[HN Gopher] Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for fri...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not
influencers
Author : CitrusFruits
Score : 702 points
Date : 2022-04-16 17:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (slowsocial.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (slowsocial.us)
| d-us-vb wrote:
| Seeing a bit of debate concerning the most defining feature: one
| post a week.
|
| This is my favorite aspect of the site!
|
| What this really brings up is the distinction made ages ago about
| _policy_ vs _mechanism_. Every social media platform out there
| has or basically uses the same mechanisms: interactive, submit
| text /photos/video, add "friends", and so on. You'll notice that
| Slow Social implements the mechanism of a social network.
|
| So... what makes every social networking site different? It's the
| _Policy_! Most platforms had a few defining policies.
|
| - Twitter: "tweets" must be quite short, originally emulating
| SMS, all tweets show up in your feed (not sure if this is true
| anymore).
|
| - Facebook: add friends, must use your real name
|
| - Quora: must use your real name, posts must take the form of
| either a question or an answer to a question (but comments may
| also be made)
|
| - Reddit: Upvotes and Downvotes are first class citizens, users
| submit an idea, and the interface encourages lively discussion in
| the comments (this isn't technically policy, but more like
| culture).
|
| And so we add Slow Social to the mix: must add a friend to your
| list for them to see your post or add their email, may only post
| once per week.
|
| It's also just cool to experiment with new policies and see if
| they work.
|
| So, Slow Social adds a new, perhaps daring policy so as to make
| things more enjoyable overall. As an aside, if I'm only allowed
| to post one thing per week for my friends, I can't help but think
| that that would encourage my writing to be more impactful,
| thoughtful, and polite. It would encourage good habits in written
| communication.
|
| So needless to say, I'm signed up and looking forward to where
| this goes!
| Aeolun wrote:
| Hmm, I feel like I would trust this project more if the first
| email I saw didn't immediately come from a non-slowsocial.us
| domain.
| jdrc wrote:
| this is more like a journal than a social network then
| gtirloni wrote:
| FAQ: How do I export my data?
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Social Networks should be like email providers. You choose one
| that fits you best, or deploy your own, without having to worry
| not being able to communicate with others.
|
| Maybe we are long overdue for an open standard protocol for
| social interactions on the web. If you come to think of it, when
| the personal data itself isn't the property of the company behind
| the social network, there should be no reason not to share that
| information, so we can access it from a provider of convenience.
|
| This is what locks people into harmful platforms. I can't go to
| slow social without all my friends coming with me, so I'm stuck
| with Instagram/whatsapp.
| riffic wrote:
| > Maybe we are long overdue for an open standard protocol for
| social interactions on the web
|
| This exists as a W3C recommendation (ActivityPub), and before
| that you had pioneers working on things like StatusNet and GNU
| Social, way back in 2008.
| mabbo wrote:
| > Maybe we are long overdue for an open standard protocol for
| social interactions on the web
|
| We have those. They are called websites and emails.
| pozol wrote:
| Yeah but most websites don't directly talk to each other. And
| email only covers some of what social media platforms have.
| It's difficult to make and plan an event over email. But if I
| could make an event on a discord-like client, and my grandma
| can get updates on facebook, and so on, that would be an
| improvement from what we have now
| attilaperez wrote:
| > ActivityPub
|
| Problem is that platforms don't see any incentive in
| letting their APIs loose like this.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| > I can't go to slow social without all my friends coming with
| me, so I'm stuck with Instagram/whatsapp.
|
| This is partially correct. Slow Social would be a lot better if
| all your friends joined. However, my accommodation for this is
| that any post can be sent as en email as well. This lets you
| loop in people that aren't part of the network, and maybe never
| will be. It's not a perfect solution, but I hope it's better
| than nothing.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Well, the people that I know don't read their personal email
| unless they are looking for a password reset or a one time
| code.
|
| once everyone started requiring an email as a user name,
| inboxes of normal people are just spam that's part of the
| deal for signing up for something.
|
| It's basically useless these days, but it's not technically
| spam because they made you click the link when you signed up.
|
| Sure you could unsubscribe, and I do, and my technical
| friends do, but the rest just ignore it unless they need it
| for a specific action. I'd have to call or text all my
| friends to let them know I'd sent them an email with a link
| to a post, and at that point, I could just text them the post
| and at that point, it's kinda . . . idk, not great.
| lukasb wrote:
| I dunno, Substack is doing pretty well.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Maybe instead of a new "slow" network that enforces these
| rules, the consumer might want slow mode. Something that
| digests the fast-paced stuff. Maybe using heuristics to pare
| down the noisy, frivolous, or contentious stuff.
|
| Or maybe this model and its intentional limitations is key.
| jsemrau wrote:
| >I can't go to slow social without all my friends coming with
| me, so I'm stuck with Instagram/whatsapp.
|
| That's the problem if these new social networks have nothing to
| add in terms of functionality. There are many examples for
| come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the-network strategies that work.
| Tmpod wrote:
| You should give ActivityPub[1] a look. There are plenty of
| platforms based on this already.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
| Gollapalli wrote:
| ActivityPub exists, it's just niche.
|
| Maybe Elon will let mastodon instances interact with twitter or
| something. It'd be unlikely, but very cool
| gone35 wrote:
| There is (was) Patchwork [1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
| [deleted]
| _greim_ wrote:
| Upon following the magic link I got this: 500
| Cannot find module '/var/task/node_modules/party-js/lib'
| Error: Cannot find module '/var/task/node_modules/party-js/lib'
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| :(
|
| That's happened before, but I thought I fixed it. I guess I'll
| just take out the party.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| If you reload and go to /onboard it might work, otherwise you
| can just go to `/`, you'll just have to find your way around
| by yourself.
| SmallBets wrote:
| Constraints can be liberating and increase focus and creativity.
| See limited budget films vs formulaic blockbusters, or even
| twitters orignal 140 limit and how it led to the platform
| flourishing.
|
| I think there is definitely room for a product like this, and
| maybe even some kind of max follower limit could also skew more
| to connection over influencers.
| riffic wrote:
| I love this segment of an interview with Charles Eames
| regarding design's need for constraints: Q:
| Does the creation of Design admit constraint? A: Design
| depends largely on constraints. Q: What constraints?
|
| A: The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective
| keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to
| recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his
| willingness and enthusiasm for working within these
| constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of
| balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has
| its own peculiar list.
|
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Eames
|
| https://www.vitra.com/en-us/magazine/details/what-is-your-de...
| [deleted]
| skoczko wrote:
| Constrained social networks don't work, look at Google+. You
| don't need a social network to stay in touch with your friends
| and family as messaging apps and e-mail fulfil that purpose
| completely. Algorithms are not the only reason why all social
| networks drift towards celebrity/influencer/news following --
| they are channels for consuming media, the "social" is in the
| name only.
| onion2k wrote:
| The first tranch of social networks (Friendster, Friends
| Reunited, MySpace, etc) were very much based on people keeping
| up to date with their friends. They worked quite well _for
| users_ , but were hard to monetize succeasfully. There was
| value there, but not much in the way of ideas about how to
| extract it besides sticking a skyscraper ad down the side. I
| don't see any reason not to try that model again. Maybe it'll
| work now people are seemingly a bit disenchanted with things
| like Facebook.
| baq wrote:
| I've found long running chats like WhatsApp, telegram or
| signal fulfill that role.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Posting in a chat demands immediate attention from the
| participants. It feels "pushy"; I don't want to disturb my
| friends with my random ramblings.
|
| It's also not really possible to compose a single, long,
| properly formatted story, interspersed with images, in
| chat. Every separate post will be a call for attention, if
| they have not muted you yet.
|
| Ignored push messages can easily turn into forgotten
| messages. There is no "mark as unread".
|
| Chat does not provide you with an experience of reading
| carefully crafted posts, on a moment you choose to spend
| reading only about what your connections have been up to.
|
| Knowing what is happening in the lives of friends and
| family living in other countries is the only thing I really
| miss since I stopped using post style social media. Sure,
| we can chat, and sometimes we do. But usually we don't.
| You're just not going to chat about random little things in
| your life with people you don't see with some regularity.
| onion2k wrote:
| Chat works well for close friends, but now I'm middle-aged
| I have lots friends from school, previous jobs, etc that I
| still want to know and I'm interested in significant events
| in their lives (having kids, changing job, getting married,
| moving house, etc) but who I'd have nothing to say to on a
| regular basis. If I rely on anything that requires active
| participation that just means I won't talk to them. I want
| to passively read about their lives, and maybe comment if I
| feel like it. Most of the time I don't.
|
| This is a problem that you don't really start to understand
| until you're getting on a bit. When you're young you
| usually have a close group of friends from school or
| college, and maybe a job or two, and your extended family,
| and that's pretty much it. Fast forward 25 years and there
| loads of people who you've met and consider people you'd
| like to keep in touch with but who aren't friendly enough
| to want in a chat app. Social networks fill that gap really
| neatly.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Facebook started out that way too and seemed...okay? But
| certainly you can make more money by appealing to influencers
| and whatnot.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| engineer_22 wrote:
| You need an android app.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I need an iOS app too.
| darawk wrote:
| As other people have mentioned but I think not quite nailed
| perfectly, restrictions on behavior aren't quite the right
| solution to the problems that plague social media. Some people
| think that the right move is to eliminate engagement optimization
| algorithms, and I think that's not quite exactly right either.
|
| IMO the right solution is personal executive autonomy over
| content presentation and algorithmic optimization. By which I
| mean, I want to be able to make an "executive" choice over what
| kind of experience I want to have on a social platform. By
| "executive" I mean, I want to be able to make that choice
| explicitly, not implicitly by my behavior. For instance, an
| implicit choice is walking by a beautiful chocolate cake and
| being unable to resist eating it. An explicit choice is being
| able to architect my environment in advance, such that there are
| no beautiful chocolate cakes to tempt me.
|
| The biggest problem with social media right now is that the
| incentives of the existing platforms do not allow people to make
| these choices explicitly. They do not allow us to craft our
| information environment using our higher order executive
| functions, they force us to do it using our reptillian brains,
| one moment at a time. Essentially, they force us to choose:
| either you get none of what social media has to offer, or you
| take every aspect of it, whether you like it or not.
|
| Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed
| thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off"
| would be an amazing feature. People have a right to that kind of
| content if they want it. But they equally have a right to engage
| their higher cognitive functions and choose not to be expose to
| it if they don't want it, or choose to be able to architect the
| manner in which they are exposed to it.
| [deleted]
| mhink wrote:
| I mean, for what it's worth there's an aspect of this on
| Reddit, in the sense that you can choose which subreddits to
| join (and can maintain multiple accounts to keep your
| experiences separate).
|
| Although I'm sure it's not perfect, it's not terrible either.
| Especially if you follow the perennial Reddit advice and
| unsubscribe from the massive default subs.
| alephaleph wrote:
| I kind of disagree about this: maybe it's different if you're
| more mature but reddit was my first social media platform, I
| used it a lot in middle school, and in my experience rage
| bait was a huge problem. Rage bait subreddits become more and
| more extreme over time, losing the ability to distinguish the
| people they hate from parodies of the people they hate and
| effectively building up an effigy/totem of "the other side"
| to concentrate that hate onto. When all you have is a hammer,
| everything looks like a nail. I eventually realized I had to
| quit reddit because the extent to which I engaged in rage
| bait made me a worse person.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Yeah I agree, had the same experience. I found I literally
| couldn't get away from the rage bait either. They keep
| putting things in your feed even if your aren't subscribed.
|
| Reddit is also just an awful hive mind.
| alephaleph wrote:
| oof it's probably worse now than it was for me lol, when
| I used it I don't think they even had an algorithmic
| feed, just a subscribed and /r/all.
|
| and yeah the hivemind stuff is pretty bad. I'm reminded
| of a talk that ViHart of all people did where they argued
| that in a McLuhanist "the medium is the message" way,
| reddit's focus on up and down votes and karma creates an
| extremely judgy and kind of adversarial experience that
| eventually breeds hiveminds. I'd also argue that reddit's
| focus on small communities managed individually by
| specific moderators creates an undercurrent of site drama
| that reliably rears its ugly head every few months or so,
| but I guess that's neither here nor there.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| I think such a network, while great in theory, would mostly be
| filled with techies like us, because by design, it favors
| intentional interaction over mindless swiping, giving
| advertisers less incentive to fund you and thus eventually
| struggling to remain solvent.
