HN Reader

I agree with a lot of what you say here. I’ve been running a 3h daily time boxed social media site for the past 6 months and even though traffic is now a crawl compared to the initial burst of activity when I started it, there are users who check in daily and it ends up being a lovely experience I think.

I am working on mobile apps and redesigning and reengineering a lot of the site and I love your thoughts on a blog focus. I’d love to let people host a small blog on the site that would also connect to their actual blog. I’ll add that to the roadmap.

Definitely stop by some time! https://seven39.com/

The author invented and then dashed against the rocks a few existing fediverse platforms in the course of a couple paragraphs.

These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from venturing outside the walls.

Friendica is one of several fediverse platforms the author basically describes. You can even self-host an instance for yourself and friends/family.

And you may say:

> I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.

Perfect. IMO, the minuscule friction to enter is the benefit. The walled gardens exist and hold people in such high numbers exactly because they've reduced the friction to enter and increased it to leave. The definition of a trap, yes?

I was about to say "Disallow forwarding". The problem with most networks (and in the old days, even emails), was that the bulk of the material I'd get from people I personally know were not original content, but memes, humor, or political content being forwarded.

But this may serve an equivalent purpose:

> And finally, there should be a reasonable cap on the number of times a user can post per day. Roughly 5 times per day feels like the upper threshold of what you can post while being intentional about what it is you're posting.

Amusingly, just yesterday I said in a comment:

"Imagine you have a quota of only 1 HN comment per day. You probably will be a lot more careful on what you reply to."

Strava is the closest thing to effective social media that I use, because it is 'slow'.

You create 'content' by doing something orthogonal. You pay for access vs selling attention for ads. You only look at Strava when you are working out, so engagement is authentic vs contrived/performative. I care about my friend completing a run because I know they did it.

One of the best thing they did was allow the chance to add photos.

Goodreads/book discussions -- the best class of social media.

Requires some (significant?) investment to have an opinion on a book. It's often pretty obvious if someone hasn't read a book and is commenting on it. The interval between comments is hours/days because users are off reading the book.

The closest platform that is a somewhat known group of people coming together in a semi-private space seems to be Discord.

You can have as large or as small a community you want, you can have known people, unknown people.

Mastodon comes close as well, but the effort to start a discord community is so much smaller compared to running a Mastodon instance.

I also dream for this. Personally I would remove likes/reactions though. As we've seen with Instagram it's too easy to chase that dopamine rush/compare number of likes. Comments are enough in my opinion.

There are local chapters of the Society for Creative Anachronism that uses Facebook heavily. The thing is that the use of FB grew out from the in-person community that had formed, and people would rather interact in-person than only through social media. The community already has its own customs and ceremonies for recognition; people there upvote and collect following in an attempt to get the FB algorithm to spread the word for each other (on events and happenings).

When there is an already-existing community like that, I think a dedicated social media platform for that particular community can be beneficial. That platform then does not have to be the social media for everyone.

However, funding (for hosting and maintenance) is still an issue.

As a small +1 — I built mood.site to be an easy way to share galleries of images with people. The idea being like "hey send me some photo inspiration for the party we're planning" and having a throwaway way to do that (kind of like a pastebin for images).

People definitely use it for this, but what has really surprised me is people's capactiy for expression inside of the bounds of the program I created, and how people are clearly using in as a sort of ad hoc social network of loosely collected boards and inspiration. There are no actual _social_ features in the app (no discovery, etc.), but what has been sort of inspriring is that The Will is just there for people to find ways of expression outside the idea of a "feed" and "posting".

I think those models have indeed become synonymous with "social media", but my only point here is to bring up a possibility of "social media" as something that can be much more expansive and look very different compared to the primary models we think of today.

Another person favorite of mine along the same lines is how the comments section of this Pilsburry recipe for "veggie pizza" has become it's own sort of ad-hoc social media for grandmas to share their own experiences with each other about the dish: https://www.pillsbury.com/recipes/veggie-pizza/4b2c60ae-69e5...

