When you say "social network", do you mean Twitter Clone?
It seems like developers in particular have come to regard Twitter as archetypal social networks despite it's many problems and the way the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph. IE, N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality, just for example and Twitter isn't something most people enjoy being on but I think it's what people get on to seem/feel important.
I think by earlier terminology Facebook/Myspace/Friendster/linkedin are social networks and Twitter/Mastodon/etc are "microblogging services".
I think the clone-Twitter impulse is kind of terrible. Not even to say Facebook is inherently better but because I don't think ways of defining one's own social network have been exhausted by all the networks out there (Discord is another format with increasing presences which shows that new ways of organizing connections are still possible).
The character limit is the last of Twitters issue, in my opinion. I think the #1 issue is the retweet model, it leads to people just brainlessly sharing low effort content with a single click. It's similar to how fake news and misleading content thrive on Facebook. But notice how Instagram where it's impossible to easily re-share content (well, you can now in stories) is far less toxic.
The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unknown artist or developer can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit.
"The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unwanted company or brand can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit."
Said nobody ever.
(I also somewhat agree with you, I have a bunch of real world friends now, who I first came to know via Twitter retweets - back in Twitter circa 2011 before the "brands" arrived. I'd totally given up by about 2018 and deleted my account.)
I'm surprised that up until now I've never seen someone on HN comment about following artists on Twitter. This is all I ever use Twitter for, never tweet myself, and unfollow people who only make passing statements that can be made up in a few seconds. My feed is almost entirely filled with people who use Twitter as something like Deviantart or Pixiv to upload original artwork and only use the character count for writing a description or title, or sometimes nothing at all and only posting artwork to speak for itself. This is entirely separate from some people's impression of Twitter as a breeding ground for arguments. People don't really argue as much in this specific subset of Twitter for some reason.
If Twitter went away then that specific platform would also go away. True, it's sad that said platform is also a hub of tribes and divisive arguments and design patterns that support mindless retweeting, but that's just how social media that needs to keep expanding its audience is designed. If an audience wanting to be a part of that culture by giving in to those patterns without slowing down to analyze the ulterior motives of social media companies like HN commenters often do motivates artists and creators to bring their work there, as they now have a sizeable audience, then I can't really complain or force them to move elsewhere. That would just be exacerbating the same issue of being divisive. I can't force these people off Twitter just because most of Twitter personally bothers me.
Yet, that still isn't enough to prevent the occasional content creator from retweeting something from a different handle that shows up on your timeline, and that specific retweet has nothing to do with the content you want to see and delves into divisive or political territory. But you also receive value from the person who retweeted it through their art. It just goes to show that separating these things is a human issue with no easy solution, and it's tempting to get frustrated at the status quo.
> My feed is almost entirely filled with people who use Twitter as something like Deviantart or Pixiv to upload original artwork and only use the character count for writing a description or title
Me too! If I discover an artist I like, I'll scroll through their feed quickly before I decide to follow. If they tweet mostly one liners or politics with only the occasional artwork, then it's a pass from me.
One other thing I'd suggest is muting certain keywords. Adding political terms to your mute list can clean things up significantly.
I made a minor but critical small edit to what the person just said. I switched "unknown artist or developer" to "unwanted company or brand" - which to me at least, is a super accurate change in majority user base between Twitter 2010 and Twitter 2020.
Now ask yourself if anybody ever said what you're responding to?
You could’ve put the changed parts in italics (you’re still in the edit window and can do it). Most people wouldn’t realize this while they scan through replies, especially when you appear to be quoting verbatim.
It felt tongue in cheek to me since they went on to somewhat agree that signal boosting via retweets at least used to be nice. But I agree, it was a bit weird of a response.
Why would you follow people that retweet brands? Retweets work just fine as a discovery mechanism for me still. (EDIT: not to forget, you can disable retweets for people you want to otherwise follow nowadays)
Perhaps "parrot", given the parent platform's choice of terminology?
"I totally made the world a better place today! I , ummm, yeah. So. I just parroted an actual activist's well thought out and carefully composed tweet, instead of doing anything of substance at all myself... What am I doing with my life? <sobs>"
It's amusing to me the retweets (and hashtags) were emergent behaviour of early Twitter users, not any sort of well thought out plan for how the platform was intended to work.
And then the platform owners mostly misunderstood the problem and emergent solution, and natively implemented something similar but optimised for advertising sales metrics ("engagement!") instead of what the users were actually doing.
