221–230 of 399 posts
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 g…
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 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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Yes, that's right. Its transport protocol has to be email. Maybe with a side of RSS.
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.