|
| Now, if we put some regulation on dopamine loop limitations,
| such a network might absolutely THRIVE!
|
| Just my personal take! Do I wish people engaged more actively
| with the idea that these products can be living breathing
| things that we also can exhibit influence over? Absolutely. Do
| I think the critical mass of such users exists today? Sadly
| not, but I hope one day to be proven wrong!
| solstice wrote:
| This sounds like https://fraidyc.at which is delightfully weird
| and really functional at the same time
| attilaperez wrote:
| That early 2010s tumblr-esque UI is wonderful. Reminds me of
| MLKSHK. Good times.
| distantsounds wrote:
| It's called RSS. and a feed reader.
|
| I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it
| already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free
| services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the
| same system to ingest exactly what you want.
|
| We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting
| since.
| hk__2 wrote:
| Are there some readers that do some content curation for you
| _on top of your subscriptions_? The biggest issue I had with
| RSS (besides content discovery) is that some people blog
| multiple times a week while others only once in a while. I
| would like something that limits the amount of content I get
| based on how much they post: posts from people who blog only
| once in a while should be more prominently visible than
| others. Some way to mark posts as "I want more of that" or
| "I don't want more of that" would also be helpful to improve
| the curation without having to manually tweak parameters.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| That works for the consumption side, but at least from what
| I've seen (it's been a while), the feed readers don't have so
| much share/comment/like side to them. Frankly, they seem to
| miss the social side. Again, maybe I'm just not using the
| right feed readers, but when I use some these days, they feel
| somewhat isolated, just receiving info, not also sending it.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| Many sites including HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss)
| provide RSS feeds, so you could presumably navigate to the
| relevant page for the share/comment/like functionality. I
| realize that's not ideal but it seems well within reason to
| me.
|
| Software exists to translate RSS feeds to ActivityPub
| actors (ex https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub).
| Going the other direction, Pleroma provides RSS feeds. Not
| sure about Mastodon or Misskey.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Shameless plug: Airss does that. https://airss.roastidio.us
|
| The reader can be used without login. To comment and share,
| you need to login to https://roastidio.us (free open
| registration)
|
| Warning: I have very few users. So you will still feel
| isolated, unless you can gather a community yourself.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| Your ideas and the OPs sound like solving drug addiction by
| offering a new less addictive drug. Obviously the addicts will
| continue using the addictive ones! I think the social problems
| can only be solved by legislation because the existence of even
| one Facebook is already the problem.
| darawk wrote:
| As a former opiate addict myself, I don't think that's true
| at all. Moving the choices of addiction from the simple parts
| of the brain to the higher parts is the whole game. If at any
| time while I was an addict, you had told me "I'll give you a
| week's supply, but after that, you can never use again", i'd
| have made that deal every time, even if I knew it would be
| enforced.
|
| The problem of addiction is the problem of inter-temporal
| choice, and a broken discount function. Most addicts don't
| want to keep using in the executive part of their brain. They
| know it's self destructive, but they keep doing it anyway,
| because _the next hit_ is always, in a very local sense,
| rational. The ability to bind your own hands is the way out.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| While your example deal might work, that's not what new
| social media services are doing. They aren't preventing
| users from using the existing ones whenever they feel the
| urge.
| tejtm wrote:
| Ahhh the original web vision and promise of the Semantic Web.
| Snippets of machine readable datum everywhere fetched and
| assembled for you by your own "intelligent agent".
|
| The competition would be innovating better personal agents and
| data tagging.
|
| I think TBL found the mother of all misunderestimations when
| they made http servers and browsers as step zero.
| a-dub wrote:
| so, basically blogs and rss readers... with privacy features
| and channels for subscriptions.
|
| sounds good to me.
| pandesmos wrote:
| > _Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be
| fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned
| off" would be an amazing feature._
|
| Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so
| good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can
| be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't
| take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people
| into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and
| hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed.
|
| Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using
| a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers,
| here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a
| different core belief than the previous group of RPG people,
| here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But
| Brilliant people.
|
| Then when they added collections so I could present the
| different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to
| unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post
| as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes,
| and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and
| never see it.
|
| I miss it so much.
| pandesmos wrote:
| Also, the original ability to "circle share" was exceptional
| (and it's truly sad it was apparently abused into the ground
| by spammers). It allowed "real people" to curate groups of
| other real people around a certain topic, and then a new user
| (assuming they could find the curator) could then mass
| follow/watch those people.
|
| "Here is a group of people who are creating things and having
| great conversations with each other. Check it out."
|
| It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice
| party.
|
| Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or
| how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never
| saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.
| blondin wrote:
| google+ loss was a true tragedy.
| civilized wrote:
| I think Google+ was just ahead of its time. Now a huge chunk
| of people are ready for a different platform.
| rogual wrote:
| Wow, Google+ sounds like it was actually pretty good. These
| are all features I've wished Twitter had.
|
| When Google+ came out, I do remember avoiding it mostly out
| of spite, because Google were so overwhelmingly aggressive in
| trying to make me use it. And these days I'd probably never
| type my personal info into any Google property. Still, sounds
| like a shame it failed.
| [deleted]
| grumple wrote:
| When Facebook was first created, there was no feed. We flocked
| to it because it was useful for a few important reasons: 1)
| communicating with friends, 2) finding events to go to, 3)
| organizing groups, 4) storing and sharing photos, and 5)
| meeting new people (sometimes). It was great as a tool to
| supplement your social life.
|
| When they introduced the feed, Facebook gradually became worse
| at all of those things. Facebook became less about being a
| useful tool and instead became a media sharing instrument for
| serving advertisements. Your entire post is about that aspect
| of it though, and really it's the problem with all social
| media. The feed design is fundamentally incompatable with
| providing the utility that was initially offered by Facebook.
| The feed is purely a tool for distribution and consumption, not
| forging connections or otherwise improving the lives of users.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The feed was introduced in 2006. Facebook was founded in
| 2004. Not many people "flocked" to Facebook before the feed.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I think the feed was chronological for a while. Did it
| switch to being non-chronological in 2006? I thought it was
| later than that.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The algorithmically generated feed was introduced in
| 2011.
| judge2020 wrote:
| While I think this helps, Twitter has their 'lists' feature
| that effectively allows you to choose what timeline you want to
| view at any point; the only difference with your post is that
| it's not forced upon you, and perhaps you envision platform
| uses some ML model to classify posts from people you never
| follow. As it stands, people don't like the friction that comes
| with needing to hand-pick people to put into different twitter
| lists, so the feature is largely unused.
| alephaleph wrote:
| the first social media platform I used was Reddit where you
| really _can_ choose to be fed thirst traps or rage bait for the
| next hour by exclusively browsing one or two specific
| subreddits and I 'm not sure I'd say that's much more healthy
| than fully algorithmic social media, it just has different
| problems.
|
| Particularly the rage bait: I basically had to quit reddit
| because I realized the extent to which I engaged in rage bait
| made me a worse person.
| DennisP wrote:
| It can have that problem if you make that choice. I use
| reddit extensively, mainly subscribed to a bunch of mostly
| small subs for my own set of narrow interests, and it works
| great.
| alephaleph wrote:
| yeah, that's fair. I was also in middle school at the time
| which is probably a bit too young to be using reddit, but I
| think that it's important to recognize that a social media
| platform that gives you high level control of the kind of
| content you see won't completely solve the problem of
| unhealthy social media usage, it will just make it easy for
| your usage to be either very healthy or very unhealthy. And
| that those unhealthy users will end up causing problems for
| the healthy users.
|
| In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff
| twitter has been doing to try to make it look like they're
| doing something about unhealthy social media usage (all the
| "remember the human" stuff) would probably be more
| effective on a reddit-type social media platform.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think this is a good example of the folk wisdom that
| kids don't have the best decisionmaking skills. I spent
| time in many an IRC flamewar as a middle schooler myself,
| so I'm not judging :) of course. Reddit first came out
| while I was in high school and subreddits became a
| feature near the end of my time in HS. I definitely was
| making better choices about the content I consumed as a
| high schooler and I've gotten better as I've gotten
| older!
|
| I deeply appreciate Reddit's openness to customizing the
| experience. The defaults suck, I agree, but you can
| choose to curate the experience how you like. Moreover
| despite lots of jaw clenching over financial incentives,
| Reddit still offers the Old Reddit interface _and_ an API
| which lets power users consume Reddit however they like.
| These values were pretty common among other fora/BBSes at
| the time. The experience one got on 4chan's /a/ or /jp/
| was very different than /b/ or /pol/ or /soc/ (and most
| of 4chan's famed toxicity came from the latter 3 boards.)
| Forums were usually partitioned by topic.
|
| > In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff
| twitter has been doing to try to make it look like
| they're doing something about unhealthy social media
| usage (all the "remember the human" stuff) would probably
| be more effective on a reddit-type social media platform.
|
| I don't think the algorithmic feed as-is is compatible
| with healthy usage, no matter what rhetoric a company
| uses. ML models need to not only take engagement as input
| but also some sort of personal toxicity input. I need to
| be able to say "content X is addictive to me but not for
| a good reason." The model also needs to offer as much
| transparency as possible to the user, offering things
| like partial dependence plots for auditing by the user.
| I'm not sure whether a ranking model trained that way can
| still provide good ad targeting performance. Moreover
| knobs like this are probably just too complex for a
| layperson to interact with. Many engineers don't
| understand how a partial dependence plot works let alone
| laypeople.
|
| My problem with social media is about the lack of choice.
| I have no qualms that the majority will continue to use
| social media the way most people in the past would spend
| time mindlessly flipping TV channels or window shopping
| at malls and boutiques. But there was always
| alternatives. People that didn't want to spend time
| window shopping could be found in libraries, bookstores,
| bars, playing sports, or outdoors. Once you became an
| adult this was expected. That didn't mean I was
| ostracized from them. I encountered people in college who
| hung out in very different places than me but still
| connected with me over shared interests.
|
| In the social media age every form of social media is
| siloed. If you're not on Twitter you can't engage with
| people on Twitter. If you're not on Facebook you can't
| see people's Facebook content. You _have_ to join the
| platform to reach people on the platform. I'd love to see
| a world of federated social media where we can all talk
| to each other no matter our hobbies and third places.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Yes, I've been yearning for platforms really to just let me
| control the database query, basically. I want to be able to
| create custom filters/sorts/queries, or even choose some from
| an algorithm store, that lets me control how I view things.
|
| For example, on Twitter, I love having the "latest tweets"
| option. But maybe I want to also have "only tweets from
| verified people with over 100 retweets from other verified
| people." This is somewhat possible on Tweetdeck, but not
| possible directly within Twitter itself.
|
| It reminds me of the Facebook Graph Search, which I loved--"my
| friends of friends who speak Spanish who live in San
| Francisco." But FB shut that down a few years ago.
|
| Makes me wonder what are the main reasons they don't implement
| such options to help us better choose how we see the data--is
| it technically difficult to implement? Does it run counter to
| the business model of placed advertisements? Does it really
| just unleash too much power in the hands of the users and make
| these companies afraid what might happen?
|
| I'd love if they did implement the changes you suggest and I
| wonder why they haven't.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > Does it really just unleash too much power in the hands of
| the users and make these companies afraid what might happen?
|
| Social media companies spend incredible resources trying to
| continuously improve the stickiness of the app so users keep
| coming back to it. Giving users total control over curation
| creates two big problems for this.
|
| 1) if I can cut out all of the BS in the feed, I can utilize
| the app more passively which likely reduces overall usage. I
| would try to get my social media into a weekly feed, which is
| not compatible with the business social media companies are
| trying to run. It's all about DAU's.
|
| 2) total curation makes researching and optimizing the UX for
| eyeballs more difficult because you introduce an entirely new
| set of variables into the equation. This increases the
| likelihood that behavioral research draws erroneous
| conclusions based on the patterns being observed. By
| controlling the drip of the content to the users, the company
| can control for this much more easily.
| hannofcart wrote:
| > Makes me wonder what are the main reasons they don't
| implement such options to help us better choose how we see
| the data...
|
| Rather than anything nefarious, I think it might simply be
| down to the fact that it doesn't justify the engineering
| effort it would take to create a feed algo store or repo like
| you suggest considering how few people might actually use
| that feature.
|
| The vast majority of people out there likely don't have the
| wherewithal, time nor inclination to carefully pick and tune
| the algo for their friend feed.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Maybe I overestimate how many people would use even simple
| sorting and filtering options if given the option.
