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Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
218 points by shanebellone on Dec 15, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 378 comments
I have a concept for a social network that would eliminate many pain points. I'm sure others do too.

How could we build a communal product for the public? Theoretically, this approach would result in a better product. Practically, it seems nearly impossible.

What are your thoughts?

Edit:

Let me give an example that I have been thinking about since 2009.

It requires a fundamental change from the reach model towards concentric social circles. The social network would allow users to arrange into small topical groups called social circles. These social circles would have a cap of 10 (arbitrary number) members. Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation, abuse, and moderation.

This model closely mirrors real social interactions and allows for both private and intimate communication. It also offers a profitable advertising opportunity. A social circle reflects its members’ interests and context.




Fleeting idea that could be combined with that: a web-of-trust social network where you can only "friend" people in real life, by tapping phones.

When you do so, the app might say, "The person you just met claims to be Joe Schmoe, do you want to vouch for them?" If you approve them, they can message you and vice versa. A friend of Joe's can see you in his friend list, and try to message you, and you can accept it if you trust Joe, but they won't be a first-tier friend until you meet them. Your tweet-like posts can be seen by anyone, or your friends only, or people within N connections of you, as you prefer.

I think it could be implemented in a distributed way, with no central server, if some proportion of the users are willing to serve their traffic from a VPS rather than just their phone. If someone cheats (uses a fork of the app that lets them "friend" people they haven't met, create fake identities, lie about their friends graph, etc), it wouldn't affect you unless you trust them. Over enough time and with enough use, this might be good enough to figure out whether someone distant from you (e.g. someone you're about to make an Ebay purchase from) is using their real identity or not, as the "main" part of the overall friend graph that a real user with a lot of friends is connected to would be structurally distinguishable from the subnets created by cheaters.

(This is not a cherished idea I've been working on for years and am prepared to defend, just a random idea I thought I'd post in case it sparks an idea for someone, so be polite in ripping it to shreds pls)


The first problem I see is separating my online identity with my real identity. I really don't want anyone at my job finding out which dog I am on the internet.

My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting. :)

The second is friends of friends can get really awkward. There are some people who are friends with me that are also friends with people who never want to see me again.


> My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting.

Shit posting is one of the biggest forms of toxicity online. It would be nice if it went away by tying posts to real people. Some people don't care and would shitpost anyway, but most people only shitpost because nobody knows who they really are.


I think maybe it depends how you define shit posting. If you mean trolling or posting extremely negative and low-effort content, then I suppose I agree with you about it being toxic.

But if shitposting is just off-color jokes or talking about topics you might want to keep private, I don't see that as a problem. I think a lot of great internet content wouldn't exist without some form of anonymity. I certainly wouldn't share genuine insights into my job without anonymity. People wouldn't share sexual content or secrets. Many people wouldn't share anything at all no matter how tame or appropriate. My wife over thinks when she writes and is always afraid she isn't wording things well. She posts absolutely nothing outside of Reddit.


My definition of shit posting is the stuff I say on Reddit. The highest rated comment on my previous account there would likely get me banned here. :)

Edit: I should note that shit posting on Reddit has a long and glorious tradition. It’s expected and highly upvoted.


I'd say that then this hypothetical new social network just wouldn't be suitable for Reddit-like shitposting.

Keep Reddit and Twitter for that, this-new-thing for real-identity real talk.

I don't see a problem and I'd love it.


I am not even sure how this is an actual position to be defended.

Writing anonymously or with pseudonyms is as old as feather pens. It allowed people to denounce tyrants and allowed women to publish their writings.

To force everyone to show an id to publish is either very naive or ill-intented to push us into a full Orwellian framework.

'Shitposting' or scorn writing is the price to pay so that anonymity is there for when you _truly_ need it.


> It would be nice if it went away by tying posts to real people. Some people don't care and would shitpost anyway, but most people only shitpost because nobody knows who they really are.

If this was true and the only explanation, HN should be much worse than it is and Facebook should be much better than it is.

Even as a person who hardly ever get in trouble with mods I have come to deeply appreciate the possibility to have accounts or profiles totally disconnected from reality.

Many stories we see couldn't have been shared if a hard link to a real identity was necessary, and many questions could not ve asked.

For example random22username12 asking about some technical aspect about some software is not a problem.

But if he is Firstname Lastname from Some Company it might get him in trouble, as it might tell others what they are working on.


The bar for "shitposting you don't want your coworkers to know about" is so low nowadays that it's almost a free speech issue to allow anonymous accounts.

If you post about not like drag shows in front of children, that itself is harmless enough in a vacuum but polarizes people to a serious extent


Facebook does tie posts to real people. It doesn’t work. People are just as toxic.


This comment rhymes with the justifications for Real Name policies. They don't work.

All real name policies do is make many LGBTQ+ people feel unwelcome.


As people who don’t do this, I prefer to stay anonymous. Anonymous writing has a long and good history with some bad apples. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwafrr


Oh my god, yes. It's like most online content has to be communicated in crappy memes, sarcastic quotes, and weird existential dread responses. It drives me insane.


Grow a thick skin. Instead of shielding people from real world things expose them to it. In a few generations they get used to it/learn to use it.

Like Google deliberately fucking up their image search and not releasing a proper face search... because rainbow ponies would fall from the sky.


It would appear there is some irony in this SoftTalker.


What do you define as shit posting?


Not the person you're replying to, but I agree with them. For me shitposting is discussing in bad faith.


But what is it?


Being contrarian for no other reason than to annoy, or trying to get under someone’s skin, ignoring their arguments and riding roughshod over what they’re trying to say. Things people avoid doing in real life because very soon after doing them you find yourself disliked.


I had a conversation recently about the problems of social media and the growing extremes of political viewpoints. We agreed the a good part of the problem is partially caused by the online echo chamber but mostly by the increasing physical isolation of people in the real world. In the past the majority of men would have worked in manual labor with lots of other people, women would have worked at home and spent a lot more time getting to know their neighbours, now we work in isolation on a screen and stay at home without integrating with a community on a daily basis like times past. This allows people's views to go unchallenged and reduces the middle ground we all depended upon. Previously our vees would be challenged and our standing in our community would depend on our views. To go back to your point about anonymity should we be posting stuff online that we know our physical peers would have a problem with. Anonymity has its place I'm just not sure where the line is drawn.


To some degree, I agree. But I also grew up before social media. Very little has changed about the fundamental ugliness of human behavior we try to tuck into a corner.

As someone who was seriously hurt by forced conformity, I’m not exactly pining for the way things used to be.

It wasn’t that long ago when people were expected to drink themselves to death rather than seek help.


I mean, nothing would stop you from making a fake identity, and friending other anonymous people, and posting spicy memes. But you can do that on mastodon today, right? This is for the cases where you want to prove your identity. If most people use it that way, then the anonymous people would be little subnets that are either separate from the main graph or connected by only a few nodes. Typical users would* have dozens of people vouching for them, who each have dozens of people vouching for them, etc, which is strong evidence that they're who they say they are.

* in some hypothetical future where this gets made and is wildly successful


> My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting. :)

Hey, here’s a thought. Maybe if there were any locally observable consequences to that behavior you’d stop and the Internet would be a better place…


The “shit posting” referring to my dark, sarcastic humor. It gets upvotes on Reddit but I try to keep it off Hacker News. :)

I worry more about my parents reading about how I see my childhood or a future employer knowing I’m bipolar.

And there are consequences to my behavior online.

Kayodé Lycaon is my identity in the furry fandom. People know me in real life under this name. I’m published under this name.

In a lot of ways, my legal identity is the pseudonym. I think of myself as Kayodé more than [legal name].


That's exactly the point of small social circles. You can segment your audience as a broadcaster based on shared interests, language, and understanding.

The vast majority of the Internet doesn't need to read your shit posting. However, a small group of friends might find that appealing. If no one finds that content useful, amusing, or interesting... you'd be screaming at a wall. Isn't that exactly how it should be?


That's... not relevant? OP was talking about a system that requires tapping phones to connect and using friends of friends to form secondary connections.

This is why I have a burner sim for online accounts requiring a phone number. (Looking at you Telegram...)


Whoops, my bad.

I also maintain two phone numbers but for different reasons. I hate spam.


Threema has a concept of "levels" for contacts:

> Level 1 (red): The ID and public key have been obtained from the server because you received a message from this contact for the first time or added the ID manually. No matching contact was found in your address book (by phone number or email), and therefore you cannot be sure that the person is who they claim to be in their messages.

> Level 2 (orange): The ID has been matched with a contact in your address book (by phone number or email). Since the server verifies phone numbers and email addresses (via an SMS or email with the activation link), you can be reasonably sure that the person is who they claim to be.

> Level 3 (green): You have personally verified the ID and public key of the person by scanning their QR code. Assuming their device has not been hijacked, you can be very sure that messages from this contact were really written by the person that they indicate.


You seem to be under the impression that real life access is the indicator of closeness of relationship. It is usually not.

Out of my set of close friends the vast majority I have never met in person. Most family I might add are in entirely separate states. Most of my IRL friends no longer live near me.


> You seem to be under the impression that real life access is the indicator of closeness of relationship.

No, just the hardest part to fake. You can copy my photo, hack my email, mimic my prose style, and steal my credit card, but you can't get the people in my school's PTA to say, "Yeah that's him" in real life.


This resonated with me. Well said.


This marks you as a tremendous outlier.


Imagine moving to a different country/state just before this app becomes popular. All your friends & family are now far away.

Most of the people I've become friends with since my 30s have moved long distances to be where I happened to meet them. Melting pot cities like Los Angeles consist largely of people who moved there from other states!

This seems like a silly design, adding a huge barrier to getting started.


Reminds me a bit of PGP and a key signing party. In that case the goal is to verify government docs to help someone verify they are who they say they are, but you can also give greater trust levels to the people you actually know.


I would hate this because I’m physically nowhere near any HNers I’d trust, and vanishingly few HNers at all.


You wouldn't be first-tier friends with people you only know from the internet. You'd be first-tier friends with neighbors and cousins and the other parents at your kids' school. Then when I prove (keybase style) that I, HN user ineptech, am also "ineptech" on this social network, you would know that I really am a 48-year-old guy in Portland and not some other person because I have also friended all my irl friends, and our friends-of-friends-of-friends eventually overlap.

Maybe "friend" is the wrong term. Maybe "vouch". You could still message me, but you wouldn't vouch for me, because you don't know from HN whether I am who I say I am.


I don't speak to my neighbors.

My blood family consists of violent homophobes that would shoot my house up if they ever learned I'm gay (or where I live).

I have a dedicated online persona (fursona, really) that I keep compartmentalized from people I distruat.

Some of my friends are trans.

Some of my friends have abusive ex-partners and stalkers.

Some of my friends are sex workers who need social media to find customers but don't want their real names leaked.

How would your proposal serve any of these use cases? From where I stand, it'd be more of a hindrance.


This idea may not fulfill every use case.


It's fine if it doesn't fulfill all use cases, but demonstrating any thought to some of them would help flesh out the details of what's being proposed.

Are you building a social network, or a chain of trust?

Are identities fungible, or irrevocably linked to a person's legal name and physicality?

Etc.


The whole point of vouching for someone is so they can prove they are who they say they are. If you don't want to do that, then don't do that. Or, if you have two identities, I suppose you'd have two accounts.

Anyway, things don't have to be for everyone. In the unlikely scenario in which this gets built, there would still be other websites too.


> Anyway, things don't have to be for everyone. In the unlikely scenario in which this gets built, there would still be other websites too.

Just so we're clear: Do you realize this is how systemic prejudice gets built?

"Our policies disproportionately exclude [insert minority group] in particular? Well it isn't because we're [insert -ist word here]! We love [group]. We're baffled why they would believe otherwise."


You've misunderstood me, no one is being excluded and there's no real name policy. Use a pseudonym, make two accounts, make ten or a hundred if you like. What you can't do is use the app to prove that you really are John Smith, if you didn't sign up as John Smith. And to the extent that one of the main features of the app is to prove your identity, the app would not be useful to someone who doesn't want to do that.


