[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
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Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
I have a concept for a social network that would eliminate many
pain points. I'm sure others do too. How could we build a communal
product for the public? Theoretically, this approach would result
in a better product. Practically, it seems nearly impossible. What
are your thoughts? Edit: Let me give an example that I have been
thinking about since 2009. It requires a fundamental change from
the reach model towards concentric social circles. The social
network would allow users to arrange into small topical groups
called social circles. These social circles would have a cap of 10
(arbitrary number) members. Each user could take part in many
social circles. This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces
the burden of misinformation, abuse, and moderation. This model
closely mirrors real social interactions and allows for both
private and intimate communication. It also offers a profitable
advertising opportunity. A social circle reflects its members'
interests and context.
Author : shanebellone
Score : 144 points
Date : 2022-12-15 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Personally, I think something like mastodon is better for this
| purpose.
|
| You can post your HN related stuff hashtagged #hackernews and
| others might follow.
|
| That being said - IMHO if you want a social network or community,
| don't call it a "communal product". Products are for making money
| and whatnot.
| shanebellone wrote:
| Should social media be a profit-driven enterprise as a
| civilization-scale product?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| It almost has to be.
|
| Running a world-scale social network requires immense
| computing power. Those bills have to be paid, and there's not
| going to be much difference between "break-even-driven" and
| "profit-driven" at that scale.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| -\\_(tth_tth)_/-
|
| I mean this question is way too big for this sort of thread.
| I would say that simply calling it a "product" already
| reveals a certain ideological bias to begin with.
|
| It's like the difference between a city square and a shopping
| mall as a place for a society or community.
|
| What is unique about this place is that many people here are
| more than qualified to build pretty much anything. So, it
| would be safe to assume that if we wanted something
| different, we would probably just build it.
| shanebellone wrote:
| Financial and intellectual resources are being diverted to
| projects with large markets but low utility.
|
| Also, "product" is a semantic argument. Product also means
| sum. Every application is a product of technology.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Yeah, everything around us can be seen as a product. It's
| all sausage factory across the board.
|
| The opinion I'm expressing here is that excessively
| seeing things in that way when venturing out to do them
| doesn't make inspire trust.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Given how things turned out, I think the answer might be
| 'no'...
| mellifluousbox wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm taking care of finance at Mastodon
|
| Appreciate Mastodon comes to mind here.
|
| I disagree with the second part regarding product not being the
| right term. Take Mastodon as an example: Mastodon is a non-
| profit LLC and an FOSS software but its community as well as
| the LLC clearly _produce_ something users are using.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Right term used where?
|
| Because I'm not saying that it's not a product. I'm saying
| that IMHO calling/thinking of something as a product upfront
| (as OP did) isn't a good way to drive interest in it as a
| community.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Over two decades into social media, I still see nothing I want
| from it as a user. Removing toxicity doesn't change that.
|
| > It requires a fundamental change from the reach model towards
| concentric social circles. The social network would allow users
| to arrange into small topical groups called social circles. These
| social circles would have a cap of 10 (arbitrary number) members.
| Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently
| limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation,
| abuse, and moderation.
|
| I have group texts that work basically that way. Maybe group
| texts could be improved in some ways, but you haven't described
| anything that would be an improvement. In a sense, the killer
| features of WhatsApp or Signal are basically just that: making
| text messages work internationally and privately.
|
| > This model closely mirrors real social interactions and allows
| for both private and intimate communication. It also offers a
| profitable advertising opportunity. A social circle reflects its
| members' interests and context.
|
| From the user's perspective: fuck advertising, and fuck
| advertisers. If I want a product I'll go looking for information
| about it, and even then I'm not interested in hearing from _you_
| , because you're not exactly an unbiased source of information.
| Advertisers are liars: even when they're not actively lying,
| they're misleading by leaving out relevant information about
| competing products.
|
| As long as your social media platform is in bed with advertisers,
| it's going to be fundamentally broken, because that money is
| going to force you to serve advertisers and not users. You can't
| serve both well--their interests are not compatible. Either
| you're serving advertisers and helping them lie to users, or
| you're serving users by keeping advertisers away from them.
| latchkey wrote:
| Scrolled the whole thread. I kind of expected 20 responses from
| people already working on this and got nothing.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Building a social network "product" is easy, entry level
| engineers build Reddit and Twitter clones during bootcamps.
|
| I think the right question is "How could we build a network and
| keep people coming back?"
|
| That's the hardest thing to do, even with millions behind your
| back.
|
| Ask Google Buzz, Orkut, iTunes Ping, Vine, Google Plus...
| fakedang wrote:
| Vine definitely had people coming back iirc. Don't take into
| account Twitter's boneheadedness.
| dennisnedry wrote:
| Vine was killed by Twitter. A foolish move given how popular
| TikTok is now.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| I'm guessing the unit economics didn't work. Different when a
| country like China decides its a strategic thing to do.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| It was killed because the big names started talking
| unionizing.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Anyone remember AOL chat rooms? You'd jump into a room with a
| topic (#teenpoolparty13) and start chatting with strangers. In
| general it would be okay, because it was like a bunch of people
| huddled together trying to have their conversations in one tiny
| bedroom. "New" social media killed the free-form group
| conversation, instead creating splinter conversations that were
| so highly focused that it actually generated more conflict.
|
| Even in-person, where we have a thousand interpersonal heuristics
| and social queues to control social interaction, it can still be
| a mess. Social interaction is best in small groups connected by a
| common theme and protected by a blanket of familiarity. But with
| a random group of strangers, no social (or physical)
| ramifications, with splintered, hyper-focused conversations, it
| can only either A) devolve into rancor, or B) become an echo
| chamber. Bringing together lots of people you barely know or
| don't know at all to talk about random things just isn't a good
| model for human interaction.
|
| Eternal September is just one of many of the examples of it
| devolving. With a small consistent group you can establish a
| consistent culture and psychological safety. Grow the group and
| the newbies destroy it. Healthy social interaction relies heavily
| on trust and cooperation.
| matt_s wrote:
| Simple: non-profit, worker cooperative is the corporate
| structure, dunbar number for the max social circle size, users
| moderate content, and no global/public/viral content at all. Open
| source software running on open source software.
|
| Here's my counter thought to some huge platform technically
| speaking. We have these massively powerful devices in our pockets
| and everything is a web app, use the device to do more. Make
| content decentralized (no, not that crypto-bro or crypto-hater).
| Decentralize the storage of content to people's devices for
| things received. Then the platform itself is more of a message
| broker. Let users pick their cloud storage drug of choice
| (icloud, onedrive, google, dropbox, etc.) or abstract it away
| where you provision storage for them and charge beyond some sane
| limit but the client app gets the content from cloud storage
| (user defined or brokered). Once the content has been delivered
| to all users for a circle (max 150) its gone off the platform and
| when users view that historical content its local/cloud delivered
| (some caching algo to make it fast). Provide users the ability to
| tag content as archivable which just gives them a timeline feed
| of it they can browse whenever. Users literally own the content.
| rhplus wrote:
| Sounds like you might be describing Google+ Circles.
|
| https://youtu.be/BeMZP-oyOII
| personjerry wrote:
| Can you answer this question first: Why would HN build a social
| network together?
| type0 wrote:
| > How could we build a communal product for the public?
|
| If it would be a product, what is it going to be sold personal
| info, ads, what?
| rendall wrote:
| I really think that any walled-garden website or app is going to
| replicate all of the problems of all of the social network apps
| that we love to hate. These problems are endemic to the format.
|
| We need our social networks to really focus on interoperability
| and communication protocols between them. The RSS feed is an
| excellent first iteration, and I don't see why it could not form
| the basis for a truly transformative, open, ubiquitous, user-
| centered social network. Each user owns their own feed and
| subscribes to anyone they like, as now. To this we could add
| discoverability, showing what feeds are common among one's
| subscribers. We could also add comments. Profile pages. Each user
| hosts their own.
|
| A properly created protocol could allow users to subscribe to
| each other's feeds, ban anyone they want to from their own feed,
| limit content to specific social circles... while not controlling
| what other people do. Each individual can be their own moderator
| and control their own algorithm.
| denysvitali wrote:
| This is somewhat what we're trying to do with OpenDolphin [1].
| Contributions are really appreciated as this is a community
| driven project.
|
| [1]: https://about.opendolphin.social
| nkotov wrote:
| >eliminate many pain points
|
| Such as?
| 2color wrote:
| I love the idea. In terms of numbers and caps, I think going with
| Dunbar's number of 150 might work best.
|
| Cal Newport makes a point about how in the early days of
| Facebook, it was essentially mirroring your real world social
| network. In fact, I remember how fun and innocent Facebook was in
| its early days.
|
| Perhaps the biggest shift in Facebook's evolution is towards
| algorithmic feed optimisation and expansion into more public
| areas that exceed dunbar's number.
|
| Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/) avoids this shift in its
| design by doing away with the "global singleton" network that
| Facebook, Instagram and other have.
|
| Another interesting project that is bringing back self-sovreign
| identity is Bluesky's At protocol (https://atproto.com/) which
| also make the "algorithm" part of a feed open source.
|
| Some building blocks that are worth considering: IPFS/IPLD
| (https://ipfs.tech/) and Hypercore (https://hypercore-
| protocol.org/).
|
| Disclaimer: I work full time on IPFS
| pfraze wrote:
| In case folks are curious: A stable release of
| Bluesky/ATProto's reference server, client, and dev tooling
| should land early next year. There's an active matrix channel
| if you want to follow closely at https://matrix.to/#/#bluesky-
| dev:matrix.org
| avinassh wrote:
| I went through the hypercore page and I still don't get it. Can
| you explain
| cgh wrote:
| It appears to be nothing more than a distributed, append-only
| log file.
|
| Edit: basically a blockchain implemented in Javascript
| talkingtab wrote:
| I think the key issue is how the circles or groups work. What is
| the mechanism for interaction as in the sense of machinery?
| Zeynep Tufecki in "twitter and teargas" raises this issue using
| the term affordance. What does twitter afford/provide? It
| provides a mechanism that is good for flash mob, but not for not
| for creating new things. So Arab Spring turned into nothing.
|
| What does HN afford? Comments. Is that how a social network
| works, I don't think so. In my experience comments on HH for
| example often tend toward negative or off topic.
|
| There was some study quite a while ago talking about how if you
| had 25 people and asked them to solve a problem the solutions
| that were provided were much better when 5 groups of 5 people
| decided, then voted for the best solution. This was compared with
| one group of 25. Not sure whether there is real science there,
| but it sounds right to me.
|
| We also live in the time of "cult of personality". Biden. Trump.
| Musk. Bezos. We follow people. We want to be infuencers. I think
| this is the result of our social media (and paying for things by
| advertising). I believe it is antithetical to effective
| communities. So no cult of personality. (And no advertising :-).
|
| A few times in my life I have been part of something that was
| bigger than myself. A high school play, a 30 person startup. How
| do you get that sense?
