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.
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)
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.
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
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
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…
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.
More users, however, means more ad / tracking revenue, so these two ideas will always be at odds.
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.
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".
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…
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 forYour 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
IMO you should make a bog standard centralized social network like Twitter or whatever people are currently using. Then split your resources between the following two activities:
1. maintain a simpler, leaner, and faster interface than everyone else. Make it easier to join than everything else. And keep it that way, as much as you can. Like a craigslist UI for the 2020s.
2. put all the rest of your dollars and time into a) building an army of anti-sockpuppet/anti-abuse/anti-astroturfing techniques and b) documenting (responsibly) the existence, behavior, and elimination of said sockpuppets/astroturf campaigns. Essentially you'll be stockpiling and utilizing myriad anti-spam/anti-abuse techniques, some of which you can periodically burn to explain how you discover and remove problematic accounts at scale.
The anti-spam/anti-abuse documentation gives insight into the problems of running a social network at scale. However, it serves a more important purpose: to begin to put a floor on the types of social media manipulation that your users will tolerate. There was a day when employees would sift through email inboxes zapping spam, yet no one is willing to do that anymore. Your users will similarly become used to a much more pleasant and fulfilling social media experience. And if you do it right it puts a spin on your lower number of users and user-engagement-- i.e., you're accurately measuring your users, whereas all your competitors have an incentive to cook the books. ;)
However, this model is essentially incompatible with the current social media adtech, so you'd probably have to do a subscription model.
Also-- why not let a single paying user be able to sign up, say, ten or so friends using their subscription? Perhaps let them know that if any one gets suspended, they all get suspended. Would be interesting to see the social dynamics of that... :)
Here are examples of what can be done with it: Twitter Clone - https://pw.wzm.me Marketplace - https://es.wzm.me Showcases and more - https://w.wzm.me Q&A - http://elgghacks.com Even a platform to create other apps - https://lab.wzm.me
Think: Reddit, HN, Twitter, Discord, TikTok, Insta, Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram/Messenger.
I feel like Reddit is a superset of most though although they suck at chat. Discord is great at chat, but their forum functionality is weak.
All of HN could be implemented as a single sub-reddit for example. I would much rather use HN on the Reddit UI too. And Twitter also.
The most important thing that trumps all is always the community.
I've often thought a fun experiment would be to create a simple clone of the UI of Reddit, HN, Twitter, Discord, and then show each of those feeds inside the UI of each other.
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":
For the past few months I've been enjoying using https://www.hnfollow.com
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.
What exactly made it so different is hard to say. Was there something about the way you organised your friends into circles? You could share things either publicly or to specific circles, or to your "extended circles", which meant all your circles, and it was readable to their circles too I think, but it still wasn't completely public.
But it could also simply have been the kind of crowd it attracted. Maybe it was helped by the fact that it wasn't the biggest. It also had a ton of extra features (agenda and hangout integration) that a lot of people loved, but unfortunately Google kept messing with that.
Of course it was still corporate, and a real social network needs to be open source and federated, like the Fediverse. Maybe another thing to consider is: is ActivityPub a suitable protocol? Does it do everything we need? Does the sharing between conceptually completely different social media on the Fediverse work well?
People used them to do two things: to communicate with people they know, and to publish info to those they don’t know.
Modern messaging apps like WhatsApp or iMessage work way better for communicating with people you know. And algorithm-driven platforms like TikTok and Instagram work way better for building an audience. Twitter, BTW, fits much more in the latter category than the former, since tweets are public by default.
- 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...
Looking at my personal Instagram as an example: I follow 223 people; I mostly follow only people that I know. Often I'll take a look in the morning and there are all of 1-3 things posted. Over time, people have dropped away from using the app or are discouraged by "is this good enough compared to the polished content that trends?" Instagram tries to compensate by suggesting content from people I haven't followed, which I resent.
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.
Yes, that's right. Its transport protocol has to be email. Maybe with a side of RSS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd be keen on any kind of social network that is end to end encrypted, decentralized and puts the user in control but the more centralized and the more you (the person running it) can see or potentially change what goes on inside it the less interested I am.