Your example just shows the perils of monopoly social networks.

Today you have Facebook and Twitter (and whatever the kids use these days) with not much in between. If you’re not on those you don’t exist as a person.

If there were more options to choose from you could have a place with all your furry friends that is completely separate from the other aspects of your life like coworkers and family. No need to link between the two, nobody needs to know what you get up to on the other places unless you wanted them to.


But why ? Why would you expose your entire real life social circle to the internet?


If you don't want people to know that you're friends with Dave, don't friend Dave, or don't use it at all. This isn't supposed to replace pseudo-anonymous networks like Twitter, this is more like Facebook without all the bullshit. The use case is "I know Dave, and I don't care who knows that I'm friends with Dave, and I'd like to let him know I won't make it to the PTA meeting without involving an enormous advertising corporation".


I think the point is that you wouldn't be. The network, from your perspective, will be quite small.


The fact of the "vouch" could provide the validation without identifying the people from whose circle overlap it was derived.


Around here, I'm pretty unwelcome at things like tech meetups. I stopped going, after experiencing the "circle of avoidance" thing, a few times.

New York ageism is even worse than Silicon Valley.

No one wants to know me, and I'm OK with that, as I get a lot done, anyway, and the people that matter to me (all over the world) are part of my circle.


Sorry to hear your experience has been that. As someone approaching that point, I wonder whether I will have to find other outlets besides the traditional tech meetups that I was attending more regularly in the times before covid.

Since you do bring experience, I would recommend (if you haven't tried yet), to give talks instead of just attending. I have found that the speakers tend to be well received regardless as they bring value. I did a lightning talk once and had the most positive interactions after my talk than any of the other meetups I attended.


Yeah...the thing about the talks (I'm quite good at that stuff), is that they also skew young, and generally, at least around here, they are considered as currency, so there's a lot of competition for them. I could really give a rat's ass about ego, and I'm not looking for work, so I'm not interested in mud-wrestling some hungry young turk, with a syllabus full of Buzzword Stew, for a speaking engagement.

I'm good at Swift and native Apple stuff. I've given courses on it, in the past. I was actually shocked to find out that no one is really interested in that, out here. I could go into the city, but, quite frankly, I'd rather eat ghost peppers.


Chris, I read your blog and many of your posts here. You are a good writer. Please don't stop.

First, it sucks that you are facing that age discrim IRL. In the tech world, "doing talks" is a bit like publishing in scientific research. It builds a brand name for yourself and increases your value. This is why the young and aggressive (and mostly men) want to do it. Plus, it is a form of fame and adoration. The same group wants that too.

Second, I had a idea reading this post: Did you ever consider "doing a talk" with an audience of zero? Record it exactly like you are giving a talk, then post to your blog or YouTube. People would watch it; I know it. The difference: You couldn't mix with an excited, buzzing crowd after your talk, but maybe the comments section would be interesting. If you get lucky (great talk), it will pop-up on HN. For example, you said you are "good at Swift and native Apple stuff". Watch a few YouTube videos on the topic. Find areas of weakness. That is an easy way to generate ideas.


Thanks. I’ve considered doing stuff like Vimeo/YouTube stuff, and may do so, but it’s a lot of work. I’ve had a full dance card, the last couple of years, and that has even affected my text postings (which is why I came up with my “Shorties”[0] series).

I enjoy writing, but don’t enjoy video production as much (but I haven’t really done enough to say that, definitively).

When I give talks and classes, I spend a lot of time, preparing. I spent close to a month, preparing this 90-minute Bluetooth class[1].

I have just been a bit strapped for time, lately.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/shorties/

[1] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master


I can relate to this. Most people don't like me. The problem is they don't like me for the things I love about myself.

Minimizing social friction produces lubricant, not "quality" humans.


What is a quality that turns people off to you but you don't think is worth changing?


I am extremely direct, often play devil's advocate, and rarely react with emotional equivalence.


Excuse me for being direct, but do you mean to say you don’t care about other people, only whether what they say is accurate and whether they can communicate it without emotional reaction?


I view all interactions as transactional. Some interactions are net-positives, but most are net-negatives. I value those who reciprocate and avoid those who do not.

From my perspective, your question is quite nuanced. I do not value people (in general) because I place no value on life. We are born, we live, and then we die. In time, we will all be forgotten. The outcome is absolute.


Out of curiosity, do you work closely with hardware/embedded systems or similar concepts?


I have not. Why do you ask? You have certainly piqued my interest.


This level of optimization away from other humans in my experience tends to come from specific forms of introverted high intelligence (interaction with others is a net loss) but also specialization functionally/professionally away from interaction with humans (typically toward machines, or at least into more constrained work environments).


I haven't yet found something I feel passionately about. I recently finished refactoring a pid-free analytics application but now find myself without motivation. I love solving problems but dislike the rest.

I'll look into the niches you mentioned. Thanks for the reply and your time.


This is actually really interesting.

Marrying digital with physical is an interesting approach. The problem of proximity is a unique point of friction which might also temper digital communication.

If the application "lived" on cellphones and communicated with a P2P protocol, users could truly own their data (excluding the data they share with their network).


I dont use telephones. Nice knowing you guys, I guess. We can still think of the good times.


I imagine that some subset of users (1/10th?) would need to aggregate and serve their own and first-tier friends' content from a cheap VPS, and the Kardashians and Elons of the world might need a CDN of some kind, but if it's limited to short text posts I imagine it would be a tractable problem.


One of the primary utilities of a social network is being able to connect with people who aren't around you. If everyone on my Twitter was within shouting distance why would I need to Tweet at all?


I'm not sure that would work for me. One of the things I like is actually making new friends. Google Plus was absolutely perfect for that: I got to know a lot of people with similar interests (hobbies, politics) to mine.

In fact, I'm not even connected to my real life friends on any social media, as far as I'm aware. Maybe they're not even on it. They may be wiser than I.


To shreds you say? And his wife?

Hearing a lot on this thread about folding real life back into social networks, making the system designed to keep people on the happy, healthy, human-scaled social path. Today's SMBC lines up pretty neatly - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/addicted


scuttlebutt[0] is like this.

0:https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/


You can add someone on SSB just by adding their public key though. That's not what the comment above is talking about


Currently working on implementing a similar feature, where instead of direct interaction it's location based relative to that users recent posts. That way if you don't want to be "found" you don't post and vice-versa.


I've always liked this idea! I think it should be device-level too, and not have a separate ephemeral identity. In other words if you get a new phone you have to start over.


This is an interesting concept. The biggest disadvantage would be losing a digital archive every two years (or as necessary).


Its sister idea is holding on to phones for longer. The big drawback would be losing the phone, I think.


So does the person who finds the phone inherits the identity? Can we have influencers selling off their circles? When I get robbed is my mugger now friends with my grandma?


Isn't he already, right now?


Well, right now they would need to unlock it and I can sign out of the app somewhere else.


The phone would have the same physical security features. But 'signing out' would be more of an ostracism thing.


Ah, ok, so it's just a pain to get back into the social network. Isn't this just adding friction for friction's sake?


No, it's adding friction for honesty's sake. You don't have six thousand friends. You have five friends, tops, and like two hundred acquaintances tops[0].

There's nothing to "get back into"-- it was all just a lie to flatter you. The network effect stops working for you in the low three digits. You're just part of a people directory owned by some corporation.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number


For Facebook I keep my friends list light - less than 50 people, but there are people who I live a far ways away from - my parents for instance are 5 hours away. I don't want to have to drive to them just to prove they should be part of my social network.


I mean, if you want, you could choose to not use this nonexistent product. You don't have to hypothetically use it.


True, and I probably wouldn't. Just throwing out what I see is a potential issue.


Interesting, but how do we know if friend of a friend is real or not? I think it's also vulnerable to bots or malicious infiltration


You only "friend" people in real life who you trust not to act maliciously. If you unwisely trust someone who is malicious, you encounter various problems, just like in real life. But it would be very difficult for a malicious person to construct a realistic-looking subnet of sockpuppets because that would require getting lots of real people to make that unwise decision.

Not saying this is perfect, but I predict that the vast majority of users who "friend" 20+ people irl who also have friends will be fine, and borderline cases will be borderline.


One thing that might be valuable on this is to do sms contact syncing where people can provide soft proof that they share the same social circles. In essence, if both parties have John Doe in their phone as 123-456-7890 , we can extrapolate that they both know him. Extend this across many contacts and it might be possible to see how much their direct networks overlap. One way of proving a person is indeed who they claim to be is by using a service like authillo.com


An invitation model would inherently link bad actors. With that being said, I dislike the approach.


On the subject of "tapping phones". I had the idea that you could generate a nice pairing key by using the aligned inertial measurements to validate identity over a public channel (like some wireless protocol). Think of it like Bump 2.0. You could then share contact information, messages, whatever...

In practice it might be a little bit more than a instantaneous bump, and more of a quick shake. Like a handshake, but with phones. Weird, but kinda cool... maybe.


I still think there is an issue of trust.

What happens when you meet a bad actor vs someone you have known your entire life?


> I think it could be implemented in a distributed way, with no central server,

Fixed by Bison Relay released yesterday.


I think what would really be great is a social media site that doesn't offer direct image or video hosting. A bit like how reddit used to be. You just have link aggregation, voting, and comments. That's it. Maybe in a nice, clean, minimal UI as well. This would lend itself to tech folk I think. If only it existed.


Great idea. To add: I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean. Also maybe it would be great to have a voting system where one could downvote as well! But only after a certain number of upvotes I think.


Let's also have zero notification whatsoever that someone answered to your comment so you have to keep engaged in constantly looking thru it manually


Maybe a really unintuitive system for ranking too? Like make it unclear why some posts are ranked higher than others, and why some are somehow greyed out even though there isn't an obvious way to downvote or report content. Also make it so you have to manually minimize the top reply in order to see the second most popular topline reply because there should be absolutely no limit to seeing the amount of subreplies.


The thing that gets me about the unintuitive system for ranking is that you have zero idea how long something will be on the front page. It could be 3 hours old, #4 on the page, with a few hundred upvotes and more points than almost all of the votes on the front page, and then just disappear an hour later.

And once something drops off the front page, it gets seen by almost no one. I keep trying to stop myself from spending too much time on comments (editing them for clarity and grammar, finding sources that people can follow instead of just relying on my claims, rereading the person I'm responding to in order to make sure I actually got what they were saying), because it's easy to spend 30 minutes trying to make a solid comment only to find out that the whole discussion has now disappeared and no one is likely going to read it.


I have no interest in what quantity of people end up reading my comments. What difference does it make to me if it’s a popular thread or an unpopular one?


Zero notifications, if such a thing existed, would help an online community stay constructive since the default behavior would be to forget conversations. This would help folks get some distance and perspective rather than being constantly reminded that they have an argument to win.

Another nice thing about zero notifications in our new social media app is that the development effort for that feature is very low.


This is a very neat "engagement" feature idea! Love it. I would probably then just bookmark the site and check it constantly.


But no ads. Cause we aren't in it for the money.


...well, okay. A few ads, but only for semi-relevant job openings.


http://hnreplies.com/


aha! good idea!

the web is… not free really… but more free than the wall gardens.

i think its biggest weakness is that notifications don’t really work there.

but that bug is now a feature. nice!


This would certainly be a site where hackers like me would come to read the news.


> I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean.

My idea was to give people IP-like addresses like the early internet. And start off (until we find something better) with the ol’ Class A, B, and C networks of sizes roughly 16M, 64k, and 256 respectively.

The value I think is in having groups as small as 256 and each group has an admin/moderator. Why are we ‘automating’ people out of a job in the tech space when we could be ‘automating’ them into one.

Keep in mind, the existing IP networks stay. This is just a logical layer.

There are better ways to do it but I think this is an interesting start. There’s even a planned obsolescence built in as the world has more people than the 4 billion or so that a 32 bit address space gives.

Which to me is perfect. A chance to try some new things but a built in expiration date so nothing becomes too entrenched.


