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

oncircles.com

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

#121

Post by newswasboring »

nnoitra wrote: post #118
newswasboring wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends directly on whether my friends will pay to be on that network. Game servers are a great example. I will pay if my friends are also on the same server. The problem is, there are way too many free options for us to organize. And this doesn't bring anything to the table which is spectacular.

What would you consider spectacular? Social network app that delivers crack cocaine by a drone? The grail of immortality?

Great question. I feel like we have two kinds of social networks right now parasocial (tiktok/instagram/etc.) and social (facebook/reddit/etc.). And there is a huge lack of good second ones. A spectacular social network for me would focus on social relationships and do something to facilitate making new ones online.

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

#122

Post by sackerhews »

jstrafy wrote: post #7
sackerhews wrote: post #4

Interesting. Will have a look when I don't need to install an app to use it.

Cool. Thanks for this feedback! We started with mobile because that's the dominant force these days but depending on movement it would be great to create a web-app or desktop client.

For the record, I'm not going to install an desktop app either to use a web service :)

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

#123

Post by aklemm »

Sign up on iOS isn’t working for me. I put in the code, it looks like its going to work then it just asks me for the code again.

Also, I found a big even before that. When you start typing your phone number, the process will lock up if you stop halfway through in order to try to update your country flag to the right one. I had to back out and start again.

Looking forward to trying it!

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

#124

Post by jstrafy »

stazz1 wrote: post #65
newswasboring wrote: post #22

I know its frowned upon in HN to talk monetization early, but if I am not the product, how do you plan to sustain and grow this? I believe social media inherently has only one product, social interactions. If you users are not being charged, they are the product. Do you plan to charge content creators? Do you plan to charge for premium features? I ask because otherwise it might just go the way of Google+ and disappea…

> frowned upon in HN to talk monetization early, it is? Would you pay for a subscription to a social network without ads? Doesn't seem too far from an actuality

That's a great point. Our baseline assumption has been that, by and large, people would not pay for a social networking function on its own. So in that we've been hesitant to talk about monetisation with future features.

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

#125

Post by jstrafy »

newswasboring wrote: post #121
nnoitra wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you consider spectacular? Social network app that delivers crack cocaine by a drone? The grail of immortality?

Great question. I feel like we have two kinds of social networks right now parasocial (tiktok/instagram/etc.) and social (facebook/reddit/etc.). And there is a huge lack of good second ones. A spectacular social network for me would focus on social relationships and do something to facilitate making new ones online.

I would agree with your categories there. Circles is clearly in the second category & although it's early days our aim with the product is to build a great utility for your social life, rather than yet another media saturated app.

For the desires you've stated above, is there any product that comes close?

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

#126

Post by jstrafy »

aklemm wrote: post #123

Sign up on iOS isn’t working for me. I put in the code, it looks like its going to work then it just asks me for the code again. Also, I found a big even before that. When you start typing your phone number, the process will lock up if you stop halfway through in order to try to update your country flag to the right one. I had to back out and start again. Looking forward to trying it!

Hey, thanks for trying us out. And sorry about the bug(s)!

Let me get some solutions and will push an update to the app store (also for Android).

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

#127

Post by jstrafy »

The-Bus wrote: post #59

Not to rain on your specific parade but I think enough "sharing" options have emerged (whether through regular chat, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, let alone existing social networks) that I'm not sure what this is trying to solve. Looking at your first five features on the landing page: I already have a set of grouped contacts across different apps ( Circles, Private Interactions) all with encryption (Encrypted Posts) a…

That's fair enough! We're definitely not trying to build for everyone and it's good you have solutions set for yourself. Our proposition is simply to have a place to share/broadcast to the different sets of people in your life, away from social media.

In that, chat apps are great but are not designed for sharing individual updates, without running several different conversations & dealing with notifications.

Appreciate the feedback though & hopefully we'll develop into something that can gets you excited.

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

#128

Post by jstrafy »

justsocrateasin wrote: post #88
The-Bus wrote: post #59

Not to rain on your specific parade but I think enough "sharing" options have emerged (whether through regular chat, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, let alone existing social networks) that I'm not sure what this is trying to solve. Looking at your first five features on the landing page: I already have a set of grouped contacts across different apps ( Circles, Private Interactions) all with encryption (Encrypted Posts) a…

I disagree here. I strongly believe there's a market for a better social media app, that messaging apps are not hitting. Why? messaging apps (chat, discord, WhatsApp, Signal) are not really social media - they're organized differently with communication at the center and content sharing on the edge (as opposed to Facebook, with content sharing at the center and communication on the edge). That edge v. center distinct…

Appreciate this, thanks! The points you've made here hit the nail on the head for taking the choices we have.

Would love to chat about your current social usage and what you would expect from us in a way that you'd be happy to pay for. Can get me via email at james@oncircles.com if you'd be up for chatting!

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

#129

Post by jstrafy »

stazz1 wrote: post #115
djbusby wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to try a social-sharing-network thing without the social-network? All that does is share content with nobody. To what? Practice pressing the share button in yet-another app? (I'm sure the workflow is common as the others)

Let's agree that spending 3 minutes typing an essay asking "what does it do" could be better spent actually evaluating the product and reporting back with info for the rest of us

Appreciate this! We really welcome the feedback & are happy to hear it, positive or negative.

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

#130

Post by jstrafy »

onion2k wrote: post #92
jstrafy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand the hesitation, it's something we'll consider changing back or making opt-in. Thanks for the grace there, and that's a problem we are solving. You might have X contacts on Circles but you're only going to see from those you have placed in a circle. So only content from people you actually want to see from. In terms of syncing contacts, we don't store any contact book information on our servers. We pa…

We pass through the contact book to see if a user exists there, we return them back as a connection. If not we return them as someone you can invite. Do you log who someone has looked up in Circles when they join? If you do then you could trivially reconstruct someone's contact book. That's what Facebook were found to be doing, except they were actually creating 'shadow profiles' for the contacts.

We don't actively log or analyse that information, no.
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