|
| A surprising truth to me is that I think much better when I am in
| conversation with sensible people. Not ones with the same
| opinions, but ones who actually think. I find that even when I
| immediately reject what they are saying, their thoughts somehow
| become part of mine. Artist often use the term of other work
| "informs" theirs and other mental constructs often "inform" my
| own. To my great benefit.
|
| So for a started I would just ask if people were in agreement
| that "the mechanism of the social interaction determines
| effectiveness of the community"
|
| If you disagree, end of conversation. If you agree then what is
| your thinking on how that works?
|
| Just my 2cents
| shanebellone wrote:
| Interesting points. I also agree that discussion revolves
| around thought rather than position. Debate is healthy but
| healthy debates are rare in this context.
|
| I would argue the ideal mechanism for interaction (or
| affordance) is the ability to communicate, engage, and prosper
| across boundaries. I believe this concept is what made the
| early Internet so inspiring. We were hopeful and ambitious.
| Rayhem wrote:
| In my experience this is basically what Discord has become. Sure,
| there are a number of power-law distributed (because of course
| it's a power law -- if you don't get a power law you're doing it
| wrong) superservers, but most servers amount to a small handful
| of regular participants interacting around a "theme".
| [deleted]
| stcroixx wrote:
| The building part is not a novel problem and probably not very
| interesting. I'm not a product person, so I don't have an
| alternative suggestion, but unless someone could explain to me
| how they plan to do it without advertising, I'm not helping.
| That's an ethical line for me and I wish it was for more people.
|
| First thoughts on max 10 member groups - I'd probably opt for a
| simple group text for that use case. Nobody has to register for
| anything, trust some 3rd party, it's self-moderated. I'd need
| some decent incentive to invite some unknown 3rd party into
| something that's already working.
| fleddr wrote:
| In any social media design you have to take well known power laws
| into account. You may consider HN currently to be a highly
| engaging site but you have to consider why that is: a huge amount
| of eye balls is watching a tiny set of content, a list of a few
| dozens links. Next, if as little as 1% joins in discussion, the
| result is threads with substance.
|
| Great outcome, but you're probably ignoring that 99% didn't
| engage. And you'll be bitten by that dynamic when creating tiny
| circles or bubbles. Because 1% engagement within something small
| approaches...nothing.
|
| Mastodon is a great way to see it in action on a small scale.
| I've been following an instance of some 2,000 members for a few
| weeks now. The power laws emerge perfectly.
|
| A handful of people post daily. 90% of posts get zero engagement.
| No like, boost, reply...nothing at all. The posters are puzzled
| by it. Some have 500 followers yet have never received engagement
| from a single one of them.
|
| Another interesting aspect is a word I only learned about this
| week: toxic positivity. A small unit of like-minded individuals
| has funny downsides. When coming from a war zone like Twitter, it
| feels rather boring. There's no drama and stirring the pot is
| frowned upon. So you'll end up reading about how somebody watered
| their favorite plant, leaving you wondering what the purpose of
| it all is.
|
| "Not stirring the pot" on Mastodon can go quite far. I saw an
| instance demanding people put a content warning on photos of
| food, as it may trigger people with an eating disorder. Yesterday
| a post had a warning (EYE CONTACT). When clicking away the
| warning, indeed a photo of a person looking into the camera was
| revealed.
|
| So you're already dealing with near-zero engagement in a tiny
| place, and then discourage a massive portion of common
| conversation. The result is perfect peace, because nobody posts
| anything.
| jacooper wrote:
| Content warnings on Mastodon are just ridiculous
| shanebellone wrote:
| Most social networks make posting (or whatever specific
| terminology is being used) equivalent to talking _at_ someone.
| The correct model would foster conversation and thus impact
| engagement. Small social groups discuss topics. Offering a
| topic for conversation implicitly earns a response.
|
| Rarely do groups of friends get together to declare simple and
| unrelated one-liners. An "ideal" social network might be more
| related to group sms than Twitter or Mastodon.
| baandang wrote:
| A problem though is how real world social networks operate.
| People love to gather with a bunch of strangers over coffee
| or at restaurants but have absolutely nothing to do with each
| other besides sitting in close proximity.
|
| Everyone wants to design an online social network as if there
| is all this spirited high brow debate going on at the local
| Starbucks when in reality it is a bunch of people shoulder to
| shoulder ignoring each other.
|
| If people really wanted interaction it would be trivial in
| the real world. Online social networks let people indulge in
| their want to talk AT strangers. This is absolutely a feature
| and not a bug of the software.
|
| Even within myself, the idea of a 19th century style salon
| sounds really cool but I would never show up to one
| physically. An online salon with more than a handful of
| people would be cool but it would break down quickly as it
| scales up past 20 or so participants until it basically
| approaches Twitter.
| fleddr wrote:
| I agree. A group of actual (traditional) friends is not the
| same thing as a bunch of online people that have something in
| common. For a group of real life friends, online
| conversations are often/best handled in a chat-like
| experience. Here in Europe it's mostly WhatsApp.
|
| There's also differences in what you expect from content.
| When one of my real friends share that they took their family
| to a zoo and had a great day, that's mildly interesting. I
| know these people.
|
| When an online stranger (or digital only "friend") shares
| this same thing, I couldn't care less. I'm happy for them,
| and it's part of normal conversation, but it's not a very
| interesting type of information to read in large quantities
| every single day. There has to be some higher shared purpose,
| the more specific the better.
| shanebellone wrote:
| " There has to be some higher shared purpose, the more
| specific the better."
|
| I have no idea if this is true but it's an interesting
| point that sounds right. I suppose the answer might come
| down to the individual purpose of group interaction.
|
| I'll definitely give this some thought. Thanks for the
| input.
| fleddr wrote:
| To me that has always been the promise of the internet:
| to connect with people on topics I'm passionate about as
| such a thing is highly constrained in the real world.
| It's a brand new capability, a super power.
|
| The opposite is true for generic chitchat online. Instead
| of more powerful, it is less powerful compared to the
| real world equivalent. You don't gain anything.
| kxrm wrote:
| I've been thinking about this for a while as well and feel that
| it all depends who is the audience of this service. One idea is
| to define geographical limits to participate. That aligns with
| your cap idea. The nice thing about this model is it allows
| participants easy access to get to know others near them. This
| has real world benefits for strengthening a local community.
|
| A second idea I had, especially relevant to HN, is to setup a
| barrier for use. Similar to old BB systems from the 80s and 90s,
| in order to participate it takes more effort than an email and
| password setup. A `vi` or `emacs` interface where there is a true
| learning curve but that also invites the user to learn more as
| they on-board into the social media service. You could spin this
| idea around other niche interests and hobbies though.
|
| Network effects mean that these ideas likely won't be break-out
| hits for the general public. However, I find that to be ok as the
| easy approaches are solved challenges, the new challenges for
| social media are making those services more of a positive/healthy
| (as in eat your Broccoli) experience for everyone who interacts
| with it.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > One idea is to define geographical limits to participate.
|
| Pretty sure you just invented NextDoor.
|
| Also, this would mean you couldn't be friends with people you
| meet online. You immediately would eliminate gaming
| communities, even closer-knit ones like in-game guilds.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I like how you're thinking.
|
| Friction is typically discussed as a universal negative, but
| intentional friction can have real utility.
|
| I'm going to continue thinking about your learning curve point.
| The shared knowledge of operation (sometimes) becomes culture.
| jcadam wrote:
| I'm 100% confident I could build a "facebook" with a better UX
| than facebook. Heck, facebook used to have better UX back in the
| days before they started focusing on monetization.
|
| That's not the problem. The problem is how do you get that
| critical mass of 10s of millions of users to make it viable. I
| keep wondering if there's an opening for niche social networks -
| but I've seen a lot of such small groups (e.g., python developers
| located in a specific city) set up shop on Slack and it seems to
| work well enough.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| When I was a moderator for tagfam.org, I was privy to internal
| research that the founder had done. About 20 percent of members
| were active on a regular basis and about 10 percent more were
| occasionally active. The rest lurked and just read.
|
| People can readily navigate a _community_ of about 150 members.
| On two different forums, once current membership got past about
| 750 people, things started splintering off into new groups. Do
| the math: 20 percent of 750 is 150.
|
| Above that figure of 150, the way people handle social
| interaction is with formal processes and protecting their
| privacy. They try to limit what they share about themselves on a
| "need to know" basis. Some people are better at this than others.
|
| This is where my life got very painful when I first went online:
| I didn't know how to do that. I had never really interacted with
| "the public" though I thought I had. I had been a homemaker and
| before that a student. I knew lots of people, but those people
| were mostly family and friends. I had extremely limited
| experience with customers, bosses, etc. and didn't really know
| how to be selective about the details I shared with an eye
| towards protecting myself and this went weird places.
|
| To remedy that, I have had to consciously think about such things
| a whole lot. I've even collected data at times and so forth.
|
| Many people are not super clear about such distinctions. If they
| grew up in a big city, maybe they don't readily share intimate
| details with anyone and don't really think about how much they
| leave out. If they grew up in a village, maybe they make no real
| distinction between friends and strangers and just let it all
| hang out and don't understand when it comes back to bite them.
|
| A lot of the problems we have currently online exist because the
| internet puts us rather unnaturally in touch with a much broader
| selection of people than in-person interactions are likely to for
| most people. It's harder to say things online that won't have
| _someone_ up in arms because you stepped on their toes without
| realizing it.
|
| I've been trying to sort out how to interact positively with
| people on Twitter (and in other online spaces) for a long time,
| people I may not know at all but may have interests in common
| with. I think a lot of our online social media issues ultimately
| will be solved -- if they get solved at all -- by working on this
| issue.
| ideonode wrote:
| Nice to see Dunbar's Number validated with real world data.
| motohagiography wrote:
| We already have one and it's perfect. Whenever you go into a new
| environment, especially for jobs, there are a bunch of HN'isms
| you can drop to recognize each other. Nobody asks each others
| handles, because they respect each others privacy, and you just
| know that the people you are dealing with have some of the same
| topics front of mind. I've never asked anyone their handle, and
| nobody has ever asked me mine, and that basic respect is what
| characterizes it to me. HN is forum where people have the
| incentive to write as their best selves, and the effect of that
| is the largest archive of human honesty in the history of the
| species.
|
| Being meta about it presumes it's an object of criticism with an
| end instead of just an ongoing experience that exists for no
| other reason than because it's enjoyable.
| cfcfcf wrote:
| Example of these isms?
| adventured wrote:
| > How could we build a communal product for the public?
| Theoretically, this approach would result in a better product.
|
| Theoretically it'll result in either a far worse product or a
| product that never ships.
|
| Committees, bureaucracy (which is what an HN communal product
| would be) is a particularly bad way to do software.
| spion wrote:
| I've long wanted to build social media which is focused on
| correct information rather than marketing. The main problem of
| existing social media is that the environment encourages the
| spread of
|
| - novel sounding (interesting) or emotionally triggering, and -
| poorly checked information
|
| (see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559).