Actually it could lend itself to a great business model as well — hackers both start startups, and often are looking for jobs at startups. You could use it for lead generation for startup founders to join your accelerator (once that concept exists), and an added benefit to founders would be access to hiring from the pool of hackers on the site. Win/win.

Sounds like bit of a schlep though. Would need to draw an audience e.g. by producing a ton of your own content early on. Lots of legal processes involved with operating an accelerator. Probably not worth it.


The good thing though: After the initial seed phase, where you produced your content you could just disappear and only be active on twitter!


no thats a great one…

can i add that to my list of ideas?


We have to be careful to not simply crowd-source the moderation either. Keeping a crowd-moderated social media site from devolving is a dang hard task.


Just curious do you have experience with this and if so, what was it


> dang hard task


i feel like that was on purpose


> link aggregation

One thing I've noticed over the years is that most social media companies have slowly started to discourage outbound links.

On reddit a surprising number of subs no longer allow you to just submit links, and a growing number require review before posting external content.

Even Twitter (before Musk) was clearly deprioritizing external links.

This is a bit troubling because it further leads to the "dead internet" where it gets harder and harder for people making interesting content independent of major sites to get visibility.

I think of the main reasons HN remains relatively high quality is its primary function is still aggregating pointers to elsewhere.


I'd thought Reddit subs prohibited links because it attracts spam and marketing disguised as organic recommendations. For Twitter, they promote organic content "for free" but want to make the inorganic stuff pay money for promotion.

Discord is close the original poster's idea for a social network, replace "social circle" with "Discord server" and lower the member limit for a server. Back to your topic, a semi-private Discord server/social circle moderator can ban anyone posting spam links so its not a huge problem there.


so hacker news


I suspect GP was being facetious.


oh yeah, rereading it, it's pretty obvious actually, I guess I was being dense that moment.


I'm pretty sure that being facetious is against the community guidelines.

The post really should be flagged immediately.


But how can i friend you? This is not social


Even just "follow" functionality would be great.


But it should be labeled frankly

"Friend" should be labeled "Manipulate"

"Follow" should be labeled "Stalk"


No voting but working on a clean/minimal link aggregation + live chat site at https://sqwok.im

bonus points: "hacker theme" to make the hacker feel at home https://i.imgur.com/AleBLed.png

https://sqwok.im/p/TXmiluFNUILE_Q (cross-post)


>voting

This always leads to a hivemind. Because even if you're supposed to use it for rewarding good posts, what the horde ends up doing is using downvotes as a disagree button. Especially if the admins/moderators have authoritarian powers to hide content on top of the users' individual powers or rate limit posting by those with differing views. Because everyone's bias sneaks in - no one is exempt from this - and it's very hard to see your own biases if you don't deliberately venture out of your filter bubble regularly. The best tool I've found for this so far (and I maintain a search) is https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news It gets trickier when one side completely ignores a story, which both do.


When I was a moderator for tagfam.org, I was privy to internal research that the founder had done. About 20 percent of members were active on a regular basis and about 10 percent more were occasionally active. The rest lurked and just read.

People can readily navigate a community of about 150 members. On two different forums, once current membership got past about 750 people, things started splintering off into new groups. Do the math: 20 percent of 750 is 150.

Above that figure of 150, the way people handle social interaction is with formal processes and protecting their privacy. They try to limit what they share about themselves on a "need to know" basis. Some people are better at this than others.

This is where my life got very painful when I first went online: I didn't know how to do that. I had never really interacted with "the public" though I thought I had. I had been a homemaker and before that a student. I knew lots of people, but those people were mostly family and friends. I had extremely limited experience with customers, bosses, etc. and didn't really know how to be selective about the details I shared with an eye towards protecting myself and this went weird places.

To remedy that, I have had to consciously think about such things a whole lot. I've even collected data at times and so forth.

Many people are not super clear about such distinctions. If they grew up in a big city, maybe they don't readily share intimate details with anyone and don't really think about how much they leave out. If they grew up in a village, maybe they make no real distinction between friends and strangers and just let it all hang out and don't understand when it comes back to bite them.

A lot of the problems we have currently online exist because the internet puts us rather unnaturally in touch with a much broader selection of people than in-person interactions are likely to for most people. It's harder to say things online that won't have someone up in arms because you stepped on their toes without realizing it.

I've been trying to sort out how to interact positively with people on Twitter (and in other online spaces) for a long time, people I may not know at all but may have interests in common with. I think a lot of our online social media issues ultimately will be solved -- if they get solved at all -- by working on this issue.


Nice to see Dunbar's Number validated with real world data.


I feel like we already have

I have gotten jobs off of HN, started organizations with people I met here, hired people from posts, argued and agreed and flamed and shared ....all the stuff you do with social networks

It's just that this network minimizes the "personality" driven aspects of social networks because it's not driven to optimize profit or engagement. It's seemingly driven to optimize for civility. I think that's why we have the longevity we do.

I've been kicking around on here since 2012 and I only recognize a handful of handles when I see them post and honestly it makes very little difference because the goal is to evaluate the argument.

I think we're good, and don't really need to change what we have. Just my 2c


I think a news feed is probably what’s missing. See friends. Track them. Pick fights every time they say something you disagree with. Upvote every time you agree with them. Done.

/s


First time I'm grateful a sarcastic comment was suffixed with a `/s`.


My title is a bit ambiguous in retrospect. Many took it as: How can HN become a social network.

My intention was to address the many talented and accomplished makers who engage with the platform. The title should probably read: "How might we build a social network that benefits everyone?"

Sorry!


No apologies necessary, communication is one of the most challenging things we do

I understand what you meant though, and just to be more focused I don't think it's possible to build a large social network that retains coherency.

Dunbar's number is a good guide here


Aren't those two different things?

A systemic limitation on individual connections is fundamentally different than the network's aggregate scope.


I love the idea. In terms of numbers and caps, I think going with Dunbar's number of 150 might work best.

Cal Newport makes a point about how in the early days of Facebook, it was essentially mirroring your real world social network. In fact, I remember how fun and innocent Facebook was in its early days.

Perhaps the biggest shift in Facebook's evolution is towards algorithmic feed optimisation and expansion into more public areas that exceed dunbar's number.

Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/) avoids this shift in its design by doing away with the "global singleton" network that Facebook, Instagram and other have.

Another interesting project that is bringing back self-sovreign identity is Bluesky's At protocol (https://atproto.com/) which also make the "algorithm" part of a feed open source.

Some building blocks that are worth considering: IPFS/IPLD (https://ipfs.tech/) and Hypercore (https://hypercore-protocol.org/).

Disclaimer: I work full time on IPFS


In case folks are curious: A stable release of Bluesky/ATProto's reference server, client, and dev tooling should land early next year. There's an active matrix channel if you want to follow closely at https://matrix.to/#/#bluesky-dev:matrix.org


I went through the hypercore page and I still don’t get it. Can you explain


It appears to be nothing more than a distributed, append-only log file.

Edit: basically a blockchain implemented in Javascript


I’m sure at least 75% of you guys in here are stronger technically than me. And 99% of you have probably seen more success in their careers than I have.

But I’ve been building little throwaway code experiments for the last three years and its totally doable.

I haven’t seen a regular paycheck since March 2019 when I was fired from a Director of Engineering role from a firm so shitty and a job so toxic I actually do think I have PTSD from it. Ironic given that my first job out of college was chasing warlords in Bosnia for the US Army in the 90s and helping the UN investigated mass grave sites.

I’m poor enough that when I finally went to the VA to get benefits for my injuries from 20+ years ago, they actually put me in their homeless abatement program and I now live in Section 8 housing in Austin. And it’s actually pretty great.

We’ve had 60 years of Moore’s law. At this point you can totally stuff the entire searchable internet on 4 good size hard drives (75-85 TB compressed) and 1 to 2 Gbps pipes are everywhere. And folks globally are rightly freaked out about a world driving towards totalitarianism and hungry for a change.

I’ve been trying out various approaches over the last three years but have zero attachment to any ideas I have on the topic.

But clearly this won’t get anywhere with just me or others sitting in our living rooms knowing that it’s fixable.

I’m 100% willing to help anyone with ideas in this space however they might need help. Full stop.

I know folks are sheepish about putting their contact info out there but here’s mine:

Alex Ross alex.l.ross@gmail.com +1.213.500.5925

Feel free to drop me a line with: ideas you have, something you need, a word of encouragement, tell me I’m a moron or a drama queen, whatever.

But for god sakes, guys, don’t look the other way. It’s 1939 Germany but this time we have no one to blame but ourselves…


I'm an Army Veteran too. Afghanistan though as Bosnia was before my time. I'll shoot you an email, it would be nice to discuss technology with (presumably) another self-taught developer with similar life experiences.

I also think we're on the precipice of something previously unthinkable. I'm undecided whether that outcome is authoritarianism or the country's implosion.

On a less grim note, I do believe nuclear fusion has the potential to save us from ourselves. Indirectly, of course.


Cool! Please do. Would love to get veterans together first and foremost. Not to mention millions of angry, battle tested insurgency/counterinsurgency experts are prob not what the world wants pointed in the wrong direction… haha. Actually getting the worlds military veterans together would be one hell of an idea. “No, sorry guys, the veterans all got together over beer, a little weed for those who partake, a lot of bbq, and a blew a few things up just for kicks and we decided that the politicians are full of shit on this one. The war is canceled.” hahaha

Would love to hear your thoughts on nuclear fusion too.


Alex, I presume that your post was basically directed at the whole social circle thing, if i understood you.

I guess as the end of the day one has to ask as to what social circles achieves.

I don't think any code or online solutions will in itself achieve anything, however it can be certainly an amplifier if there are the right people involved. Go ahead have a look at my profile and the link ( 5 minute read) that I put in the profile and see if it is something that perks your interest. Heads up: most people I think are repulsed by my idea, or at least would think I'm a nutcase.


> 99% of you have probably seen more success in their careers than I have. > Director of Engineering > chasing warlords in Bosnia for the US Army in the 90s and helping the UN investigated mass grave sites

Very modest, or I guess I'm in that one percent.


In any social media design you have to take well known power laws into account. You may consider HN currently to be a highly engaging site but you have to consider why that is: a huge amount of eye balls is watching a tiny set of content, a list of a few dozens links. Next, if as little as 1% joins in discussion, the result is threads with substance.

Great outcome, but you're probably ignoring that 99% didn't engage. And you'll be bitten by that dynamic when creating tiny circles or bubbles. Because 1% engagement within something small approaches...nothing.

Mastodon is a great way to see it in action on a small scale. I've been following an instance of some 2,000 members for a few weeks now. The power laws emerge perfectly.

A handful of people post daily. 90% of posts get zero engagement. No like, boost, reply...nothing at all. The posters are puzzled by it. Some have 500 followers yet have never received engagement from a single one of them.

Another interesting aspect is a word I only learned about this week: toxic positivity. A small unit of like-minded individuals has funny downsides. When coming from a war zone like Twitter, it feels rather boring. There's no drama and stirring the pot is frowned upon. So you'll end up reading about how somebody watered their favorite plant, leaving you wondering what the purpose of it all is.

"Not stirring the pot" on Mastodon can go quite far. I saw an instance demanding people put a content warning on photos of food, as it may trigger people with an eating disorder. Yesterday a post had a warning (EYE CONTACT). When clicking away the warning, indeed a photo of a person looking into the camera was revealed.

So you're already dealing with near-zero engagement in a tiny place, and then discourage a massive portion of common conversation. The result is perfect peace, because nobody posts anything.


Most social networks make posting (or whatever specific terminology is being used) equivalent to talking at someone. The correct model would foster conversation and thus impact engagement. Small social groups discuss topics. Offering a topic for conversation implicitly earns a response.

Rarely do groups of friends get together to declare simple and unrelated one-liners. An "ideal" social network might be more related to group sms than Twitter or Mastodon.


I agree. A group of actual (traditional) friends is not the same thing as a bunch of online people that have something in common. For a group of real life friends, online conversations are often/best handled in a chat-like experience. Here in Europe it's mostly WhatsApp.

There's also differences in what you expect from content. When one of my real friends share that they took their family to a zoo and had a great day, that's mildly interesting. I know these people.