And then as the user base changed from it's early-userbase to being heavily biased to marketers (sorry, "influencers" and/or advertisers), and social media expert gurus started talking about "message amplification" - and so we end up with new contenders in the field thinking that the lack of ability to shout "brand messages" through a megaphone was the problem those early users "invented" retweeting to solve... <sigh>
(And now I'm imagining a world where a St*rbucks-like cafe chain hands megaphones to everybody as they enter the store, with the implicit understanding that you shout out every interesting bit of conversation you overhear, which inevitably quickly develops into people only shouting out other people's megaphone shouts because that's all you can hear, until eventually if crescendos into a Hendrix-esque never ending earsplitting feedback wail - probably Star Spangled Banner for maximum crudeness... Has Black Mirror done this yet?)
God so much this. Manual retweets didn't really work like the feature Twitter implemented do and they had drastically different effects on content spread. Quote tweets (which were also emergent before rts even became a feature) are actually closer in those terms.
But because the button is right there the more useful emergent version died completely off.
> But notice how Instagram where it's impossible to easily re-share content (well, you can now in stories) is far less toxic.
People still re-share it, Instagram just encourages and rewards you to just steal the content and pretend it's your own and because the system doesn't support hyperlinking it's very difficult to call people out on it.
It's a huge issue for any artists on the platform.
I've never really thought of twitter as a social network more of a collection of grandstands or soapboxes or something all with people holding megaphones with a 10 second limit all yelling at the same time and sometimes the people around your megaphone will yell your message out to the people near their soap boxes. The more important you are, the taller your soapbox and and the farther the sound goes, but your megaphone still only works for 10 seconds at a time.
I very much want a Facebook for coding friends clone.
Lots of solutions out there but I for whatever reason I don't like any of them
Slack/Discord and similar interfaces are effectively chat. I want topics and replies. I know you can start a topic on both of those but it just feels less conducive to friends talking to me than talking on Facebook.
I could make groups on facebook. I can't put my finger on why this doesn't work. Maybe because it requires diligence. I have to remember to select the group of "programmer friends" that I want to topic to go to. Forget and my either my programmer friends get family posts or my family gets programmer posts. Also FB will spam non-programmer friends with "g posted about x over here".
A forum like discourse or phpbb doesn't have to social graph. Anyone that joins can participate in all discussion. I want to talk to friends only
Google+ and some features that seemed to kind of go in this directly but I feel like most people used it to spread news instead of discuss what they're working on or thoughts they are having. I don't need tech news. I can get that here.
I'm not even saying Facebook is the best UX for what I want. I used to enjoy a smf forum that was mostly friends and I liked that I could see the list of topics. But, I also just like glancing at my Facebook feed once a day or so and see what my friends are up to. I'd like a similar experience except for programming / tech only topics with tech only friends.
And of course it goes without saying that a coding FB should format code well and some how allow embedding live snippets in iframes
Note: I know lots of people say their FB news feed is a dumpster fire. For whatever reason I've unfollowed enough people or something that mine is fine. Unfollowed every political friend for example. Just don't want that on my newsfeed. Can get it elsewhere
Lots of solutions out there but I for whatever reason I don't like any of them
This is one of the reasons why I think Facebook is virtually impossible to topple as the dominant social network. Facebook came along when social networks were new and unusual, and people didn't really have ideas about what they could be. Everyone accepted Facebook's UI and feature set, even if they didn't really like it, and signed up anyway. Now people expect to see set of features they want from a social network on Day One, and won't compromise by signing up if those things aren't there. Consequently if you want to build a new social network app you have a massive undertaking from the outset. Without doing that no social network can gain enough traction to grow enough to compete with Facebook.
Unless users are willing to accept a less than perfect solution they're going to be stuck with Facebook as the only real option.
I want the social graph. I post, only the people I added as "friends" get to see my post, not everyone who signed up for the discord/slack. I also only want to see posts from my friends. But of course, we all have different lists of friends. Discord/Slack don't seem to be about that. But thank you for the recommendation. I'll still take a look
Dischord/Slack allows me to set up chat servers for any specific circle I share a common project with.
If anything it provides a more specialized, focused, social graph. That's not saying it's better or worse than Facebook's approach. I generally expect someone to answer a post I put on discord "in real time", to accomplish something.
What's good (and bad) about a Facebook post is that it allows me to just throw out an idea and any one of my many friends, from many circles, can respond.
I wonder if a discord that allowed general broad also would be interesting.
> N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality
Is this an assumption or is there evidence?
I can see why at first glance that would seem true, but I also see conspiracy theories spread with or without character limits. What seems to do better for discourse is not char limits, but rather enforcing limits on misinformation and hate speech.