|
| Makes me wonder, how many people do you think have
| filters/rules/folders on their Gmail or other email
| inboxes? I assume a majority have some but maybe not.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I agree, it's not perfect. Maybe, just maybe though, it's
| better than other alternatives out there.
|
| Your suggestions for being able to apply our "higher order
| executive function" to our social networks is honestly a great
| take, and a great suggestion. Unfortunately though, that's not
| something I can really build, even if I had the time,
| resources, and personnel. That sort of social network requires
| critical mass of content and would by definition almost, have
| to be a competitor or aggregator of other social networks.
| However, that's not the sort of social network I personally am
| interested in building either.
|
| I think what you're describing definitely falls into our modern
| definition of a social network, but I also think that
| definition falls very short of the potential for technology to
| facilitate relationships. In my opinion, the "thirst traps and
| rage baits" totally have there place (they're a lot of fun!),
| but I don't think their place is in the same app as your best
| friend sharing about their mixed feelings of loss and euphoria
| as they move from one job to another.
|
| That all being said, I think you bring up a really good talking
| point, one that I hope the people at Instagram, Snap, TikTok,
| etc. all pay attention to. As for me though, there's nothing I
| can really do about it other than start discussion.
| darawk wrote:
| Totally get that, and to be clear I think what you're doing
| is super cool. I should have given a more relevant example to
| you. I think the general category of "user autonomy" over
| how/what kinds of content they see or don't see is a better
| abstraction than restrictions on behavior.
|
| So, for something like your network, that might mean rather
| than limiting how frequently people can post, give users the
| option to aggregate content from frequent posters in their
| feed. So, maybe I have a switch I can toggle that says, "show
| a unit of content from one person no more than once per day",
| where that single block of content is expandable, and gives
| some aggregated summary of how many things they posted / what
| its content was, that I can drill into if I want to, or
| quickly skim over if I don't care.
| civilized wrote:
| This is exactly what I was trying to say in my other post.
|
| Currently I suspect the logic behind social media engagement
| algorithms is something like "feed the user more of what they
| have clicked on in the past". But in real life, I don't just do
| more of what I did in the past. Sometimes I choose to do
| different things. But in legacy social media like FB I can't
| choose to be offered anything different than what I clicked on
| in the past. I can't ask for the culture wars and political hot
| takes to fuck off so I can see normal friends and family posts
| (or vice versa).
|
| This lack of choice in what we're offered is what's essentially
| inhuman about legacy social media.
| alar44 wrote:
| Neat idea but literally no one wants that. You think the
| average Joe wants to explicitly configure his social media
| algorithms?
|
| Get real.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Does everyone in Path of Exile create their own loot filters?
|
| You could, but most people download neversinks or someone
| else's custom filter.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Crippling frequency isn't the answer. North sure there's anything
| else to say here.
| Elll wrote:
| Heyy,I think we all need something "almost' like that social
| network. Tired of all instafacebook/Tik Tok, they are just an
| annoying buzz. But once a week?!!! Why post just once a week?
| Honestly I think ppl need to post more than once a week. Well...
| I need ...
| rbrbr wrote:
| xtracto wrote:
| Way back in the day there was a great social platform called
| Multiply.com. it allowed you to post videos, pics and blog posts.
| I felt it was better than Myspace or Facebook. Unfortunately it
| didn't survive, but I hope this SlowSocial gets better traction!
| omoikane wrote:
| The "new friends do not get to see old posts" seems very
| limiting, I would certainly want the option of being able to
| share some of my old posts with new friends, given that often new
| friends are made because of some overlap in real life history.
|
| I understand that this platform is perhaps deliberately not
| trying to attract strangers, but other platforms that had taken
| this stance eventually all faded away because all my friends want
| to play at where the parties are at, and those tend not to be
| private networks of this sort. It might be possible to avoid this
| demise if this network grows to be sufficiently large, but it's
| hard to grow when all existing contents are invisible to new
| users.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| You can share old posts with new friends, it's just on a post
| by post basis. But yeah, more fine grained control would be a
| nice feature.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Posts are shared with all of your confirmed friends once
| published (let the people in your life know what you've been
| up to)
|
| That part also seems weird to me, and also why I never really
| post anything to facebook these days (even if I used it more
| than once a month). Unless the things you're writing are
| stupidly generic they won't appeal to all your friends,
| especially since "social media friends" these days also means
| family, coworkers, acquaintences, that one guy you did a
| college project with and never talked to again, etc. Not
| actual friends.
|
| I know which of my friends are interested in what, and I can
| share what I know they'll be interested in hearing via DMs,
| leading to more productive discussions. I'm not sure what the
| appeal of friend-only self posts even is these days, unless
| you're planning a get together of some sort.
|
| If you're making a self post, there must be people that you
| don't know about that can see it, so there is some chance
| that you'll find someone new that's interested in what you
| posted. E.g. posting in fb or discord groups or in public
| like on reddit or here.
| p5v wrote:
| It makes me so happy to see projects like this one get developed.
| A few months back, we started working on a pet project with a
| similar idea - to help people dissociate the good and honest
| writing on Twitter from all the links, threads, mentions,
| hashtags, and other engagement tactics. We called it BARE
| (https://bare.tw) and it offers an extremely spartan look over
| one's Twitter timeline. As TWiT's Leo Laporte called it "it shows
| you all the boring stuff."
|
| I believe that with projects like SlowSocial and ours, we will
| help people find hidden gems among the "boring stuff."
|
| Kudos, and will be happy to collaborate on further ideas.
| riffic wrote:
| really dig the "slow" idea. Will you federate? There's a good
| argument for this here (you would have a built-in audience of at
| least 5m accounts):
|
| https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/
|
| Federation could be your "moat" to avoid joining the _Club of
| Abandoned Social Apps_ (it 's a harsh ecosystem, ask Clubhouse or
| App.Net).
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Probably won't federate. TBH, federation doesn't appeal to me
| that much. I recognize it has benefits, but it also introduces
| significant complexity.
|
| Plus, Slow Social is already designed to work with the most
| widely adopted federated platform: email. Posts can be sent as
| emails, and there is no comment system other than opening up an
| email and starting a conversation with them that way.
| trungdq88 wrote:
| For a long time, I encouraged my IRL friends to set up their
| personal newsletter and write once or twice a month so I can
| subscribe to. Quite similar to this social media idea.
|
| I think it's a very good way of getting updates from people I
| care about. Social media is just too noisy.
|
| The plan hasn't been working very well unfortunately.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Could I have a chat with you about this? I am working on
| finclout which helps irregular posters earn.
| gverrilla wrote:
| No innovation whatsoever.
| aleken wrote:
| This looks nice. If I were to use it, I would rely mostly on the
| mail-feature as none of my family/friends have signed up. That's
| a nice feature!
|
| But there's one thing I reacted to, @citrusfruits. If I click the
| "start private conversation"-button, the email address of the
| user is revealed. That's not bad in itself if the user is
| informed about it. But I didn't see any information in the
| otherwise user friendly onboarding about revealing my email
| address.
| stevenicr wrote:
| facebook some time ago added a way to export your posts (is that
| what they are called?) - to wordpress - it's really hard to find
| -
|
| but if it's still working - I'd suggest showing folks how to
| export thier posts to slow social - and have them saved - then
| weekly published - give people options to re-order blocks / sort
| by time/date .. sort by drag and drop or number ordering or
| something..
|
| offer a way to have that weekly post sent by email for fam /
| whoever could opt in reply to get it that way.. also rss..
|
| could be a thing.
|
| I could see this useful for both pro and non-pro folks in
| different ways.
| anarchogeek wrote:
| Closed source and no information about who's making it.... this
| is better how?
| fastball wrote:
| In this vein, an app I've been using with some friends is
| BeReal[1]. It is intended to be more of an Instagram substitute
| rather than this which feels a bit more like a substitute for
| Facebook.
|
| The idea with BeReal is that every day you get a notification at
| some random time (it changes every day). When you get the
| notification, you have 2 minutes to post what you're doing at the
| time. The app takes one picture of your environment with the main
| camera and one of you with the front-facing camera.
|
| It's not perfect and if I was developing it there are a couple
| things I would probably change to keep a little more in the
| spirit of "being real", but it's a fun thing to be on with
| friends.
|
| [1] https://bere.al
| yosito wrote:
| Love this idea, and love that it supports email updates. I think
| that makes it useful even if most (all) of my friends don't use
| it yet. That's something a lot of attempts at doing social
| networks differently miss: it needs to be useful even without all
| my friends being on it, or I'll just stop using it. I submitted
| my email and I'll check this out more in the coming days.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I'm glad someone else is a fan of the email updates. I think it
| makes gradual adoption much more feasible.
| bananamerica wrote:
| The only thing I dislike is not allowing everyone to see my
| preview posts. If I write something cool that remains relevant,
| I'd be sad to see it go. I might end up just posting in a more
| permanent place instead.
| tonymet wrote:
| It's a great prototype of features, but features don't build an
| audience. To Draw in customers, there has to be growth marketing
| features like friend recommendations, push notifications,
| syndicating updates to existing networks.
|
| It's the network that brings in consumers, not the features.
| danamit wrote:
| Want a social network that's for friends only? simply make
| registering and adding others possible by phone numbers only, and
| make phone numbers always visible to friends.
| shlurpy wrote:
| It sounds like a great idea. I did notice a carveout in the
| privacy policy for "if we get acquired, they can do whatever they
| want with any information" which seems... undermining, given how
| getting acquired by one of the worst data brokers is generally
| assumed for any successful social media startup.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Are you referring to this part:
|
| > Business Transfers. We may share or transfer your information
| in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale
| of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a
| portion of our business to another company.
|
| ? It doesn't mention the "they can do whatever they want with
| any information" explicitly, but given that the parallel
| "Affiliates" section says they'll have to adhere to this
| privacy policy and this section doesn't, I suppose it's
| implied.
|
| To be clear, this is always the case whether or not it's
| explicitly mentioned in the policy, unless the opposite is
| mentioned - some kind of "any merger contact will require our
| acquirer to adhere this same policy", which I've never seen
| from any company. And it'll be an unlikely (albeit very
| welcome) addition given that it'll affect the acquisition
| potential and the $$$ bottom-line.
| 2arrs2ells wrote:
| At Clever we include this in our privacy policy. It caused no
| problems when we sold our company last year:
|
| > In the event of a change of control: If we sell, divest or
| transfer our business, we will not transfer personal
| information of our customers unless the new owner intends to
| maintain and provide the Service as a going concern, and
| provided that the new owner has agreed to data privacy
| standards no less stringent than our own. In such case we
| will provide you with notice and an opportunity to opt-out of
| the transfer of personally identifiable Student Data.
| after_care wrote:
| I will not sign up for a service with a clause like this.
| karaterobot wrote:
| What are the chances that you haven't already? Sounds like
| pretty low, unless you habitually read the entire privacy
| policy for every website before signing up.
| lolinder wrote:
| You're posting on such a service right now. From Y
| Combinator's privacy policy, which applies to HN:
|
| > Business Transfers: If we are involved in a merger,
| acquisition, financing due diligence, reorganization,
| bankruptcy, receivership, sale of all or a portion of our
| assets, or transition of service to another provider
| (collectively a "Transaction"), your Personal Information and
| other information may be shared in the diligence process with
| counterparties and others assisting with the Transaction and
| transferred to a successor or affiliate as part of that
| Transaction along with other assets.
| sushid wrote:
| I bet you have already done so many times before.
| [deleted]
| lolinder wrote:
| I wouldn't assume malicious intent here, as this exact clause
| shows up word for word in dozens of privacy policies. It
| appears to just be a stock part of a generic privacy policy
| that made it past their initial edits.
|
| I'm also unsure if its absence would really change anything. If
| a data broker acquires the company, what's to stop them from
| just changing the privacy policy to be compatible with their
| uses?