When an online stranger (or digital only "friend") shares this same thing, I couldn't care less. I'm happy for them, and it's part of normal conversation, but it's not a very interesting type of information to read in large quantities every single day. There has to be some higher shared purpose, the more specific the better.


" There has to be some higher shared purpose, the more specific the better."

I have no idea if this is true but it's an interesting point that sounds right. I suppose the answer might come down to the individual purpose of group interaction.

I'll definitely give this some thought. Thanks for the input.


To me that has always been the promise of the internet: to connect with people on topics I'm passionate about as such a thing is highly constrained in the real world. It's a brand new capability, a super power.

The opposite is true for generic chitchat online. Instead of more powerful, it is less powerful compared to the real world equivalent. You don't gain anything.


A problem though is how real world social networks operate. People love to gather with a bunch of strangers over coffee or at restaurants but have absolutely nothing to do with each other besides sitting in close proximity.

Everyone wants to design an online social network as if there is all this spirited high brow debate going on at the local Starbucks when in reality it is a bunch of people shoulder to shoulder ignoring each other.

If people really wanted interaction it would be trivial in the real world. Online social networks let people indulge in their want to talk AT strangers. This is absolutely a feature and not a bug of the software.

Even within myself, the idea of a 19th century style salon sounds really cool but I would never show up to one physically. An online salon with more than a handful of people would be cool but it would break down quickly as it scales up past 20 or so participants until it basically approaches Twitter.


Content warnings on Mastodon are just ridiculous


Unpopular opinion: any social network, no matter how it’s architected will become terrible past a certain size. Perhaps some architectures will have different “maximum tolerable sizes” than others, but all will become intolerable once there is a large enough user base.

More users, however, means more ad / tracking revenue, so these two ideas will always be at odds.


Agreed. Small, decentralised communities should be the way forward. We could call them forums ;-)


I miss forums. Discord has replaced forums in most of the communities I cared about and it’s been for the worse.


I hate this, and I like Discord.

Discord is a replacement for IRC/chat/AIM/other synchronous and informal conversation.

It's not a replacement for forums, archives, or formal communication.


Dealing with opensource projects via discord is a nightmare. One I use regularly decided to escape the walled garden and move to github discussions and it's been such a boon for search. Discord is a repetitive nightmare of doing support I don't know why projects use it.

The discord server still exists but questions generally don't get answered as much or if they do it's usually a link to github discussions.


So how do you combine social network + forum? What does that look like?


There is/was already a social network for that - Ning.

Back when social network platforms became A Thing they adopted OpenSocial - they had a news feed, notifications, etc - but each social network was completely isolated. I haven't taken a look at Ning since I worked on social networking apps about 12 years ago, so I have no clue how they've evolved since then.


Heh, I just thought of an even smaller solution called newsgroups ;#)


Is this really an unpopular opinion? Seems most people have acknowledged then general toxicity of large social networks by now.


I suppose it's not. The part which I _thought_ would be unpopular was that technology unequivocally could not solve this problem.


As someone else pointed out, that was Google Plus.

The number one thing to realize is: this is not a technical problem. It's a marketing, political, and social problem.

Facebook and Twitter have vast numbers of users who are not at all technical. How you reach people like that and get them to join is your problem, and it has nothing to do with deep understanding of the technology.


Facebook was kinda like this bbut then it had to make a quarterly profit.


right, google plus failed bc it was a platform problem. Who would prefer to use that product over facebook, twitter, etc that duplicate the functionality 90%. ello was another hilarious example (that somehow... still exists...)


The thing is, Google+ had a dedicated user base. It just wasn't the Facebook killer they thought it would be.

Same thing with Google Reader, too.

If you want to "take on Facebook or Twitter", you will fail. But if you just want to create a community of people, you absolutely can outcompete those companies in that niche, because Facebook and Twitter traded in quality for scale.


> The thing is, Google+ had a dedicated user base.

Indeed. I really preferred Google+ to any of it's competitors. The circles idea just makes a lot of sense. Most other social media ignores the fact that people in your social circles might have different interests. People interested in programming languages might not be interested in baking and vice versa. Why spam all baking followers with your latest programming language realization?


Google+ had a big user base of tech people talking to other tech people. Facebook had the college crowd, and they got their families to join. Twitter isn't all that big, but they got the brands on board.


yeah, was also more annoying to use. it read trying to solve the problem of broadcasting everything to everyone, so it had this concept of circles, whereas Twitter people WANT everyone to see everything they say, either for like or conflict. Facebook was similar, but you could throw sheep at your friend/girl you liked, and it might be ambiguous.

plus made you define your social circles as literal "circles", that's not the MySpace top 8, or Seinfeld speed dial.

plus might have just been the right tech for the wrong model.


> Facebook was similar, but you could throw sheep at your friend/girl you liked, and it might be ambiguous.

Throwing sheep is an idiom I'm unfamiliar with and urban dictionary isn't helping (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=throw%20a%20...) what does it mean in this context?

I liked the idea of circles. It solves the problem of having to create multiple accounts (one for work, one for friends, one for parents, etc) that a lot of people were doing on facebook/insta so that they didn't have to self-censor as much. People don't always want to broadcast a night of drugs and drinking to your employer or your Mom but still want to send photos of your wild night out to your friends.


Not an idiom, it was an alternative to the "poke" https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/throw-a-shee...


Thanks! I would never have guessed that. Facebook seems like a strange place.


>Throwing sheep is an idiom I'm unfamiliar with

He likely meant "throwing shade."


One wonders what "throwing sheep" would actually mean, as slang.

is it similar to "being pwned"?


I actually liked Google+ to an extent, but mostly because I found it to be so easy to get away with shitposting there. For some reason shitposts got a ton of viewers as opposed to Twitter and Facebook. Good memories, even though I was the only one in my friends group to visit often


> I have a concept for a social network that would eliminate many pain points.

And what is this concept? Hidden in this question is a strong undercurrent of "I'm an ideas person with a world changing idea. I can't share it because I believe that it's valuable. I just need engineers".


I just added it to the main post in order to help shape the conversation. I have no desire to lead a social media company.


Isn't that idea the same idea that google tried and failed at?


Google failing implies nothing about the tribal conceptualization of social networking.


> implies nothing

Nothing is a strong word.

A similar idea was tried, by one of the largest tech companies in the world, pushing it on to their already established user base, and it didn't catch on. Will it fail again? No idea, but it doesn't imply nothing.


G+ actually worked, it just didn't hit as big as Google would have liked. I used it mostly every day for a while and was sad when it disappeared. So I guess you could say it "failed" for one set of criteria, but may not "fail" if the criteria is a little less demanding.


I stand by my statement.

One might argue correlation, but any argument about causation is devoid of logic.


Building a social network “product” is easy, entry level engineers build Reddit and Twitter clones during bootcamps.

I think the right question is “How could we build a network and keep people coming back?”

That’s the hardest thing to do, even with millions behind your back.

Ask Google Buzz, Orkut, iTunes Ping, Vine, Google Plus…


Vine was killed by Twitter. A foolish move given how popular TikTok is now.


I’m guessing the unit economics didn’t work. Different when a country like China decides its a strategic thing to do.


It was killed because the big names started talking unionizing.


Vine definitely had people coming back iirc. Don't take into account Twitter's boneheadedness.


I think the answer is personal newsletters. Email is (sufficiently) distributed, and (about) everybody uses it.

I've replaced most of my social email with a monthly update. On the first day of every month, I publish a post on my website titled “What I’m up to this month.” In it, I have three simple sections:

- Highlights from last month

- Things to share

- What I’m up to this month

It sends to my mailing list. I find it works great - I can stay in touch with people, and people bring it up in conversations. It lacks the dopamine hits of "likes", but I think that it's ok to have a calmer, stupider system for staying in touch.


Using email as a slower social platform. Love it!


Step 1: BUILD IT!

Ideas are addicting; the longer you have them the more you idolize them and become over time immune to the idea's criticism.

The general principle in startups is that you know remarkably little about what actually is valued in the market until you do some very specific validation research, which involves putting some kind of real, meaningful solution to a person's pain in front of them to see how they react.


I wish I could upvote this more than once.

The first rule of social network is that it's useless without many people on it, and there has to be some hook to get them in. But you won't figure that out just by thinking about it and imagining how people will behave. In practice it's a billion subtle factors which you can't reason about without a tangible product that people are interacting with.


100%. I've been going through this exact concept in building https://sqwok.im. I got a ton of positive feedback but also "it's not fully baked yet", "not quite there", "missing X feature". It's a challenge but you have to believe in it and keep pushing, try new things, and constantly collect feedback.


Then you're not providing a "gain" for the user, if people are saying it's "incomplete".

You need to figure out what problem your users are having and solve that. Random feature bloat in search of a magical fit is Hope as a Strategy (TM), and it's not typically effective.


I do agree with you. I've had more positive feedback than negative and there's been a cohort of supporters who seem to enjoy it.

Def have to be careful about building features, throwing darts, etc. For this project the genesis was that I wanted to use the product myself and didn't see it in the market; I wanted to scratch my own itch, so I did indeed just build it.

But when I initially did a Show HN[1], the client wasn't far along other than supporting the basic chat feature. By the 2nd Show HN[2], the client had matured a bit and it both withstood the hn blitzkrieg and led to people from all over the world having realtime public conversations - the core idea in action. But people were asking for expected features including tags, search, message permalinks, and other stuff that wasn't there yet.

So that's what I've been building since...

All that said I could be blind to my own biases and it's taken awhile to bring it to maturity. I've also had slowdowns due to outside normal job stuff etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25470672

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160302


Oh yeah I'm in the same boat right now; it's easier to throw features at the wall to see what sticks, but the success rate and is lower and "worthless" effort is higher. Hard to resist though, as someone technical!


100%, it's something I do struggle with because I enjoy building, and not marketing lol. But the latter is absolutely critical to even be able to continue building.

What you working on?


FWIW: It is already seriously cool.


Thank you! Appreciate that. Hoping to find ways to get the word out and grow the community. So far it's been a fun ride!


Every year at Christmas, I get a card from a family member with a short, personal hand-written note and a 1-page, generic printed update on how their year has been, usually with some pictures.

This is what I want from a social network.

I want to be able to keep up some regular connection with people I don't see on a regular basis. I want us to remember each other, know about major life events, and have a convenient way to reconnect more personally when that makes sense.

For people I see (or want to talk to) regularly, I'll just send messages or group messages.

For more of the topic-centered type of internet community I may want in my life... well HN already does that perfectly.


I think that is what most people want.. However, I don't know how to make that self-sufficient let alone profitable .. People want free and free means ads and ads means click-bait/faux outrage/addiction.

The old model was this (MySpace) but you had to go look at people .. They didn't come to you and it wasn't addictive enough or profitable enough.


You've just re-invented group texts.

The thing is: people don't want limited reach. Why would anyone sign up for a network that limits everything they say to be visible to less than a dozen people? What's the incentive? With numbers like that I could just go outside.

So many "Let's solve a problem about social networks" ideas turn out to be "let's remove or limit the reason people use social networks in the first place"! The last one I saw -- also posted here on HN -- wanted to replace LinkedIn with a network that only allowed you to connect with people via their email addresses. So..... it was email.

(Of course, to be fair I thought the same thing when Twitter was introduced. "Why would anyone want to limit themselves to 160 characters?" I thought. So hey, who knows, maybe your group text simulator really is the next big thing)


What piece of technology do you use that wasn't pitched like this: Like product but differentiating feature.

Reach is the fundamental flaw from both operational and social standpoints. It makes the world worse.

We regulate heroin for the same reason. Although this argument makes me a bit of a hypocrite because I do believe all drugs should be legal and regulated. I'm not entirely sure which opinion will hold after I reconcile this conflict.


Well, sure, but this is "like product but minus the thing that makes product compelling.

If you want people to use a service, you have to give them a reason to use it -- "because it's good for you" isn't exactly going to fill your onboarding funnel, however true it might be.


I firmly disagree.

An understanding of negativity requires an understanding of positivity. To shift the paradigm, one must offer a more fulfilling alternative. A rewarding experience would highlight the disadvantages inherent to the current paradigm.

