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Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

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Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

#141

Post by addrian27 »

ineptech wrote: post #129

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…

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

Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

#142

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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

Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

#143

Post by shanebellone »

addrian27 wrote: post #141
ineptech wrote: post #129

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…

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

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

Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

#145

Post by efdee »

baxtr wrote: post #60
bil7 wrote: post #6

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.

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

Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

#146

Post by ineptech »

shanebellone wrote: post #138
ineptech wrote: post #129

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…

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 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.

Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

#147

Post by martindbp »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #85

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 th…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

#148

Post by rendall »

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.

Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

#149

Post by ineptech »

addrian27 wrote: post #141
ineptech wrote: post #129

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

#150

Post by martindbp »

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.

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