|
| Regardless of algorithm, Twitter promotes fast re-sharing without
| thought (retweet is easy), short messages which make it difficult
| to explain a nuanced position. Even without an algorithm, this
| produces a Darwinian environment which favors replication
| (retweeting) of certain types of tweets over others.
|
| I suspect a lot can be changed by changing the base environment.
| For example, retweeting could become "intent to retweet", which
| isn't applied until information gets a peer review. Peers can be
| calculated via a per-topic reputation system + reference users
| (examplars). Automatic reviews could at least check that you've
| included references...
| n4r9 wrote:
| > The social network would allow users to arrange into small
| topical groups called social circles.
|
| This sounds like Google+ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B
|
| I loved the idea back then. As other commenters have pointed out,
| the structure and design of the network is not the biggest factor
| influencing its success.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I wasn't aware of Google's use of "circles" so thanks for the
| share!
| pax wrote:
| I've been dreaming of a platform where each post is categorized
| (manually, by choosing a circle/channel, or automatically
| detected), as I'm not interested in all the content / themes of
| people I'd follow. Besides G+, I remember Pownce had a similar
| feature.
|
| It would also be helpful to be able to choose your feed sorting
| algorithm - chronologically or else.
| samsquire wrote:
| I wrote the beginnings of a feed in PHP that used email to
| communicate.
|
| But I never got further than that.
|
| I encrypted XML files inside email attachments and the system
| relied on a client that interpreted them.
|
| I had a file system mailbox which sent items whenever they
| appeared in the folder by email to the email addresses in the
| XML.
| Applethief wrote:
| I'm in. Lets do this.
| jraph wrote:
| > What are your thoughts?
|
| A question.
|
| What problem(s) / do you want to see solved or what needs do you
| want to address with this?
|
| (asking as someone who mostly never used social networks outside
| HN)
| datan3rd wrote:
| My idea is for everyone to have their own personal
| website/app/space (could be very basic, prebuilt templates, drag
| and drop, something your grandparents could set up). That would
| then lead to the development of social networking protocols or
| being able to subscribe to web content modules. Basically, I want
| RSS feeds for web components/modules, but then a personal portal
| to interact with the items i subscribe to.
|
| I, as userA, with site www.squarespace.com/userA, could subscribe
| to all or part of userB's site www.wix.com/userB or
| www.userB.com/photos but not www.userB.com/crazyBlog. Then, on
| your own site/app, you choose the things you are subscribed to
| that you want to "re-publish" or add comments to or share. userB
| could also choose to not let you follow their space.
|
| This decentralizes away from any particular company and should
| limit the unintentional crazy that is broadcast across current
| platforms.
| diimdeep wrote:
| Use fine-tuned GPT3 as AI automatic moderator.
| martindbp wrote:
| Personally, despite its reputation I've gravitated more and more
| towards Twitter, because at HN I can't really trust what people
| are saying. People may sound smart and like they know their
| stuff, but you can come up with great sounding arguments for and
| against anything. It takes a lot of time and energy to figure out
| if someone is worth listening to, so to me it makes more sense to
| seek out the known experts and follow them on Twitter instead. HN
| has also become more and more anti-hacker, anti-technology and
| negative in general. Life's too short to be immersed in
| negativity, even if it's right, which it rarely is.
|
| How would the ideal social network look like? A mix of HN and
| Twitter perhaps. There are rarely any discussions on Twitter with
| deep comment trees.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Interesting. I find the discussions here on HN much more useful
| than pretty much any other so-called social media.
|
| There is nothing social about them. They act as echo chambers
| imo and very easily become cargo cults surrounded by the usual
| suspects.
| martindbp wrote:
| It depends on who you follow. I try to follow mostly
| technical people who post about technical things, or other
| musings. If they tweet too much about politics I unfollow
| them, no matter how important they are otherwise. If you do
| this, you get a high signal to noise ratio, but Twitter
| unfortunately lacks in the depth of discussion. And also it's
| not very social as you say, it's mainly a way for me to
| listen in on conversations between experts rather than as a
| way for me to chime in personally.
| motoxpro wrote:
| I have the opposite reaction. I like how all context of a
| persons argument is in one post. You could be The President or
| a homeless person and I will give your reply the same thought
| here, seems meritocratic to me.
| [deleted]
| 999900000999 wrote:
| This is it.
|
| I think HN has the perfect amount of users, we don't need this to
| turn into Reddit. I learn more here than with any other website,
| but it needs to stay relatively small.
|
| If tomorrow HN had to appeal to everyone we'd have click bait all
| over the place, along with ads.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Yeah, but we could really use some low-effort "that moment when
| you realize" memes around here! Would also be cool if HN threw
| in some random live streams on the homepage and let me buy
| badges for posts I like! Dang is also too benevolent; we need
| some overzealous mods on a power trip to really spice things
| up! /jk
| abetusk wrote:
| In my opinion, this is a tarpit idea [0]. It's not that it's
| impossible, it's that the user expectations are high, the
| marginal utility of the new features is negligible and, even if
| you had a vastly superior product, you would still need to
| somehow convince some critical mass of people to migrate over and
| use it. I think there's a reason new social networks succeed from
| a fresh set of users rather than somehow convincing people who
| are already established on FB/Twitter/Whatever to migrate over.
|
| In addition, any new service will be fighting against the
| tendency to centralize, create a walled garden and prioritize
| tools for advertisers and user management rather than enabling
| users. There was a recent quote of Jack Dorsey to that effect
| [1]:
|
| """ The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in
| building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus
| building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it
| for themselves. """
|
| That being said, I don't think it's impossible but it's almost
| going to be a "worst is better" solution and one that at least
| has some traction now, like Mastodon [2] or Scuttlebutt [3] (I'm
| on Mastodon but haven't used Scuttlebutt). Maybe IPFS thrown in
| there somewhere [4]? There might even be a way to bootstrap a
| social web through some web3 solution, though that's pretty
| speculative at this point (or maybe overlaps with IPFS?).
|
| All of the FOSS/libre alternatives have major problems, not the
| least of which is that they're not tested at scale, have growing
| pains or just don't have the critical mass that any of the other
| platforms do (though maybe Mastodon is getting more popular?).
|
| I go where the people are. The major feature, in my opinion, is
| Metcalfe's law. Any other feature might be necessary for long
| term survival but for to even get started, the value added from
| Metcalfe's law dwarfs any new feature that people might think up.
| I'm willing to put up with some pain for a libre/free/FOSS
| solution but even then, it needs to be decentralized in some way
| or else we're most likely to be doomed by a repeat of something
| like Reddit open sourcing their stack, it being a mess and them
| just close sourcing it again, without any major benefit to the
| public or users.
|
| Put it this way: Why is some idea going to work when so many
| other people have tried and failed? This is not a rhetorical
| question. There's bound to be a social network that takes over
| FB/TWitter/Whatever. What are the conditions for this new social
| network to take over? A new breed of users? Cheaper compute? Web3
| adoption? Cheaper storage leading to easier data distribution?
| Continually cheaper communication costs?
|
| Sometimes it's good to throw stuff at the wall and see what
| sticks, that's certainly how a lot of startups succeed, but
| that's not something I'm going to invest a lot of emotional
| energy into.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMIawSAygO4
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/BillyM2k/status/1603135805039382529
|
| [2] https://mastodon.social
|
| [3] https://scuttlebutt.nz/
|
| [4] https://ipfs.tech/
| abetusk wrote:
| Sorry to reply to my own thread but here's something that
| actually might change this equation: AI.
|
| How can AI help create the social networking site we actually
| want to see? Language models to filter out hateful content?
| Boost content we want to see? _Generate_ content we want?
|
| Google's search engine initially worked because it was piggy
| backing off of our focus on quality content by having multiple
| links to content. There might be an argument to make that
| Google came at a time when the hardware to do "whole internet"
| analysis became affordable.
|
| Twitter is a kind of "web2" site that piggy backed off of the
| ubiquity of the cell phone (in my opinion, if other people have
| differing opinions on Twitters success, I would love to hear
| it).
|
| Now we have (potentially some rudimentary) AI, like language
| models or stable diffusion. How can we leverage these to drive
| engagement and add actual value to the user base? What's the
| next generation of AI models that can be used for this purpose?
| squarefoot wrote:
| Google tried this, and failed. Actually they failed from their
| point of view: Google Plus had some good points over Facebook,
| but they wanted it to become #1 in no time, which simply couldn't
| be done because it was already too late. Had they kept the
| project alive, they could have benefited from the current
| situation at Twitter.
| [deleted]
| germinalphrase wrote:
| The only "social media" features I would accept on HN are: (1)
| reply notification so I can keep a thread going, and (2)
| increased visibility of comments/posts of selected users through
| conditional color coding. I don't want any other notifications,
| curation, etc.
| pak9rabid wrote:
| I've toyed with the idea of having a standardized and
| decentralized social network that would work much like how SMTP
| (or XMPP) does today, in that each domain could have it's own set
| of social media servers, controlled via SRV records, and data is
| propagated and cached on-demand between domains that socialize
| with each other. Obviously, great care would need to be taken to
| ensure the Internet isn't just flooded with a bunch of traffic
| all the time (see: intelligent caching solutions). This way, no
| single commercial entity is able to control and manipulate it to
| their own advantage to the detriment of its users.
| MattJ100 wrote:
| For social networking atop XMPP, see https://movim.eu/
|
| Combined with the in-development ActivityPub gateway from
| Libervia ( https://salut-a-
| toi.org/blog/view/goffi@goffi.org/@/id/liber... ), interop with
| Mastodon, Pleroma and others becomes possible too. The
| decentralized social web space is quite active at the moment.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Hacker News users have already built a social network together.
| It's called Hacker News.
| Dwolb wrote:
| The issues with social networks aren't single dimensional.
|
| The fundamental issues that arise have to do with the medium of
| the internet itself.
|
| What happens communities when they can reach limitless scale and
| the communication channels which limit emotional understanding?
|
| Those are the difficult problems to solve.
| matt3D wrote:
| > It requires a fundamental change from the reach model towards
| concentric social circles. The social network would allow users
| to arrange into small topical groups called social circles. These
| social circles would have a cap of 10 (arbitrary number) members.
| Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently
| limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation,
| abuse, and moderation.
|
| Isn't this just group messaging (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal
| etc.)? This is pretty much the only 'social networking' I do.
|
| The only way I can rationalise any other sort of social network
| being successful is that deep down people actually want strangers
| or loose acquaintances to see their updates. Everything is on a
| parasocial scale from group messaging with an equal relationship
| through to Facebook, then Twitter all the way to Youtube where
| the relationship is completely one sided.
| elefantastisch wrote:
| Every year at Christmas, I get a card from a family member with a
| short, personal hand-written note and a 1-page, generic printed
| update on how their year has been, usually with some pictures.
|
| This is what I want from a social network.
|
| I want to be able to keep up some regular connection with people
| I don't see on a regular basis. I want us to remember each other,
| know about major life events, and have a convenient way to
| reconnect more personally when that makes sense.
|
| For people I see (or want to talk to) regularly, I'll just send
| messages or group messages.
