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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

#51

Post by itslennysfault »

simulate-me wrote: post #46
kqr wrote: post #13

> The goal of the company is to equally value the customer, environment, and profits. In other words, the model isn't to maximize profit like an investor backed startup, but rather to create a lean, useful piece of software that grows with its users and can sustain itself from every angle from day one. If the owners are separate from the users, it's not set up for sustainability. If someone other than the users bear…

Has any technical product ever organized as a co op and been successful? Such a weird criticism…

The jury is obviously still out, but I think The Drivers Cooperative is pretty successful, and I'm optimistic that it will continue to be.

https://drivers.coop/

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

#52

Post by linuxdude314 »

civilized wrote: post #28
CitrusFruits wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your first and second sentence are necessarily in conflict with each other. In fact, Slow Social has no algorithms for engagement-optimizing, it's part of the design of the application. That being said, you absolutely _could_ be right on the restrictions on post frequency. Perhaps its not something any sort of large user base might not want. However, as far as I know it hasn't been tried before, and I t…

Slowing things down has the virtue of being a much easier means of social engineering than figuring out how to empower users to control the flow of content that comes to them. I only have some sketchy ideas of how exactly it would work. Definitely the starting point is to let users have a simple chronological option.

How does slowing things down make social engineering easier?

That’s a security term, and I’m not quite sure how it’s relevant to the OP.

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

#53

Post by planb »

simulate-me wrote: post #46
kqr wrote: post #13

> The goal of the company is to equally value the customer, environment, and profits. In other words, the model isn't to maximize profit like an investor backed startup, but rather to create a lean, useful piece of software that grows with its users and can sustain itself from every angle from day one. If the owners are separate from the users, it's not set up for sustainability. If someone other than the users bear…

Has any technical product ever organized as a co op and been successful? Such a weird criticism…

Has any social network ever focused on users well-being and been successful? I think it’s not criticism but an interesting idea.

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

#54

Post by psyc »

linuxdude314 wrote: post #52
civilized wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slowing things down has the virtue of being a much easier means of social engineering than figuring out how to empower users to control the flow of content that comes to them. I only have some sketchy ideas of how exactly it would work. Definitely the starting point is to let users have a simple chronological option.

How does slowing things down make social engineering easier? That’s a security term, and I’m not quite sure how it’s relevant to the OP.

I assume they mean herding cats.

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

#55

Post by vmception »

Minutiae seems to do this decently

Lets you use the app for one minute a day at a random time, and during that minute you get to see a random users old feed

You might think it’s a different use case, but i think it’s tackling the same problem and in a more succinct and simpler way

https://minutiae-app.org/faqs

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

#56

Post by CitrusFruits »

darawk wrote: post #43

As other people have mentioned but I think not quite nailed perfectly, restrictions on behavior aren't quite the right solution to the problems that plague social media. Some people think that the right move is to eliminate engagement optimization algorithms, and I think that's not quite exactly right either. IMO the right solution is personal executive autonomy over content presentation and algorithmic optimization.…

I agree, it's not perfect. Maybe, just maybe though, it's better than other alternatives out there.

Your suggestions for being able to apply our "higher order executive function" to our social networks is honestly a great take, and a great suggestion. Unfortunately though, that's not something I can really build, even if I had the time, resources, and personnel. That sort of social network requires critical mass of content and would by definition almost, have to be a competitor or aggregator of other social networks. However, that's not the sort of social network I personally am interested in building either.

I think what you're describing definitely falls into our modern definition of a social network, but I also think that definition falls very short of the potential for technology to facilitate relationships. In my opinion, the "thirst traps and rage baits" totally have there place (they're a lot of fun!), but I don't think their place is in the same app as your best friend sharing about their mixed feelings of loss and euphoria as they move from one job to another.

That all being said, I think you bring up a really good talking point, one that I hope the people at Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc. all pay attention to. As for me though, there's nothing I can really do about it other than start discussion.

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

#57

Post by CitrusFruits »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #40
civilized wrote: post #6

Respect the effort, but I think it's not going in quite the right direction. I don't think people need paternalistic restrictions on post frequency. People need to be liberated from engagement-optimizing algorithms and allowed to choose which activity is presented to them and in what order.

One way to look at it is a restriction on post frequency, but the reason why modern social is so harmful is because unlimited post frequency means unlimited read frequency. It isn't restricted post frequency, it is restricted read frequency.

Yeah, I definitely thought of this. It's kindof a chicken or the egg thing. Some of my friends had the suggestion of a weekly digest or something like that.

In the end, I opted for this since, from my perspective, there's a sort of solace knowing that I'm only "expected" to write at most once a week.

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

#59

Post by typeofhuman »

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…

If it hasn't been mentioned, you should learn from the social media app Path.

It limited the amount of friends you could have. As a result, people didn't add friends because they didn't want to give up a space for a potential future connection. The scarcity worked against Path.

You might find the same result where people won't post because they'll be afraid of using up their allotment when they may have a better one later.

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