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Thanks for the benefit of the doubt. Yeah, this is part of a
| stock privacy policy. Slow Social is a hobby and experimental
| social network, not a startup. I fully intend to support any
| users on the platform and hopefully make it into a really
| nice experience, but there are no investors or stakeholders
| to incentivize me to do anything other than my original goal,
| which is to make a Social Network for friends, not
| influencers.
| [deleted]
| slater wrote:
| Not sure if it's your site, but the sign-up and magic link went
| straight to my GMail's spam folder, with the link removed.
| riffic wrote:
| curious who they're using for transactional email. there are
| unfortunately a few hoops to jump through to ensure
| deliverability.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Supabase does the auth emails. If you make a post and have
| the service email it for you, it uses Sendgrid which seems to
| make it past the spam folder most of the time.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Can you update here what you learn?
|
| This is a huge sticking point for new projects and
| businesses.
| riffic wrote:
| make sure you got the right dns records in place as well. I
| haven't looked at your mail headers yet[0] but you probably
| want to send from a separate subdomain than the one you use
| for everyday use (like for team@slowsocial.us).
|
| [0] This may be seen as a back-handed way of saying I have
| no intention of signing up, but I didn't intend for it to
| be.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah, sadly I couldn't figure out how to not make it happen.
| The SSO OAuth providers tend to work better.
|
| If you mark it as "Not spam" it will fix it on a case by case
| basis.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| If enough people start marking it as "Not Spam," would that
| make things better?
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I'd hope so! Ideally I'd be able to send the Magic Link
| from my own domain, but I haven't found a way to do that
| yet through Supabase.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I think it's irrelevant, most friend groups are using something
| for this already. Whatsapp group, private discord etc.
| NanoWar wrote:
| Missed opportunity to call it "Slowcial" ;)
| jsemrau wrote:
| glacial ? or slocial?
| deltille wrote:
| I had the same thought and had been holding my tongue. I think
| the more literal name probably suits the intent of the service
| better but my impulse to terrible portmanteau is screaming. :)
| rglullis wrote:
| The one question I have is: what can I do here that I can not do
| with a messaging group?
| TekMol wrote:
| It's cool. A bit rough around the edges. I see a lot of "NULL"
| and "UNDEFINED" in the interface.
|
| What is your stack?
|
| For how long have you been coding?
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yes, definitely rough around the edges.
|
| The DB, Auth, and File Storage is all Supabase. The web
| framework is SvelteKit, and I'm using Sendgrid to send emails.
| Also using Tailwind.
|
| I've been coding for a long time, but have been working on this
| mostly in off hours so I haven't been able to give this the
| polish I'd like to. If you have any screenshots of the nulls or
| undefineds I'd be happy to fix them.
| TekMol wrote:
| Thanks for the info!
|
| "A long time" is very relative. I sometimes meet coders who
| have been coding for 3 years and call it a long time. But for
| me, "a long time" means 20+ years. So I am still curious :)
|
| The "NULLs" and "UNDEFINEDs" went away after I set my user
| name.
| ivanhoe wrote:
| IMHO this is doing completely the opposite of the intended
| effect, because the concept is focused only on pleasing the
| content consumers, but it completely misses the point of what the
| content creators need and want out of it. And without content
| creators you have nothing.
|
| The influencers are the ones who post in regular periods because
| it's a job for them, while ordinary people post whenever they
| find something interesting to say/share because their motivation
| is purely emotional - they're looking to channel their MOMENTARY
| excitement or frustrations about something. It has to happen
| immediately or it will not happen. Limiting them to a single post
| per week kinda kills all the fun, because you can't share what
| you feel when you feel it. System forces you to postpone the
| reaction until the next weekend, which means it breaks this
| emotional cycle and the reward of venting online. This would
| certainly make for a higher quality of reactions, but frankly
| what would be the motivation for me to sit on some thoughts for a
| whole week and then login to this service to post a single post,
| and then again be forced to wait a whole week for the next chance
| to say something? I can see myself doing something like that only
| if there's some personal gain in it, so IMHO in a long-term only
| influencers and self-promoters would be motivated to participate.
| dejw wrote:
| What? Opposite of intended effect for who? Platform owners or
| users? Most of us, users, want to get less but more relevant
| information.
| stefanv wrote:
| My first thought after reading the frontpage: this is my
| "liberation" from Facebook and all the things that FB is doing
| wrong. I click on "join today" and I see "continue with
| Facebook". Why?
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| Because for them to even think of approaching a userbase size
| that can enjoy network effects, they will need to make signing-
| up as easy as possible. Using some of the other OAuths is a
| smart business decision in my opinion.
| [deleted]
| Method-X wrote:
| To minimize the friction of switching over for most regular
| folks. It doesn't force you to use Facebook. You can use your
| email, Google and GitHub too.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yup, this is exactly right. Facebook was the last OAuth
| provider I added because I don't love being tied to them, but
| at the end of the day some people just want the easiest way
| to authenticate possible, and Facebook is one of the largest
| authentication providers available in the world.
|
| And to put it into perspective, yes Facebook is able to
| collect information about you when you use them as an
| authentication provider (like when you log in, how often, how
| long your sessions are), but beyond that it's a pretty narrow
| interaction.
| privatdozent wrote:
| Question: Does encouraging people to sign up with FB (bc it
| is faster/easier) also have the unwanted consequence of
| preventing them from leaving FB in the future? If they are
| signed up through to Slow Social via FB, can they still log
| in manually if their FB account has been deleted?
| loceng wrote:
| I see it as more of providing a false signal of adoption
| or success: if people need the friction to be as little
| as clicking a single button to "sign up" then they're not
| very convinced or committed to trying something new and
| likely not willing to invest time actually engaging with
| the system; all major platforms today used tricks or
| first mover mechanics for engagement to keep enough
| people on the platform long enough to make it sticky,
| rather than adding or creating or providing a wide
| breadth of usefulness/function to a wide variety of
| demographics - providing candy to the 80% at very low
| cost of ingredients vs. creating something of quality
| (product and service); dumb inflammatory sugary candy vs.
| quality nutrients that is trying to milk clicks and time
| engaging on a platform attempting to control and retain a
| user every moment.
| judge2020 wrote:
| A lot of human time is sacrificed to maintain passwords
| for different websites; having a one-click sign in option
| saves a lot of people the time and headache of having to
| deal with a compromised account or forgotten password
| years in the future.
| loceng wrote:
| Who you give the gatekeeping keys to has importance and
| value.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The only other option is passwordless webauthn which has
| a lot of downsides compared to social sign in. Allowing
| people to sign in with social is a personal choice that
| i'm happy many sites give the option of using.
| loceng wrote:
| I'm not saying it shouldn't be an option but we should be
| conscious of who we give that login data to and how
| they're use/benefit from it and then misuse or waste the
| value they extract from it; be conscious of who we reward
| with our actions.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| It's really about reducing friction, not pumping up
| numbers. This is bootstrapped, not investor backed so
| there's no reason to skew the numbers.
|
| As for the candy analogy, I think that's a bit cynical if
| all you're critiquing is the login system without looking
| at the actual application. Lots of quality applications
| provide login via Facebook: Spotify, Notion, Airbnb, etc.
| It has nothing to do with the actual apps itself, it's
| just the doorway.
| loceng wrote:
| Hey there. I didn't mean to insinuate that your intent
| was to do so - but I suppose the caution is to perhaps
| take that signal (# of signups) with at least a bit of a
| grain of salt; you likewise, as other commenters stated,
| could be turning off a set of demographics who want
| nothing to do with Facebook et al, and who may be your
| most passionated, motivated userbase you'd perhaps want
| to start off with. Pros and cons either way, it seems.
|
| And to further clarify: I also wasn't criticizing your
| platform as part of my comment, I was referring to the
| status quo platforms - citing specifically all major
| platforms.
|
| I do greatly appreciate anyone genuinely attempting to
| solve the problem - it's a very serious problem; obesity,
| literally, is a big problem in North America and growing
| globally (no pun intended) - and in big part is the
| capture of our information systems (including MSM/legacy
| media and platforms that have reached popularity and are
| ad funded/driven) by industrial complexes; with a
| sprinkling of foreign interests and bad actors
| interfering.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| You can also sign up with GitHub, Google, and email.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| How is it any different than old style blogging?
|
| The whole social network thing is a attention grabbing game.
| Blogging, on the other hand, is talking into the void: I don't
| need anyone. All past attempts to combined the best parts of both
| has been combining the worst part of both: no freedom of speech
| and no audience.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I'd argue it's different because it has better privacy
| controls. Instead of all your content being public, it's all
| private and you can share it to a non Slow Social member via
| email. Additionally, it's a more focused, concentrated
| experience.
|
| Otherwise, feel free to make blog posts. I think blogs are
| great.
| markstos wrote:
| Email has privacy controls and is decentralized. Just send
| HTML emails to the friends you want to get it.
| janfoeh wrote:
| Email is push, this is pull. For stuff below the threshold
| of breaking news ("grandma has passed"), it would feel
| awfully presumptuous to email people.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| It is a sad world when marketers boldly blast emails to
| us but we feel presumptuous to send emails to each other.
| janfoeh wrote:
| What marketers do is between them and their conscience.
| If I want to write about the dozen breakfast dishes from
| around the world I made during Corona, I do not want to
| have to wonder if this is worth asking for peoples
| attention. In a pull model, that point is moot.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Privacy is great; however requiring everyone to login adds
| frictions, which kill engagement.
|
| Anyway, it is always good to see someone challenging the
| status quo. Good luck.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah, and perhaps it will too much friction in the end. Or
| maybe it won't be. Either way, time will tell. Thanks for
| your feedback!
| zaik wrote:
| Does this built on existing Internet standards like ActivityPub
| or XMPP?
| olah_1 wrote:
| This is awesome, but I'd like to see it built on top of something
| like https://Manyver.se (SSB) where the content lives on user
| devices!
| ryanschneider wrote:
| Honestly if this was geared towards teams inside a company I
| would probably lobby for it at my job. Have you considered an
| "enterprise option"? :)
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Something I hadn't considered. I'm not sure I'd go in that
| direction but I'm curious what this would look like. Are you
| thinking of something like a weekly status update on
| projects/etc?
| ryanschneider wrote:
| Ya exactly. Basically to replace daily status updates in
| slack or scrum or tickets or where ever.
| theplumber wrote:
| So it's a blogging app, right?
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| I like the idea, but I won't bite unless the network has an open
| protocol and some mechanism of guaranteeing it stays open at
| minimum.
|
| No more walled gardens.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think your magic link is broken. I put in my email addy and got
| an email that said "click here to confirm your email" but there
| was no link.
| dollop43 wrote:
| My thought is that one post per week, seems like a blog platform
| rather than a social app. Social media is too vague. Maybe you
| could remove the concept of being a social media, but a diary
| sharing platform. Define the task as to share a weekly diary
| among friends, it could gives more commitment for people to
| write.
| faraaz98 wrote:
| How long until this too succumbs to influencers or dies out?
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Buy my new book to find out! Or something along those lines.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| If I'm running it, I have no intentions of letting it become
| that way. The whole point of the product is that it's about
| friends and not influencers. People, not money. This is
| something for myself, my friends, and people like them more
| than.
|
| If Slow Social had any measure of great success I'd love to
| make it a B-Corp.
| civilized wrote:
| Respect the effort, but I think it's not going in quite the right
| direction. I don't think people need paternalistic restrictions
| on post frequency. People need to be liberated from engagement-
| optimizing algorithms and allowed to choose which activity is
| presented to them and in what order.
| chrischen wrote:
| I agree. What I'd like is to be given control so that I can at
| least work on _improving_ my social life and interactions. I
| want _pro software_ but for socializing. Something like my
| calendar app, email app, Photoshop, etc.
|
| Imagine if our email app changed their goal from empowering
| users to engaging users. We'd have email apps that surfaced
| only engaging emails you received and buried the rest. It would
| maximize our short term app usage engagement to the detriment
| of long term goals (getting work done). Gmail shows it's
| possible to meld good algorithms (spam detection) with good
| user empowering features, while also being an ad-supported
| model!