|
| For more of the topic-centered type of internet community I may
| want in my life... well HN already does that perfectly.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I think that is what most people want.. However, I don't know
| how to make that self-sufficient let alone profitable .. People
| want free and free means ads and ads means click-bait/faux
| outrage/addiction.
|
| The old model was this (MySpace) but you had to go look at
| people .. They didn't come to you and it wasn't addictive
| enough or profitable enough.
| ekinertac wrote:
| the perfect social network was "FriendFeed" and Facebook killed
| it as we all know.
| nathias wrote:
| make a repo with a readme, put your ideas in it and invite people
| to comment
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Hmm. I had almost the same idea, though I called it "rooms"
| instead of "social circles". But, yeah, segment my online social
| network, so that my crazy uncle can't get in my political
| discussions, and my wife is not afflicted with my tech ones. (But
| that doesn't actually keep the uncle from bringing the political
| discussion to the family "room"...)
|
| I'm not sure whether limiting the size is a good idea (though I
| can see the reasons for it). But if it is, I suspect that 10 is
| too small.
| remote_phone wrote:
| No thank you. I'm okay with not having another social media
| product.
| aaron695 wrote:
| hardnose wrote:
| Seems like a recipe for elitism. The groups of interesting people
| would be virtually impossible to get into, and the pleb groups
| would be boring.
|
| One of the things that worked about internet discussions of the
| past is that they prioritized quality of ideas, not importance of
| identity or who you know or any of that. Social media turned that
| on its head, I think a successful model might involve turning it
| back. More like UseNet than Facebook.
| solardev wrote:
| The early net was nice because it didn't have billions of
| people on it. It was a self selecting crowd of early tech
| adopters who had the time and money to have an online presence,
| a rarity back in the day. It was its own moderation system
| because there weren't that many people. Even the web index used
| to be manually curated.
|
| Then the internet became a victim of its own success and the
| signal to noise ratio plummeted. You can't replicate the early
| internet with less moderation, you either need selective
| participation or heavy curation (not moderation).
| ctvo wrote:
| > I have a concept for a social network that would eliminate many
| pain points.
|
| And what is this concept? Hidden in this question is a strong
| undercurrent of "I'm an ideas person with a world changing idea.
| I can't share it because I believe that it's valuable. I just
| need engineers".
| [deleted]
| shanebellone wrote:
| I just added it to the main post in order to help shape the
| conversation. I have no desire to lead a social media company.
| stevehawk wrote:
| Isn't that idea the same idea that google tried and failed
| at?
| shanebellone wrote:
| Google failing implies nothing about the tribal
| conceptualization of social networking.
| ctvo wrote:
| > implies nothing
|
| Nothing is a strong word.
|
| A similar idea was tried, by one of the largest tech
| companies in the world, pushing it on to their already
| established user base, and it didn't catch on. Will it
| fail again? No idea, but it doesn't imply _nothing_.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I stand by my statement.
|
| One might argue correlation, but any argument about
| causation is devoid of logic.
| dymk wrote:
| You've got one already, it's called Hacker News.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| dymk wrote:
| What does that even mean?
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Apologies, I'm coming in a little hot this morning... :)
|
| I'd put it this way... you and I have HN. What about the
| protesters in Iran? We're closer to that scenario than
| you're prob realizing.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I would argue that HN is a collective not a social network.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Mods agree - if bot replies became high quality enough to
| meet human standards here, dang is ok with allowing them.
| This site's managers value the content quality, with no value
| given to social qualities
| [deleted]
| TrueGeek wrote:
| You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship.
| anon1094 wrote:
| You're being social right now, on Hacker News.
| agentwiggles wrote:
| You can even argue here!
| aceazzameen wrote:
| No, you can't!
| n4bz0r wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I can!
| dxbydt wrote:
| I don't know man. There are times when I genuinely want
| an argument to clarify my thoughts. There is zero
| argument- it just gets downvoted minus three. So then I
| sadly delete my comment. I usually assume since I'm not
| an American (wasn't born here), am not able to get the
| nuances right, or maybe there's some deep underlying
| social dynamics I'm unaware of. So better to just delete
| my comment and move on. These days I use HN primarily as
| mathoverflow - if I know how to work a problem I post.
| Otherwise best to shut my trap. HN isn't the place for
| arguing- atleast not for me.
| tedeba wrote:
| What do you like to argue about?
|
| Personally I'm a big fan of the ChangeMyView forum on
| Reddit. Pretty much anything goes there, as long as
| you're civil and interested in productive discussion that
| aims toward clarifying your views. Which is a refreshing
| change from the ideological echo chambers of most of the
| rest of the site, where if you say the wrong thing you'll
| be banned.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| HN is social media, but it's not a social network. A
| network puts the emphasis on individual nodes (users) and
| the connections between them (following/friendship).
| latchkey wrote:
| Correct. I love that the focus of HN is on discussing
| topics, not discussing individuals. Of course a topic
| could be an individual, like Elmo, but that's not the
| focus of the site itself. I don't follow any individuals
| on HN, I just respond to whomever I'm discussing a topic
| with and I don't care who that is.
| yucky wrote:
| By that argument, email, text messaging and even phone
| calls are a part of social media.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Where does the network come in? I can't friend anybody, I
| can't tag anybody. There's no social graph, at least not
| one that users are aware of.
| mattdesl wrote:
| One idea would be something like RSS that supports social media
| like activity (posts, reposts), but with a user alias namespace
| that is registered by a shared and distributed ledger. I wrote
| about this here:
|
| https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...
|
| Related, see the protocol spec and design for Farcaster, which
| aims to be a "sufficiently decentralized social network":
|
| https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol
| [deleted]
| schwoll wrote:
| Federated Mastodon.
| Kinrany wrote:
| The main benefit of social networks is secure messaging. All the
| other features require a combination of a sophisticated frontend
| and a sufficiently general authorization mechanism.
|
| One crazy idea is to build a basic messenger and let the users
| write channel policies in Datalog, a-la Biscuits.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| FOAF it up!
| hackerbrother wrote:
| IRC over raw UDP. Identity governed by WebAuthn, moderated by
| stable diffusion.
| talkingtab wrote:
| Another thought is to wonder how we build social networks in real
| life. The mechanisms are hard to isolate because they are so
| normal, but attempting to transpose those to the internet is
| interesting. People have reputations. This acts as an incentive
| for people to behave. If you get known as a jerk then you don't
| have much of an audience.
|
| But reputation is complicated. There is a lack of civility -
| someone who breaks the laws or is otherwise a
| danger/problem/nuisance. Then there are people who are civil but
| have different social customs/expectations. One of these perhaps
| has to do with trust - is the person safe. The other has to do
| with engagement. I'm not interested in having a discussion about
| Trump so I won't engage. I suspect there is a lot more to it.
| Like if you go to a bus stop at night and there is someone there,
| what really determines how you react to that person? It seems to
| me that people are generally very good at "clues".
|
| HN has karma, but not really a reputation. You can go look at
| someone's comments. You can pay attention to how they react. It
| would be interesting to know how many down votes a person uses
| for example. How many up votes.
|
| Another different issue, but perhaps related, is the idea of
| boundaries. If you have a community that is productive, what
| happens if someone can easily come in and be divisive. Imagine a
| gardening group talking about how to control aphids without
| pesticides and someone comes in and starts saying "it is stupid
| not to use pesticides" (or vice versa).
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| I'm sure at least 75% of you guys in here are stronger
| technically than me. And 99% of you have probably seen more
| success in their careers than I have.
|
| But I've been building little throwaway code experiments for the
| last three years and its totally doable.
|
| I haven't seen a regular paycheck since March 2019 when I was
| fired from a Director of Engineering role from a firm so shitty
| and a job so toxic I actually do think I have PTSD from it.
| Ironic given that my first job out of college was chasing
| warlords in Bosnia for the US Army in the 90s and helping the UN
| investigated mass grave sites.
|
| I'm poor enough that when I finally went to the VA to get
| benefits for my injuries from 20+ years ago, they actually put me
| in their homeless abatement program and I now live in Section 8
| housing in Austin. And it's actually pretty great.
|
| We've had 60 years of Moore's law. At this point you can totally
| stuff the entire searchable internet on 4 good size hard drives
| (75-85 TB compressed) and 1 to 2 Gbps pipes are everywhere. And
| folks globally are rightly freaked out about a world driving
| towards totalitarianism and hungry for a change.
|
| I've been trying out various approaches over the last three years
| but have zero attachment to any ideas I have on the topic.
|
| But clearly this won't get anywhere with just me or others
| sitting in our living rooms knowing that it's fixable.
|
| I'm 100% willing to help anyone with ideas in this space however
| they might need help. Full stop.
|
| I know folks are sheepish about putting their contact info out
| there but here's mine:
|
| Alex Ross alex.l.ross@gmail.com +1.213.500.5925
|
| Feel free to drop me a line with: ideas you have, something you
| need, a word of encouragement, tell me I'm a moron or a drama
| queen, whatever.
|
| But for god sakes, guys, don't look the other way. It's 1939
| Germany but this time we have no one to blame but ourselves...
| martindbp wrote:
| > 99% of you have probably seen more success in their careers
| than I have. > Director of Engineering > chasing warlords in
| Bosnia for the US Army in the 90s and helping the UN
| investigated mass grave sites
|
| Very modest, or I guess I'm in that one percent.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I'm an Army Veteran too. Afghanistan though as Bosnia was
| before my time. I'll shoot you an email, it would be nice to
| discuss technology with (presumably) another self-taught
| developer with similar life experiences.
|
| I also think we're on the precipice of something previously
| unthinkable. I'm undecided whether that outcome is
| authoritarianism or the country's implosion.
|
| On a less grim note, I do believe nuclear fusion has the
| potential to save us from ourselves. Indirectly, of course.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Cool! Please do. Would love to get veterans together first
| and foremost. Not to mention millions of angry, battle tested
| insurgency/counterinsurgency experts are prob not what the
| world wants pointed in the wrong direction... haha. Actually
| getting the _worlds_ military veterans together would be one
| hell of an idea. "No, sorry guys, the veterans all got
| together over beer, a little weed for those who partake, a
| lot of bbq, and a blew a few things up just for kicks and we
| decided that the politicians are full of shit on this one.
| The war is canceled." hahaha
|
| Would love to hear your thoughts on nuclear fusion too.
| outsidetheparty wrote:
| You've just re-invented group texts.
|
| The thing is: people don't _want_ limited reach. Why would anyone
| sign up for a network that limits everything they say to be
| visible to less than a dozen people? What 's the incentive? With
| numbers like that I could just go outside.
|
| So many "Let's solve a problem about social networks" ideas turn
| out to be "let's remove or limit the reason people use social
| networks in the first place"! The last one I saw -- also posted
| here on HN -- wanted to replace LinkedIn with a network that only
| allowed you to connect with people via their email addresses.
| So..... it was email.
