrote:
| It's neat but seems ephemeral. Maybe that's the point.
|
| I had a not similar but related idea, basically borne from my
| hatred of Twitter. Basically, you'd only be able to make a
| comment if you have a credit. Credits would be time based,
| probably 1 or 2 a day. The only other way to get credits is if
| the person you replied to likes your comment. Basically, the idea
| being to quit getting people being so controversial and
| argumentative.
|
| Edit:
|
| I kept replying below describing some vision that doesn't exist,
| which I feel is rude to the OP and Minus, so I'll not reply
| further. As I have little intention in building anything at the
| moment, feel free to take anything you like from it, Minus et al.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Token bucket! But perhaps a microtransaction system would also
| fit neatly in your scenario. >:)
| silisili wrote:
| I thought about that, but still unsure. Want to be an asshat?
| Pay a dollar and get another credit.
| axelroze wrote:
| That won't stop organizations with lots of money unless the
| cost for more credits raises exponentially. Everyone will
| have to stop when millions and billions get into play.
| maximp wrote:
| I like that time-based mechanism much better. The
| karma/engagement-based stuff would just let popular people post
| more :)
| abeppu wrote:
| I think this is still bad, because it heavily encourages
| people to post stuff that others will respond to, which isn't
| necessarily what's honest, authentic, valuable, etc.
| silisili wrote:
| Posts, as they are not a response to anything, in my head
| wouldn't use a credit unless the post tags someone.
|
| So if you want to write mean things, do so in your own
| posts without bothering others' discussions.
| silisili wrote:
| Well, not more. Sending a comment takes you down to zero,
| you're done. Unless that person likes your comment. Popular
| posts or number of likes per comment would be irrelevant. The
| idea I guess is to allow and even encourage a friendly back
| and forth without burning all your credits.
|
| Example. A -I released this tool!
|
| B - Wow nice how long did that take
|
| A - Thanks, 6 months.
|
| At this point, the conversation is done unless both like each
| other's comment, which in such an exchange would be
| encouraged.
|
| If C comes along and says 'this tool sucks', even if 50
| people like it, if A doesn't, C is done commenting for the
| day.
|
| In fairness, I haven't really thought the whole thing out in
| detail, just some rough ideas. I appreciate pointing out
| challenges and dislikes with it though.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| What if B, for whatever reason, doesn't like A's reply? So
| A is out of comments for the day, and can't respond to
| anyone else who replies to them.
|
| B might have just logged off, or maybe their question was
| bait to intentionally silence A. Either way, A is probably
| annoyed with B.
| kortilla wrote:
| Unfortunately this doesn't help with flame wars where
| people can go over to a sub thread they get agreement on to
| harvest credits to then brigade the ones they disagree
| with.
| Saptarishi wrote:
| Very interesting idea. C can still come back and comment
| the next day/after a fixed time frame. I think it provides
| a much needed balance between lack of interaction and over
| interaction. I guess it can prevent bickering and
| unnecessary arguments.
|
| Though if anyone wanted to set up an information farm, by
| creating a bunch of accounts, where they post and like each
| other, acting like different individuals, it could still
| create engagement with other innocent people who could
| eventually become biased, hateful and misinformed.
| whitepaint wrote:
| Why?
| neilv wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210905040333/https://minus.soc...
| aerosmile wrote:
| 10 years ago, I launched a small modification to a social network
| I was running at the time - you could only post once per day. The
| quality of the content went through the roof, but it turned the
| product into more something like Medium. It had some upsides, but
| also some downsides. It was amazing to see how such a simple
| change can dramatically alter the nature of the product.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This to me is the equivalent to the war on drugs. If you limit
| someone's ability on your platform, they will find a different
| platform. Until you squash the need/desire, those with the
| need/desire will find a solution.
|
| Addiction is more complicated.
| maximp wrote:
| This product seems to combine a few unrelated ideas. No
| monetization, reverse-chronological feed, no notifications:
| sweet. Easier to have cleaner, more meaningful conversations with
| people, hopefully. In short, a nicer, ad-free, less-harmful
| Facebook. How will you pay for it if it ever gets popular?
|
| I'm not sure how limited posts play into this. I think the
| intention is to make users really think about what they're
| posting. But the arbitrary, "nice, round number" limit just feels
| existentially dreadful at best, and like a headline-generating
| schtick at worst. Surely there's some other mechanism that can
| nudge people towards more thoughtful, less self-promoting posts
| (or whatever the goal is); maybe limiting posts to one a day?
| georgeoliver wrote:
| This particular implementation isn't a product (it's an art
| piece).