Well intentioned, but never going to work. Social networks will always create financial incentives that have to be contended with. No network that can connect to “close” people, will always result in some nodes on the graph that connect to a “large portion of people”.

Always. This broadcast ability is then a path to financial renumeration, which will see the rise of copy cats and another arms race to gather attention from people on the network.

Fundamentally, information / clout / something is resistant to being distributed equitably on information networks, especially online networks.

Everybody just forgetting bulletin boards. Dirt cheap to host, can be invite only if desired and, most importantly, asynchronous.

People are basically looking for a standalone Facebook groups that's not owned by a corporation. Or Twitter for small groups but not what mastodon has become. I think honourably some people have tried and many continue to build niche products like micro.blog. Personally I just want a service that is not commercially owned, for profit or by a US corporation. My own attempts/ambitions get in the way of being able to achieve it, so I started working on something that slowly solved my own problems e.g news feed aggregation, videos without shorts or the algorithm, chat with AI based on a model from Qatar. Soon I'll add posting but only because I feel like I need some sort of personalised way to bookmark and share my thoughts within it being about gaining attention or validation from a world of likes and retweets.

There are no good answers, because the reality is the next medium is probably quite different from the last. But yea personalised small group chat, feed, news makes sense.

I think modern social media is a huge problem but don’t see we can fix it without regulation. It’s clear that all the current incentives point companies towards engagement and rage bait and away from anything actually “social”, and I think it’s unlikely that any new social network that tries to fix these issues would achieve widespread usage.

Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would that legislation look like? My main idea is to simply outlaw ML-based recommendation algorithms, but obviously that is not as simple as it sounds and is mostly based on looking fondly on the earlier days of social media, when I felt like it was making my life better instead of worse.

Media was always already social. If I email my friend a link to a YouTube video, is the Internet a social network? I think what we think of when we think of 'social media' or a 'social network' is an integrated platform that lubricates particular potentials, like being able to create and share content with friends and fans. But there are other ways to realise those potentials, including ones that require the interfacing of different platforms (or media, in the McLuhanian sense), or what might be perceived as different platforms at one scale, and the same platform at another scale, as per my Internet example. And, the multiplicity of platforms, and the interfacing between them, might confer additional advantages and open up yet more potentials.

What are people using now instead of Facebook (for broastcast and interaction with friends/family)?

Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.

WhatsApp and Telegram are my slow social media. They ring only for the very few people I really care about. Everything else accumulates in their chats.

I get some link to FB and TikTok in my chats and groups but I don't open all of them. I don't have the apps, so if I do I open them in the browser. I'm not logged in. No TikTok account. Links to Instagram are very rare. No account. I check WhatsApp and Telegram when I feel like, no pressure.

>I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right

What about a requirement "at least one direct interaction in a year"? Maybe with a reminder "you didn't catch up with X in 11 months, are you still connected"? This will both:

* Achieve the main reason of social network existence, i.e. give people an excuse to have a chat with a former friend and keep in touch. I sometimes thing about messaging a person I knew years ago, but it feels awkward enough that I don't do it usually.

* Naturally limit the number of connections, because now having connectione require (small but still) work. A very small dopamine addicted users may still try to collect connections, but I feel like this platform will be hostile enough for them and they will leave anyway, not finding what they want from SM.

“blog as a social network” was/is pretty much Tumblr. Most of the content was structured as posts and updates on your personal page. You didn’t even need to engage with the social part.

It’s hard to explain the difference between it and Twitter if you never used it, but the platform itself creates very different posting ideologies.

I’ve been dreaming of building this.

I miss chronological feeds the most.

Social media as it is works perfectly and does not need to be changed for extroverts. We just need a product made for those who care about small private groups.

How about https://slowly.app/ ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_(app)

I love this. It is close to what we've built with Peergos [0].

1. People have to accept you as a follower, and the default is bi-directional.

2. There are no visible follower/friend counts.

3. Chronological feed which has an end (no infinite scroll)

4. No arbitrary character limit

5. No analytics (enforced by E2EE)

We don't have a max friends/number of posts per day though.