A net-positive implementation would be the catalyst for mass migration.


"To shift the paradigm, one must offer a more fulfilling alternative. A rewarding experience would highlight the disadvantages inherent to the current paradigm."

Yep, that's what I'm talking about. What's the "more fulfilling alternative" in a social network that won't let you talk to people?


> The social network would allow users to arrange into small topical groups called social circles.

This sounds like Google+ : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B

I loved the idea back then. As other commenters have pointed out, the structure and design of the network is not the biggest factor influencing its success.


I've been dreaming of a platform where each post is categorized (manually, by choosing a circle/channel, or automatically detected), as I'm not interested in all the content / themes of people I'd follow. Besides G+, I remember Pownce had a similar feature.

It would also be helpful to be able to choose your feed sorting algorithm - chronologically or else.


I wasn't aware of Google's use of "circles" so thanks for the share!


I really think that any walled-garden website or app is going to replicate all of the problems of all of the social network apps that we love to hate. These problems are endemic to the format.

We need our social networks to really focus on interoperability and communication protocols between them. The RSS feed is an excellent first iteration, and I don't see why it could not form the basis for a truly transformative, open, ubiquitous, user-centered social network. Each user owns their own feed and subscribes to anyone they like, as now. To this we could add discoverability, showing what feeds are common among one's subscribers. We could also add comments. Profile pages. Each user hosts their own.

A properly created protocol could allow users to subscribe to each other's feeds, ban anyone they want to from their own feed, limit content to specific social circles... while not controlling what other people do. Each individual can be their own moderator and control their own algorithm.


You’ve got one already, it’s called Hacker News.


I would argue that HN is a collective not a social network.


You're being social right now, on Hacker News.


HN is social media, but it's not a social network. A network puts the emphasis on individual nodes (users) and the connections between them (following/friendship).


Correct. I love that the focus of HN is on discussing topics, not discussing individuals. Of course a topic could be an individual, like Elmo, but that's not the focus of the site itself. I don't follow any individuals on HN, I just respond to whomever I'm discussing a topic with and I don't care who that is.


You can even argue here!


I don’t know man. There are times when I genuinely want an argument to clarify my thoughts. There is zero argument- it just gets downvoted minus three. So then I sadly delete my comment. I usually assume since I’m not an American (wasn’t born here), am not able to get the nuances right, or maybe there’s some deep underlying social dynamics I’m unaware of. So better to just delete my comment and move on. These days I use HN primarily as mathoverflow - if I know how to work a problem I post. Otherwise best to shut my trap. HN isn’t the place for arguing- atleast not for me.


Downvotes attract other downvotes - which doesn't say much for the quality of our, much trumpeted, gregariousness. A downvote is when someone doesn't like your opinion but they can't be bothered to discuss the issue. So a downvote is often a sign of disrespect and can be safely ignored.

Surely not everyone here is American - me for instance. If you don't get the nuance right then they can tell you - that way both parties learn something.

The following phrases are contradictory btw, thus:

"I genuinely want an argument to clarify my thoughts"

"HN isn’t the place for arguing- at least not for me"


What do you like to argue about?

Personally I'm a big fan of the ChangeMyView forum on Reddit. Pretty much anything goes there, as long as you're civil and interested in productive discussion that aims toward clarifying your views. Which is a refreshing change from the ideological echo chambers of most of the rest of the site, where if you say the wrong thing you'll be banned.


No, you can't!


I'm pretty sure I can!


Where does the network come in? I can't friend anybody, I can't tag anybody. There's no social graph, at least not one that users are aware of.


By that argument, email, text messaging and even phone calls are a part of social media.


Mods agree - if bot replies became high quality enough to meet human standards here, dang is ok with allowing them. This site’s managers value the content quality, with no value given to social qualities


You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship.


[flagged]


What does that even mean?


Apologies, I’m coming in a little hot this morning… :)

I’d put it this way… you and I have HN. What about the protesters in Iran? We’re closer to that scenario than you’re prob realizing.


Personally, despite its reputation I've gravitated more and more towards Twitter, because at HN I can't really trust what people are saying. People may sound smart and like they know their stuff, but you can come up with great sounding arguments for and against anything. It takes a lot of time and energy to figure out if someone is worth listening to, so to me it makes more sense to seek out the known experts and follow them on Twitter instead. HN has also become more and more anti-hacker, anti-technology and negative in general. Life's too short to be immersed in negativity, even if it's right, which it rarely is.

How would the ideal social network look like? A mix of HN and Twitter perhaps. There are rarely any discussions on Twitter with deep comment trees.


Interesting. I find the discussions here on HN much more useful than pretty much any other so-called social media.

There is nothing social about them. They act as echo chambers imo and very easily become cargo cults surrounded by the usual suspects.


It depends on who you follow. I try to follow mostly technical people who post about technical things, or other musings. If they tweet too much about politics I unfollow them, no matter how important they are otherwise. If you do this, you get a high signal to noise ratio, but Twitter unfortunately lacks in the depth of discussion. And also it's not very social as you say, it's mainly a way for me to listen in on conversations between experts rather than as a way for me to chime in personally.


I have the opposite reaction. I like how all context of a persons argument is in one post. You could be The President or a homeless person and I will give your reply the same thought here, seems meritocratic to me.


Simple: non-profit, worker cooperative is the corporate structure, dunbar number for the max social circle size, users moderate content, and no global/public/viral content at all. Open source software running on open source software.

Here's my counter thought to some huge platform technically speaking. We have these massively powerful devices in our pockets and everything is a web app, use the device to do more. Make content decentralized (no, not that crypto-bro or crypto-hater). Decentralize the storage of content to people's devices for things received. Then the platform itself is more of a message broker. Let users pick their cloud storage drug of choice (icloud, onedrive, google, dropbox, etc.) or abstract it away where you provision storage for them and charge beyond some sane limit but the client app gets the content from cloud storage (user defined or brokered). Once the content has been delivered to all users for a circle (max 150) its gone off the platform and when users view that historical content its local/cloud delivered (some caching algo to make it fast). Provide users the ability to tag content as archivable which just gives them a timeline feed of it they can browse whenever. Users literally own the content.


This sounds great on paper, but you would still run into a few major problems:

- the network effect or how do you get a critical mass of users

- moderation/abuse prevention since its distributed

Imagine someone uploads CSAM and now muliple people unwillingly and unknowingly have their computers redstribute it (become mirrors) or re-upload it to cloud storage.

In addition, most of these points are wet dreams for the average HNer, but the vast majority of people don't care about the company structure, if its truly distributed, nor if you're running FOSS. They care about who is already there (chicken-egg problem) or about some innovative feature.


Network effect and critical mass of users isn't part of the plan. Scaling is done per the user population. If you end up with 100 circles of 150 people and it is sustainable with ads thats fine. No social circles are public, nothing is public.

Moderation is done by users since no circle or content is spread wider than 150. Their phones/devices are only end nodes receiving content, not distributing it at all. The idea is the platform doesn't need suggestion algo's or spying on people's content for advertisers. It just distributes content to those that are members in a circle. The client apps can be built to flag questionable content so it doesn't end up in the users cloud storage.

Again, in my head this is not a global/public "town square" (which any website thinking they are that is a fallacy). It is a social media site for private groups of people to use which is the vast majority of what people want. A social circle for family, social circles for current/former groups of workers, etc. Maybe allow larger private groups for churches, schools, etc. Private groups tend to have very good self-moderation.


I've been thinking about this for a while as well and feel that it all depends who is the audience of this service. One idea is to define geographical limits to participate. That aligns with your cap idea. The nice thing about this model is it allows participants easy access to get to know others near them. This has real world benefits for strengthening a local community.

A second idea I had, especially relevant to HN, is to setup a barrier for use. Similar to old BB systems from the 80s and 90s, in order to participate it takes more effort than an email and password setup. A `vi` or `emacs` interface where there is a true learning curve but that also invites the user to learn more as they on-board into the social media service. You could spin this idea around other niche interests and hobbies though.

Network effects mean that these ideas likely won't be break-out hits for the general public. However, I find that to be ok as the easy approaches are solved challenges, the new challenges for social media are making those services more of a positive/healthy (as in eat your Broccoli) experience for everyone who interacts with it.


> One idea is to define geographical limits to participate.

Pretty sure you just invented NextDoor.

Also, this would mean you couldn't be friends with people you meet online. You immediately would eliminate gaming communities, even closer-knit ones like in-game guilds.


I like how you're thinking.

Friction is typically discussed as a universal negative, but intentional friction can have real utility.

I'm going to continue thinking about your learning curve point. The shared knowledge of operation (sometimes) becomes culture.


The building part is not a novel problem and probably not very interesting. I'm not a product person, so I don't have an alternative suggestion, but unless someone could explain to me how they plan to do it without advertising, I'm not helping. That's an ethical line for me and I wish it was for more people.

First thoughts on max 10 member groups - I'd probably opt for a simple group text for that use case. Nobody has to register for anything, trust some 3rd party, it's self-moderated. I'd need some decent incentive to invite some unknown 3rd party into something that's already working.


Personally, I think something like mastodon is better for this purpose.

You can post your HN related stuff hashtagged #hackernews and others might follow.

That being said - IMHO if you want a social network or community, don’t call it a “communal product”. Products are for making money and whatnot.


Should social media be a profit-driven enterprise as a civilization-scale product?


¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯

I mean this question is way too big for this sort of thread. I would say that simply calling it a “product” already reveals a certain ideological bias to begin with.

It’s like the difference between a city square and a shopping mall as a place for a society or community.

What is unique about this place is that many people here are more than qualified to build pretty much anything. So, it would be safe to assume that if we wanted something different, we would probably just build it.


Financial and intellectual resources are being diverted to projects with large markets but low utility.

Also, "product" is a semantic argument. Product also means sum. Every application is a product of technology.


Yeah, everything around us can be seen as a product. It’s all sausage factory across the board.

The opinion I’m expressing here is that excessively seeing things in that way when venturing out to do them doesn’t make inspire trust.


Fair point and I do agree. I have no interest in pursuing anything in the space. I wanted to start a discussion on the topic because I don't know how to fix this obvious problem. If a solution could be found (or even a broad direction), this group of people... would a probable source.


It almost has to be.

Running a world-scale social network requires immense computing power. Those bills have to be paid, and there's not going to be much difference between "break-even-driven" and "profit-driven" at that scale.


Given how things turned out, I think the answer might be ‘no’…


Disclaimer: I'm taking care of finance at Mastodon

Appreciate Mastodon comes to mind here.

I disagree with the second part regarding product not being the right term. Take Mastodon as an example: Mastodon is a non-profit LLC and an FOSS software but its community as well as the LLC clearly _produce_ something users are using.


Right term used where?

Because I’m not saying that it’s not a product. I’m saying that IMHO calling/thinking of something as a product upfront (as OP did) isn’t a good way to drive interest in it as a community.


Sounds like you might be describing Google+ Circles.

https://youtu.be/BeMZP-oyOII


I think of HN as being a social network already. There is no need for another 'social network' in the world, actually less would be best.


I think of HN (And really, any other website driven by user-generated contented content like reddit and forums) to be social media but not a social network.

I consider social networks to be a subset of social media where the focus becomes following specific users and having a feed consist of posts made by specific users, whereas reddit has a feed consisting on posts on specific topics.


It's more of a "thought" network or an "idea" network than a social network. Unless I am super motivated to click through to your submissions and comments (and then back read the parent posts to understand).. most of the interaction is limited to threads. So this limits any attempts to curate a theme or push a dominate ideology.


I think nobody would use a social network that would be created by the most popular ideas that float on HN. Established social networks are popular not despite their "problems" but because of them:

  nobody wants to manage their own data
  people are on social networks to be entertained not to "keep up with old friends"
  they want to be where brands, advertising and celebs are
  they want the opposite of decentralization, they want where everything is in one place
  addictive algorithms are what people like by definition, they are not created but discovered
  click bait, outrage, etc, again are what people are looking for


> click bait, outrage, etc, again are what people are looking for

I don't think people actively seek clickbait and outrage, but rather, are simply drawn to it when they see it.