In my mind, it is only a social network if I know whom I am networking with and they know who I am in real life. Reddit isn’t a social network since no one on there knows who I am and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never interacted with the same person on there twice. Anonymous is not social.
That's really interesting to me. I grew up with MySpace. Facebook wasn't a thing until high school. I used them similarly, but for different reasons: I spoke to new people on MySpace and people that I already knew on Facebook. I made many dear friends on MySpace and still talk to many of them frequently.
I think that more traditional "profile-based" social media is well-suited to meeting new people. I have no interest in reading another person's "feed" of shared content and ramblings, but I am more inclined to perhaps read a short "About Me" if that makes sense.
This site is a bit of an in between. There are definitely recognizable names here like JacquesM, DoreenMichelle, etc. that I don’t know IRL but recognize here. Then there are the users like WalterBright where I can correlate to an IRL identity, without knowing him personally.
That might be one difference. I read comments, but not who wrote them. I don't even know who I am replying to right now ;-) It is like shouting into the dark.
HN de-emphasises the handle of the commenter (smaller font, lighter text). No doubt that was an intentional decision, but I wonder just to what extent the original designer (pg?) expected it would influence the discussions.
Reddit emphasises them a bit more than HN, but still the natural reading flow is such that you miss the username. It's common for someone to comment, a second poster to reply asking a question, and a third poster to reply without people noticing he's different from the first poster.
Facebook emphasises the commenter more, showing their name in bolder text and a profile picture.
Some older forums (on phpBB, vBulletin, etc) emphasised it even more, devoting a large section to the left of each post to the commenter's name, statistics and often an avatar. These forums were much more prone to cults of personality than the likes of Reddit.
On the other end of the spectrum is 4chan, where posts are anonymous and content, or at least memes, is king. It doesn't seem like that necessarily leads to more nuanced discussion.
> the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph
Far as I'm concerned, this is the main feature of Twitter. The only thing that really sets it apart is that every exchange is a public exchange.
This also (until recently) set a standard for statements, where if there are enough replies, and even the critical ones don't cast doubt on the statement, you could have more trust in it. Now of course it's uncertain, since Twitter automatically censors and pseudo-censors replies, including quality ones. Sometimes Twitter does this thing where it won't even show you a reply that you sent unless you have a direct link.
I touched upon this in another comment, but I miss "profile-based" social media sites. No feed.
Ex. I have a profile that I can update with photos, etc. If you want to see those things, add me as a friend and navigate to my profile. If I want to share something with my friends, I can use a feature similar to MySpace's bulletin board, a space to share text-only updates about my life. The actual content of the update is hidden behind a link (the title of the update) so I can decide if I am interested in it or not.
I think centralized feeds have destroyed social media. This is especially true of feeds optimized to show "relevant" content.
I wanted to see how it would handle non-ascii text so I typed 안녕하세요 and it romanized it to annyeonghaseyo. (This is "hello" in Korean). I did not expect that.
I really like the idea of a text-only social network, so I hope this takes off. I think the author should consider supporting other languages though. Seeing romanized text isn't very helpful to people that actually want to read or write in other character sets. It's a cute feature though.
>Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks.
[...]
>Limitations
>480 characters per reply
ASCII only because it works everywhere
I could see this being a xenophobic thing, but I could also see it being more about the limited character set (for minimalism). I'm not making a claim about the motivations, but either way your desire seems counter to his vision.
It could also be a moderation thing. If the people working on the website mostly just speak English, then it will be much easier for them to moderate an English-only website.
> I think the author should consider supporting other languages though
Maybe it's a moderation problem?
I personally wouldn't feel comfortable running a non-english service, as I feel it would be too hard to moderate it effectively (or at least until you rearch the point where you have paid or volunteer moderators fluent in both the "main" language (to communicate rules and policy clearly) and any other supported langage). You can try auto-translating foreign text but you won't necessarily get a good translation, let alone handle cultural references (not Korean, but e.g. [1])and so on.
I tried カレーライス, 高田馬場, ﾀﾃｲｽｶﾝﾅﾆﾗｾ, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. Results were "kareraisu", "Gao Tian Ma Chang", and error message "Use spaces or shorter words" for the latter ones. Something funky is going on.
As seen on twitch, letting people put emojis in their name on a black and white site sets up a system where scanning eyes just see those eye-candies and skip over the rest. This is useful on twitch as it highlights the streamer's paying subscribers but here it's just whoever is more obnoxious.
I disagree. Using this thing for an hour, users with emojis are more distinguishable at a glance. I often face this issue with HN where I have to read the user's username to know if they're OP. Twitter usernames with emojis, however, is really obnoxious.