|
| (Of course, to be fair I thought the same thing when Twitter was
| introduced. "Why would anyone want to limit themselves to 160
| characters?" I thought. So hey, who knows, maybe your group text
| simulator really is the next big thing)
| shanebellone wrote:
| What piece of technology do you use that wasn't pitched like
| this: Like _product_ but _differentiating feature_.
|
| Reach is the fundamental flaw from both operational and social
| standpoints. It makes the world worse.
|
| We regulate heroin for the same reason. Although this argument
| makes me a bit of a hypocrite because I do believe all drugs
| should be legal and regulated. I'm not entirely sure which
| opinion will hold after I reconcile this conflict.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| The problem with your idea around 'concentric social circles' is
| that it would require a lot of management - managing a thousand
| different circles could be a nightmare. A cap on members would
| force aggregators to potentially push messages to other circles.
| Just some things off the top of my head.
| shanebellone wrote:
| Why would you need to manage the circles? Individuals are
| entitled to the content their circle deems acceptable (when
| legal). If the content being shared is incongruent with group
| beliefs, they can kick the user from their circle.
|
| In my mind, it's a self-managing paradigm. Sure, it would be
| possible to mass message but only to those who are willful
| receivers. However, the inability to circulate mass messages
| with ease would fundamentally stifle virality.
|
| It's my belief that reach is bad.
| akkartik wrote:
| I've always wanted to follow HN users. 10+ years ago I built
| multiple iterations of a solution
| (http://akkartik.name/hackerstream,
| http://akkartik.name/post/hackerstream), all now defunct because
| the upkeep on the crawler got too onerous.
|
| For the past few months I've been enjoying using
| https://www.hnfollow.com
| magwa101 wrote:
| Ultimately spam takes over. There was a model for email whereby
| senders have to pay to send, I think MS had some papers on this.
| They never implemented it. I do wonder if a pay to post model
| could tame the spam and all the BS. That money could be used to
| fund the network, because nothing is free and it's time we all
| embrace that reality.
| p2hari wrote:
| Cool, this came up. Hey HN! I'm building Overlapp, a true social
| network connecting everyone over the things we like, dislike, and
| want to do: our Overlapps!
|
| Imagine instagram with a sliding scale to share just how much you
| like or dislike something and also a button to easily add to your
| wish list.
|
| From there we show you friends, colleagues or people nearby (or
| around the world) that also want to see that quirky band this
| weekend or didn't think that hugely popular movie was so great.
|
| We'll have an "Only Overlapps" option so just people with similar
| tastes will see your opinions to avoid haters
|
| Based your preferences by adding opinions and items to your wish
| list we'll show you cool new things and people to discover.
|
| Data will be treated with complete confidence. Here's our website
| https://letsoverlapp.com we will post the app on show HN next
| week or so. Would love your feedback.
|
| Edit: updated the link. Thanks
| edgefield wrote:
| Website is down...
| 2devnull wrote:
| We have one! This is it. Put your name and a public key in your
| profile. It's great here. Stay awhile.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| As someone else pointed out, that was Google Plus.
|
| The number one thing to realize is: this is not a technical
| problem. It's a marketing, political, and social problem.
|
| Facebook and Twitter have vast numbers of users who are not at
| all technical. How you reach people like that and get them to
| join is your problem, and it has nothing to do with deep
| understanding of the technology.
| qrio2 wrote:
| right, google plus failed bc it was a platform problem. Who
| would prefer to use that product over facebook, twitter, etc
| that duplicate the functionality 90%. ello was another
| hilarious example (that somehow... still exists...)
| scrame wrote:
| yeah, was also more annoying to use. it read trying to solve
| the problem of broadcasting everything to everyone, so it had
| this concept of circles, whereas Twitter people WANT everyone
| to see everything they say, either for like or conflict.
| Facebook was similar, but you could throw sheep at your
| friend/girl you liked, and it might be ambiguous.
|
| plus made you define your social circles as literal
| "circles", that's not the MySpace top 8, or Seinfeld speed
| dial.
|
| plus might have just been the right tech for the wrong model.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Facebook was similar, but you could throw sheep at your
| friend/girl you liked, and it might be ambiguous.
|
| Throwing sheep is an idiom I'm unfamiliar with and urban
| dictionary isn't helping (https://www.urbandictionary.com/d
| efine.php?term=throw%20a%20...) what does it mean in this
| context?
|
| I liked the idea of circles. It solves the problem of
| having to create multiple accounts (one for work, one for
| friends, one for parents, etc) that a lot of people were
| doing on facebook/insta so that they didn't have to self-
| censor as much. People don't always want to broadcast a
| night of drugs and drinking to your employer or your Mom
| but still want to send photos of your wild night out to
| your friends.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| >Throwing sheep is an idiom I'm unfamiliar with
|
| He likely meant "throwing shade."
| danjoredd wrote:
| I actually liked Google+ to an extent, but mostly because I
| found it to be so easy to get away with shitposting there.
| For some reason shitposts got a ton of viewers as opposed to
| Twitter and Facebook. Good memories, even though I was the
| only one in my friends group to visit often
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The thing is, Google+ _had_ a dedicated user base. It just
| wasn 't the Facebook killer they thought it would be.
|
| Same thing with Google Reader, too.
|
| If you want to "take on Facebook or Twitter", you will fail.
| But if you just want to create _a_ community of people, you
| absolutely can outcompete those companies in that niche,
| because Facebook and Twitter traded in quality for scale.
| 7speter wrote:
| Facebook was kinda like this bbut then it had to make a
| quarterly profit.
| trabant00 wrote:
| I think nobody would use a social network that would be created
| by the most popular ideas that float on HN. Established social
| networks are popular not despite their "problems" but because of
| them: nobody wants to manage their own data
| people are on social networks to be entertained not to "keep up
| with old friends" they want to be where brands, advertising
| and celebs are they want the opposite of decentralization,
| they want where everything is in one place addictive
| algorithms are what people like by definition, they are not
| created but discovered click bait, outrage, etc, again are
| what people are looking for
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > click bait, outrage, etc, again are what people are looking
| for
|
| I don't think people actively seek clickbait and outrage, but
| rather, are simply drawn to it when they see it.
| tootie wrote:
| 99% of the value of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram is reach.
| Posting 140 characters is not much of technical challenge.
| Getting 400M people to sign up and giving people a platform to
| build an audience is really, really hard. In terms of creating
| narrower social platforms, I think we have 100 good options. HN
| is already a pretty good platform, reddit has a nice balance of
| broad and niche topics, and if I want to go smaller I'll find a
| special-interest group that has a standalone forum, Discord or
| Slack channel.
|
| There's a fundamental difference between platforms built around
| truly personal social networking. Following people you know
| personally or within a few degrees of separation. The other is
| the much debated "Global Town Square" which Twitter has been the
| de facto best option for and is the hardest to replicate or
| improve upon.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Instead of having a oversimplified up/down voting of content,
| there should be multiple dimensions on which to rank/rate things.
| Anytime you force things into a hierarchy, you lose generality.
| Recently I've wished that many of my social media networks
| offered simple non-verbal ways to express factuality, humor,
| relevance, snark, sarcasm, interesting, worth-watching, but-what-
| about, etc. in a way that could be collectively used.
|
| Corrections should link to previous versions of a post. The posts
| themselves could be stored in a content addressable storage model
| as used in GIT.
| soliton4 wrote:
| what is the point of creating yet another social network unless
| you have a key feature to make it distinct and valuable? if you
| just make a twitter / facebook clone for tech people all you are
| doing is dividing yourself from other people. that might be
| desireable for some people but i dont think its worth persueing
| in the long term.
|
| i propose we create something that addresses existing problems
| and adds new features. a social network not based on yet another
| website, not based on yet another app with centralized ownership.
| blockchain is the new hype and promises new features and value.
| lets make a social network that exists entirely on a cryptoblock
| chain. i am not talking about creating yet another coin. this is
| entiely outside of the scope of monetary tokens. lets use the
| blockchain technology to host text and link posts in a
| distributed fashion. lets come up with a way to give an incentive
| to host a copy of the chain. and lets make it completely
| decentralized. then you have a social network worthy of hackers
| mistermann wrote:
| Blockchain would make it distinct, but would it provide unique
| value to users?
|
| I certainly agree that we need some innovation in the space.
| soliton4 wrote:
| the added value would be decentralized and cencorship
| resistant. you will probably also not see a lot of ads
| mattdesl wrote:
| The main value would be decentralization--the ability to
| carry your social graph across competing web and native
| clients, somewhat like RSS and Podcast apps. I wrote about it
| here:
|
| https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1.
| ..
| everdrive wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: any social network, no matter how it's
| architected will become terrible past a certain size. Perhaps
| some architectures will have different "maximum tolerable sizes"
| than others, but all will become intolerable once there is a
| large enough user base.
|
| More users, however, means more ad / tracking revenue, so these
| two ideas will always be at odds.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Is this really an unpopular opinion? Seems most people have
| acknowledged then general toxicity of large social networks by
| now.
| everdrive wrote:
| I suppose it's not. The part which I _thought_ would be
| unpopular was that technology unequivocally could not solve
| this problem.
| deanc wrote:
| Agreed. Small, decentralised communities should be the way
| forward. We could call them forums ;-)
| asynchronous wrote:
| I miss forums. Discord has replaced forums in most of the
| communities I cared about and it's been for the worse.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I hate this, and I _like_ Discord.
|
| Discord is a replacement for IRC/chat/AIM/other synchronous
| and informal conversation.
|
| It's not a replacement for forums, archives, or formal
| communication.
| Grimburger wrote:
| Dealing with opensource projects via discord is a
| nightmare. One I use regularly decided to escape the
| walled garden and move to github discussions and it's
| been such a boon for search. Discord is a repetitive
| nightmare of doing support I don't know why projects use
| it.
|
| The discord server still exists but questions generally
| don't get answered as much or if they do it's usually a
| link to github discussions.
| prox wrote:
| So how do you combine _social network_ + forum? What does
| that look like?
| squarefoot wrote:
| Heh, I just thought of an even smaller solution called
| newsgroups ;#)
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| There is/was already a social network for that - Ning.
|
| Back when social network platforms became A Thing they
| adopted OpenSocial - they had a news feed, notifications, etc
| - but each social network was completely isolated. I haven't
| taken a look at Ning since I worked on social networking apps
| about 12 years ago, so I have no clue how they've evolved
| since then.
| [deleted]
| devmunchies wrote:
| I feel like my main pain point is following someone and then
| their account gets censored and i don't get any updates. I feel
| like it'd be nice if a "follow" subscribes to an RSS feed. A
| platform can "filter out" a feed if it's "bad" but the feed is
| still live and i just need to use a different client.
|
| Like the notification feed and the "timeline" feed are 2 separate
| things, maybe? I can click on a notification and it opens in a
| different client. Like apple can remove a podcast from the
| podcast app, but the podcaster can still publish on the rss feed
| and you can subscribe on a different client.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| guessbest wrote:
| I'd merge NNTP and IRC with the latter for chatrooms and the
| former for storing data in a forum format.
| Minor49er wrote:
| - No friends or follows - The feed can be organized by
| top/new stories or threads - Posts and submissions can be
| upvoted/downvoted with a karma-like system - The more
| someone's posts are downvoted, the more transparent their entire
| profile page becomes - dang is the only moderator
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I feel like we already have
|
| I have gotten jobs off of HN, started organizations with people I
| met here, hired people from posts, argued and agreed and flamed
| and shared ....all the stuff you do with social networks
|
| It's just that this network minimizes the "personality" driven
| aspects of social networks because it's not driven to optimize
| profit or engagement. It's seemingly driven to optimize for
| civility. I think that's why we have the longevity we do.
|
| I've been kicking around on here since 2012 and I only recognize
| a handful of handles when I see them post and honestly it makes
| very little difference because the goal is to evaluate the
| argument.
|
| I think we're good, and don't really need to change what we have.
| Just my 2c
| nashashmi wrote:
| I think a news feed is probably what's missing. See friends.
| Track them. Pick fights every time they say something you
| disagree with. Upvote every time you agree with them. Done.
|
| /s
| shanebellone wrote:
| My title is a bit ambiguous in retrospect. Many took it as: How
| can HN become a social network.
|
| My intention was to address the many talented and accomplished
| makers who engage with the platform. The title should probably
| read: "How might we build a social network that benefits
| everyone?"
|
| Sorry!