Google tried this, and failed. Actually they failed from their point of view: Google Plus had some good points over Facebook, but they wanted it to become #1 in no time, which simply couldn't be done because it was already too late. Had they kept the project alive, they could have benefited from the current situation at Twitter.


HN is a social network. (Nearly) All content is submitted by users. Rankings are influenced primarily by users. Users comment on the content. Conversations happen.

Your Ask HN is you collaborating on a social network. Without your content, and the content of users like you, this social network wouldn’t exist.


If Hacker News tried building a social network, we'd spend the whole time arguing about every single micro-decision and getting nowhere.


We can just make two versions, one is a reddit clone Next.js site backed by a boring database, the other is a dockerized CLI written in Rust that you have to deploy locally and persist on a blockchain, after you sign in with a hand soldered hardware authenticator, and where every post is written in XML with no Unicode support. Once a night a cron job transpiles and mirrors posts between the two systems, and you only see votes from your home system.

That would probably settle most arguments.


Plus, the new site is useless because it doesn't work on SnowLinux Puppy v3.1 with HTML, CSS, JS and electricity disabled. Also don't like the scrollbar.


Nah, the complainer would clearly be BSD user


Re-enabled electricity and booted up my AS/400 to read your comment, which I curled.


Can I port to my Timex Sinclair?


There's no need to port it because it's a fine device. Are you one of those consumerist sheep that is obsessed with buying a new device every few decades? It works fine!


Anyone remember AOL chat rooms? You'd jump into a room with a topic (#teenpoolparty13) and start chatting with strangers. In general it would be okay, because it was like a bunch of people huddled together trying to have their conversations in one tiny bedroom. "New" social media killed the free-form group conversation, instead creating splinter conversations that were so highly focused that it actually generated more conflict.

Even in-person, where we have a thousand interpersonal heuristics and social queues to control social interaction, it can still be a mess. Social interaction is best in small groups connected by a common theme and protected by a blanket of familiarity. But with a random group of strangers, no social (or physical) ramifications, with splintered, hyper-focused conversations, it can only either A) devolve into rancor, or B) become an echo chamber. Bringing together lots of people you barely know or don't know at all to talk about random things just isn't a good model for human interaction.

Eternal September is just one of many of the examples of it devolving. With a small consistent group you can establish a consistent culture and psychological safety. Grow the group and the newbies destroy it. Healthy social interaction relies heavily on trust and cooperation.


Is this a problem that needs to be solved? No sarcasm intended.


My idea is for everyone to have their own personal website/app/space (could be very basic, prebuilt templates, drag and drop, something your grandparents could set up). That would then lead to the development of social networking protocols or being able to subscribe to web content modules. Basically, I want RSS feeds for web components/modules, but then a personal portal to interact with the items i subscribe to.

I, as userA, with site www.squarespace.com/userA, could subscribe to all or part of userB's site www.wix.com/userB or www.userB.com/photos but not www.userB.com/crazyBlog. Then, on your own site/app, you choose the things you are subscribed to that you want to "re-publish" or add comments to or share. userB could also choose to not let you follow their space.

This decentralizes away from any particular company and should limit the unintentional crazy that is broadcast across current platforms.


Cool, this came up. Hey HN! I’m building Overlapp, a true social network connecting everyone over the things we like, dislike, and want to do: our Overlapps!

Imagine instagram with a sliding scale to share just how much you like or dislike something and also a button to easily add to your wish list.

From there we show you friends, colleagues or people nearby (or around the world) that also want to see that quirky band this weekend or didn’t think that hugely popular movie was so great.

We’ll have an “Only Overlapps” option so just people with similar tastes will see your opinions to avoid haters

Based your preferences by adding opinions and items to your wish list we’ll show you cool new things and people to discover.

Data will be treated with complete confidence. Here’s our website https://letsoverlapp.com we will post the app on show HN next week or so. Would love your feedback.

Edit: updated the link. Thanks


I wonder if having to manually set your interest/disinterest in each topic would get a bit annoying, but I do like the end result of seeing your common ground with other people.

Ditching the slider and having discrete 1-5 buttons (face emoji) could make it quicker. Combines the slider and the buttons in one.


Thanks for the thoughtful comment. We have been discussing this internally and eventually will end up where users want it to be. But imho the slider will prove to be fun and provide more of an emotional connection with the topic and the app. But we will certainly have shortcuts so most likely will be the best of both a slider and a quick 5 choices.


We have a successful app where an early key was a satisfying button, so I get the interest in that. But if you're up against the current boom social app not requiring interaction beyond quick swipes/taps, you'll want to absolutely minimise friction in your own effort. And cover less content. No need for a modal with the slider and ugly buttons. Just have 5 face emoji circles hovering over the content. Think about how Reels look for Instagram - fullscreen content with floating interface.


Thanks for the insight. Point taken


Website is down…


99% of the value of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram is reach. Posting 140 characters is not much of technical challenge. Getting 400M people to sign up and giving people a platform to build an audience is really, really hard. In terms of creating narrower social platforms, I think we have 100 good options. HN is already a pretty good platform, reddit has a nice balance of broad and niche topics, and if I want to go smaller I'll find a special-interest group that has a standalone forum, Discord or Slack channel.

There's a fundamental difference between platforms built around truly personal social networking. Following people you know personally or within a few degrees of separation. The other is the much debated "Global Town Square" which Twitter has been the de facto best option for and is the hardest to replicate or improve upon.


Both Reddit and HN show there's an enormous value in letting anyone arrive with nearly no friction and participate. Limiting reach in the way that you suggest reduces your social network essentially to an imessage competitor.

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... :)


Look at Elgg https://elgg.org This social app framework has everything you need.

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


Also, Minds https://www.minds.com and Pleio https://pleio.nl


I find it interesting that most discussion forums have essentially the same data model, but just a different UI and moderation.

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.


One idea would be something like RSS that supports social media like activity (posts, reposts), but with a user alias namespace that is registered by a shared and distributed ledger. I wrote about this here:

https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...

Related, see the protocol spec and design for Farcaster, which aims to be a "sufficiently decentralized social network":

https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol


I've toyed with the idea of having a standardized and decentralized social network that would work much like how SMTP (or XMPP) does today, in that each domain could have it's own set of social media servers, controlled via SRV records, and data is propagated and cached on-demand between domains that socialize with each other. Obviously, great care would need to be taken to ensure the Internet isn't just flooded with a bunch of traffic all the time (see: intelligent caching solutions). This way, no single commercial entity is able to control and manipulate it to their own advantage to the detriment of its users.


For social networking atop XMPP, see https://movim.eu/

Combined with the in-development ActivityPub gateway from Libervia ( https://salut-a-toi.org/blog/view/goffi@goffi.org/@/id/liber... ), interop with Mastodon, Pleroma and others becomes possible too. The decentralized social web space is quite active at the moment.


I've always wanted to follow HN users. 10+ years ago I built multiple iterations of a solution (http://akkartik.name/hackerstream, http://akkartik.name/post/hackerstream), all now defunct because the upkeep on the crawler got too onerous.

For the past few months I've been enjoying using https://www.hnfollow.com


I'm 100% confident I could build a "facebook" with a better UX than facebook. Heck, facebook used to have better UX back in the days before they started focusing on monetization.

That's not the problem. The problem is how do you get that critical mass of 10s of millions of users to make it viable. I keep wondering if there's an opening for niche social networks - but I've seen a lot of such small groups (e.g., python developers located in a specific city) set up shop on Slack and it seems to work well enough.


Personally I still think Google Plus got a lot of things right. It was a very pleasant place where people had real, meaningful discussions, and was quite unlike Facebook or Twitter. Nothing else I've tried since its disappearance had quite the same sense of content and community.

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?


IMO the reason it failed is the same reason it was great. It didn't have Facebook's stickiness and way of getting you to add everybody because of the way circles worked. If it had been less privacy minded and just copied Facebook's lack of respect for user privacy and glued everyone together in one big pot, then it would have done better.


Well, not for me. Google Plus worked great for its users, but Google clearly wanted something else from it and kept messing with it. Changing or removing features, first requiring real names, then importing all Youtube users (that's when it really went down hill), and ultimately they decided to pull the plug despite millions of happy users. It was a fantastic success, just not as big as Facebook, nor apparently something Google knew what to do with.


What pain points? I can argue that the way HN is built today is the most effective for its purpose.


No info that someone answered to your comment is annoying compared to reddit.


Social networks, as a concept, are dead in my opinion.

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.


Aren't TikTok and Instagram and social networks?


I've long wanted to build social media which is focused on correct information rather than marketing. The main problem of existing social media is that the environment encourages the spread of

- novel sounding (interesting) or emotionally triggering, and - poorly checked information

(see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559).

Regardless of algorithm, Twitter promotes fast re-sharing without thought (retweet is easy), short messages which make it difficult to explain a nuanced position. Even without an algorithm, this produces a Darwinian environment which favors replication (retweeting) of certain types of tweets over others.

I suspect a lot can be changed by changing the base environment. For example, retweeting could become "intent to retweet", which isn't applied until information gets a peer review. Peers can be calculated via a per-topic reputation system + reference users (examplars). Automatic reviews could at least check that you've included references...


The idea as presented wouldn't survive. People fade away from a network more often than they explicitly leave so a capped group of 10 would be 1-2 people soon enough. The challenge that social networks have had is that they need to maintain content levels to encourage engagement, but typically the people you choose to follow will post less with time. This leads to networks adding in a lot of content you haven't chosen to follow - suggested tweets and follows and reels and the like.

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.


Ultimately spam takes over. There was a model for email whereby senders have to pay to send, I think MS had some papers on this. They never implemented it. I do wonder if a pay to post model could tame the spam and all the BS. That money could be used to fund the network, because nothing is free and it's time we all embrace that reality.


In my experience this is basically what Discord has become. Sure, there are a number of power-law distributed (because of course it's a power law -- if you don't get a power law you're doing it wrong) superservers, but most servers amount to a small handful of regular participants interacting around a "theme".


I love the idea and the angle - better to feel out community support than work feverishly by yourself for 6 months and hope for the best.

Small groups feels much more real + human-sized than being thrown into the ocean. That could solve the lurker problem where 90% of people are passive consumers. Would need to balance out with some global content as sugar on top.

I honestly think the safest business plan for a new network coming from HN is a one-time entry fee. Somewhere between $35 and $300, like SA(?) used to do. Maybe fund development through early sales.

To get the most help from community coders, break the project into core and peripheral pieces. Too much "help" leads to drowning in complexity, best to isolate the backbone of the system.

My pet idea is gamified ratings - let people invest in commments or posts (with regenerating energy/play money), and let them spend their earnings on boosting visibility of other posts.


I think the only way a federated social network could possibly take off in the current environment (one in which launching new Internet protocols is really, really hard) is by piggybacking on the most-successful one that already exists.

Yes, that's right. Its transport protocol has to be email. Maybe with a side of RSS.


We already have one and it's perfect. Whenever you go into a new environment, especially for jobs, there are a bunch of HN'isms you can drop to recognize each other. Nobody asks each others handles, because they respect each others privacy, and you just know that the people you are dealing with have some of the same topics front of mind. I've never asked anyone their handle, and nobody has ever asked me mine, and that basic respect is what characterizes it to me. HN is forum where people have the incentive to write as their best selves, and the effect of that is the largest archive of human honesty in the history of the species.

Being meta about it presumes it's an object of criticism with an end instead of just an ongoing experience that exists for no other reason than because it's enjoyable.


Example of these isms?


I wrote the beginnings of a feed in PHP that used email to communicate.

But I never got further than that.

I encrypted XML files inside email attachments and the system relied on a client that interpreted them.

I had a file system mailbox which sent items whenever they appeared in the folder by email to the email addresses in the XML.


Hacker News users have already built a social network together. It's called Hacker News.


I have a good idea too, without ads! Profitable also but not a twitter or mastodon clone, more like myspace met reddit and a really pretty baby (great UI concept, i won't spill the beans), moderators get paid and moderation is federated. Most importantly it isn't some idealist utopian platform but built for profit while preseving freedoms and user consent and user data ownership.