We can't embed media but we can still link to it? I welcome efforts to encourage higher-quality discussion on social media, but I don't see how this gets us there.
"Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks."
What does "untrustworthy" mean in this context, and how is Subreply easier to trust by comparison? The entire terms are "be nice or else". What exactly does "nice" mean and what are the consequences of violating this vague standard? It doesn't say. I don't understand how that's trustworthy.
And as with most moderation, how explicit can "I" be when advocating for genocide before getting booted? Do I have to just not spout slurs, or do I have to hide it even better?
I think moderators would do nicely to consider that not all negativity manifests as "niceness". If I were to say "trans women are just gay men trying to score straight men" (a real opinion of some) there's nothing contained just within that statement that makes it "un-nice", but the thought expressed is exceedingly vile. If someone else then replies "You're a horrible bigot" that would very much be a break with "niceness" or civility - is that allowed?
Moderation is harder than it looks, and I've seen forums descent into racist hellholes because moderators only cared about civility and niceness. This has slowly become my number one concern with new forums and places of discussion.
Tried registering, I usually try the username luc on sites to see if it's still free. But that is an "invalid username", no explanation given. So what, do I need to add numbers and special characters? Is my legal name too short? Is it already in use? This tells me nothing.
Also, the about page is contradictory:
> [brain][muscles] one or two emojis instead of avatars
> [...]
> ASCII only because it works everywhere
Hmm hmm, I see. Emojis work so everywhere that I have to [substitute] them to even talk about it here. Seems to me like "we don't do encoding because it's hard" more than because it works everywhere: any device with emoji support will also at least support the basic characters -- perhaps a unicode snowman won't exist in some fonts, but surely a character like µ should work... This is not just about other languages, either: °C, µm, different length dashes, etc. are regular non-ASCII symbols that occur in English.
And no, "ASCII only" is not meant in the sense of "plain text only". Any non-US ASCII is converted (ç->c, ÿ->y, ś->s, µ->u).
So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”?
Yikes.
These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband.
No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about the same complexity.
In 2020, why are you going out of your way to prevent people from typing the honest-to-goodness useful characters they want to communicate with? In English?! Where exactly does UTF-8 not work, that this site does?
I don't think it was a technical decision. It sounds like a stylistic choice, I suspect in the sentiment of "everyone on the platform should be able to understand each other, no one should be locked off from interesting conversations due to a language barrier", and from there they selected the lowest common denominator language.
To play devil's advocate, I don't think your exampled limitations are meaningful handicaps. Money can be discussed as GBP or EUR. With context it's easy to understand 90F as temperature, and unicode quotes are hardly a compelling restriction.
MacBooks sold in the UK have a £ sign on them, where a # is found on a US keyboard.
So in the country the English language originated in, you're not allowed to use a character on the default keyboard. (And that's just one -- the € is on there too, among others.)
We're not talking obscure key combos, we're talking characters in use everywhere you go every day. Would you really appreciate not being able to use the $ character on a forum? Every time you type a comment about a price, a key on your keyboard doesn't work, or the comment is rejected for an invalid character, or the character is silently deleted? Forget about it.
> I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”?
Those are all totally argument-for-the-sake-of-argument nit-picks, in my opinion.
To be honest, I rarely enough need to refer to UK pounds, Euro, or Yen - that I'd much more likely just type it out like that instead of try to remember/experiment what the magic key combination to produce them properly is. There is no a single English speaker in the world that wouldn't understand "fiancee" - even with non "proper" quotes around it.
> In 2020, why are you going out of your way to prevent people from ...
That argument seems to me to inevitable end with some combination of 4chan-ish image boards (because "people want to communicate in memes") or Snapchat-ish 100% video content (because "people want to communicate in video"). If you want those things - go use those things.
The OP is trying something different. You call it "exclusionary", and claim it's a decision based on zero good technical reasons. I suspect it's better described as "intentionally constrained" and a social experiment.
(And thinking bigger picture, there are totally "benefits" to using http and dial-up or slower bandwidth in some places. I have a pile of ESP32/LoRaWAN boards sitting here. If I want to maximise the range the LoRa radios can achieve, I'm looking at 27kbps or so throughput. If I want to use these on 433MHz where I live, I can't legally operate them at more than 1% duty cycle (due to .au restriction on the 433MHz ISM band and digital transmissions). I don't have enough CPU to do TLS, I don't have much more than about 255 bits per second of bandwidth. I could _probably_ use the OP's software under those limitations, and build a mesh based messaging network that'd work for anyone within ~ 3-20km of you. Totally niche application, but also possibly useful. Imagine a pocket sized battery powered non cellular non wifi multi mile range comms device that'll mesh with the ones your friends are carrying - at a festival where cellular is crushed or not available. Text messaging style social network gadgets for your camp at Burningman, for less then $40 per user? I'd build that...)
