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Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

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Re: Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

#331

Post by aleken »

samarama wrote: post #322

The issue is you have built in a mechanism to prevent the site from gaining critical mass. In order for a user to check the site, there would need to be 50 posts from their friends that they can read through. For that to happen, they would need 500 friends for them to make 50 posts a week. In order to reach 500 friends, you would need 100 million users, before that the network would be empty with nothing happening. I…

Isn’t one of the points about “slow” social that you don’t need to read 50 posts a day? I would be happy checking in once a week, the same day I am going to post my update.

Re: Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

#333

Post by ricardobayes »

newsclues wrote: post #262
nightski wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have skin in this game and will probably never use it anyways, but to me that is a non starter for this whole project. Why would I want to limit how often my friends can post? The problem with FB isn't that my friends post to much, it's that I never see what my friends post.

Why would I want to limit my speed in my own car? Because others exist

If there was anything that we learned from the pandemic is people are not in any way considerate of others needs.

Re: Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

#334

Post by ricardobayes »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #320
CitrusFruits wrote: post #9

Hey everyone, OP here. I, like many others tend to waffle between loving and hating social media, so this is my take on what I think a better solution looks like. This is something I've been working on for the past couple of months and a concept that I think will be though provoking, if nothing else, to the HN community. If you want to read more on my thoughts and the story behind this, you can check out my blog post…

Looks like this may work for older generations where the pace of life is different and things are less spontaneous. I’m looking forward to see where it will go.

older folk seem to have zero issues with facebook though. All over my feed and groups is 60+ people posting. Younger people have largely abandoned ship

Re: Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

#335

Post by ivan_gammel »

ricardobayes wrote: post #334
ivan_gammel wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like this may work for older generations where the pace of life is different and things are less spontaneous. I’m looking forward to see where it will go.

older folk seem to have zero issues with facebook though. All over my feed and groups is 60+ people posting. Younger people have largely abandoned ship

I mean 35-40 and older, not the retirement age. 90% of my friends in this age have gone offline or keep their old blogs for posting. They may keep the accounts or even read some stuff sometimes, but social networks of 2010s are dead for them. This is in Europe though, maybe in other parts of the world it is different.

Re: Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

#336

Post by spoils19 »

smaudet wrote: post #328
samarama wrote: post #322

The issue is you have built in a mechanism to prevent the site from gaining critical mass. In order for a user to check the site, there would need to be 50 posts from their friends that they can read through. For that to happen, they would need 500 friends for them to make 50 posts a week. In order to reach 500 friends, you would need 100 million users, before that the network would be empty with nothing happening. I…

This seems a bit arbitrary? I would be happy with one, or two posts a day...I only need 5 friends to post a week, at 10 I always have something to read, at 50 friends I am positively awash... Introverts are a big crowd - a fact the socialites like Zuckerberg tend to forget. This will easily grow...

Agreed. I'll be looking forward to quoting your post when this social network grows and takes off over the next few years.

Re: Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

#338

Post by p5v »

It makes me so happy to see projects like this one get developed. A few months back, we started working on a pet project with a similar idea - to help people dissociate the good and honest writing on Twitter from all the links, threads, mentions, hashtags, and other engagement tactics. We called it BARE (https://bare.tw) and it offers an extremely spartan look over one's Twitter timeline. As TWiT's Leo Laporte called it "it shows you all the boring stuff."

I believe that with projects like SlowSocial and ours, we will help people find hidden gems among the "boring stuff."

Kudos, and will be happy to collaborate on further ideas.

Re: Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

#339

Post by Tmpod »

gchamonlive wrote: post #226

Social Networks should be like email providers. You choose one that fits you best, or deploy your own, without having to worry not being able to communicate with others. Maybe we are long overdue for an open standard protocol for social interactions on the web. If you come to think of it, when the personal data itself isn't the property of the company behind the social network, there should be no reason not to share…

You should give ActivityPub[1] a look. There are plenty of platforms based on this already.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

Re: Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers

#340

Post by quambene »

_zzaw wrote: post #308
gmanis wrote: post #276

OP, you should charge users a small amount ($24-50 a year), after a trial period. Keep it simple, free of ads and keep the timeline algorithm free. I’m sure there are many who would love something like this and be willing to pay enough to cover costs and maybe generate a full time income for you. Good luck!!

I wouldn’t pay that much for what this is. I’m sure most of my friends wouldn’t. It’s a neat enough idea that I’d try the free tier, but it doesn’t offer anything compelling enough to make me want to pay for it. I’m not trying to be mean or dismissive; it’s a genuinely cool experiment, and I’d honestly love to see a social network where people actually said longer substantive things rather than low-effort shitposts (…

IMO, building a social network is quite difficult nowadays because you can't monetize it right away. So you either have to bootstrap as a side project and build a community for years or getting paid by VC money early on.

We tried something similar [1] a few years ago. The limit is 5 posts per day. Our approach was minimalistic in a sense as you could post links only and no text, pictures, or videos.

We named it Turtle, symbolizing the opposite of the chatty twitter bird. It wasn't so clever from an SEO point of view though.

[1] https://turtle.community

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