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

Great work! Congratulations on launching. Here's feedback.

I don't want to sync all my phone contacts because many are confidential; do you provide a workaround?

I loved the circles concept on Google+, but many people said circles were too much overhead to create and maintain; how will your app be better?

Your landing page and video emphasize one person's personal connections, whereas Instagram and similar social networks are seeing major usage in B2C accounts; what can you say about your ideas for this kind of usage?

Great work on the app! I haven't used it yet, as I'm reluctant to download an app or even sign up for an app without a clear demo of how it works. The video on the landing page explains the principles of the app (circles, privacy, etc) but it doesn't show how it works in practice.

As someone who also abhors social media, how is this different from those experiences? How are the circles managed? How are my posts and feed managed?

I used Google+ back in the day, and the circles concept was introduced with that. The circles were somewhat tedious to maintain, and became difficult at scale. How is this easier or better than that?

Also, without a web option, it's a no go for me for a social media app.

Thanks for the comment! I think it's a great question, the hypothesis with Circles is that a vast amount of people would like to share online but don't because of the dynamics of these other social apps make them uncomfortable.

So in that the hurdle has been overcome because people are able to share content and interact in ways that they 'can't' do elsewhere. There's also a group of people (like myself) who avoid typical social media, so downloading a different solution is less of a hurdle because it's designed for them.

However, you point about people 'hating' social media yet still using it is well and true. It's almost like fruit vs mcdonalds, everyone would prefer to be an avid fruit eater and have control of their diet, but few do in the end. In that we believe the only moat for social networks is providing utility that other networks can't - YC wrote a really good blog post on this in relation to WeChat (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3t-how-wechat-grew-to-be...). We're obviously not there yet but it's a start.

Also, if looking for a solution to that messaging problem, Beeper and Texts.com are creating something exciting there. Perhaps the social media equivalent of these services will be enabled by interoperability by DeSo, ETH or the like. Interesting to think about.

Same here. And I wouldn't share my contacts regardless. That's a big ask before getting to any main features and not worth the risk to me.

So a couple of thoughts: 1) Allow me to sign in and post texts without permissions or sharing contacts. 2) Give the option to ask me for photo/file access permissions when I push the photo upload button. 3) When adding contacts, a prompt for contact permission is okay then but should be optional i.e. I should be able to put a phone number or email address in manually. I don't know if you had that or not I stopped at the file permission.

Google+ had circles as well. I found it very hard to properly segment people properly. There are rarely such hard boundaries on relationships. If I'm snowboarding or barbecuing, it's very seldom I only wanna share that with just friends, just family, or just co-workers. It will usually be much more interest-based.

Trying to create interested-based circles was also hard, as the cardinality explodes quite fast (and you're back to square one with not knowing who you share what with).

I guess this is where Snapchat is onto something with giving a very rapid selection of who you want to share with. I usually have a small group of people in mind when I want to share something.

Defining that group, fast, almost on a per share level is the key challenge.

I think the "circles"-approach could be a way, but I think it must be much more dynamic and alive than how Google+ solved it. It must continuously evolve.