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| No apologies necessary, communication is one of the most
| challenging things we do
|
| I understand what you meant though, and just to be more
| focused I don't think it's possible to build a large social
| network that retains coherency.
|
| Dunbar's number is a good guide here
| shanebellone wrote:
| Aren't those two different things?
|
| A systemic limitation on individual connections is
| fundamentally different than the network's aggregate scope.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I have a good idea too, without ads! Profitable also but not a
| twitter or mastodon clone, more like myspace met reddit and a
| really pretty baby (great UI concept, i won't spill the beans),
| moderators get paid and moderation is federated. Most importantly
| it isn't some idealist utopian platform but built for profit
| while preseving freedoms and user consent and user data
| ownership.
|
| I would rethink about mirroring real life interactions, real life
| has drawbacks and people can do real life in real life just fine.
|
| I have many ideas though, and I am not motivated enough and I
| don't code for a living or have a ton of money and a desire to
| make sales pitches.
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| You're kinda reinventing the wheel here. Federated communities
| have let you do this for years, but it hasn't resulted in a
| direct upgrade over Twitter. They're just two different social
| graphs, with two different goals.
| eps wrote:
| VC: "I know there are similar companies out there doing the
| same as Dropbox, why should I invest in just another similar
| company?"
|
| Drew: "Yes. There are similar companies out there doing the
| same as Dropbox. But do you actually use any of them?"
|
| VC: "No."
|
| Drew: "Why?"
|
| VC: "Because they are bad."
|
| Same here. There _are_ existing solutions, but none of them is
| good enough.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The existing solutions are fine, though. The reason we got
| into this mess in the first place was because we thought a
| centralized service would enable greater interaction than RSS
| provided. All we got was a lame 140 characters and an edit
| button a decade later. Then some asshole bought it and kicked
| everyone back to square one. The solution isn't 'building
| another monolith with better moderation', it's upsetting the
| unified architecture in the first place. Twitter's
| centralization was a design concession that is past it's
| time.
|
| It's a shame people keep using that Dropbox example too. I've
| seen hundreds of people use iCloud and Google Drive over the
| years, but maybe 2 people total who used Dropbox. Is it more
| popular outside the States or something? I get that it's a
| mantra HN entrepreneurs repeat to themselves when they see
| their startup struggling, but I don't understand it's context
| in this conversation when they had their lunch eaten by every
| other company competing with them.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I think the only way a federated social network could possibly
| take off in the current environment (one in which launching new
| Internet protocols is _really, really hard_ ) is by piggybacking
| on the most-successful one that already exists.
|
| Yes, that's right. Its transport protocol has to be email. Maybe
| with a side of RSS.
| INGSOCIALITE wrote:
| I think of HN as being a social network already. There is no need
| for another 'social network' in the world, actually less would be
| best.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| It's more of a "thought" network or an "idea" network than a
| social network. Unless I am super motivated to click through to
| your submissions and comments (and then back read the parent
| posts to understand).. most of the interaction is limited to
| threads. So this limits any attempts to curate a theme or push
| a dominate ideology.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I think of HN (And really, any other website driven by user-
| generated contented content like reddit and forums) to be
| social _media_ but not a social _network_.
|
| I consider social networks to be a subset of social media where
| the focus becomes following specific users and having a feed
| consist of posts made by specific users, whereas reddit has a
| feed consisting on posts on specific topics.
| sdwr wrote:
| I love the idea and the angle - better to feel out community
| support than work feverishly by yourself for 6 months and hope
| for the best.
|
| Small groups feels much more real + human-sized than being thrown
| into the ocean. That could solve the lurker problem where 90% of
| people are passive consumers. Would need to balance out with
| _some_ global content as sugar on top.
|
| I honestly think the safest business plan for a new network
| coming from HN is a one-time entry fee. Somewhere between $35 and
| $300, like SA(?) used to do. Maybe fund development through early
| sales.
|
| To get the most help from community coders, break the project
| into core and peripheral pieces. Too much "help" leads to
| drowning in complexity, best to isolate the backbone of the
| system.
|
| My pet idea is gamified ratings - let people invest in commments
| or posts (with regenerating energy/play money), and let them
| spend their earnings on boosting visibility of other posts.
| bil7 wrote:
| I think what would really be great is a social media site that
| doesn't offer direct image or video hosting. A bit like how
| reddit used to be. You just have link aggregation, voting, and
| comments. That's it. Maybe in a nice, clean, minimal UI as well.
| This would lend itself to tech folk I think. If only it existed.
| [deleted]
| baxtr wrote:
| Great idea. To add: I think the site would also need a rock
| star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps
| the site clean. Also maybe it would be great to have a voting
| system where one could downvote as well! But only after a
| certain number of upvotes I think.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| > I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who
| diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean.
|
| My idea was to give people IP-like addresses like the early
| internet. And start off (until we find something better) with
| the ol' Class A, B, and C networks of sizes roughly 16M, 64k,
| and 256 respectively.
|
| The value I think is in having groups as small as 256 and
| each group has an admin/moderator. Why are we 'automating'
| people out of a job in the tech space when we could be
| 'automating' them into one.
|
| Keep in mind, the existing IP networks stay. This is just a
| logical layer.
|
| There are better ways to do it but I think this is an
| interesting start. There's even a planned obsolescence built
| in as the world has more people than the 4 billion or so that
| a 32 bit address space gives.
|
| Which to me is perfect. A chance to try some new things but a
| built in expiration date so nothing becomes too entrenched.
| ilyt wrote:
| Let's also have zero notification whatsoever that someone
| answered to your comment so you have to keep engaged in
| constantly looking thru it manually
| wheats wrote:
| Maybe a really unintuitive system for ranking too? Like
| make it unclear why some posts are ranked higher than
| others, and why some are somehow greyed out even though
| there isn't an obvious way to downvote or report content.
| Also make it so you have to manually minimize the top reply
| in order to see the second most popular topline reply
| because there should be absolutely no limit to seeing the
| amount of subreplies.
| bnralt wrote:
| The thing that gets me about the unintuitive system for
| ranking is that you have zero idea how long something
| will be on the front page. It could be 3 hours old, #4 on
| the page, with a few hundred upvotes and more points than
| almost all of the votes on the front page, and then just
| disappear an hour later.
|
| And once something drops off the front page, it gets seen
| by almost no one. I keep trying to stop myself from
| spending too much time on comments (editing them for
| clarity and grammar, finding sources that people can
| follow instead of just relying on my claims, rereading
| the person I'm responding to in order to make sure I
| actually got what they were saying), because it's easy to
| spend 30 minutes trying to make a solid comment only to
| find out that the whole discussion has now disappeared
| and no one is likely going to read it.
| xigoi wrote:
| http://hnreplies.com/
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| aha! good idea!
|
| the web is... not free really... but more free than the
| wall gardens.
|
| i think its biggest weakness is that notifications don't
| really work there.
|
| but that bug is now a feature. nice!
| baxtr wrote:
| This is a very neat "engagement" feature idea! Love it. I
| would probably then just bookmark the site and check it
| constantly.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| But no ads. Cause we aren't in it for the money.
| smoldesu wrote:
| ...well, okay. A few ads, but only for semi-relevant job
| openings.
| 37amxn37 wrote:
| efdee wrote:
| This would certainly be a site where hackers like me would
| come to read the news.
| holler wrote:
| No voting but working on a clean/minimal link aggregation +
| live chat site at https://sqwok.im
|
| bonus points: "hacker theme" to make the hacker feel at home
| https://i.imgur.com/AleBLed.png
|
| https://sqwok.im/p/TXmiluFNUILE_Q (cross-post)
| bcjordan wrote:
| Actually it could lend itself to a great business model as well
| -- hackers both start startups, and often are looking for jobs
| at startups. You could use it for lead generation for startup
| founders to join your accelerator (once that concept exists),
| and an added benefit to founders would be access to hiring from
| the pool of hackers on the site. Win/win.
|
| Sounds like bit of a schlep though. Would need to draw an
| audience e.g. by producing a ton of your own content early on.
| Lots of legal processes involved with operating an accelerator.
| Probably not worth it.
| baxtr wrote:
| The good thing though: After the initial seed phase, where
| you produced your content you could just disappear and only
| be active on twitter!
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| no thats a great one...
|
| can i add that to my list of ideas?