> To be honest, I rarely enough need to refer to UK pounds, Euro, or Yen - that I'd much more likely just type it out like that instead of try to remember/experiment what the magic key combination to produce them properly is.
The description says 'english only', not 'US only'. There are quite a few english speaking people all over the world. Not to mention that Britain, which I'd consider pretty english, definitely needs the pound sign quite often. And European keyboards produce the €-sign with ease, I even have it explicitly marked.
I can see your point about intensional constraints and social experiments, but I fully disagree with your point that a lack of UTF-8 is a 'nit-pick' or that is is unneeded for english conversation. You can work around it, sure, but that does not make it great.
> That argument seems to me to inevitable end with some combination of 4chan-ish image boards (because "people want to communicate in memes") or Snapchat-ish 100% video content (because "people want to communicate in video"). If you want those things - go use those things.
Including images or videos is a feature with quite some overhead, while romanizing UTF-8 input is putting in extra work just to disallow it. So this goes in quite a different direction.
It is, as you and everybody you know seems to have worked out, not really worth the effort, unless you are amused in just the right way by such things.
(I did start the French novel influenced by it, but my decades-rusty high school French comprehension was not up to the task...)
I agree with the overall sentiment of your comment but..
> It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about the same complexity.
At minimum, unicode does come with a lot of complexity in implementation, and a lot of potential vulnerabilities due to that complexity.
Not saying that excuses all websites, modern DBs handle unicode just fine after all, and the browser takes care of the rendering - (although some might crash your computer), and there are usually builtins for serverside web languages to help you sanitise strings... still, things would be way simpler with any fixed word <8bit encoding without glyph manipulation builtin. So yeah, it's complex, but it's usually worth it.
Unicode includes a lot of features that aren't universally desirable in applications that handle text. "Zalgo" text (many stacked combining subscript and superscript characters) can break out of the box it's contained in. Emoji characters render as distracting full-color icons that are easily confused for UI. Directional overrides let you plop an "everything after this should be printed backwards" control character into any string you control, providing endless opportunities to break UI and confuse other users, as in https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2014/01/the-rtlo-me...
IMO websites like this that challenge the assumption that all modern software is obligated to support all of Unicode are a valuable contribution to the world, if only because they might inspire the creation of a better, more well-scoped character set.
> IMO websites like this that challenge the assumption that all modern software is obligated to support all of Unicode are a valuable contribution to the world, if only because they might inspire the creation of a better, more well-scoped character set.
Oh God no.
We do not need any more character sets.
Most of what you mention can be fixed with a font, and the LTR-override stuff is in the realm of proper escaping which all web apps everywhere in the world need to do at all times absolutely goddamned regardless.
It's genuinely pretty tricky. There seems to be a valid use case in filenames if it needs to include both an English and Arabic or Hebrew component, for example. Which, if you work with bilingual documents between countries, is not unusual.
It's part of a broader question of visual strings having multiple unexpected Unicode representations, including Cyrillic letters masquerading as Latin, etc.
I've never heard of any solution, except for when a text component is supposed to be machine-interpretable (e.g. a file extension or domain), for the computer to display its interpretation in a special way (via icon, showing the extracted extension below the name, bolding the domain, etc.).
They're not great solutions, but there don't seem to really be any alternatives either.
I don’t know if you use Android based phones. It is common for these devices to practically never get updates. I think there are a lot of users stuck on older versions of Unicode?
> Using the term "extended ASCII" on its own is sometimes criticized, because it can be mistakenly interpreted to mean that the ASCII standard has been updated to include more than 128 characters or that the term unambiguously identifies a single encoding, neither of which is the case.
totally agree with you. i went back and saw that the author wanted a english-only forum. so yes, the service is english only and ascii works well in that case.
Really, as long as other people make text-only social networks for other languages, maybe that's a good thing. I'm not sure that having all languages on one social network really buys the user anything (esp. since they can switch to other social networks for other conversations).
It buys the company running the social network something, if they're trying to have literally billions of users. But I'm not sure that's a good thing for the users, either.
So if I want to post something in a combination of English and Hungarian and German, for my fairly large set of friends who speak all three, which network should I use?
