Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Text-Only Social Network

subreply.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 240 posts

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#141

Post by newman8r »

zem wrote: post #83
newman8r wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm experimenting with it and I might get rid of it. It's mostly just to try to keep the group active, because it's a small group and if the activity level dies out, the group dies out. But thanks for the feedback, I'm making a note of it.

I once watched a livejournal group die in my general takeaway from that was that people might get annoyed when you tell them what they are not allowed to do on your site, but most of them will roll their eyes and put up with it. if you tell them what they have to do they will simply drop the site and never look back.

I think in this scenario, where some sort of rule is imposed upon a group that's already been established, people would be justifiably pissed off.

I do my best to make the activity requirements clear upfront, so the only people who will be upset are those who choose not to sign up anyway. For me, the far bigger challenge is learning how to define these "rules" in a way that makes the group sustainable over the long run - which is to the benefit of everyone involved. While the idea of having to post once every 25 days may seem unnecessary, if 100 people followed it to a tee, you're going to have a group that remains active indefinitely.

I do see your point, and I agree that if any sorts of hard rules are to be imposed upon a discussion, it needs to be done tactfully.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#142

Post by smichel17 »

cortesoft wrote: post #139
bigiain wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unwanted company or brand can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit." Said nobody ever. (I also somewhat agree with you, I have a bunch of real world friends now, who I first came to know via Twitter retweets - back in T…

Did you just say "said nobody ever" to someone who literally just said that? There is clearly at least one person who feels that way.

It felt tongue in cheek to me since they went on to somewhat agree that signal boosting via retweets at least used to be nice. But I agree, it was a bit weird of a response.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#143

Post by smhmd »

carrolldunham wrote: post #31

As seen on twitch, letting people put emojis in their name on a black and white site sets up a system where scanning eyes just see those eye-candies and skip over the rest. This is useful on twitch as it highlights the streamer's paying subscribers but here it's just whoever is more obnoxious.

I disagree. Using this thing for an hour, users with emojis are more distinguishable at a glance. I often face this issue with HN where I have to read the user's username to know if they're OP. Twitter usernames with emojis, however, is really obnoxious.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#144

Post by bigiain »

65536 wrote: post #137
bigiain wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not proprietary. Yeah. I was being snarky without enough context to make myself clear there... Sorry. > Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable, What mechanisms do you see in place to stop this being an inevitable result for Minichan as well? It's a social problem not a technical one... > With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site…

These are good points and I think you are right. I just wish it was possible for such a dream place like I wish for to exist.

I think they _do_ exist. Transiently and briefly.

For me, they recur maybe once every 5-10 years or so and last about the same sort of time period?? Here since 2009. Twitter circa 2008 or so. Burningman in the early 2000s. ASR on usenet in the late '90s

Things change, they run their course - and I change and the things I want become different. Some people rant and demand things "go back the way they were", but by then the people who made it "the way things were" have moved on to a new thing, and new people have grown up and started building new things they think are better than the old people had.

Hold on to your dream, but realise that you may have to either chase it around the internet as it moves (and work out how to find it when you one day wake up are realise it's gone from the old place), or make it yourself as part of a team prepared to put in the hard work required to shape it the way you think is right.

(While I personally think 4Chan is a total shit show, I have no doubt moot invested enormous effort in making it or helping it become what _he_ wanted in the world. A whole different sort of effort than pg/deng/scott/YC/others put in here, but I have no doubt moot complained bitterly to his friends how hard it was dealing with things like lawyers and hosting companies and all the other things that become a problem when you decide you need to make a thing like 4Cahn exists in the world...)

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#145

Post by foxhop »

Please let me follow people.

Next let me see all the people I follow on a "pintrest" style page. I should be able to see only their latest subreply.

Most recent subreply to oldest.

I hit refresh when I'm ready for updates.

If I want to see all of somebodies subreplies I will click their username to see all the threads they have created.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#146

Post by deevolution »

inopinatus wrote: post #97
ehsankia wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The character limit is the last of Twitters issue, in my opinion. I think the #1 issue is the retweet model, it leads to people just brainlessly sharing low effort content with a single click. It's similar to how fake news and misleading content thrive on Facebook. But notice how Instagram where it's impossible to easily re-share content (well, you can now in stories) is far less toxic.

An honest UI might use the word “echo” rather than “retweet”.

Retweet is more on brand.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#147

Post by bigiain »

cortesoft wrote: post #139
bigiain wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unwanted company or brand can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit." Said nobody ever. (I also somewhat agree with you, I have a bunch of real world friends now, who I first came to know via Twitter retweets - back in T…

Did you just say "said nobody ever" to someone who literally just said that? There is clearly at least one person who feels that way.

I made a minor but critical small edit to what the person just said. I switched "unknown artist or developer" to "unwanted company or brand" - which to me at least, is a super accurate change in majority user base between Twitter 2010 and Twitter 2020.

Now ask yourself if anybody ever said what you're responding to?

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#148

Post by detaro »

bigiain wrote: post #134
dorkwood wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unknown artist or developer can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit.

"The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unwanted company or brand can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit." Said nobody ever. (I also somewhat agree with you, I have a bunch of real world friends now, who I first came to know via Twitter retweets - back in T…

Why would you follow people that retweet brands? Retweets work just fine as a discovery mechanism for me still. (EDIT: not to forget, you can disable retweets for people you want to otherwise follow nowadays)

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#149

Post by stormbrew »

bigiain wrote: post #131
microcolonel wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retweet used to actually retweet things (i.e. pretend "RT" and the OP's handle), so it's like the floppy disk icon. Parler uses a megaphone.

It's amusing to me the retweets (and hashtags) were emergent behaviour of early Twitter users, not any sort of well thought out plan for how the platform was intended to work. And then the platform owners mostly misunderstood the problem and emergent solution, and natively implemented something similar but optimised for advertising sales metrics ("engagement!") instead of what the users were actually doing. And then…

God so much this. Manual retweets didn't really work like the feature Twitter implemented do and they had drastically different effects on content spread. Quote tweets (which were also emergent before rts even became a feature) are actually closer in those terms.

But because the button is right there the more useful emergent version died completely off.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#150

Post by kerkeslager »

cortesoft wrote: post #139
bigiain wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unwanted company or brand can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit." Said nobody ever. (I also somewhat agree with you, I have a bunch of real world friends now, who I first came to know via Twitter retweets - back in T…

Did you just say "said nobody ever" to someone who literally just said that? There is clearly at least one person who feels that way.

> Did you just say "said nobody ever" to someone who literally just said that?

No they did not. If you read it carefully you'll note there's a slight change. I missed it too on first read.

Post reply on HN