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >voting
|
| This always leads to a hivemind. Because even if you're
| supposed to use it for rewarding good posts, what the horde
| ends up doing is using downvotes as a disagree button.
| Especially if the admins/moderators have authoritarian powers
| to hide content on top of the users' individual powers or rate
| limit posting by those with differing views. Because everyone's
| bias sneaks in - no one is exempt from this - and it's very
| hard to see your own biases if you don't deliberately venture
| out of your filter bubble regularly. The best tool I've found
| for this so far (and I maintain a search) is
| https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news It gets
| trickier when one side completely ignores a story, which _both
| do_.
| seydor wrote:
| But how can i friend you? This is not social
| dnissley wrote:
| Even just "follow" functionality would be great.
| seydor wrote:
| But it should be labeled frankly
|
| "Friend" should be labeled "Manipulate"
|
| "Follow" should be labeled "Stalk"
| cheschire wrote:
| We have to be careful to not simply crowd-source the moderation
| either. Keeping a crowd-moderated social media site from
| devolving is a dang hard task.
| talkingtab wrote:
| Just curious do you have experience with this and if so, what
| was it
| 58x14 wrote:
| > dang hard task
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| i feel like that was on purpose
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > link aggregation
|
| One thing I've noticed over the years is that most social media
| companies have slowly started to discourage outbound links.
|
| On reddit a surprising number of subs no longer allow you to
| just submit links, and a growing number require review before
| posting external content.
|
| Even Twitter (before Musk) was clearly deprioritizing external
| links.
|
| This is a bit troubling because it further leads to the "dead
| internet" where it gets harder and harder for people making
| interesting content independent of major sites to get
| visibility.
|
| I think of the main reasons HN remains relatively high quality
| is its primary function is still aggregating pointers to
| elsewhere.
| axus wrote:
| I'd thought Reddit subs prohibited links because it attracts
| spam and marketing disguised as organic recommendations. For
| Twitter, they promote organic content "for free" but want to
| make the inorganic stuff pay money for promotion.
|
| Discord is close the original poster's idea for a social
| network, replace "social circle" with "Discord server" and
| lower the member limit for a server. Back to your topic, a
| semi-private Discord server/social circle moderator can ban
| anyone posting spam links so its not a huge problem there.
| asddubs wrote:
| so hacker news
| JadoJodo wrote:
| I suspect GP was being facetious.
| ihatepython wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that being facetious is against the
| community guidelines.
|
| The post really should be flagged immediately.
| asddubs wrote:
| oh yeah, rereading it, it's pretty obvious actually, I
| guess I was being dense that moment.
| xwdv wrote:
| Make it a command line tool. Then you will have a very targeted
| audience.
| will_lam wrote:
| Is this a problem that needs to be solved? No sarcasm intended.
| ineptech wrote:
| Fleeting idea that could be combined with that: a web-of-trust
| social network where you can only "friend" people in real life,
| by tapping phones.
|
| When you do so, the app might say, "The person you just met
| claims to be Joe Schmoe, do you want to vouch for them?" If you
| approve them, they can message you and vice versa. A friend of
| Joe's can see you in his friend list, and try to message you, and
| you can accept it if you trust Joe, but they won't be a first-
| tier friend until you meet them. Your tweet-like posts can be
| seen by anyone, or your friends only, or people within N
| connections of you, as you prefer.
|
| I _think_ it could be implemented in a distributed way, with no
| central server, if some proportion of the users are willing to
| serve their traffic from a VPS rather than just their phone. If
| someone cheats (uses a fork of the app that lets them "friend"
| people they haven't met, create fake identities, lie about their
| friends graph, etc), it wouldn't affect you unless you trust
| them. Over enough time and with enough use, this _might_ be good
| enough to figure out whether someone distant from you (e.g.
| someone you 're about to make an Ebay purchase from) is using
| their real identity or not, as the "main" part of the overall
| friend graph that a real user with a lot of friends is connected
| to would be structurally distinguishable from the subnets created
| by cheaters.
|
| (This is not a cherished idea I've been working on for years and
| am prepared to defend, just a random idea I thought I'd post in
| case it sparks an idea for someone, so be polite in ripping it to
| shreds pls)
| vmc_7645 wrote:
| Currently working on implementing a similar feature, where
| instead of direct interaction it's location based relative to
| that users recent posts. That way if you don't want to be
| "found" you don't post and vice-versa.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| The first problem I see is separating my online identity with
| my real identity. I really don't want anyone at my job finding
| out which dog I am on the internet.
|
| My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit
| posting. :)
|
| The second is friends of friends can get really awkward. There
| are some people who are friends with me that are also friends
| with people who never want to see me again.
| ineptech wrote:
| I mean, nothing would stop you from making a fake identity,
| and friending other anonymous people, and posting spicy
| memes. But you can do that on mastodon today, right? This is
| for the cases where you _want_ to prove your identity. If
| most people use it that way, then the anonymous people would
| be little subnets that are either separate from the main
| graph or connected by only a few nodes. Typical users would*
| have dozens of people vouching for them, who each have dozens
| of people vouching for them, etc, which is strong evidence
| that they 're who they say they are.
|
| * in some hypothetical future where this gets made and is
| wildly successful
| mywacaday wrote:
| I had a conversation recently about the problems of social
| media and the growing extremes of political viewpoints. We
| agreed the a good part of the problem is partially caused by
| the online echo chamber but mostly by the increasing physical
| isolation of people in the real world. In the past the
| majority of men would have worked in manual labor with lots
| of other people, women would have worked at home and spent a
| lot more time getting to know their neighbours, now we work
| in isolation on a screen and stay at home without integrating
| with a community on a daily basis like times past. This
| allows people's views to go unchallenged and reduces the
| middle ground we all depended upon. Previously our vees would
| be challenged and our standing in our community would depend
| on our views. To go back to your point about anonymity should
| we be posting stuff online that we know our physical peers
| would have a problem with. Anonymity has its place I'm just
| not sure where the line is drawn.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| To some degree, I agree. But I also grew up before social
| media. Very little has changed about the fundamental
| ugliness of human behavior we try to tuck into a corner.
|
| As someone who was seriously hurt by forced conformity, I'm
| not exactly pining for the way things used to be.
|
| It wasn't that long ago when people were expected to drink
| themselves to death rather than seek help.
| shanebellone wrote:
| That's exactly the point of small social circles. You can
| segment your audience as a broadcaster based on shared
| interests, language, and understanding.
|
| The vast majority of the Internet doesn't need to read your
| shit posting. However, a small group of friends might find
| that appealing. If no one finds that content useful, amusing,
| or interesting... you'd be screaming at a wall. Isn't that
| exactly how it should be?
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| That's... not relevant? OP was talking about a system that
| requires tapping phones to connect and using friends of
| friends to form secondary connections.
|
| This is why I have a burner sim for online accounts
| requiring a phone number. (Looking at you Telegram...)
| shanebellone wrote:
| Whoops, my bad.
|
| I also maintain two phone numbers but for different
| reasons. I hate spam.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit
| posting.
|
| Shit posting is one of the biggest forms of toxicity online.
| It would be nice if it went away by tying posts to real
| people. Some people don't care and would shitpost anyway, but
| most people only shitpost because nobody knows who they
| really are.
| some_furry wrote:
| This comment rhymes with the justifications for Real Name
| policies. They don't work.
|
| All real name policies do is make many LGBTQ+ people feel
| unwelcome.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Facebook does tie posts to real people. It doesn't work.
| People are just as toxic.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It would appear there is some irony in this SoftTalker.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Threema has a concept of "levels" for contacts:
|
| > Level 1 (red): The ID and public key have been obtained from
| the server because you received a message from this contact for
| the first time or added the ID manually. No matching contact
| was found in your address book (by phone number or email), and
| therefore you cannot be sure that the person is who they claim
| to be in their messages.
|
| > Level 2 (orange): The ID has been matched with a contact in
| your address book (by phone number or email). Since the server
| verifies phone numbers and email addresses (via an SMS or email
| with the activation link), you can be reasonably sure that the
| person is who they claim to be.
|
| > Level 3 (green): You have personally verified the ID and
| public key of the person by scanning their QR code. Assuming
| their device has not been hijacked, you can be very sure that
| messages from this contact were really written by the person
| that they indicate.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| You seem to be under the impression that real life access is
| the indicator of closeness of relationship. It is usually not.
|
| Out of my set of close friends the vast majority I have never
| met in person. Most family I might add are in entirely separate
| states. Most of my IRL friends no longer live near me.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| This marks you as a tremendous outlier.
| ineptech wrote:
| > You seem to be under the impression that real life access
| is the indicator of closeness of relationship.
|
| No, just the hardest part to fake. You can copy my photo,
| hack my email, mimic my prose style, and steal my credit
| card, but you can't get the people in my school's PTA to say,
| "Yeah that's him" in real life.
| shanebellone wrote:
| This resonated with me. Well said.
| uxamanda wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of PGP and a key signing party. In that case
| the goal is to verify government docs to help someone verify
| they are who they say they are, but you can also give greater
| trust levels to the people you actually know.
| sdwr wrote:
| To shreds you say? And his wife?
|
| Hearing a lot on this thread about folding real life back into
| social networks, making the system designed to keep people on
| the happy, healthy, human-scaled social path. Today's SMBC
| lines up pretty neatly - https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comic/addicted
| shanebellone wrote:
| This is actually really interesting.
|
| Marrying digital with physical is an interesting approach. The
| problem of proximity is a unique point of friction which might
| also temper digital communication.
|
| If the application "lived" on cellphones and communicated with
| a P2P protocol, users could truly own their data (excluding the
| data they share with their network).
| aliqot wrote:
| I dont use telephones. Nice knowing you guys, I guess. We can
| still think of the good times.
| ineptech wrote:
| I imagine that some subset of users (1/10th?) would need to
| aggregate and serve their own and first-tier friends' content
| from a cheap VPS, and the Kardashians and Elons of the world
| might need a CDN of some kind, but if it's limited to short
| text posts I imagine it would be a tractable problem.
| wylie39 wrote:
| scuttlebutt[0] is like this.
|
| 0:https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/
| olah_1 wrote:
| You can add someone on SSB just by adding their public key
| though. That's not what the comment above is talking about
| kyleyeats wrote:
| I've always liked this idea! I think it should be device-level
| too, and not have a separate ephemeral identity. In other words
| if you get a new phone you have to start over.
| shanebellone wrote:
| This is an interesting concept. The biggest disadvantage
| would be losing a digital archive every two years (or as
| necessary).
| kyleyeats wrote:
| Its sister idea is holding on to phones for longer. The big
| drawback would be losing the phone, I think.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| So does the person who finds the phone inherits the identity?
| Can we have influencers selling off their circles? When I get
| robbed is my mugger now friends with my grandma?
| addrian27 wrote:
| Interesting, but how do we know if friend of a friend is real
| or not? I think it's also vulnerable to bots or malicious
| infiltration
| ineptech wrote:
| You only "friend" people in real life who you trust not to
| act maliciously. If you unwisely trust someone who is
| malicious, you encounter various problems, just like in real
| life. But it would be very difficult for a malicious person
| to construct a realistic-looking subnet of sockpuppets
| because that would require getting lots of real people to
| make that unwise decision.
|
| Not saying this is perfect, but I predict that the vast
| majority of users who "friend" 20+ people irl who also have
| friends will be fine, and borderline cases will be
| borderline.
| shanebellone wrote:
| An invitation model would inherently link bad actors. With
| that being said, I dislike the approach.
| grom117 wrote:
| One thing that might be valuable on this is to do sms contact
| syncing where people can provide soft proof that they share
| the same social circles. In essence, if both parties have
| John Doe in their phone as 123-456-7890 , we can extrapolate
| that they both know him. Extend this across many contacts and
| it might be possible to see how much their direct networks
| overlap. One way of proving a person is indeed who they claim
| to be is by using a service like authillo.com
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I would hate this because I'm physically nowhere near any HNers
| I'd trust, and vanishingly few HNers at all.
| ineptech wrote:
| You wouldn't be first-tier friends with people you only know
| from the internet. You'd be first-tier friends with neighbors
| and cousins and the other parents at your kids' school. Then
| when I prove (keybase style) that I, HN user ineptech, am
| also "ineptech" on this social network, you would know that I
| really am a 48-year-old guy in Portland and not some other
| person because I have also friended all my irl friends, and
| our friends-of-friends-of-friends eventually overlap.