[0] https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media

I don’t want to be limited to „meaningful connections!“ I stay in close contact with those who are dear to me outside of social media. I want to stay connected to some random coworker I enjoyed working with in 2011, because I enjoy watching them from a distance, getting married, settling down, that kind of stuff, and occasionally comment on these things. This used to be a strength of social media before algorithms came in and decided that because I am not liking every post of that person it follows that I am not interested.

Now I have been using Whatsapp as my only "social media app" basically as stated in another comment: Whatsapp updates, you can see the updates of your contacts, then you can react or send them a message. And these updates only contain the people who you have as a contact and they have you as a contact, so you only receive the updates of the people you care about and if there is someone you don't want to see their updates you can turn off updates for them.

I hope meta doesn't ruin this feature.

It's Also available in signal I think

Not as slow as Scuttlebutt, but fairly laid back is twtxt (https://twtxt.dev/). The community is small, but thriving!

Replacing the current social media giants is incredibly hard because of network effects and lock-in. Could we instead implement most of the OP's ideas with a client for an existing social media site that filters out all the crap?

The article is basically describing Friendster, which was the first big social media platform after MySpace. I have zero social media accounts (for all the reasons described) but wouldn’t mind a Friendster-like platform.

I also wish there will be a lot of diverse social media for specific interest groups. I am fine that not many people would use them. I would actually prefer that because I can at least expect people with genuine interest on the topic. Discord in this regard is pretty close to this direction I think.

I agree for the most part here. The biggest barrier to this sort of platform is that people love convienence and low effort use, but that's not what social interraction is about. I really think going out of your way to do things in a more difficult way (inconvience) is the secret to living in the real world again. That's why I prefer DIY to whatever standard solution to any given problem there might be already.

It exists: Whatsapp

Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.

Should internet based chat platforms develop a common protocol (like SMS for mobile networks) so that people don't all need to use the same app (Whatsapp and the like) to be able to have 1:1 or group chats?

(Before someone says I have rediscoered email -- I know email exists for a similar reason but not for instant messaging for a smartphone weilding generation)

What he describes existed and didn’t scale comparing to modern social media. It was called LiveJournal.

Most people wouldn't enjoy something like https://github.com/dimkr/tootik

back in 2009 in Spain we had what the author describes in Tuenti (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuenti). at first it was invite only and by default people's profiles were private, you'd need to be friends to see their activity and pictures. your feed was just your friends statuses and new pictures in chronological order.

later on it got some games and a realtime chat but it ended up dying because of newer social networks. it was great to keep your actual friends and family connected.

I think something like a Whatsapp that recommends contacts that can be close is good enough. Something like friends of friends recommendations. But no more.

A lot of his ideas remind me of the BeReal app, it limits posts per day and is geared toward 'friends in real life' and with just a few friends on it I've stayed engaged. But it's sparse for me and can be a ghost town much of the time, but that may be just because my friend group isn't using it much. There needs to be sufficient network effect to maintain and grow it's reach as a network, which may be antithetical to its founding principles.

I relate to so many points here. I have a desire to share my thoughts and ideas, but no format (except for my personal blog) feels right.

Just started building autogram.bio to help people create their personal corner of the web, and this post was exactly the motivation I needed to continue. Thank you!

The problem is whenever wise people sit out of the popular platforms like today’s social media, society continues most of its speech and politics on those big popular fast social media platforms. So we are all still exposed to its risks.

Minus is a finite social platform where users get 100 posts--for life. https://minus.social

I'm building an app builder (getmocha.com) and one of my favorite use cases I have seen is "small private social network":

some people are building custom, tailored social networks only available to their family, church, community, sports team, school, etc...

This was previously impossible but now AI changes that. I don't know if it will materialize, but a more federally distributed web with tons of small private social networks could be a future of healthy social

> I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right. Any more than that and you're a collector, and not using the platform to foster connection.

Path[1] did that, but with a cap of 50, and then 150 (based on the Dunbar number of meaningful human connections one can retain). They had a crazy growth period but eventually went kaput.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)

Slowcial Media

I guess if you could convince your friends & family to use something like https://friendi.ca/ it could work for you.