English with a limitation to ASCII. There are many words in written English or topics that are not in ASCII, though. Subreply also disallows non-ASCII names with "First name should use English alphabet".
Clicked through and the username of someone who'd replied in the thread on the front page was a racial slur. That's enough to turn me away. I'm no prude, but allowing someone to drop a bomb like that in their handle is a big broken window. Doesn't instill hope that I'd have a lot of positive interactions with the folks in this community.
Bringing back social isn't about getting rid of images and focusing on ASCII text, it's about getting rid of URLs and article snippets, and refocusing solely on user created content. Remember when streams were only filled with updates from old friends and family with things like birthday parties, vacations, graduations, concerts, restaurant meals, etc., and nothing else? (Sort of like Instagram still is, but with text allowed, two-way authorization only and without the "influencers".)
Now you log in (FB, Twitter, etc.) only to find out which of your casual acquaintances are the most gullible, racist, sexist, homophobic, sociopathic or worse by the news items they're spewing into their increasingly extreme echo chamber. Sure, the same thing could be conveyed by a selfie wearing a MAGA hat, but it would happen much, much less often.
All these services would have to do to get back to their social roots is provide a default filter for news items. But they refuse, and in fact are increasingly manipulating your feed instead to increase "engagement" (read: anger and hate).
I'm amazed that a social-only network hasn't taken off yet that provides this basic functionality. It feels like the time is right for something like this.
I'm not the gp, but i like the look and feel of the site. I also love the idea. I've been using group messages (mms) for this purpose and its been working great. It has the advantage that nobody needs to go to a website or download an extra app, but it has the drawback that sometimes people forget that I started a group message and will use that thread to start a new conversation with someone and people get messages that were not intended for them.
I'm interested in the claim that its impossible to share content with someone that doesn't have permission. How do you protect against copy/paste or screenshots?
About the sharing, I am sorry, but I didn't want to claim that it is impossible to share. I will check the phrasing, but the idea is that it doesn't have a sharing feature (like retweeting or the share button on phones). You can't click on a button to forward the content. You still can copy/paste and screenshot normally.
> there is no way to share content outside of the list of who posted it.
I can see how I misunderstood. Still it seems like it might be a good compromise and would get me around the issue I described with mms of unintentional sharing. I'm going to see if I can get some of my family and friends to sign up with me.
> I'm amazed that a social-only network hasn't taken off yet that provides this basic functionality
You'd have a hell of a time making it profitable. It'd have to be run like a charity, which would cost nearly nothing in the scheme of things, but we just don't seem to have any people who want to do good and happen to have enough money to do it.
It'll take a rich rebel who gets tired of billionaire fine dining and says fuck it, I'm for the people who don't have a penny to their name, not you rich schmucks.
True, but my terminal, web browser, phone, and text editor don't render base64-encoded images in-line, nor is base64 encoding part of the Unicode spec. Emojis behave much more like text than like images.
I've been trying to make something along those lines at podaero.com, and I'm actually trying to get HN users to join some of the small groups... see here if interested https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod
I did try signing up. The second I ran into the activity requirement quota I quickly got out of there. That's a huge red flag for me, why is there a quota imposed on me? Are you paying users or something? Why expect free work to be done?
I'm experimenting with it and I might get rid of it. It's mostly just to try to keep the group active, because it's a small group and if the activity level dies out, the group dies out.
But thanks for the feedback, I'm making a note of it.
I once watched a livejournal group die in < 24 hours because the mod suddenly decided it was too dead and put in a rule saying anyone who didn't keep up a certain level of posting would be evicted. the thing is, it really didn't matter if no one posted much; posts were aggregated with all the other groups and journals people followed, so when someone did post something it was seen and the large lulls between posts didn't bother anyone. the minute the new rule was announced there was a general stampede for the door and the mod left there saying "but I was only trying to revive the group!"
my general takeaway from that was that people might get annoyed when you tell them what they are not allowed to do on your site, but most of them will roll their eyes and put up with it. if you tell them what they have to do they will simply drop the site and never look back.
I think in this scenario, where some sort of rule is imposed upon a group that's already been established, people would be justifiably pissed off.
I do my best to make the activity requirements clear upfront, so the only people who will be upset are those who choose not to sign up anyway. For me, the far bigger challenge is learning how to define these "rules" in a way that makes the group sustainable over the long run - which is to the benefit of everyone involved. While the idea of having to post once every 25 days may seem unnecessary, if 100 people followed it to a tee, you're going to have a group that remains active indefinitely.
I do see your point, and I agree that if any sorts of hard rules are to be imposed upon a discussion, it needs to be done tactfully.