I would rethink about mirroring real life interactions, real life has drawbacks and people can do real life in real life just fine.

I have many ideas though, and I am not motivated enough and I don't code for a living or have a ton of money and a desire to make sales pitches.


I feel like my main pain point is following someone and then their account gets censored and i don't get any updates. I feel like it'd be nice if a "follow" subscribes to an RSS feed. A platform can "filter out" a feed if it's "bad" but the feed is still live and i just need to use a different client.

Like the notification feed and the "timeline" feed are 2 separate things, maybe? I can click on a notification and it opens in a different client. Like apple can remove a podcast from the podcast app, but the podcaster can still publish on the rss feed and you can subscribe on a different client.


Instead of having a oversimplified up/down voting of content, there should be multiple dimensions on which to rank/rate things. Anytime you force things into a hierarchy, you lose generality. Recently I've wished that many of my social media networks offered simple non-verbal ways to express factuality, humor, relevance, snark, sarcasm, interesting, worth-watching, but-what-about, etc. in a way that could be collectively used.

Corrections should link to previous versions of a post. The posts themselves could be stored in a content addressable storage model as used in GIT.


You've basically described signal/WhatsApp groups.

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.


A couple of questions.

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.


Hmm. I had almost the same idea, though I called it "rooms" instead of "social circles". But, yeah, segment my online social network, so that my crazy uncle can't get in my political discussions, and my wife is not afflicted with my tech ones. (But that doesn't actually keep the uncle from bringing the political discussion to the family "room"...)

I'm not sure whether limiting the size is a good idea (though I can see the reasons for it). But if it is, I suspect that 10 is too small.


There's already a myriad of ways in which people can communicate and, it seems, when people go against certain narratives set forth by media or the mods or the apparent majority in a given space people get really mad and simply want to eliminate others from "having a platform".

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.


HN is already a "social" network, albeit with a limited set of features. But that "limitation" is what makes the site so engaging (a strong set of moderation rules also help of course). I'm building "Create your very own HN site yourself" - (https://hn.plus) if anyone is interested - I guess you will be able to follow the HN model yourself with it.


No thank you. I’m okay with not having another social media product.


I am sure it will work in browser with javascript disabled.


Not quite a social network but a new version of the web where documents are just markdown or something very similar and the browser is an unglorified document reader with no JavaScript has been on my mind for a while.


Sounds interesting. Let’s call the markup language “Hypertext Markup Language”, and we’ll make it XML-like versus Markdown-like so we have at least have a well-designed spec to work with. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll work well enough.

And let’s support JavaScript, but you can turn it off if you’d like.


As someone that runs a platform for people to get to edit and control the HTML of their content I extra appreciate the snarkiness, but the point is to use a format humans can more easily/cleanly edit, and focus on document oriented display of data where the browser/reader decides/controls styling vs the platform and you don't have to fight back against a trustless code execution engine trying to attack you while you read a news article.

It would be a pleasant and interesting contrast to the giant anti-user Rube Goldberg machine browsers have turned into (err actually just two browsers both funded by the same company because the nightmareish complexity makes it impossible to do competing browser implementations).

Feel free to call my idea stupid (it is) but let's not pretend HTML and the current implementation of the web is some sort of perfect ultimate gold standard we can't improve upon.


What distinguishing feature would it have to something like Gopher or Gemini[0]?

[0] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/


I'm building a SaaS website similar to this. Unfortunately, we all like shiny things.


Gopher called


Seems like a recipe for elitism. The groups of interesting people would be virtually impossible to get into, and the pleb groups would be boring.

One of the things that worked about internet discussions of the past is that they prioritized quality of ideas, not importance of identity or who you know or any of that. Social media turned that on its head, I think a successful model might involve turning it back. More like UseNet than Facebook.


The early net was nice because it didn't have billions of people on it. It was a self selecting crowd of early tech adopters who had the time and money to have an online presence, a rarity back in the day. It was its own moderation system because there weren't that many people. Even the web index used to be manually curated.

Then the internet became a victim of its own success and the signal to noise ratio plummeted. You can't replicate the early internet with less moderation, you either need selective participation or heavy curation (not moderation).


Let me make a counter argument - the signal to noise ratio was always awful. Look at UseNet, at Eternal September.

What changed wasn't the signal to noise ratio, but rather how the internet judged reputation of speakers. We went from forcing everyone to analyze the ideas presented, to offering them shortcuts in the form of "curation" or "moderation" that selected for better content.

Then, the gatekeepers of the "curation" and "moderation" systems developed cliques and hugboxes. They built balkanized, loyal audiences in this way. Call this the Fark, SomethingAwful, Bodybuildingforums, etc. era.

The strong balkanized cliques formed by this iteration pivoted their cliques into social media, and content began to be selected for based on who you were - how much money you had, who was on your friends list, what job positions you held. These cliques established fairly stringent, unwritten ideological litmus tests for admittance. And nobody is better at passing ideological litmus tests than motivated power seekers (i.e. activists) in fields like politics, academia, and journalism, who quickly discovered that they could blackmail/extort their way into the gatekeeping positions.

That leads us to today, where myopic moderation by ideological activists is sold to the public as "curation" and your ability to choose which speakers to hear is sold as a negative externality and a threat to public safety.

So what's the path forward? I posit that we could achieve much by actively suppressing these newer forms of gatekeeping, and returning in as much as possible to the original form that allowed internet discussions to thrive - anonymous text coupled with broad based evaluation of ideas, not speakers' allegiances, possessions, and public personas.


How to fix censorship on social media?

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:

https://github.com/Cyphrme/Coze


what is the point of creating yet another social network unless you have a key feature to make it distinct and valuable? if you just make a twitter / facebook clone for tech people all you are doing is dividing yourself from other people. that might be desireable for some people but i dont think its worth persueing in the long term.

i propose we create something that addresses existing problems and adds new features. a social network not based on yet another website, not based on yet another app with centralized ownership. blockchain is the new hype and promises new features and value. lets make a social network that exists entirely on a cryptoblock chain. i am not talking about creating yet another coin. this is entiely outside of the scope of monetary tokens. lets use the blockchain technology to host text and link posts in a distributed fashion. lets come up with a way to give an incentive to host a copy of the chain. and lets make it completely decentralized. then you have a social network worthy of hackers


Blockchain would make it distinct, but would it provide unique value to users?

I certainly agree that we need some innovation in the space.


The main value would be decentralization—the ability to carry your social graph across competing web and native clients, somewhat like RSS and Podcast apps. I wrote about it here:

https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...


the added value would be decentralized and cencorship resistant. you will probably also not see a lot of ads


diaspora* is still a thing, and what you describe looks like its concept of "aspect", which was developed before google+ " circles". It is AGPL, you're welcome to contribute or fork it. https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora


  - No friends or follows
  - The feed can be organized by top/new stories or threads
  - Posts and submissions can be upvoted/downvoted with a karma-like system
  - The more someone's posts are downvoted, the more transparent their entire profile page becomes
  - dang is the only moderator


I get your joke, but I actually find that the faint posts draw the eye more. I tested something similar on a forum of mine, where unverified/anonymous posts were collapsed by default, but found that I and others were just expanding them to check for drama.

Reddit collapses threads too, but I actually find that what's left is "enough" to get a read on a thread (in a subreddit like r/NBA for example, probably less so in something political) and I rarely expand for more.


I wonder if a toggle to show/hide posts from unverified accounts would work better for most users. Have you tried something similar with your forums?


Not a button to do it for the thread en masse. I haven't experimented enough but suspect the key is rewarding positive contributions rather than focus on penalising the negative. e.g., have a threshold based on liveliness of a thread, and render visible anything above that. The rest is collapsed or worse.

I think then if you expand looking for drama, and half the time just find something mundane that didn't make the grade, you'll settle on just reading the abbreviated best-of content.

To be honest, not much online is critical reference material or vital how-to. I think most of us need to be helped in staying out of the gossip and button-pushing grime. Streamlined threads surely help. Do we really need to read every one of 1,000+ comments on Musk doing x or y? Any time I hit a hurdle on Reddit (e.g., trying to force me to login to read something contentious) I use it as a reminder that I'm probably wasting time and should do something else. It's a hurdle at the time but seconds later I'm appreciative!


The problem with your idea around 'concentric social circles' is that it would require a lot of management - managing a thousand different circles could be a nightmare. A cap on members would force aggregators to potentially push messages to other circles. Just some things off the top of my head.


Why would you need to manage the circles? Individuals are entitled to the content their circle deems acceptable (when legal). If the content being shared is incongruent with group beliefs, they can kick the user from their circle.

In my mind, it's a self-managing paradigm. Sure, it would be possible to mass message but only to those who are willful receivers. However, the inability to circulate mass messages with ease would fundamentally stifle virality.

It's my belief that reach is bad.


Scrolled the whole thread. I kind of expected 20 responses from people already working on this and got nothing.


> How could we build a communal product for the public? Theoretically, this approach would result in a better product.

Theoretically it'll result in either a far worse product or a product that never ships.

Committees, bureaucracy (which is what an HN communal product would be) is a particularly bad way to do software.


Another thought is to wonder how we build social networks in real life. The mechanisms are hard to isolate because they are so normal, but attempting to transpose those to the internet is interesting. People have reputations. This acts as an incentive for people to behave. If you get known as a jerk then you don't have much of an audience.

But reputation is complicated. There is a lack of civility - someone who breaks the laws or is otherwise a danger/problem/nuisance. Then there are people who are civil but have different social customs/expectations. One of these perhaps has to do with trust - is the person safe. The other has to do with engagement. I'm not interested in having a discussion about Trump so I won't engage. I suspect there is a lot more to it. Like if you go to a bus stop at night and there is someone there, what really determines how you react to that person? It seems to me that people are generally very good at "clues".

HN has karma, but not really a reputation. You can go look at someone's comments. You can pay attention to how they react. It would be interesting to know how many down votes a person uses for example. How many up votes.

Another different issue, but perhaps related, is the idea of boundaries. If you have a community that is productive, what happens if someone can easily come in and be divisive. Imagine a gardening group talking about how to control aphids without pesticides and someone comes in and starts saying "it is stupid not to use pesticides" (or vice versa).


The main benefit of social networks is secure messaging. All the other features require a combination of a sophisticated frontend and a sufficiently general authorization mechanism.

One crazy idea is to build a basic messenger and let the users write channel policies in Datalog, a-la Biscuits.


The issues with social networks aren't single dimensional.

The fundamental issues that arise have to do with the medium of the internet itself.

What happens communities when they can reach limitless scale and the communication channels which limit emotional understanding?

Those are the difficult problems to solve.


The only “social media” features I would accept on HN are: (1) reply notification so I can keep a thread going, and (2) increased visibility of comments/posts of selected users through conditional color coding. I don’t want any other notifications, curation, etc.


If you really want to build a social network, don't fall into the trap that many side-projects and freeware products fall into: Trying to experiment. There really is no room for experimentation, because the market has already been there and tried that. Anything novel or unique you can think of, existing sites have already either experimented with, or decided against based on A/B testing.

Better to just make a "bland"/"vanilla" social network and focus on differentiating yourself by having a sterling reputation and "new car smell". Be like Google when Google was new:Just another search engine, but eh, it seems nicer than the rest somehow!

Facbook/Instagram is haunted by Cambridge Analytica and ongoing investigations and lawsuits around the world. Twitter has become Musk's playpen. LinkedIn is full of dark patterns (and that was even before Microsoft bought it!) TikTok is banned in several countries.

You also need to be able to make enough money from the project to keep the servers running, and pay engineers to fix bugs, and pay customer support people to do GDPR deletions and stuff like that. And you'll need moderators to keep the Nazis away. So, you'll need to build an advertising platform also.


This is it.

I think HN has the perfect amount of users, we don't need this to turn into Reddit. I learn more here than with any other website, but it needs to stay relatively small.

If tomorrow HN had to appeal to everyone we'd have click bait all over the place, along with ads.