I was recently inspired on this front by an interview[1] with a recommender system engineer that explored the idea of a "good" recommender algorithm:

> It feels like smartphones have saturated the available time. It's like the famous quote from the Netflix CEO: "Our main competitor is sleep." There aren't many more biological hours in the day to capture. At this point, it's mostly a war between recommender systems for your attention, as they've already consumed roughly all the available time.

...

> For me, the big issue with recommender systems isn't that they will destroy our minds, though that is a possible risk. It's the incredible waste of potential. Billions of hours of human time will be allocated today, guided mostly by clickbait incentives. The goal is to entertain people, not in a joyful way, but to help them dissociate.

> You have such an opportunity. There's probably a video on YouTube right now that, if I watched it, would inspire me to call my dad, talk to a stranger, or start a new relationship. Google could probably introduce me to a good friend, a co-founder, or my future life partner.

> They have the data, but they aren't using it that way. Instead, they're optimizing for a few more cents of advertising revenue, which is a colossal, civilizational-level failure.

...

> That is the crux of the incentives problem we've been discussing. One thing that gives me hope is we're no longer in the era of free software. Paradoxically, now that intelligence is cheap enough, people are willing to pay for software. It's more reasonable to charge for a subscription now because you can provide measurable value to someone's life. Paying $10 or $20 a month for a social media service that actually helps you live according to your goals is a much less crazy proposition than it was 10 years ago.

[1] https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/forecasting-the-future-of-r...

I wrote a lil blog post after reading this this morning: https://awarm.leaflet.pub/3lyzchme2d22b

tl;dr: people have a huge diversity of preferences for social media, we need to rearchitect social networks to allow them to express those preferences while still connecting with each other, I think atproto enables this and is where I'm betting on.

So—slowcial media? :D

> I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.

For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized.

The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you receive both got monetized. They monetized Attention by adding View, Like, Share and Follower counts to everything.

And those counts started acting like Currency does in the real economy.

For example a key feature of Currency is that it acts as Store of Value. That value can then be exchanged at whatever time for something else in the real economy.

But in the real economy the Money Supply is regulated and controlled by the Central Bank. Why did that happen?

Before Central Banks (a very recent invention) showed up individual Banks printed their own currency. If they printed "too much" all kinds of strange phenomenon started emerging in the real world. For centuries no one connected that back to how much money was being printed. Because people had no idea what the level of the money supply was. Just like on social media there is no tracking or visible signal of the global Money supply and interest rate setting to control it.

So any time there was a price rising in the market, bank runs, bubbles in the market people would blame everything under the sun other than those responsible for money printing. After centuries of chaos Central Banks started emerging to control what individual Banks could do. Same story will repeat with Attention(which is acting just like a Currency).

This is why Elon and Trump rush to start their own Attention Banks cause they understand better than anyone being able to print a store of value that everyone else uses gives you power.

This is also why having China influencing the money supply (Attention) of US is via TikTok is non-optional.

So people eventually land on 2 paths forward - 1. Demonetize Attention - which is what the post is talking about

2. Remonetize Attention - where there is tracking of how much Attention anyone can receive, and how much Attention anyone can pay. Similar to what controls exist on Banks in what they lend and how much cash they need to hold. And Banks can then run for-profit without doing as much damage as they did when they controlled the money supply.

Um, I'm building this? [1]

The one key element I added was privacy. If your posts are private to your social group then there is no mechanism to try appealing to a broader "viral" audience. Also--if it is decentralized then the company (or person in my case) building it can't change their mind and start selling your data/eyeballs.

I have a LOT of thoughts in this space. Lots of people think they want some sort of healthier social-media alternative, but we're fighting against systems that are so finely tuned engagement monsters that is hard compete to protect your attention and time.

Herman- I'll reach out to you by email!

[1]: https://havenweb.org

Bluesky and Mastodon are exactly this IMO. No algorithm, just following people.

Minor formatting quip: At the top, the "dd mm yyyy" format should not use a comma.

use nostr. it can be anything you want it to be.