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I don't think your first and second sentence are necessarily in
| conflict with each other. In fact, Slow Social has no
| algorithms for engagement-optimizing, it's part of the design
| of the application.
|
| That being said, you absolutely _could_ be right on the
| restrictions on post frequency. Perhaps its not something any
| sort of large user base might not want. However, as far as I
| know it hasn't been tried before, and I think that makes it
| worth a shot.
|
| Lastly, it's possible that restrictions on post frequency serve
| a segment of the population that might be underserved by
| current social media, and its something those people would
| thrive one. At this point we can't say for sure, but I'd love
| to find out.
| civilized wrote:
| Slowing things down has the virtue of being a much easier
| means of social engineering than figuring out how to empower
| users to control the flow of content that comes to them. I
| only have some sketchy ideas of how exactly it would work.
|
| Definitely the starting point is to let users have a simple
| chronological option.
| linuxdude314 wrote:
| How does slowing things down make social engineering
| easier?
|
| That's a security term, and I'm not quite sure how it's
| relevant to the OP.
| civilized wrote:
| Social engineering isn't just a security term. The use in
| security is inherited from a broader and pre-existing
| concept. It's about setting up conditions that influence
| people to behave in a desired way.
| psyc wrote:
| I assume they mean herding cats.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think 'the algorithm' truly is the bogeyman of our time. Have
| you considered that it is precisely people themselves who crave
| engagement and that it is the often reviled paternalism which
| liberates people from following their worst instincts?
| civilized wrote:
| Paternalism isn't categorically bad but I see it as a last
| resort. People have never had the _option_ to filter out
| garbage from their feeds. If they did, there might be little
| _need_ for paternalism.
| moffkalast wrote:
| People crave engagement as much as they crave unhealthy food.
| Having a person stand behind you at all times with an
| infinite amount of the exact kind of burger you like isn't
| gonna help make you get thinner lol. And that's like the
| whole point of personalization algorithms.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > isn't gonna help make you get thinner lol.
|
| sure as hell isn't but do you actually think the reason 65%
| of the American population is overweight is burger ads,
| rather than the simple fact that people unless very
| explicitly told not to will stuff their faces with cheap
| and delicious fast food? Do you think that requires
| coercion? Like in a world where McDonalds doesn't run ads,
| they all start working out and eat salads?
|
| The algorithm itself only exists to satisfy a never-ending
| demand by people, it's nothing else than an internet
| conveyor belt.
|
| When you walk into Twitter HQ and turn the algorithms off
| you think the people will greet you in the streets as
| liberators with flowers and open arms? You'll have a riot
| because Instagram and TikTok don't work any more
| moffkalast wrote:
| Nah I'm saying that some things have a level of healthy
| natural scarcity to them. That scarcity can be removed
| artificially to not always beneficial ends.
|
| Would I want an unlimited supply of free chocolate? Sure.
| Would I trust myself with it? Definitely not. Same
| applies here.
|
| I'm aware that for example Tiktok owes its entire
| popularity to its smart filtering and suggestions, but
| that's also why I've never tried it myself. It's like
| going out of your way to try heroin or something. You
| know it's not gonna end well.
| [deleted]
| dansiemens wrote:
| I agree to some extent. The "medium is the message"; let the
| outcomes of post frequency be determined by the structure of
| the platform. Whether that structure should be more
| prescriptive than descriptive though is certainly up for
| debate.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think the idea of paternalism comes from seeing people harm
| themselves by undertaking actions they were manipulated into
| taking, and confusing that with actions they'd have done on
| their own, independently.
| civilized wrote:
| What I object to is we skipped straight from exploitation to
| paternalism. Freedom was never an option on offer.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I have WhatsApp/iMessage groups for immediate friends and
| family who I don't mind getting real time updates from.
| Everyone else, I am okay with periodically contacting as
| desired via text/audio/video call.
|
| It seems pretty liberated, and I am not sure what more a social
| network website could offer. Outside of about 5 people, I have
| no interest in real time updates...I can wait to see photo
| albums next time I call or visit, like in the times before
| broadband. In fact I prefer it, so that there is a jumping off
| point for things to talk about.
| civilized wrote:
| I have the family SMS group as well.
|
| I can't imagine having much use for a social network after
| all these years of social networks being awful, but maybe a
| truly different and more liberated one would offer some
| possibilities.
| [deleted]
| mrweasel wrote:
| Personally I believe that the era of Facebook style social
| media networks have come and gone. It's on the road to becoming
| a niche product, like family newsletters, not completely dead,
| but also not completely alive.
|
| I can respect the work and the idea, but not many are going to
| sign up, the first mover types have been burned so badly by
| Facebook that they're going to pass.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| You say that, but what if they choose paternalistic
| restrictions on post frequency?
|
| "You _must_ make all your choices yourself, and you _must_
| prefer that! " <- doesn't actually seem all that free, to me.
|
| People act like any one website must support all use cases, all
| the time, when in reality, opting in to the site is also a
| choice; literally nothing on the Internet is required, you can
| choose not to participate (and all of the consequences, good or
| bad, that come with that choice).
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| One way to look at it is a restriction on post frequency, but
| the reason why modern social is so harmful is because unlimited
| post frequency means unlimited read frequency.
|
| It isn't restricted post frequency, it is restricted read
| frequency.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah, I definitely thought of this. It's kindof a chicken or
| the egg thing. Some of my friends had the suggestion of a
| weekly digest or something like that.
|
| In the end, I opted for this since, from my perspective,
| there's a sort of solace knowing that I'm only "expected" to
| write at most once a week.
| civilized wrote:
| I must be some sort of freak libertarian. People are always
| talking about how they want or need their lifestyle to
| force them to do this and that. I would always rather have
| the choice.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| It is a choice. The choice is: I will only write/read
| once a week, that is you making a choice about how you
| want to allocate time.
| sunshi23 wrote:
| What value does this provide at all? This reminds me of Chinese
| online games will block teenagers at night. (Fang Chen Mi )
| Except that the government forced all online games to do so.
| Because if some does some does not, teenagers just play the one
| that does not block them.
|
| Maybe we should build a system that have user's actual password
| to FB IG TWTR TIKTOK, and user only has password to that system
| and when they post go through that system as a proxy. Then the
| system can truly restrict the frequency of post.
|
| But this violates the term of service of all the social network
| listed above
| willio58 wrote:
| This whole page could do with a little padding/margin work.
| unkulunkulu wrote:
| From article by the op:
|
| > ...products owned by publicly traded companies who have a
| legally binding responsibility to maximize financial return on
| investment to their shareholders.
|
| Can someone enlighten me to this particular detail? How come
| legally? I believed it was free market?
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| board members of publicly traded companies have a fiduciary
| responsibility to their shareholders to make decisions that
| maximize shareholder value
| DreamFlasher wrote:
| Great work! Wish it were built on Mastodon and e2e encrypted.
| vmception wrote:
| Minutiae seems to do this decently
|
| Lets you use the app for one minute a day at a random time, and
| during that minute you get to see a random users old feed
|
| You might think it's a different use case, but i think it's
| tackling the same problem and in a more succinct and simpler way
|
| https://minutiae-app.org/faqs
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| This is a really interesting concept!
|
| I'm trying to solve the problem of creating space for people to
| share more thoughtful, potentially longer form content, while
| this seems to be solving for transient "what are you doing
| right now" type content. I'd say they're different enough, but
| both seem to be a reaction to similar concepts.
| vmception wrote:
| Try it out! Maybe you can incorporate it into your sentiment
| of solving this goal for a broader population
|
| I know some people whose lives it changed by not being able
| to curate their images they post during their 1 minute (a
| prerequisite to viewing others images in the 1 minute). They
| realized they were sitting at a desk every time and didnt
| want their life to be that way so it was a catalyst to taking
| more drastic steps to doing something else.
| martinadolfsson wrote:
| Hey, Martin here, the co-founder of minutiae - saw a spike
| in traffic from Hackernews and got curious where it came
| from.
|
| Thanks for sharing the project.
|
| Feel free to reach out if you have any questions
| info@minutiae-app.org
| RajT88 wrote:
| I love it.
|
| But my friends all use Facebook.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Hey everyone, OP here.
|
| I, like many others tend to waffle between loving and hating
| social media, so this is my take on what I think a better
| solution looks like. This is something I've been working on for
| the past couple of months and a concept that I think will be
| though provoking, if nothing else, to the HN community. If you
| want to read more on my thoughts and the story behind this, you
| can check out my blog post here:
| https://dev.to/duensing/introducing-slow-social-4a90
|
| Besides that, I'm happy to answer questions and take criticism.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I've not used your service because I don't know anyone who's on
| it and I won't invite anyone to a new social network right
| away. Too many burnt fingers. So what I am sharing is my social
| network wish list.
|
| Give a minimum characters/words post and same for photo posts.
|
| Do not show amount of reshares/likes (if at all you allow that;
| you should not - just let people reply to posts). Definitely
| add minimum words limits to comments/responses. Let the low
| effort appreciations or disagreements propagate heart to heart.
|
| Have an idea of a non-searchable ID (I like that from
| https://slowly.app/ - very similar names as well :)) that one
| can have - it's unique and decently readable and completely
| avoids "reserve the username as a real estate" bullshit of many
| social networks. You have one to but it isn't apparent it can
| be used that way.
|
| And I know it may not sound reasonable or even feasible but I
| wouldn't mind some kind of federation. I am slowly tending to
| hate the walled gardens more and more.
|
| As a general social network it may not take off and if it
| doesn't then one wouldn't want to just post in a circle of 3.5
| people (that two and half being people who just opened accounts
| but are not active).
|
| Once a week seems too less and too limiting. Will the weeks
| when one didn't post be accumulated to a max accumulation (and
| even these can't be used more than once a day, or once in a two
| days maybe)?
|
| There's no way to delete the old posts, or I can't see one.
|
| Clicking start conversation shares the other person's email and
| intimates an email compose. Is that intentional? Or is it pre-
| alpha build?
|
| Anyway, there was an old submission
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731419. I don't really
| remember a lot from it (definitely nothing from the post) but
| maybe give it a look.
| mind-blight wrote:
| I'm really curious what your business model is and how you make
| money. I looked under those sections on the about page, but
| they don't actually answer the question.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| The app is just launching, and it's a side hustle. Everything
| right now can run on a free tier, and I'm fairly certain I
| can support a _very_ sizeable amount of users for < $100 of
| operating overhead, which is cash I'd totally be willing to
| spare if I had thousands of users enjoying the app.
|
| But, if I get there, the plan would be to explore charging
| something reasonable for a plus tier which would offer more
| formatting options, more pictures per post, and a couple
| other things, for something nominal like $3 of a month. That
| could help cover the overhead, and maybe would result in some
| cash on the side.
| and0 wrote:
| I think there's a lot of honesty and practicality in your
| response but not the transparency or clarity needed for
| this to scale. These networks require buy-in / critical
| mass to function as intended, and not knowing if I (or my
| friends) will agree to the pricing terms after I get my
| network on board is a hard stop for me.
|
| I do like the idea. Well designed limitations can add a lot
| of appeal, and in social spaces especially they can be fun
| to play within.
| ada1981 wrote:
| None of the other social networks you were an early
| adopter of told your their future monetization plans did
| they?
| and0 wrote:
| The two that I used to maintain personal connections and
| communicate in ways worth archiving were Myspace and
| Facebook. For Myspace I was a teen. Same with Facebook.
| My connections were from school so if either disappeared
| I'd just have to talk to them the next day. Also both had
| attained critical mass at some sort of scale by the time
| they popped up on my radar, and were fairly new ideas so
| it's not like I was able to shop around. I just went
| where my friends were.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Exactly. They've learned from experience what happens.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| If it hasn't been mentioned, you should learn from the social
| media app Path.
|
| It limited the amount of friends you could have. As a result,
| people didn't add friends because they didn't want to give up a
| space for a potential future connection. The scarcity worked
| against Path.
|
| You might find the same result where people won't post because
| they'll be afraid of using up their allotment when they may
| have a better one later.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Thanks, that's a good tip! I'll definitely check them out.
|
| And yup, definitely a concern. Makes me think that perhaps
| there's a possibility to not cap the posts, but rather have
| any posts outside of the first one in a week have something
| like a "secondary" tag. Then again, you might run into the
| problem that Instagram has where everyone stopped posting as
| soon as stories caught on.
|
| Alas, it's a tricky problem.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I feel like you could achieve your aim by just cutting out
| the content that isn't even posted by your friends (or is
| lazily shared by a friend, but originates with a commercial
| entity).
| adfm wrote:
| Attenuate with a temporal component. Share short bursty
| material with the people you frequently interact with and
| dither out over time. Pin things you want your infrequent
| contacts to see. You keep your "free" speech while slowing
| the spread of batshit insane brain worms naturally.
| pjerem wrote:
| Why not just allow your users to write their weekly post
| during all the week (and saving it while not publishing it)
| but just allowing to publish once a week ?
|
| In doing so, there would be no real scarcity for the writer
| (the post can be edited to the infinity) and you encourage
| writing long prose.
|
| Your UX should show that editing the post is the default
| option and publishing it should be some ritual (maybe send
| a notification when it is possible?)
