If it was up to you to design a social network that is better for humanity (without dopamine driven, without selling users data) - how would you design it? How will it make money?
Ask HN: What's your idea of a “better” social network?
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Re: Ask HN: What's your idea of a “better” social network?
#2Websites, RSS feeds, and email. Anybody who can't figure out how to run their own website can just do without. Social networking was a mistake. Human relationships and identity are not things that can be reduced to third normal form and stored in a database.
Re: Ask HN: What's your idea of a “better” social network?
#3Facebook was amazing before it allowed you to see strangers' comments and before news was in your feed.
My feed ("timeline" at the time) was composed entirely of friends' personal life updates, conversations, jokes, etc. There was political stuff, but nothing more extreme than you'd hear at a party.
The news in the feed famously killed all of that. The worst part is that it would show you your friends at their most extreme, for example responding to rage-bait articles
It's not hard to build a great social network, but it's extremely hard to monetize one.
Re: Ask HN: What's your idea of a “better” social network?
#4Making it free for non-commercial (personal) use but charging for commercial (brands, businesses, etc) accounts and using that to subsidize the free users. Businesses also get more features such as analytics, their phone contact details prominently displayed on their profile, etc.
Sensible limits on what users can do. New accounts can't immediately upload media or post links and have to gain trust over time to try and limit spam.
Better moderation, not just for obviously illegal content but anything that's predatory such as multi-level marketing schemes, quack "alternative medicine", anti-vax and similar crap. Anyone posting or promoting this kind of content gets the boot after a few warnings.
Re: Ask HN: What's your idea of a “better” social network?
#5As infrastructure (an API/Protocol a la NNTP) rather than a branded thing, so all backend and people make their own clients and offer their own filtering choices. People can post anonymously but also have the option to hide all anonymously posted content.
Not with the tiny character limit of Twitter, which I think seriously damages discourse by fragmenting it into artificially small chunks and thus promoting snark and sarcasm and one-liners. It disturbs me that my most popular tweets are throwaway smartass remarks; of course I like that people find them clever or funny, but I would much rather get a little consistent engagement on serious/thoughtful tweets than big boosts on the least important things I write.
Most of all, social tagging. So if you regularly post spam or are a nazi, that's going to follow your posts (and you) around and people can filter against it. Sure, this would lead to gamesmanship as nazis would try to tag folk like me in negative ways, but that's OK. Cluster identification and conflicts will emerge naturally but will be much more transparent than now.
The graph of communication interactions will be fully exposed so people can see how information propagates around the network.
Re: Ask HN: What's your idea of a “better” social network?
#6Websites, RSS feeds, and email. Anybody who can't figure out how to run their own website can just do without. Social networking was a mistake. Human relationships and identity are not things that can be reduced to third normal form and stored in a database.
Humanity isn't noted for its inclination or ability to un-invent things.
Re: Ask HN: What's your idea of a “better” social network?
#7Websites, RSS feeds, and email. Anybody who can't figure out how to run their own website can just do without. Social networking was a mistake. Human relationships and identity are not things that can be reduced to third normal form and stored in a database.
Humanity isn't noted for its inclination or ability to un-invent things.
But it has demonstrated the capacity to un-deploy things and let them fade from the active global consciousness. Both technical and social.
I’d be happy if they didn’t immediately bring to mind “One Ring to rule them all...”