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > But the arbitrary, "nice, round number" limit just feels
| existentially dreadful at best, and like a headline-generating
| schtick at worst.
|
| From TFA:
|
| > Minus was created by Ben Grosser and commissioned by arebyte
| Gallery (London, UK) as part of the solo exhibition Software
| for Less [https://www.arebyte.com/software-for-less].
|
| It's an art project. Headline-generating schticks and
| existential dread are to be expected.
| Stupulous wrote:
| Re: one a day
|
| By coincidence, earlier today I had the same idea. I was
| thinking about how so much of what you encounter in social
| media is biased towards people who post a lot.
|
| In politics, for example, most people are relatively moderate.
| People who spend more time talking about politics are more
| likely to hold extreme positions. And people who spend the most
| time talking about politics are the ones who spend the least
| time evaluating their and others' positions. So the political
| social media is dominated by uneducated extremists with hot
| takes. (I admit this often includes myself, though I do try to
| put effort into my comments).
|
| A possible solution to this would be reducing the amount of
| allowed posts per time, which would quiet the noise and give
| high-effort interactions a more level playing field. Of course,
| that sucks for engagement and interferes with topics like humor
| that benefit from low-effort contributions. I wonder if there's
| a client-side way to bias your feed towards people who post
| less frequently.
| darig wrote:
| Any only system that attempts to limit the bandwidth of
| single accounts will be overrun by forged and stolen accounts
| to make up for the restrictions. At the same time, honest
| account holders are silenced, unable to counter. The system
| is doomed to fail.
| lcnmrn wrote:
| I scaled Subreply with the same amount of money I would pay for
| Netflix/Spotify.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I know, I know, this is more art than a serious social medium (if
| social media can be serious): but I don't think the concept is as
| clever as it tries to seem. A project like this, even as an
| _objet d 'art_, ought to inspire someone to interact with it, to
| poke at it and see what happens -- but would anyone really
| bother? The limitations would make you think carefully about what
| you share with the community, but that caution works against
| building any sort of community, even an ephemeral one. It's just
| not attractive or engaging, like a painting you'd see in a
| gallery and walk past after a glance.
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| Interesting idea, but what's stopping someone from creating a
| second account?
| nacs wrote:
| Nothing and that's exactly what would happen if it became
| popular.
|
| You'd get @kanyewest7, @kanyewest289, @kanyewest3058, etc.
|
| Also, the younger you are when you join the network, the fewer
| posts you get per year. If you join as an 18 year old, you have
| a little over 1 post per year remaining. If you join at 90, you
| have 10 posts per year, etc.
| axelroze wrote:
| Inconvenience. With the second account one has to re-friend all
| the users from the first account. Also it would lead to bad
| social standing as by re-friending it will be obvious they are
| breaking the 100 posts per person per life rule. This could
| even lead to automatic bans by studying the connection
| structure.
| pgroves wrote:
| That's what I want... this would force me to make a different
| account for every topic I might comment/post on, and they can
| have their own local networks. If it's a topic that I know a
| lot about (eg what I do at my day job), it would force a fresh
| start every few years.
|
| This is in contrast to my twitter account, which is such a mess
| that I don't like posting b/c "most" people who will see it
| followed me for some other topic.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| The artist has many more gimmick projects like this if anyone
| else is interested
|
| https://bengrosser.com/projects/
| abeppu wrote:
| I love this as an idea, but I suspect as a user, I would use
| either zero or one posts.
|
| I do like the idea that the platform can actively disrupt the
| "addictive" patterns that develop elsewhere. Other things I've
| wanted:
|
| - Instagram with an ML layer that auto-rejects pics with faces or
| text. Landscapes, vistas, animals, architecture etc all would be
| welcome.
|
| - high latency Twitter, where no post is viewable until at least
| 2 weeks after it's published. Bickering threads become
| impractical. People learn to post stuff that will be worth caring
| about later.
|
| - Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook
| alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction of
| posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone quickly
| learns you can't trust it, but it can still be cute/fun/humorous.
| fogof wrote:
| Let me take this chance to mention the "Unhook" Youtube browser
| extension, which I recently added and which I think has been
| having a big positive effect for me. The extension allows you
| to remove (among other things, it's very customizable) the
| sidebar of suggested videos from Youtube.
|
| This extension has been more effective for me than any other at
| cutting down how much youtube I watch. Maybe the biggest factor
| in this is that it doesn't ban me from youtube entirely - When
| I've tried extensions like that in the past, I've always ended
| up uninstalling the extension when I needed to watch a youtube
| video for work. This way, I can watch a little, but the lack of
| constant new recommendations keeps me from spending hours and
| hours on the site.
