Show HN: What do you think of my new social app?

First time posting on Hacker News in about 2 years! The reason I’m posting is that I thought I’d write about the product I’ve been building, in hopes it resonates with people.

Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour, including mine and my friends.

I also noticed that the vast majority of my friends were pretty much passive on the services, even if they had an account. Turns out that most people felt uncomfortable sharing to people they didn’t know too well, which inevitably happens as you meet new people, add them, and often don’t develop the relationship much further. I had a sense that there could be a better way.

In that, I remembered the days of Path and Google+ which had the model of focusing on particular people in your network, both through the feed and in how you shared. Path in particular was a ‘real life’ social network, something that despite being brought to market in 2010 or whatever, seemed to be more relevant today.

So problem found, problem solved. I took the journey of learning how to code when COVID hit (I was working in Architecture and Design and was about to start my masters degree at Harvard GSD in Boston), then one thing led to another, my prototype garnered some investment interest, and Circles was born.

The idea is very much like the name suggests, it’s about adding your contacts (synced through your phonebook) into Circles that define what the relationship is. This means that you only see things from people you have tagged (rather than everyone) and when you share, you choose exactly who it goes to (rather than all your friends or followers).

It also takes cues from other privacy focused social products. Posts are encrypted, reactions and comments are only shown to people who are contacts with eachother, and user profiles only show that which has been explicitly shared to the user viewing the profile.

As they were mentioned briefly before, it’s essentially a crossover between Path and Google+ with a wrap around layer of privacy, so the potential revenue has to eventually come through paid features rather than ads.

We’re in the app store and google play store (yay, cross-platform JS frameworks), the invite code is ‘FULLCIRCLE’ and download links are below:

Landing: https://oncircles.com

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/circles-share-more-with-less/i...

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oncircles

I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on the idea. Hit or miss?

PS: If you want to chat about the idea or are interested in working together I’d love to chat. Always interesting to meet people on HN and we have the funds, ideas and drive to continue making cool things that can solve big problems. Send me an email at james@oncircles.com

Thanks!

Show HN: What do you think of my new social app?
oncircles.com

Many people says they "hate" social media, in reality everyone is still using it and it's very hard to even convince people (even close family) to use another messenger even though the barrier is way lower than a social network.

Update:

On maybe the fifth try, it worked. But now it's requiring my contact list to proceed. The app itself on the home screen is just called "rn-fetch-blob" (i.e. a default react native project). I'm not going to give contact list access to an app that didn't even bother to give itself a non-default name/icon on the home screen. I think the app needs a little more time in the oven before you have other people try it out.

But let's assume for the moment that you aren't running a contact harvesting scam... I hardly use Facebook and I'm very particular about who I add on there. I actually go back and remove people I don't interact with or who create noise --I want to be able to log in once a week and see what people are doing, not scroll through memes or other crappy shared content.

My contact list on my phone, on the other hand, has friends, ex-friends, family, current and former coworkers, etc. Most of them I don't want to be connected with on a social network.

So I guess what I'm saying is that from my perspective, you aren't solving any problems, and are just a potential security risk when it comes to sucking up contact information.