I just signed up for your hackernews pod. Here is some feedback, if you want it:
1. Why is there a minimum commitment to post? It makes it more difficult to overcome the inertia required to sign up in the first place.
2. Why do I need to write an intro before I can see any content? Without seeing any content, I don't know if it's worth spending any time writing up an intro. This really rubbed me the wrong way. I haven't written an intro yet, although I will probably half-ass one just to get a look at what kind of discussions are taking place.
The minimum commitment of posting once every 25 days is mostly an incentive to keep people active. In my experience, if these groups go a certain amount of time without activity, they're effectively dead anyway.
Regarding the requirement to post an introduction - it's my experience that without this requirement, there's often barely enough activity in the beginning to even get things started in a given group. While I do lose about 30% of people who sign up and decide not to post an intro, the introduction posts are usually the nucleus for all discussion that follows.
As far as half-ass writing an intro - that's completely fine, and a lot of people do that too. I should make it more clear that that's 100% fine - if you want to write "hello, just curious about what's going on here" that works.
This is cool. I'm glad people are working in this direction.
A common theme that I've noticed among recent upstart social efforts is a focus on platform and/or policy differentiation. I personally believe this is not very important during the phase where a social network is working to reach critical mass. It seems to me that most successful social networks got their start by offering users unique content, by targeting existing, tight-knit communities, or through some combination of the two. Platform and policy help shape the social network, but there needs to be a network to be shaped in the first place - they don't form magically.
How about adding a `latest top level posts' page? Many posts that you see on the search page don't make sense without seeing the post they're in reply to.
Oops! I made an account and logged out from within Settings so I could read over more of the about page, but I got stuck with Internal Server Error on the whole site. I deleted the "identity" cookie from site storage, which was an empty string after logging out. I logged back in and it seems to be working as normal. Other than that, I really like the vibe of Subreply, nice work.
I understand that they limit the text to ascii. But many other languages can be (sort of) written using only ascii characters. How do they want to enforce that? Do they block users who speak other languages? It sounds callous to me. A great thing about twitter is precisely that it allows to form communities of speakers of tiny, globally irrelevant languages.
Was thinking about a dating app where you only get to reveal a few photos/ability to message after answering a short multiple choice quiz managed by the user. The questions can be arbitrary but the point is that the pursued gets to control which pursuer can get to their profile via question navigation. This could help throw off unwanted pursuers.
What will happen is that people will just post links to imgur/giphy etc like they used to when Twitter came out.
Eventually for convenience they’d start getting embedded on the page.
The tracking implications with embedding media would occur. The media would either be proxied (same/more? bandwidth usage, less storage needed though) or just self hosted and then we’re back to Twitter again.
You assume that they'd support embedding even though they say their MO is to be text-only? I could see them just resisting support for that, and the type of content adapting accordingly
I would like to see a video-faces-only social network.
Setting aside the topic of lookism and other bias issues,
I assert that the apparently intrinsic and inevitable degradation of low-bandwidth communication into tribalism and discord,
would be greatly retarded by a universal requirement for real-time high-bandwidth messaging.
Yes, this would break a lot of other qualities/features; but I'd be willing to give it a try.
(Stretch goal, looking-the-camera/image-in-the-eye as an additional requirement...)
I know this is counter to the frictionless, skim and summarize and react many-parallel-sources sipping-from-the-stream relationship we have evolved with out various extent social media platforms....
...but it's about time we tried something really different, in pursuit of finding a better balance between our technologies and our humanity, to put it grandly.
It’s nice that people are trying different things but the N word is plastered all over the site and when I emailed Lucian about it, he was curt and dismissive and told me to use a “delete” button that doesn’t work. Subreply has no guards against abuse.
I like the premise of sort of simplifying things a bit..but nowadays I'm not signing up for any centralized system/network if i can avoid it. For me, an important criteria would be if it can federate (that is, not be centralized), and additionally, ideally if i can self-host my own instance. Gone are the days where i blindly sign up for systems that are centralized. I should clarify that i'm by no means bashing the people behind this effort - kudos to them for trying new stuff! With no offense to them, I'm merely noting that if this effort were combined with the fediverse efforts, then it would interest me.
> It might raise the quality of the content on Minichan.
Coming from an imageboard myself, I think about this often. The "serious" users keep comparing themselves to Reddit when they should strive to be more like HN, instead. Now HN is home -- literally; it's my homepage.
Anything with the word -chan never had good moderation. HN is good because of the moderation and the work dang does. He's pulled me up multiple times and it reminds me to keep discussion in-line with the vision of the website.