IMHO social networking needs some heavy disambiguation, too. Speaking candidly to my friends and publishing stuff to the world are two entirely distinct use cases that shouldn't really fall under the same umbrella but on, say, Facebook it does.
Do you want to connect with people that you know of people (OG Facebook) that you want to know (OG LinkedIn). Because these are entirely different products.
How do you want to surface content? Based on interest or based on connection proximity?
Do you want to do real-identities or pseudo-anonymous (Reddit/Twitter) although verified Twitter is a much better experience IMHO.
Do you want to enable a creator/influencer portion? Or a pro-plan?
I think in 2022, it's easy to build a community-based product. But hard to find users that are passionate enough to stick around on an empty platform.
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.
At the end of the day, social networks can and will be done with reasonable people who can hear opposing views without trying to censor or hide them, and they won't need any specific tool but patience.
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.
Empower everyone with their own cryptographic keys.
This requires easier to use cryptographic tools so developers can write clients for users. I'm working on a tool that makes using cryptography easier:
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
- 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 moderatorTheoretically 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.
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).
One crazy idea is to build a basic messenger and let the users write channel policies in Datalog, a-la Biscuits.
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.
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.
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.
Just have been released yesterday , Peer to Peer social media. No censorship, no surveillance and no advertising, working with Lightning Network.
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
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)
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.
If it would be a product, what is it going to be sold personal info, ads, what?
> 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.
and keep your advertising out of my contact list
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.
Why would I limit myself here in any way? I think that's a terrible idea. But then again, maybe I'm using my social networks wrong and the difference (to my blog for example, which has technical content) is exactly that I don't want to send my "I've discovered a nice brand of coffee today" message to a 10 person coffee circle (I don't care enough), but to the people who follow me. This only makes sense because I've been successfully using Twitter for 13ish years with <200 followers and following.
Such as?
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.
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
Circles are a significant part of that, but also 'hats'. A person wearing the Lego hat is distinct from the same person wearing the fantasy console fan hat. Circles and hats combine so that you have both control over the context of what you say and who you say it to. Circles should also have content types. Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram etc. are fundamentally the same thing with a different content type. It should be possible to have an underlying network to handle arbitrary content as blobs of data, and have the users define the circle content themselves. This may mean you need to download a custom program to view some circle types but if you are not in that circle you can safely ignore the type altogether.
The other aspect is discoverability. Algorithms boosting content are prone to abuse. I think there is scope for human curation in a social network context. We have all seen the obviously broken thing that a user has had no success at finding a remedy though 'official' channels, but once it becomes a trending issue on social media there is a prompt fix. Winning the trending lottery is how information gets to where it needs to be and like lotteries there are far more losers than winners.
I would like to see some sort of curation tree (or more likely feed forward network). Anyone can play the role of a curator and anyone can suggest things to any curator, but curators have the tools to filter and prioritize topics they care about and people they trust. Following curators gets you what you want, from cute cat pictures, to a list of Android Apps containing malware. A key aspect of this that makes it more network like than tree like is there should not be any topic overlord, there may be five Android Malware curators and a thousand cat pic curators. It should be possible to follow all of Android Malware #153 and anything that any three of the others agree on (or any other combination/weighting). As a user with a piece of information, you could just shout at the top of the tree (as may people without a sense of perspective might), which is why filtering is necessary, but in general it is better to tell someone lower down who receives a lower volume of notifications who can then use their judgement to feed information to other curators.
The curation model itself could be implemented within the scope of Circles and Hats with user interface design to suggest the curation model. To operate this it would require significant volunteer effort, but I think that can be achieved. Wikipedia is proof that there are people out there prepared to work to enable better information for people they have never met. I also think that it is human nature to want to tell someone about something that they have noticed. It is why people post to Sites like HN, Reddit, Slashdot
I don't think such a system can be supported by Advertising or Subscription. Advertising corrupts everything it touches and Subscription just closes the gate to the majority of users. I think it can only really be done by donation of time and resources by those who feel like the existence of the network is a societal good.
That last aspect represents a real challenge because in conjunction with the features described above it has to do all of the baseline things that a social media platform. Security, encryption, scalability. I have enough expertise to know what a daunting task this is, not nearly enough to implement it.