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| I just tested, it works exactly this way. You start
| editing and do it over time until you publish it. It is
| not obvious from UX though.
| rad88 wrote:
| Allow edits to the post, or allow the author to append
| short updates to it, or something else, but I think the
| rate limit is an interesting thing and worth sticking with
| at this stage. It's a principle that once you break would
| be hard to reestablish. The main risk is that slow posting
| probably means slow growth, and that is a reason to add
| some kind of exception -- but try to make it limited it,
| imo.
|
| Maybe new users can make secondary posts, and as they post
| more and connect with people, you guide them somehow
| towards 1/week. Sort of reversing the traditional pattern
| that new users might need to be rate limited when they
| first sign up, instead what you want is for established
| users to post slowly.
| Husafan wrote:
| I think the weekly post idea really applies to the reader,
| not the writer. Perhaps you could get around this with a
| "digest" style of posting. I.e. I can write as many posts
| as I want, but it will only be published once a week as a
| digest of posts. This might fit better with human behavior
| too as it lowers the cost of a single post while still
| achieving the goal of updating friends on what's happening
| at a spaced interval.
|
| Anyway, love the idea. Good luck!
| prismatix wrote:
| Maybe you can only see one post per friend per week in
| the feed, but then you can click into their profile to
| see the whole of their posts.
| brewtide wrote:
| I have nothing to add except I fully second this. Perhaps
| a counter icon indicating 'other posts exist'
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I would definitely not cap the posts, nor would I limit in
| any way their consumption. If I have something to say, why
| should I not be able to? And if I am interested in what
| someone does, I don't want to wait for a week to read it.
|
| That said, it is important how the posts are presented. A
| person who posts all the time about each plate of food...
| might not be as interesting as another friend who writes
| only once a month, but usually about really interesting
| things. A good UI which puts control in the hands of the
| consumer (but easy to use - convenience matters) is the
| most important thing here imho.
|
| Best of luck!
| metamet wrote:
| The ability to edit the weekly post seems like it could
| remedy this. Would probably see folks embrace the
| journaling approach by using headers to timestamp them.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| That would be great!
|
| I'm sick of articles needing follow ups or corrections
| instead get a separate, unlinked post.
|
| Articles become stale but they get shared and referenced
| as if they're the final point on the subject.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Everyone should get a post refresh at the exact same time.
| So if you don't use your post that week, you lose it.
| Tepix wrote:
| That seems like a bad idea, i want to post shortly after
| an event, not wait for a week
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Then use twitter
| Siira wrote:
| People should be afraid to post. Erring on the side of less
| content is better, as the content isn't all that valuable in
| the best of times.
|
| It might very well be that the best social media is simple
| private messaging.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The app BeReal is getting press lately. The one post a day is
| a photo and they solve the holding back problem by making it
| an impulsive post at a preset time. It's not supposed to
| communicate everything you did in a day only what you are
| doing in the scheduled moment.
|
| https://text.npr.org/1092814566
| lasagna_coder wrote:
| Typo on the welcome - onboarding page: "get updates from thos
| close to you." /thos/those
| simonjgreen wrote:
| Does the .us TLD mean you are only interested in US users?
| csilverman wrote:
| I'm guessing it's "us" as in "something for all of us."
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Just a word of caution on soliciting product feedback on here,
| HN users are a notoriously unrepresentative bunch (with a lot
| of bad ideas). Better to try ways to get it into the hands of
| more normal people and see what makes it go 'viral'
| subpixel wrote:
| This is exactly the app idea I pitched my wife with the working
| title "What's Happening". Which she had turned into a joke at
| my expense. I wish you luck!
| [deleted]
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Looks like this may work for older generations where the pace
| of life is different and things are less spontaneous. I'm
| looking forward to see where it will go.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| older folk seem to have zero issues with facebook though. All
| over my feed and groups is 60+ people posting. Younger people
| have largely abandoned ship
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| I mean 35-40 and older, not the retirement age. 90% of my
| friends in this age have gone offline or keep their old
| blogs for posting. They may keep the accounts or even read
| some stuff sometimes, but social networks of 2010s are dead
| for them. This is in Europe though, maybe in other parts of
| the world it is different.
| EdgarVerona wrote:
| This is great!
|
| Coincidentally I've been working on a prototype that is
| _almost_ the exact same idea. I had very similar motivations
| and a feeling that "slow social" (I was calling it the same
| thing even!) is something that can potentially break some
| people free from cycles of nonstop engagement and the
| unexpected downsides of always on, public and sharable social
| networks.
|
| I hope you have success with it! Know that you're not alone in
| feeling like we need a solution like this. I think I'm far
| enough along with my prototype that I might as well see it
| through to completion anyways, but either way it's heartening
| to see that folks are feeling the same way I am about social
| networks.
| murphyslab wrote:
| The rate limitation sounds good for a general audience of one's
| connections, but there are a lot of times when life calls for
| more frequent updates, particularly in times of emergency and
| medical crisis where the changes to one's life circumstances
| change by the day, if not by the hour. Posting, "Andy is in the
| hospital", then needing to wait a week to post, "Andy died 1
| hour after being admitted to the hospital". One suggestion
| might be to allow posts to be threaded, so that updates to an
| initial post can be added without waiting an entire week.
| noduerme wrote:
| I think there's a case to be made that whatever you write
| after a week of reflection will be of more value or at least
| higher quality than what you'd be able to send off
| immediately when someone dies. Certainly there's a need for a
| space that puts quality over immediacy. There are already a
| dozen channels by which you can update people with short
| bursts of information, but by their nature those channels are
| not well suited to more thoughtful posting.
| bityard wrote:
| Not the OP but I think the answer for this is that
| communication of medical/health issues is best handled by a
| more private form of media.
| murphyslab wrote:
| For medical issues, I agree that private is usually best;
| or at least restricted to close friends and family.
| Imminent death often has an adjacent position, where people
| commonly wish to share with a broader audience.
|
| However it was just an example of an emergency where one
| might strongly desire to update a broad range of friends
| and family quickly. Other situations might be natural
| disasters or a house fire where one "We're alive!" post
| might require a follow-up the next day with more details,
| needs, or grief.
|
| It's just to say that an unyielding, global rate limit
| would not serve peoples' interests well.
| FFRefresh wrote:
| I sometimes wonder whether our goal of making everything
| as convenient & frictionless as possible is part of our
| problem. By serving _some_ of our short-term interests,
| are we jeopardizing our long-term interests?
|
| I'm personally okay with seeing products that have well-
| intended friction built into them.
| nightski wrote:
| I don't have skin in this game and will probably never use
| it anyways, but to me that is a non starter for this whole
| project. Why would I want to limit how often my friends can
| post? The problem with FB isn't that my friends post to
| much, it's that I never see what my _friends_ post.
| newsclues wrote:
| Why would I want to limit my speed in my own car?
|
| Because others exist
| nightski wrote:
| This argument makes sense to me in a public space, like
| twitter. But among a close knit group of friends? Not one
| bit. They are directly advertising this as a space built
| for "friends", not influencers. Having to time-filter
| your friends sounds like a really negative friendship
| dynamic.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| If there was anything that we learned from the pandemic
| is people are not in any way considerate of others needs.
| Siira wrote:
| Then you can already use a Telegram channel. (Or an RSS
| feed if your friends can bother.) It fits your needs
| pretty well. You don't need a new social media app.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I'd want to use both. Using private media is more reliable
| if you remember everyone relevant but that's hard.
| Guest19023892 wrote:
| I don't agree here. This social network is a tool for one
| method of communication. It doesn't need to be a platform for
| all types of communication. By trying to excel at everything,
| it would do nothing particularly well.
|
| You choose the right tool for the job. If a friend is in
| critical care at the hospital with life threatening injuries,
| do you really think "slow social" is the appropriate service
| to use? That's just being silly. As the name suggests, this
| service is designed for the opposite type of communication.
| It's like complaining that Sharpie markers should make
| thinner lines because sometimes you need to write complex
| notes. Or, that Ferrari should modify their cars because
| sometimes you need to tow a boat.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Sorry, but why not just send an email to all your friends once
| a week?
|
| I have no idea why we think we need to complicate our
| relationships with any third party...
|
| The only reason why social media works is because it is
| horrible and addictive, Your product is neither of those, so it
| will never work.
| Spivak wrote:
| 3rd parties like email hosting providers or messaging
| services?
|
| Pull works better for stories/updates because then the reader
| has control over how often they want to check in an see what
| their friends are doing.
|
| "Oh but if you wanted that you could just something something
| with e-mail rules something something Dropbox curl ftpfs."
| headsoup wrote:
| I think perhaps an option is not to limit how often people can
| post, but limit _how little_ they post, i.e. there is a
| _minimum_ word limit for each post. Add the 'like' options for
| any general short response (agree, like, love, sad, angry, +1,
| haha, shock, thanks, etc), but having a minimum demands at
| least some effort into posting.
|
| The obvious problem is people just posting /10char type
| responses to hit the character limit, but if it's a word limit
| with some AI that can recognise 'bad' patterns in structure it
| could be mitigated to an extent.
|
| You could add a grammar checker and advise corrections or
| perhaps prompt to improve the message if particularly poor.
| This would be implemented for public posts only, because for
| private conversations it is not so relevant to positive
| discourse.
| sujal wrote:
| This is great, and I really appreciate the time you took to
| explain your thinking. I have similar feelings about the social
| networks out there, and I'm working on my own take on what I
| want. It's very different than what you did, so I'm curious to
| try yours out and see what everyone has to say. We need more
| experiments like this - unabashedly anti-engagement and pro-
| utility.
|
| Good luck with this!
| Lamad123 wrote:
| One post per week is too limiting!! There are days when I want
| to talk to or mention 10 friends!
| manmal wrote:
| Why not IM those friends?
| [deleted]
| hamoid wrote:
| For years I've thought that dating sites could benefit from
| such post limits. If one could write 3 posts per day I think
| one would be more careful about what is posted and success
| might be shifted a bit from quantity of posts to their quality
| instead.
|
| I like the idea. I think it would be nice to read in SlowSocial
| how will posts be treated. Will the company's algorithms read
| them? parse them? Put users into categories? I assume not, but
| it might be nice to display this in the front page.
|
| And maybe there are useful ideas in
| https://www.humanetech.com/technologists ?
| mabbo wrote:
| FYI: when I gave my email address to sign up, the very bare
| email that hit my gmail inbox went straight to spam.
|
| You're going to need to do more to keep it on the 'not spam'
| list, I think.
| alxndr wrote:
| The link to follow 404s for me... perhaps because I put a
| plus sign in my email?
| ccorcos wrote:
| Have you talked to Joe Edelman? He would have all kinds of good
| ideas for you.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Who is Joe Edelman?
| basic612 wrote:
| http://nxhx.org/
| ada1981 wrote:
| Def talk to Joe Edelman.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I think your general vibe is good here, but I don't think you
| need the posting limit, necessarily. Compared to Facebook, to
| make it less about re-sharing spam and the like, and more like
| a conversation, what you need is:
|
| * More emphasis on text (which you already have, great)
|
| * Less emphasis on photos. I hate how when you create a post on
| FB with a lot of text and photos, photos get much more space
| within the post layout, it should be reversed if you want a
| conversation, and if people want to see a bigger version they
| can always click them to blow them up.
|
| * Links aren't treated as special. You can include them in your
| posts and people can click them, but they shouldn't result in
| including a photo+description on the post.
|
| * No sharing other people's posts. You can copy+paste and link
| to their post (which will only work for other friends of them),
| but no re-sharing.
|
| Especially those last two mean that you don't get the 'spam' of
| people sharing content from other people or websites.
|
| Anyway, overall great job, this is definitely something I wanna
| see. Facebook is full of news spam/hot takes and the like,
| Instagram is largely just photos and videos, I really want
| something that's focused on what my immediate friends and
| families wanna talk about (not just share photos of).
| lvl102 wrote:
| Looks great and love the concept. What's the tech stack behind
| it?
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I'm using Supabase, Sveltekit, Tailwind, SendGrid, and
| Netlify.
|
| SvelteKit has been a lot of fun but definitely has a few
| rough edges. Supabase has been awesome, but as you can
| probably see, from the comments elsewhere, has some kinks
| around magic link based authentication.
| starfoxmulder wrote:
| Do you understand the underlying technologies of Supabase
| and these other frameworks? Just curious.
|
| And how are you liking supabase as opposed to other quick
| start solutions?
| gnicholas wrote:
| FYI my magic link went to spam. Dunno if it's the gmail
| spam filter or the one in Apple Mail. But that's where it
| ended up. There was also a typo in the onboarding process
| ("from thos[e] close to you").
| alxndr wrote:
| The email-based create-an-account link is 404ing for me,
| using an iPhone and Brave browser.
| saos wrote:
| Could get behind this.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| Facebook without comments or statuses or groups or likes would be
| a pretty good social network. I'd also only show mutual friends.