| simias wrote:
| I really like like the idea of a "high latency" social network,
| effectively bringing back the feeling of old snail mail (but
| more public).
|
| 2 weeks seems unnecessarily extreme to me though, even 24h
| would probably be enough to severely limit the flame potential.
| It would also potentially mean that one could have a daily
| routine of checking for the new content and replies and writing
| your own stuff and you're good to go for the day.
|
| Although to really be effective I think it'd have to work on a
| global tick (i.e., all new content is published once a day at a
| certain time). Otherwise the new content would still slowly
| drip continuously and you'd still have the addictive nature of
| social networks.
|
| At this point I'm sort of reinventing a collaborative version
| of a newspaper.
| villasv wrote:
| > high latency Twitter
|
| This seems easy enough for current twitter-fediverse-clones to
| implement.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| For the last one: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/
| dunnevens wrote:
| Regarding high latency twitter: maybe someone should make
| FidoNet.social. For those who don't remember, back in the early
| 90's your local BBS's might offer message boards connected to
| the rest of the US/world. Not a continuous connection. Every
| day at 2 AM (or whenever), your favorite BBS would dial into
| some remote node and sync messages.
|
| Practical effect was a roughly 24-48 (or more) hour wait for
| responses. Didn't stop bickering though. I was quite young at
| the time. Asked some question about a game. The first response
| was fairly hostile. Which started an argument. My first time
| flamed online, and my first online argument. Which went very
| slowly.
|
| Still, slow social media would be interesting. I kinda like the
| FidoNet model. Where syncing only happens once a day. Maybe
| only at a set time overnight. Faster than snailmail but you
| have the full day to type out your response about why Ultima V
| did not suck as your opponent claimed. With the ability to
| submit a post any time, but also with the ability to edit it
| until sync. I think it would encourage long posting more than
| the current systems. Which may or may not be a good thing.
| hkt wrote:
| I've always wondered about the practicality of doing
| something like fidonet over AX25/some other packet radio
| system. It'd be fabulous to be able to ditch the internet and
| participate in something slower and more humane. Your post
| has reminded me of that ambition. These days, I'd love an
| e-ink display to accompany it. Slow computing!
| int_19h wrote:
| With AREDN, you get a whole TCP/IP ecosystem to play with.
| This could then be used to run protocols like UUCP or NNTP,
| that are tailored to disconnected scenarios.
|
| https://arednmesh.readthedocs.io/
| int_19h wrote:
| FidoNet didn't really mandate syncing once per day. It
| required the nodes to sync _at least_ that often, and
| established a common hour for each zone to allow direct node-
| to-node connections for that purpose; but even in late 90s,
| larger nodes would already sync more often in practice.
|
| FWIW FidoNet is still around, although most connections seem
| to be over IP these days.
| kripy wrote:
| > Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook
| alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction
| of posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone
| quickly learns you can't trust it, but it can still be
| cute/fun/humorous.
|
| Billy Chasen developed faux-social network called Botnet.
| Unfortunately, it looks like it's gone and I doubt that name
| would have lasted long in the App store let alone how he
| managed to get it through.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/botnet-social-network-where-ever...
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| The latency idea actually makes a lot of sense
| woko wrote:
| I emulate it by deactivating as many notifications as
| possible, and manually checking replies after a few days or
| weeks, when I remember. I have noticed that what was a "hot"
| discussion often becomes pointless and laughable after enough
| time has elapsed. I usually don't feel the need to reply to
| these old bickerings anymore.
| Y_Y wrote:
| What about a low-bandwidth Twitter, where posts load
| immediately, but at 2e-3 bits per second, so that it takes two
| weeks to load the whole thing.
| itisit wrote:
| Call it "Loris"
| rzzzt wrote:
| The combination of your ideas would be Mars rover Twitter:
| 5-20 minutes propagation delay, 160-800 bps bandwidth using
| the X-Band High-Gain Antenna - https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020
| /spacecraft/rover/communicatio...
| dylan604 wrote:
| >- Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook
| alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction
| of posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone
| quickly learns you can't trust it, but it can still be
| cute/fun/humorous.
|
| Aren't we pretty much there now with a so many bots posting?
| aymendjellal wrote:
| For the twitter latency
|
| Have you tried slowly.app? It's an app that simulates snail
| mail Pairs you with someone based on your preferences and you
| can write them a letter / email that will be delivered in a few
| hours / days, based on your distance with said person
| [deleted]
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| How about the last post being a redirect to new account?