Look at the top post of that board. It's a different crowd - sure there might be some cross contamination but it's definitely not a site you'd expect to see the same content and level of discourse on.
Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable, and besides, having everyone use the same interface and see images alongside is different from having people use a multitude of different clients that present binary attachments in various different ways.
With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site. The crowd would be small enough that I don’t think there would be much point in decentralizing it. Besides, with centralization then mods still have a fighting chance of keeping the quality of the posts up to par, if they felt so inclined.
The value of anonymous discussion is that every thread is a fresh start. You can express yourself about what’s on your mind without be constrained by your own desire to make everything you say fit into some bigger picture of an identity of self. If that makes sense. But also, it is different from making throwaway accounts on sites where all other people are using identities. Admittedly on Minichan there are many people that use names and tripcodes. But the ability for threads to exist where everyone is on an equal footing is valuable.
I’m thinking not so much in terms of discussion itself actually but in terms of creative potential. At their peak, chan style imageboards can be amazingly creative.
Imagine an imageboard with people from HN, where people were producing graphics and music like in the Demoscene, but together and for no purpose other than creativity itself. No names or anything. Just pure unfiltered creativity.
Yeah. I was being snarky without enough context to make myself clear there... Sorry.
> Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable,
What mechanisms do you see in place to stop this being an inevitable result for Minichan as well? It's a social problem not a technical one...
> With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site.
Maybe. pg's recent comment about the amount of time and effort it has taken to curate this community into some semblance of civility suggest even "we, the magnificent HM community" are subject to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory as well... (I've had a few "bad days" and needed pulling into line by dang or others over the years...)
> Imagine an imageboard with people from HN
From what pg says, that'll most likely end up closer to 4Chan that HN - without several people in full time (well paid) roles who's job description includes community management/moderation (and who are good at it).
HN is a magical place _only_ because YC values it enough to have people like pg and dang and scott spend as vast chunk of their paid time making it this way. Those of us who benefit from this place owe a debt to pg's vision and YC's commitment, and are lucky it was founded by someone like pg instead of moot. (And at the same time, people who benefit from 4Chan owe similar thanks for diametrically opposed visions there.)
For me, they recur maybe once every 5-10 years or so and last about the same sort of time period?? Here since 2009. Twitter circa 2008 or so. Burningman in the early 2000s. ASR on usenet in the late '90s
Things change, they run their course - and I change and the things I want become different. Some people rant and demand things "go back the way they were", but by then the people who made it "the way things were" have moved on to a new thing, and new people have grown up and started building new things they think are better than the old people had.
Hold on to your dream, but realise that you may have to either chase it around the internet as it moves (and work out how to find it when you one day wake up are realise it's gone from the old place), or make it yourself as part of a team prepared to put in the hard work required to shape it the way you think is right.
(While I personally think 4Chan is a total shit show, I have no doubt moot invested enormous effort in making it or helping it become what _he_ wanted in the world. A whole different sort of effort than pg/deng/scott/YC/others put in here, but I have no doubt moot complained bitterly to his friends how hard it was dealing with things like lawyers and hosting companies and all the other things that become a problem when you decide you need to make a thing like 4Cahn exists in the world...)
Always considered doing this sort of thing but with a more myspace-y lean but never did because I knew the users would still find ways to ruin it in multiple ways.
Off the top of my head people could still just link to media and it would make grooming far easier without any expectations of profile photos.
This is all compounded by the fact that text is much harder to moderate than images as you can't immediately read the situation at a glance and it's not like moderating a normal social network was ever an easy task anyway.
These guys are building a subscription-based social network. It's a freemium model. Best part is that they are sharing 70% of their subscription fees with original content creators.
Every time someone likes your post you'll make money. It's an interesting idea.https://sivaapp.xyz/
As i understand, there's some evidence that visual social networks are preferred by females, e.g. pinterest.
I recall a hypothesis that it has to do with women (or rather, neurotypes bell-curving around female gender identification) tending to use social media to discuss interpersonal and emotion-based content rather than facts and knowledge-sharing. There is more value placed on relationships with others when using social networks, which perhaps is bolstered by visual elements.
I do wonder whether text-based social networks (e.g., some subreddits, slashdot, HN, mailing lists) are biased toward making a certain sort of mind and neurotype more comfortable. And without those neurotypes, what ways of seeing might that community also now be lacking...
disclosure: i usually identify more with feminine ways of relating to knowledge and people, than masculine ones.
They should do some kind of username filtering though. It's much easier because everything is in English, so a blacklist of words could do the job. I found several offensive username and names within few minutes of browsing the site.