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| Anyone interested building a social network should read:
| https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
|
| tl;dr - There is a specific reason that we like to use social
| networks, and it's the receiving of status or accumulate capital.
| From this theory, a network like Slow Social cannot succeed
| because there isn't enough social capital that can be consumed.
| charcircuit wrote:
| One big issue with this model is that you can't build an
| audience. You can't make friends. What's the point of using the
| site when all of your posts go to the void. Even if you add a
| friend all of those posts you worked hard on are gone.
|
| If it takes a long time before there is new content to see, why
| would people visit the site instead of forgetting about it? How
| are you going to make it a rabbit for people to go there?
| xixixao wrote:
| This is true for messaging social networks and they thrive. I
| don't think this is necessarily a huge blocker.
| charcircuit wrote:
| No, take for example Discord. It's easy to find servers with
| people who share your interests.
| tsuujin wrote:
| You make friends in real life and then include them in this
| platform, not the other way around. Not building an audience
| seems to be a feature.
|
| I view this as a great way to keep in touch with people you
| actually know.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah, this is basically my take. Not everyone will feel like
| this, but I often find I have enough friends, but not great
| ways to connect with them in online spaces. In other words,
| I'd rather build a tool that helps people understand and
| relate to each other, not a tool that connects people to
| others who have the capacity to understand and relate to them
| but might not necessarily already be in their lives.
| flipdot wrote:
| I tried to sign up, but the confirmation email got automarked as
| spam by Gmail and didn't contain any links.
| walterclifford wrote:
| Same, you have to not only tell gmail it looks safe but also
| mark it as not phishing (from the three dot dropdown), then it
| will be in your inbox AND have a link to click.
| flipdot wrote:
| Thanks! First time dealing with this Gmail's "feature".
| (deg[?]deg`)
| aabbcc1241 wrote:
| This sounds good fit for researchers to share their work / teens
| to share their growth / hikers to share their journey
| lobstey wrote:
| just like the WeChat way of dealing moments.
| samarama wrote:
| The issue is you have built in a mechanism to prevent the site
| from gaining critical mass.
|
| In order for a user to check the site, there would need to be 50
| posts from their friends that they can read through.
|
| For that to happen, they would need 500 friends for them to make
| 50 posts a week.
|
| In order to reach 500 friends, you would need 100 million users,
| before that the network would be empty with nothing happening.
|
| It's better to limit the number of posts to 1 per day.
|
| This way, you would be able to have some stuff going with 50
| friends in some areas and 3 million users.
|
| However, you need to get to 3 million users somehow with no value
| in your network, maybe you can get this through posts like this,
| but very difficult.
|
| You also need to let users upload their contact list otherwise
| you won't be able to build your social graph.
| bartread wrote:
| > You also need to let users upload their contact list
| otherwise you won't be able to build your social graph.
|
| In the context of legislation like GDPR and CCPA is this even
| legal in some jurisdictions any more? Genuinely not sure so any
| insight gratefully received.
| smaudet wrote:
| This seems a bit arbitrary?
|
| I would be happy with one, or two posts a day...I only need 5
| friends to post a week, at 10 I always have something to read,
| at 50 friends I am positively awash...
|
| Introverts are a big crowd - a fact the socialites like
| Zuckerberg tend to forget. This will easily grow...
| spoils19 wrote:
| Agreed. I'll be looking forward to quoting your post when
| this social network grows and takes off over the next few
| years.
| aleken wrote:
| Isn't one of the points about "slow" social that you don't need
| to read 50 posts a day? I would be happy checking in once a
| week, the same day I am going to post my update.
| jmcgough wrote:
| I feel like you could make a similar argument against Wordle:
|
| You can only play one game a day! How are you going to get
| revenue if someone can only spend a few minutes a day on it?
| bigthymer wrote:
| People can play Wordle alone and get value. Not true for a
| social network
| spullara wrote:
| Just make it a $1/min like it was in the old days and people will
| limit their communication to folks they don't see regularly for
| only important things.
| dnndev wrote:
| This seems odd to me (I am considered a Millennial). Social media
| for friends, are they really friends? I text, call, see in person
| my friends. A person does not have that many true friends in my
| experience.
|
| Facebook should not exist for friends- mostly people bragging
| about something or another.
|
| Facebook groups are extremely helpful. That as a social network
| makes more sense to me. For example, I can find a group of
| experts that have to do with carpet cleaning to answer questions.
|
| So my two cents, your solving the wrong problem. Social networks
| are not for friends. I also understand I am most likely an
| outcast odd ball who feels this way.
| kqr wrote:
| > The goal of the company is to equally value the customer,
| environment, and profits. In other words, the model isn't to
| maximize profit like an investor backed startup, but rather to
| create a lean, useful piece of software that grows with its users
| and can sustain itself from every angle from day one.
|
| If the owners are separate from the users, it's not set up for
| sustainability. If someone other than the users bear the risk of
| loss and upside of profits, it creates weird incentives whether
| you want it to or not.
|
| Have you considered running it as a co-op? Every user has an
| equal stake in costs and profits and an equal voice in decisions.
| This model literally grows with its users, and it's the only one
| that does so.
|
| I like this but it sounds like you've chosen the wrong model for
| running it. If I was going to use something like this (which I
| would like to, I think, if nothing else to share updates with
| families/close friends) I would want to own it equally with the
| other users.
| simulate-me wrote:
| Has any technical product ever organized as a co op and been
| successful? Such a weird criticism...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Quite a few!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative
|
| I think it's a valid concern to ask about incentive alignment
| - if you're wanting to do a tech-for-good project, you
| probably want to make sure that profiteering doesn't become
| the primary driver at a later date by making a Ulysses pact
| [1].
|
| 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| It's not a weird criticism. May not be unrealistic to be a
| co-op, fine that's difficult. But don't lie and say there's
| no profit incentive to be had when there clearly is if owners
| of the platform are separate from individual users
| itslennysfault wrote:
| The jury is obviously still out, but I think The Drivers
| Cooperative is pretty successful, and I'm optimistic that it
| will continue to be.
|
| https://drivers.coop/
| planb wrote:
| Has any social network ever focused on users well-being and
| been successful? I think it's not criticism but an
| interesting idea.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I too, am curious. It seems like Mastodon and other
| federated networks definitely have user well being and
| autonomy as a goal. However, for whatever reason, most of
| the more popular federated networks seem to aspire to be
| "X, but federated" instead of having drastically different
| user experiences.
| mr90210 wrote:
| What an idea!
| nsomaru wrote:
| I'm not sure how this works in the US but I would be worried
| about attracting liability for what happens on the platform.
|
| How does that work?
| gglon wrote:
| That is exactly why I think one post per week and lack of
| global space is a great solution for a startup; it massively
| simplifies spam and other hostile content early detection and
| removal.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| That's an interesting idea! No I haven't considered that.
| B-Corp is what I was imagining, but a co-op is a great idea as
| well.
| Biologist123 wrote:
| Lovely concept. Have a look at the work Commonwealth have
| done on digital platform cooperatives. https://www.common-
| wealth.co.uk/reports/digital-co-ops-and-t...
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| Couchsurfing converted to a B-corp, but that didn't work out
| well (for the members). I think co-op would put the emphasis
| back on the member experience and would have prevented
| Couchsurfing from killing its community and ruining its
| brand. CS also claimed that the B-corp meant it couldn't
| accept donations or do open source development, though I have
| no idea if that was true.
|
| If you go for co-op, you could go one further and try for a
| non-profit co-op: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/nonprofit-
| coop-66008.html
| civilized wrote:
| RStudio, in my opinion one of the greatest companies in the
| world today, is a public benefit corp.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| There are several advocacy groups that could help out:
|
| https://ioo.coop (Internet of Ownership Coop) (Edit:
| currently down, a snapshot is available at
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211207224925/http://ioo.coop/ )
|
| https://platform.coop (Platform Cooperativism site)
|
| A good short read on the topic could be Nick Srnicek's
| Platform Capitalism; it covers concisely a lot of the
| economics involved.
| severak_cz wrote:
| I like the idea of experimenting with a different styled social
| network.
|
| I have built one such network myself. It's called Kyselo and it's
| for refugees from now-defunct social network Soup.io.
|
| It's very different from today's social network in these things:
|
| - it has strictly chronological timeline
|
| - everything (except DM) is public (this makes leaks from
| seemingly private spaces impossible)
|
| - but it encourages pseudonyms
|
| - you can colour/style your profile page as you like - see for
| example my page - https://kyselo.eu/severak
|
| - it's small and mostly meme based
|
| Small userbase size and chronological timeline makes it very time
| saving (except when you are trying to find a right meme in your
| collection :-D).
|
| It works fine for me but it will need some polishing before it's
| open to wide public. Now it's in semi-open beta (you have to ask
| me for invitation code).
| movedx wrote:
| Oooooh! So it's like email, but worse? Worse because:
|
| It doesn't scale to infinity like email does.
|
| Someone else centralises the data and you have to trust them to
| keep it safe. Email doesn't have this problem because I can take
| my emails elsewhere and/or change my address, something I've done
| plenty of times.
|
| You don't know what they're doing with the data and you don't now
| who can access it. The same applies with email, except I know who
| Google are and I know they're "reading" it. I accept this cost. I
| don't know who "Slow Social" are.
|
| It's a whole new system for elderly (and even not-so-elderly)
| relatives to get to grips with. They get email today. They use
| email right now.
|
| It's another website that needs another login for my mum to
| remember, except she'll just use the same password again (and
| again), until one day it's breached.
|
| I think growth, innovation, and ideas are important, but I also
| wish we'd focus on building on and improving the systems we
| already have.
|
| So I guess I have to ask: why not (better) email? Why not a new
| email system that's interoperable with the existing system, but
| offers a better UI focused on sharing stories with each other?
| reidrac wrote:
| > Someone else centralises the data and you have to trust them
| to keep it safe. Email doesn't have this problem because I can
| take my emails elsewhere and/or change my address, something
| I've done plenty of times.
|
| I'm not going to defend any social network, and I think that
| _in essence_ you are right; but using email is a terrible idea.
|
| Is just that people don't understand email any more
|
| When I've been added to a email chain (last time at the end of
| the 2010s), it was an awful experience: you can't get out,
| people including addresses in "To" so they get added to all
| recipients address book (they keep a copy of each email,
| security depends on each user of the chain!), windows users get
| infected with viruses and you start getting those as well,
| nobody will remove _anything_ from the emails so you get huge
| emails with top-posts without context on what they are replying
| to, ... it was a mess!
|
| I have no reasons to think things have improved.
|
| So perhaps a better email is needed, and I wonder if it may
| look like a social network.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| > It doesn't scale to infinity like email does. The article
| clearly states you can turn your posts into e-mails
|
| > Someone else centralises the data and you have to trust them
| to keep it safe. That goes for any public medium. At least
| these guys have a clearly stated mission not to harvest,
| package and sell your data. Also, see above for your email
| remark.
|
| > You don't know what they're doing with the data and you don't
| now who can access it. See both replies above
|
| > It's a whole new system for elderly Again, it can be turned
| into emails
|
| > It's another website that needs another login for my mum to
| remember, except she'll just use the same password again (and
| again), until one day it's breached. See above + unrelated
| issue
|
| > Why not (better) email? Because rebuilding email and
| convincing everyone to use that is a lot harder than trying to
| launch a new, experimental social media platform.
| EdgarVerona wrote:
| How do you get around the CAN-SPAM act and GDPR for the sending
| of emails in response to posts, when the people being sent them
| haven't already signed up on the site?
|
| I had to bend over backwards to try and make a workaround for
| that issue, basically by letting people manually send invite
| links if they weren't already registered for the site because of
| the restrictions around who you are allowed to send emails to,
| when, and for what purpose. It's a real pain in the butt, but
| maybe I didn't have to go that far?
|
| It was articles like this one that got me paranoid about it,
| really set back my prototype as I went around trying to change
| features related to email as a result:
|
| https://privacyvox.com/news/social-media-inviting-non-user-f...