Yeah, but we could really use some low-effort "that moment when you realize" memes around here! Would also be cool if HN threw in some random live streams on the homepage and let me buy badges for posts I like! Dang is also too benevolent; we need some overzealous mods on a power trip to really spice things up! /jk


https://about.opendolphin.social

https://github.com/OpenDolphin/introduction


This is somewhat what we're trying to do with OpenDolphin [1]. Contributions are really appreciated as this is a community driven project.

[1]: https://about.opendolphin.social


https://bisonrelay.org/

Just have been released yesterday , Peer to Peer social media. No censorship, no surveillance and no advertising, working with Lightning Network.


You're kinda reinventing the wheel here. Federated communities have let you do this for years, but it hasn't resulted in a direct upgrade over Twitter. They're just two different social graphs, with two different goals.


VC: “I know there are similar companies out there doing the same as Dropbox, why should I invest in just another similar company?”

Drew: “Yes. There are similar companies out there doing the same as Dropbox. But do you actually use any of them?”

VC: “No.”

Drew: “Why?”

VC: “Because they are bad.”

Same here. There are existing solutions, but none of them is good enough.


The existing solutions are fine, though. The reason we got into this mess in the first place was because we thought a centralized service would enable greater interaction than RSS provided. All we got was a lame 140 characters and an edit button a decade later. Then some asshole bought it and kicked everyone back to square one. The solution isn't 'building another monolith with better moderation', it's upsetting the unified architecture in the first place. Twitter's centralization was a design concession that is past it's time.

It's a shame people keep using that Dropbox example too. I've seen hundreds of people use iCloud and Google Drive over the years, but maybe 2 people total who used Dropbox. Is it more popular outside the States or something? I get that it's a mantra HN entrepreneurs repeat to themselves when they see their startup struggling, but I don't understand it's context in this conversation when they had their lunch eaten by every other company competing with them.


Are there any "headless community / forum" platforms out there that are easy to build on top of (e.g. Supabase level of "easy")? Some of the ActivityPub ones seem very complicated to build on.


Can you answer this question first: Why would HN build a social network together?


A ten person social network is a group chat...? I don't want a whole website with ads to justify its own existence. I just want to send and receive fun moments with a few lads every now and then.


I really like how Signal implemented stories, you can post stories to a group chat.

So you can just share a story with your lads in a group.


The social circles thing already exists in the form of group chats. Facebook saw this coming too, which is why they own the platforms that are most popular for this type of social networking.


I think next big social network might start as anti-tinder dating app.


Honestly, I feel like the forum alone is enough social media for me.


There is really only a single barrier: adoption. You have to figure out how you can get thousands of users to join and then if it's a good product it should start to snowball.


We could offer orange checkmarks for $7 and undercut our competitors.


I think the key issue is how the circles or groups work. What is the mechanism for interaction as in the sense of machinery? Zeynep Tufecki in "twitter and teargas" raises this issue using the term affordance. What does twitter afford/provide? It provides a mechanism that is good for flash mob, but not for not for creating new things. So Arab Spring turned into nothing.

What does HN afford? Comments. Is that how a social network works, I don't think so. In my experience comments on HH for example often tend toward negative or off topic.

There was some study quite a while ago talking about how if you had 25 people and asked them to solve a problem the solutions that were provided were much better when 5 groups of 5 people decided, then voted for the best solution. This was compared with one group of 25. Not sure whether there is real science there, but it sounds right to me.

We also live in the time of "cult of personality". Biden. Trump. Musk. Bezos. We follow people. We want to be infuencers. I think this is the result of our social media (and paying for things by advertising). I believe it is antithetical to effective communities. So no cult of personality. (And no advertising :-).

A few times in my life I have been part of something that was bigger than myself. A high school play, a 30 person startup. How do you get that sense?

A surprising truth to me is that I think much better when I am in conversation with sensible people. Not ones with the same opinions, but ones who actually think. I find that even when I immediately reject what they are saying, their thoughts somehow become part of mine. Artist often use the term of other work "informs" theirs and other mental constructs often "inform" my own. To my great benefit.

So for a started I would just ask if people were in agreement that "the mechanism of the social interaction determines effectiveness of the community"

If you disagree, end of conversation. If you agree then what is your thinking on how that works?

Just my 2cents


Interesting points. I also agree that discussion revolves around thought rather than position. Debate is healthy but healthy debates are rare in this context.

I would argue the ideal mechanism for interaction (or affordance) is the ability to communicate, engage, and prosper across boundaries. I believe this concept is what made the early Internet so inspiring. We were hopeful and ambitious.


> What are your thoughts?

A question.

What problem(s) / do you want to see solved or what needs do you want to address with this?

(asking as someone who mostly never used social networks outside HN)


Google+ already did exactly what you described.


> It requires a fundamental change from the reach model towards concentric social circles. The social network would allow users to arrange into small topical groups called social circles. These social circles would have a cap of 10 (arbitrary number) members. Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation, abuse, and moderation.

This reminds me of Google+. They had circles of people that you could share to. I actually thought it was quite brilliant, but in typical Google fashion, they killed it and had horrible marketing.


> How could we build a communal product for the public?

If it would be a product, what is it going to be sold personal info, ads, what?


I'd merge NNTP and IRC with the latter for chatrooms and the former for storing data in a forum format.


We have one! This is it. Put your name and a public key in your profile. It’s great here. Stay awhile.


Been thinking about that as well. Can you add contact details to your profile?


IRC over raw UDP. Identity governed by WebAuthn, moderated by stable diffusion.


Over two decades into social media, I still see nothing I want from it as a user. Removing toxicity doesn't change that.

> It requires a fundamental change from the reach model towards concentric social circles. The social network would allow users to arrange into small topical groups called social circles. These social circles would have a cap of 10 (arbitrary number) members. Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation, abuse, and moderation.

I have group texts that work basically that way. Maybe group texts could be improved in some ways, but you haven't described anything that would be an improvement. In a sense, the killer features of WhatsApp or Signal are basically just that: making text messages work internationally and privately.

> This model closely mirrors real social interactions and allows for both private and intimate communication. It also offers a profitable advertising opportunity. A social circle reflects its members’ interests and context.

From the user's perspective: fuck advertising, and fuck advertisers. If I want a product I'll go looking for information about it, and even then I'm not interested in hearing from you, because you're not exactly an unbiased source of information. Advertisers are liars: even when they're not actively lying, they're misleading by leaving out relevant information about competing products.

As long as your social media platform is in bed with advertisers, it's going to be fundamentally broken, because that money is going to force you to serve advertisers and not users. You can't serve both well--their interests are not compatible. Either you're serving advertisers and helping them lie to users, or you're serving users by keeping advertisers away from them.


Make it a command line tool. Then you will have a very targeted audience.


literally [nextcloud's talk](https://nextcloud.com/talk/)

and keep your advertising out of my contact list


> It requires a fundamental change from the reach model towards concentric social circles. The social network would allow users to arrange into small topical groups called social circles. These social circles would have a cap of 10 (arbitrary number) members. Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation, abuse, and moderation.

Isn't this just group messaging (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal etc.)? This is pretty much the only 'social networking' I do.

The only way I can rationalise any other sort of social network being successful is that deep down people actually want strangers or loose acquaintances to see their updates. Everything is on a parasocial scale from group messaging with an equal relationship through to Facebook, then Twitter all the way to Youtube where the relationship is completely one sided.


> Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation, abuse, and moderation.

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.


>eliminate many pain points

Such as?


Federated Mastodon.


Every time I see the two words social and network together, I keep asking myself: what do I need a social network for? I've never found a satisfying answer.


> This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation

I have no interest in any social network who's primary concern is limiting the spread of information. I don't care if you are scared of "misinformation". You want to restrict the spread of "good" information because you are scared of misinformation? That's the wrong solution to the problem. The correct solution is to spread your "good" information and education people on how to think critically. Censorship isn't the answer to stupidity.


This is one of the points...

Everyone wants to limit who can send informatiom.

But no one is interested in limiting himself to 10 people or so.

It is not only about Elon or Ye - even grandmas want to have a thrill of publishing post that will reach hundreds of people. Social network that limits outgoing communication has 0 chance of success. Social network that has great tools for limiting what I want to see has some possibility. Ideal social network would be one where I don't need to use any tools to see what I want ... which I think is the idea behind algorithmic feeds they came up with ... unfortunately these algorithmic feeds turned out to be not what "I want to see" but "what they want to show me" or "who paid the most to stuff his things into users faces".


Ah yes, the starry-eyed "Level One" of the Content Moderation Learning Curve [1] :)

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...


One man's censorship is another man's filtering of noise.

I agree there's no universal filter, but humanity is proof there are "good enough" filters most reasonable people would agree on.

What's missing is the type of wikipedia fanaticism for which effort would be expended.


Which is why there shouldn't be only one dimension of voting/ranking/rating.


the perfect social network was "FriendFeed" and Facebook killed it as we all know.


So you want to relaunch Orkut?


FOAF it up!


make a repo with a readme, put your ideas in it and invite people to comment


In my opinion, this is a tarpit idea [0]. It's not that it's impossible, it's that the user expectations are high, the marginal utility of the new features is negligible and, even if you had a vastly superior product, you would still need to somehow convince some critical mass of people to migrate over and use it. I think there's a reason new social networks succeed from a fresh set of users rather than somehow convincing people who are already established on FB/Twitter/Whatever to migrate over.

In addition, any new service will be fighting against the tendency to centralize, create a walled garden and prioritize tools for advertisers and user management rather than enabling users. There was a recent quote of Jack Dorsey to that effect [1]:

""" The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. """

That being said, I don't think it's impossible but it's almost going to be a "worst is better" solution and one that at least has some traction now, like Mastodon [2] or Scuttlebutt [3] (I'm on Mastodon but haven't used Scuttlebutt). Maybe IPFS thrown in there somewhere [4]? There might even be a way to bootstrap a social web through some web3 solution, though that's pretty speculative at this point (or maybe overlaps with IPFS?).

All of the FOSS/libre alternatives have major problems, not the least of which is that they're not tested at scale, have growing pains or just don't have the critical mass that any of the other platforms do (though maybe Mastodon is getting more popular?).

I go where the people are. The major feature, in my opinion, is Metcalfe's law. Any other feature might be necessary for long term survival but for to even get started, the value added from Metcalfe's law dwarfs any new feature that people might think up. I'm willing to put up with some pain for a libre/free/FOSS solution but even then, it needs to be decentralized in some way or else we're most likely to be doomed by a repeat of something like Reddit open sourcing their stack, it being a mess and them just close sourcing it again, without any major benefit to the public or users.

Put it this way: Why is some idea going to work when so many other people have tried and failed? This is not a rhetorical question. There's bound to be a social network that takes over FB/TWitter/Whatever. What are the conditions for this new social network to take over? A new breed of users? Cheaper compute? Web3 adoption? Cheaper storage leading to easier data distribution? Continually cheaper communication costs?

Sometimes it's good to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, that's certainly how a lot of startups succeed, but that's not something I'm going to invest a lot of emotional energy into.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMIawSAygO4

[1] https://twitter.com/BillyM2k/status/1603135805039382529

[2] https://mastodon.social

[3] https://scuttlebutt.nz/

[4] https://ipfs.tech/


Sorry to reply to my own thread but here's something that actually might change this equation: AI.

How can AI help create the social networking site we actually want to see? Language models to filter out hateful content? Boost content we want to see? Generate content we want?

Google's search engine initially worked because it was piggy backing off of our focus on quality content by having multiple links to content. There might be an argument to make that Google came at a time when the hardware to do "whole internet" analysis became affordable.

Twitter is a kind of "web2" site that piggy backed off of the ubiquity of the cell phone (in my opinion, if other people have differing opinions on Twitters success, I would love to hear it).

Now we have (potentially some rudimentary) AI, like language models or stable diffusion. How can we leverage these to drive engagement and add actual value to the user base? What's the next generation of AI models that can be used for this purpose?


I'm in. Lets do this.


Use fine-tuned GPT3 as AI automatic moderator.


I think there are a few things that would help.

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.




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