|
| Maybe "friend" is the wrong term. Maybe "vouch". You could
| still message me, but you wouldn't vouch for me, because you
| don't know from HN whether I am who I say I am.
| some_furry wrote:
| I don't speak to my neighbors.
|
| My blood family consists of violent homophobes that would
| shoot my house up if they ever learned I'm gay (or where I
| live).
|
| I have a dedicated online persona (fursona, really) that I
| keep compartmentalized from people I distruat.
|
| Some of my friends are trans.
|
| Some of my friends have abusive ex-partners and stalkers.
|
| Some of my friends are sex workers who need social media to
| find customers but don't want their real names leaked.
|
| How would your proposal serve any of these use cases? From
| where I stand, it'd be more of a hindrance.
| benji-york wrote:
| This idea may not fulfill every use case.
| some_furry wrote:
| It's fine if it doesn't fulfill all use cases, but
| demonstrating any thought to some of them would help
| flesh out the details of what's being proposed.
|
| Are you building a social network, or a chain of trust?
|
| Are identities fungible, or irrevocably linked to a
| person's legal name and physicality?
|
| Etc.
| jacooper wrote:
| But why ? Why would you expose your entire real life social
| circle to the internet?
| ineptech wrote:
| If you don't want people to know that you're friends with
| Dave, don't friend Dave, or don't use it at all. This
| isn't supposed to replace pseudo-anonymous networks like
| Twitter, this is more like Facebook without all the
| bullshit. The use case is "I know Dave, and I don't care
| who knows that I'm friends with Dave, and I'd like to let
| him know I won't make it to the PTA meeting without
| involving an enormous advertising corporation".
| redler wrote:
| The fact of the "vouch" could provide the validation
| without identifying the people from whose circle overlap
| it was derived.
| xapata wrote:
| I think the point is that you wouldn't be. The network,
| from your perspective, will be quite small.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Around here, I'm pretty unwelcome at things like tech
| meetups. I stopped going, after experiencing the "circle of
| avoidance" thing, a few times.
|
| New York ageism is even worse than Silicon Valley.
|
| No one wants to know me, and I'm OK with that, as I get a lot
| done, anyway, and the people that matter to me (all over the
| world) are part of my circle.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I can relate to this. Most people don't like me. The
| problem is they don't like me for the things I love about
| myself.
|
| Minimizing social friction produces lubricant, not
| "quality" humans.
| tayo42 wrote:
| What is a quality that turns people off to you but you
| don't think is worth changing?
| shanebellone wrote:
| I am extremely direct, often play devil's advocate, and
| rarely react with emotional equivalence.
| cpersona wrote:
| Sorry to hear your experience has been that. As someone
| approaching that point, I wonder whether I will have to
| find other outlets besides the traditional tech meetups
| that I was attending more regularly in the times before
| covid.
|
| Since you do bring experience, I would recommend (if you
| haven't tried yet), to give talks instead of just
| attending. I have found that the speakers tend to be well
| received regardless as they bring value. I did a lightning
| talk once and had the most positive interactions after my
| talk than any of the other meetups I attended.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah...the thing about the talks (I'm quite good at that
| stuff), is that they also skew young, and generally, at
| least around here, they are considered as currency, so
| there's a lot of competition for them. I could really
| give a rat's ass about ego, and I'm not looking for work,
| so I'm not interested in mud-wrestling some hungry young
| turk, with a syllabus full of Buzzword Stew, for a
| speaking engagement.
|
| I'm good at Swift and native Apple stuff. I've given
| courses on it, in the past. I was actually shocked to
| find out that no one is really interested in that, out
| here. I could go into the city, but, quite frankly, I'd
| rather eat ghost peppers.
| philip1209 wrote:
| I think the answer is personal newsletters. Email is
| (sufficiently) distributed, and (about) everybody uses it.
|
| I've replaced most of my social email with a monthly update. On
| the first day of every month, I publish a post on my website
| titled "What I'm up to this month." In it, I have three simple
| sections:
|
| - Highlights from last month
|
| - Things to share
|
| - What I'm up to this month
|
| It sends to my mailing list. I find it works great - I can stay
| in touch with people, and people bring it up in conversations. It
| lacks the dopamine hits of "likes", but I think that it's ok to
| have a calmer, stupider system for staying in touch.
| sgallant wrote:
| Using email as a slower social platform. Love it!
| denysvitali wrote:
| https://about.opendolphin.social
|
| https://github.com/OpenDolphin/introduction
| choward wrote:
| > This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces the burden
| of misinformation
|
| I have no interest in any social network who's primary concern is
| limiting the spread of information. I don't care if you are
| scared of "misinformation". You want to restrict the spread of
| "good" information because you are scared of misinformation?
| That's the wrong solution to the problem. The correct solution is
| to spread your "good" information and education people on how to
| think critically. Censorship isn't the answer to stupidity.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| One man's censorship is another man's filtering of noise.
|
| I agree there's no universal filter, but humanity is proof
| there are "good enough" filters most reasonable people would
| agree on.
|
| What's missing is the type of wikipedia fanaticism for which
| effort would be expended.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Google+ already did exactly what you described.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| There is really only a single barrier: adoption. You have to
| figure out how you can get thousands of users to join and then if
| it's a good product it should start to snowball.
| solardev wrote:
| We could offer orange checkmarks for $7 and undercut our
| competitors.
| bubblehack3r wrote:
| What pain points? I can argue that the way HN is built today is
| the most effective for its purpose.
| ilyt wrote:
| No info that someone answered to your comment is annoying
| compared to reddit.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| If you really want to build a social network, don't fall into the
| trap that many side-projects and freeware products fall into:
| Trying to experiment. There really is no room for
| experimentation, because the market has already been there and
| tried that. Anything novel or unique you can think of, existing
| sites have already either experimented with, or decided against
| based on A/B testing.
|
| Better to just make a "bland"/"vanilla" social network and focus
| on differentiating yourself by having a sterling reputation and
| "new car smell". Be like Google when Google was new:Just another
| search engine, but eh, it seems nicer than the rest somehow!
|
| Facbook/Instagram is haunted by Cambridge Analytica and ongoing
| investigations and lawsuits around the world. Twitter has become
| Musk's playpen. LinkedIn is full of dark patterns (and that was
| even before Microsoft bought it!) TikTok is banned in several
| countries.
|
| You also need to be able to make enough money from the project to
| keep the servers running, and pay engineers to fix bugs, and pay
| customer support people to do GDPR deletions and stuff like that.
| And you'll need moderators to keep the Nazis away. So, you'll
| need to build an advertising platform also.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| Step 1: BUILD IT!
|
| Ideas are addicting; the longer you have them the more you
| idolize them and become over time immune to the idea's criticism.
|
| The general principle in startups is that you know remarkably
| little about what _actually_ is valued in the market until you do
| some very specific validation research, which involves putting
| some kind of real, meaningful solution to a person 's pain in
| front of them to see how they react.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I wish I could upvote this more than once.
|
| The first rule of social network is that it's useless without
| many people on it, and there has to be some hook to get them
| in. But you won't figure that out just by thinking about it and
| imagining how people will behave. In practice it's a billion
| subtle factors which you can't reason about without a tangible
| product that people are interacting with.
| blowski wrote:
| If Hacker News tried building a social network, we'd spend the
| whole time arguing about every single micro-decision and getting
| nowhere.
| fleddr wrote:
| Plus, the new site is useless because it doesn't work on
| SnowLinux Puppy v3.1 with HTML, CSS, JS and electricity
| disabled. Also don't like the scrollbar.
| ilyt wrote:
| Nah, the complainer would clearly be BSD user
| fleddr wrote:
| Re-enabled electricity and booted up my AS/400 to read your
| comment, which I curled.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Can I port to my Timex Sinclair?
| fleddr wrote:
| There's no need to port it because it's a fine device.
| Are you one of those consumerist sheep that is obsessed
| with buying a new device every few decades? It works
| fine!
| solardev wrote:
| We can just make two versions, one is a reddit clone Next.js
| site backed by a boring database, the other is a dockerized CLI
| written in Rust that you have to deploy locally and persist on
| a blockchain, after you sign in with a hand soldered hardware
| authenticator, and where every post is written in XML with no
| Unicode support. Once a night a cron job transpiles and mirrors
| posts between the two systems, and you only see votes from your
| home system.
|
| That would probably settle most arguments.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| HN is a social network. (Nearly) All content is submitted by
| users. Rankings are influenced primarily by users. Users comment
| on the content. Conversations happen.
|
| Your Ask HN is you collaborating on a social network. Without
| your content, and the content of users like you, this social
| network wouldn't exist.
| anderber wrote:
| > It requires a fundamental change from the reach model towards
| concentric social circles. The social network would allow users
| to arrange into small topical groups called social circles. These
| social circles would have a cap of 10 (arbitrary number) members.
| Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently
| limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation,
| abuse, and moderation.
|
| This reminds me of Google+. They had circles of people that you
| could share to. I actually thought it was quite brilliant, but in
| typical Google fashion, they killed it and had horrible
| marketing.
| adjusted wrote:
| I am sure it will work in browser with javascript disabled.
| kyledrake wrote:
| Not quite a social network but a new version of the web where
| documents are just markdown or something very similar and the
| browser is an unglorified document reader with no JavaScript
| has been on my mind for a while.
| ovao wrote:
| Sounds interesting. Let's call the markup language "Hypertext
| Markup Language", and we'll make it XML-like versus Markdown-
| like so we have at least have a well-designed spec to work
| with. It won't be pretty, but it'll work well enough.
|
| And let's support JavaScript, but you can turn it off if
| you'd like.
| kyledrake wrote:
| As someone that runs a platform for people to get to edit
| and control the HTML of their content I extra appreciate
| the snarkiness, but the point is to use a format humans can
| more easily/cleanly edit, and focus on document oriented
| display of data where the browser/reader decides/controls
| styling vs the platform and you don't have to fight back
| against a trustless code execution engine trying to attack
| you while you read a news article.
|
| It would be a pleasant and interesting contrast to the
| giant anti-user Rube Goldberg machine browsers have turned
| into (err actually just two browsers both funded by the
| same company because the nightmareish complexity makes it
| impossible to do competing browser implementations).
|
| Feel free to call my idea stupid (it is) but let's not
| pretend HTML and the current implementation of the web is
| some sort of perfect ultimate gold standard we can't
| improve upon.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| What distinguishing feature would it have to something like
| Gopher or Gemini[0]?
|
| [0] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
| shanebellone wrote:
| I'm building a SaaS website similar to this. Unfortunately,
| we all like shiny things.
| solardev wrote:
| Gopher called
| corytheboyd wrote:
| A ten person social network is a group chat...? I don't want a
| whole website with ads to justify its own existence. I just want
| to send and receive fun moments with a few lads every now and
| then.
| jacooper wrote:
| I really like how Signal implemented stories, you can post
| stories to a group chat.
|
| So you can just share a story with your lads in a group.
| [deleted]
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