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| There was a social network "this" some years back, the idea being
| that you could make just one post a day. I enjoyed it a bit, and
| IIRC it didn't do too terribly.
|
| Predictably, it's now gone.
| sayhar wrote:
| I have one of their stickers. It was nice! IIRC it was doing
| fine, but they ran of out funding and their next round of
| financing fell through unexpectedly.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The old "X" but with new cool restriction "Y" startup idea. Like
| Twitter or Snapchat.
| beckman466 wrote:
| Sounds a bit like the dev got stuck in the childhood fantasy of
| "what if the more words I speak, the sooner I die"...
| [deleted]
| droptablemain wrote:
| I don't use social media, so I'm probably not the target audience
| anyway -- but I don't understand this at all. It just seems like
| an arbitrary and stupid limitation.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't
| dependent on selling ads. The need to drive engagement and sell
| things to people tends to limit the types of social media. It's
| nice to see an experiment like this but I don't know if it will
| go anywhere.
|
| I was thinking the other day of an idea where you take turns with
| people in your circle to become a 'star' for a period of
| time(day, days, week, hour, whatever) every so often. During that
| time you get the limelight, and become the focus of the group.
| Imagine that, during that tie period, you're encouraged to share
| more of the boring details of life. Like 5 minutes of every hour
| or two maybe.
|
| Something like this appeals to me because I feel like I don't
| really connect with my friends on social media the way I would in
| real life. If I hung out with a friend, I'd experience more of
| the banalities and have a more complete picture of what their day
| to day life was actually like. Obviously that's not something you
| want to get blasted with every day in your feed, and it's not
| something you want the responsibility to produce every day, but
| let's say it happens once a year for each person.
|
| I just feel like the Facebook/Instagram model promotes a focus on
| curated highlights of a persons life, which is fine, but doesn't
| really feel like friendship. I want something that replaces the
| experience of spending a day with someone. With all the distance
| between us these days, either from economic migration, the
| pandemic, or whatever, I really feel like I'm losing touch with
| my friends. Seeing their highlights on my feed or even
| communicating with them via text/im/voice just doesn't cut it.
| How can we provide that sense of connection remotely?
| myself248 wrote:
| > take turns with people in your circle to become a 'star' for
| a period of time
|
| I like this idea. For a while, "day in the life of a ____"
| posts were very popular on imgur, and I really enjoyed it, even
| though they were strangers.
|
| The downside I figure might be that after someone's star-time,
| they get a lot of incoming attention, which then fades out.
| Some people might react quite well to that and others quite
| poorly, so I figure you'd need a set of other functions (say,
| blast-from-the-past auto-regurgiations, or week-delayed emails
| as suggested in another post here) to mitigate that and help
| people of various social proclivities all feel comfortable.
|
| I miss letter writing. When you'd sit down and put real thought
| into it because you'd know it would be the only time you'd
| communicate for the next week or two. Or even tape swapping --
| my dad and uncle used to mail tapes back and forth, hour-long
| audio rambles because it was more fun than the written word.
| Every tape started with a delay to make sure the leader was
| past the head, then the "pk-ssht" of a beer can being
| opened....
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't
| dependent on selling ads.
|
| I suppose you could skim through Usenet archives.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _if it wasn 't dependent on selling ads. The need to drive
| engagement_
|
| Driving engagement isn't a consequence of ads. Netflix tries to
| aggressively drive engagement too and it doesn't have ads.
|
| The reason is simple: the less people use a service, the more
| likely they are to unsubscribe. The more likely they are to
| spend their time on a competing service that's doing a better
| job at driving engagement.
|
| Driving engagement is necessary for a business period, no
| matter how they're funded.
| [deleted]
| juliend2 wrote:
| (Site is down)
|
| Here's the intro video: https://vimeo.com/587261149
| [deleted]
| soneca wrote:
| Tangential plug, I launched my own social network without feed,
| notifications, or even a way to find people there.
|
| It flopped everywhere I promoted it, but it is still online since
| I am on free tier of the host service.
|
| If anyone wants to check it:
|
| https://www.quidsentio.com
| smoldesu wrote:
| > ...It flopped everywhere I promoted it...
|
| Have you considered lowering the barrier-of-entry from $19? For
| what is effectively a journaling app, you're driving an
| incredible amount of margin out of a scenario where your
| audience has no incentive to pay.
| soneca wrote:
| It is a _shared_ journaling app, not many of those around. I
| believe $19 annually is pretty low already ($1.58/month). And
| people have to pay only after they have a lot of posts, so
| anyone can try for free. If people aren't willing to pay
| that, it does not make sense to lower the price, but rather
| give up the idea.
|
| Even my comment above mentioning has been downvoted twice. It
| is pretty clear it's not something people want.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-06 23:00 UTC)