| EdgarVerona wrote:
| (for context though, I love your site! I just would love tips
| as someone thinking in this area who ran into what he thought
| was trouble in this area... I might have just been overly
| paranoid)
| chetanbhasin wrote:
| Tried to sign up but got the rate limit error.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Oh, fascinating. Was it a Supabase thing? I haven't run into
| that before. If you have any more details, I'd love to hear.
| You could comment here or email team@slowsocial.us
| kiwicopple wrote:
| supabase ceo here. Did you set up a custom SMTP? We have
| rate-limiting on the signup emails by default to protect
| against malicious users.
|
| We also have some DDoS protection (via cloudflare), but it
| don't think this would have triggered it. Feel free to reach
| out to support if you need any assistance
| (https://app.supabase.io/support/new)
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Screen shots, need more screen shots please.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Good stuff! Keep going!
| hanspeter wrote:
| It's an interesting idea, however the slow part of this social
| network doesn't make it built more for friends than an
| unrestricted network. It seems to solve the noise and lack of
| depth part, but that has just as much value outside of your close
| friends network. So I would focus the messaging around that part
| - slow and deep - rather than the friendship part.
|
| And then there's the inherit issue of a restricted social network
| being disadvantaged in competition with other networks. If you
| limit the use or the reach of a social network, other networks
| who have more use and reach will grow faster. The reason the
| current major social networks are full of noise and over-
| engagement is not because people necessarily like that more or
| that other alternatives hasn't existed. It's because they won in
| the inevitable darwinistic battle a social network will join,
| where maximum reach and volume of content are key advantages.
| crawsome wrote:
| didip wrote:
| Is there a need for another social media app? Isn't the need
| covered with chat app?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| "Frequently asked questions
|
| What's your business model?
|
| The goal of the company is to equally value the customer,
| environment, and profits. In other words, [...]
|
| How do you make money?
|
| The goal of the company is to equally value the customer,
| environment, and profits. In other words, [...]"
|
| What?
|
| https://slowsocial.us/about#business-model
| davesque wrote:
| I'm assuming that was a typo?
| [deleted]
| Qahlel wrote:
| As the world becomes a more digital place, we cannot forget
| about the human connection.
|
| If you're going to build a business that's based on community,
| your business has to have community in it.
|
| If your business is the right business, then money will never
| be an issue.
| amelius wrote:
| Market has been spoiled, everybody thinks social media should
| be free as in beer.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah, there's a bad copypasta there. I'll see if I can update
| that real quick.
|
| EDIT: The FAQ has been updated.
| bfrog wrote:
| I kind of love it, but it sort of feels like the burn of social
| networks at this point is less about the bite sized crap stream
| and more that some entity now has my social network and interests
| saved for the purpose of targeting ads. Ads are the evil that
| drives the crap to keep us doom scrolling. Has this somehow found
| another revenue stream? Ads as a revenue stream is the issue, not
| the size or rate of posting.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Low overhead costs and charging users something like $3/mo
| would be the target for sustainability if the network ever
| starts to have significant operating expenses. Until then, it's
| really cheap to keep running.
| [deleted]
| gmanis wrote:
| OP, you should charge users a small amount ($24-50 a year), after
| a trial period. Keep it simple, free of ads and keep the timeline
| algorithm free.
|
| I'm sure there are many who would love something like this and be
| willing to pay enough to cover costs and maybe generate a full
| time income for you. Good luck!!
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| This is not a small amount. 3 USD is a small amount.
| mayankkaizen wrote:
| If target userbase is HN like crowd, charging a small fee is
| fine. However, I feel this model won't be scalable to general
| public. Hybrid model (make payments or see ads) might also be
| worth exploring.
| csilverman wrote:
| I wouldn't pay that much for what this is. I'm sure most of my
| friends wouldn't. It's a neat enough idea that I'd try the free
| tier, but it doesn't offer anything compelling enough to make
| me want to pay for it. I'm not trying to be mean or dismissive;
| it's a genuinely cool experiment, and I'd honestly love to see
| a social network where people actually said longer substantive
| things rather than low-effort shitposts (or, more and more,
| just sharing somebody else's low-effort shitposts).
|
| I don't like the idea that people can't see my earlier
| writings. That's important to me, especially if I don't share
| stuff often and I put effort into it. I don't see the benefit
| in hiding that from my friends.
|
| What I'm looking for these days is actual community,
| conversation, and connection. I think the effortless posting on
| Facebook/Twitter encourages kneejerk garbage (and blogs, sadly,
| have fallen into decline) so I really like the more "slow down
| and make something meaningful" philosophy here. If you can turn
| that into an actual community--one that offers something Reddit
| doesn't--I'd pay for that.
| quambene wrote:
| IMO, building a social network is quite difficult nowadays
| because you can't monetize it right away. So you either have
| to bootstrap as a side project and build a community for
| years or getting paid by VC money early on.
|
| We tried something similar [1] a few years ago. The limit is
| 5 posts per day. Our approach was minimalistic in a sense as
| you could post links only and no text, pictures, or videos.
|
| We named it Turtle, symbolizing the opposite of the chatty
| twitter bird. It wasn't so clever from an SEO point of view
| though.
|
| [1] https://turtle.community
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > OP, you should charge users a small amount ($24-50 a year)
|
| This is a great way to ensure that the website fails by never
| hitting critical mass.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| Great to see more ideas in this space! A few years back my wife
| and I tried something kinda similar, Sundayy. We even launched on
| HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848793
|
| Some people still use Sundayy but it didn't really take off. I am
| really glad we did it, but I'll admit it got less exciting to
| work on when most users would fizzle out after a few weeks. My
| gut feel on why is that we didn't do enough to compete with the
| dopamine drip feeding of typical social networks. Social networks
| are (amongst other things) a way to kill time and we didn't offer
| that. This made it hard for users to make Sundayy core to their
| lives unless they were really committed, and then even if they
| did that it wasn't very rewarding if none of their friends were
| equally committed.
|
| For me personally I stopped using the product when I had some big
| personal news I needed to keep secret for a few months. It was
| very hard to write about other stuff on Sundayy because it was
| all I thought about. So I ended up writing nothing and broke the
| habit. That sucked - maybe I'll pick it up again now I think
| about it.
|
| Good luck OP. I hope this gives insight into some challenges you
| might face. I don't have solutions to these challenges but
| hopefully you find some :) If you want to chat more on the topic
| feel free to reach out by email.
| [deleted]
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| This is really cool! And those are some great insights. I just
| might send you an email.
| wilbur-larch wrote:
| I was building a social media network about 6 years ago. I failed
| to get enough users since the native apps were just web views
| that had a lack of notifications. @CitrusFruit How did you get so
| much attraction to slowsocial?
| noobermin wrote:
| Sorry for the nitpick but the f in the typeface they chose is
| unfortunately distracting for normal text.
| felipemesquita wrote:
| Nice to see what I think is a trix[0] editor for the rich text
| posts.
|
| [0] https://trix-editor.org/
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yup! It's Trix alright. I was pretty amazed out how heavy and
| complicated most rich text editors are. But then again, it's a
| pretty complex interaction they have to design around.
| ubicomp wrote:
| Re-doing social networks based on one size fits all social
| activity streams seems like it's going in the wrong direction.
| Especially since these social shapes typically necessitate
| funding requirements like ads or pay to play.
|
| I wonder when we'll go back to forums to connect. Earlier "slow
| social" methods (mailing lists / message boards). Forums can be
| free. People can self-host. They can run for years and years and
| years. Folks can organize around a single subject or a series of
| subjects and grow together over time at various levels of
| engagement without resorting to a one size fits all model that
| social networks force on users.
|
| I really enjoyed running forums for my friends. I never had to
| pay giant server fees because it was just a few of us. We had
| 100K page views per month. We never had to have ads. We had forum
| permissions and mods and a lot of fun times.
|
| I see Discord being similar to this vs. social media, where you
| can slowly join communities and get nearer to the core. More of
| an onion model of community. I'm looking forward to seeing what
| happens in this space.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| > Especially since these social shapes typically necessitate
| funding
|
| I would actually argue, that with today's technologies and
| cloud offerings, this isn't necessarily true. The operating
| costs for a high availability sites aren't all that high. You
| can easily support a million users for under $1000 a month. The
| real cost to most other social networks is the need to generate
| infrastructure and growth engines around returning investment
| to venture capitalists and other stakeholders.
|
| But regarding your other points, I definitely sympathize. I've
| actually tried to get my friends onto forums, and thoroughly
| enjoy Discord. Slow Social, however, is for a niche that I
| don't think those other options fully serve.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| What a fabulous idea! I'll bet Zuckerberg hates it, which makes
| it even better.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I'd be amazed if the Zuck ever heard about it.
|
| Also, I think this is something that could co-exist with Insta,
| Facebook, and WhatsApp.
| AndrewSChapman wrote:
| "4. WHEN AND WITH WHOM DO WE SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?
|
| Affiliates. We may share your information with our affiliates, in
| which case we will require those affiliates to honor this privacy
| notice. Affiliates include our parent company and any
| subsidiaries, joint venture partners, or other companies that we
| control or that are under common control with us."
|
| I would much prefer that this simply read: We do not share your
| information with anyone.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I don't plan on sharing personal information with any sort of
| entity, certainly not for profit. But, the personal information
| is stored on machines and manipulated by other companies,
| namely Supabase and SendGrid since its necessary for the site
| to function.
| javajosh wrote:
| It's admirable that you're aware of the risk you're placing
| on your users, and willing to assuage them. If you're
| audience is HN, you might want to simply list the 3rd party
| runtime components you're using (and to go one better, review
| _their_ privacy notices, recursively -- I can imagine a
| malefactor doing a backroom deal with a component provider to
| get kickbacks on data being shared down the line.) I would
| also include any front end components in this notice, like
| Cloudflare or GA.
|
| Last but not least, it would be nice to know who's behind
| this, because none of these assurances mean anything if
| you're _really_ a malefactor. I would recommend putting a
| real name or two in your "About" page.
| spullara wrote:
| For it to be available in EU at all I think they will have
| to list all of them anyway.
| hn_user2 wrote:
| If this is the case, I would recommend a stronger word than
| "affiliate". My data is always being sold to marketing
| affiliates.
| fridental wrote:
| Never ever I would sign up into a social network that doesn't
| publish any real-world contacts. Who are you, guys? Americans?
| Russians? Chinese? Why should I trust you with my online life, if
| I don't even know, where you live, what are your names and how
| your faces looks like?
|
| And, in Germany, publishing of the real-world information is
| mandatory.
| [deleted]
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| >And, in Germany, publishing of the real-world information is
| mandatory.
|
| thankfully, nobody outside Germany has to give a fuck about
| German laws
| glerk wrote:
| > Who are you, guys? Americans? Russians? Chinese?
|
| We are all free citizens of the cyberspace here. Take your
| nationalism back to meatspace :)
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Safe to assume they're not Germans, then! ;]
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I mean, there's an email address and, if your really curious,
| you could have read the blog post linked in the main site that
| has my name associated with it.
|
| https://dev.to/duensing/introducing-slow-social-4a90
|
| But I see the larger point, there's trust that needs to be
| built, but I think the standards are going to be different for
| different people. The German legal requirements are also
| something I didn't know about. I do my best to protect and
| guard the personal information, and only request what's
| directly relevant for the app.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Also, I'm American and all the data is being stored
| stateside.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> all the data is being stored stateside.
|
| Which brings up all manner of privacy issues for those not
| stateside.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Having .us implies it's only for Americans
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| waveywaves wrote:
| If rich text formatting is your feature proposal for a social
| media network should I even care about it. Users care about a
| larger abstracted view about what you can do differently with
| what you can do with the smn interface. Flaunting rich text
| formatting feels like a core developer's achivement rather than a
| technology achievement. Do correct me if I am wrong.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I think what I was trying to get across is that you can do
| things more in a blog post styles as opposed to Twitter style
| quick bites. But maybe you're right it's not worth mentioning.
| The copy for the site hasn't gone through any focus group
| testing or anything like that.
| LadyCoconut wrote:
| Rich text formatting definitely is a plus for me in a social
| media app! I think it's better to specify such things,
| especially for users coming from Facebook/Twitter/etc with
| Facebook/Twitter-like expectations.
| civilized wrote:
| I think it's a good feature. The FB text box is almost
| insulting in its lack of features and options.
| [deleted]
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