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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

#61

Post by CitrusFruits »

planb wrote: post #53
simulate-me wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I too, am curious. It seems like Mastodon and other federated networks definitely have user well being and autonomy as a goal. However, for whatever reason, most of the more popular federated networks seem to aspire to be "X, but federated" instead of having drastically different user experiences.

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

#62

Post by mhink »

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 mean, for what it's worth there's an aspect of this on Reddit, in the sense that you can choose which subreddits to join (and can maintain multiple accounts to keep your experiences separate).

Although I'm sure it's not perfect, it's not terrible either. Especially if you follow the perennial Reddit advice and unsubscribe from the massive default subs.

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

#63

Post by xtracto »

Way back in the day there was a great social platform called Multiply.com. it allowed you to post videos, pics and blog posts. I felt it was better than Myspace or Facebook. Unfortunately it didn't survive, but I hope this SlowSocial gets better traction!

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

#64

Post by CitrusFruits »

typeofhuman wrote: post #59
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…

Thanks, that's a good tip! I'll definitely check them out.

And yup, definitely a concern. Makes me think that perhaps there's a possibility to not cap the posts, but rather have any posts outside of the first one in a week have something like a "secondary" tag. Then again, you might run into the problem that Instagram has where everyone stopped posting as soon as stories caught on.

Alas, it's a tricky problem.

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

#65

Post by subpixel »

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…

This is exactly the app idea I pitched my wife with the working title “What’s Happening”. Which she had turned into a joke at my expense. I wish you luck!

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

#66

Post by pandesmos »

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.…

> Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature.

Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed.

Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers, here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a different core belief than the previous group of RPG people, here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But Brilliant people.

Then when they added collections so I could present the different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes, and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and never see it.

I miss it so much.

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

#67

Post by beaconstudios »

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…

Quite a few!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative

I think it's a valid concern to ask about incentive alignment - if you're wanting to do a tech-for-good project, you probably want to make sure that profiteering doesn't become the primary driver at a later date by making a Ulysses pact [1].

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact

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

#68

Post by CitrusFruits »

lvl102 wrote: post #38
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…

Looks great and love the concept. What’s the tech stack behind it?

I'm using Supabase, Sveltekit, Tailwind, SendGrid, and Netlify.

SvelteKit has been a lot of fun but definitely has a few rough edges. Supabase has been awesome, but as you can probably see, from the comments elsewhere, has some kinks around magic link based authentication.

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

#69

Post by pandesmos »

pandesmos wrote: post #66
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.…

> Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature. Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people into a circl…

Also, the original ability to "circle share" was exceptional (and it's truly sad it was apparently abused into the ground by spammers). It allowed "real people" to curate groups of other real people around a certain topic, and then a new user (assuming they could find the curator) could then mass follow/watch those people.

"Here is a group of people who are creating things and having great conversations with each other. Check it out."

It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice party.

Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.

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

#70

Post by alephaleph »

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.…

the first social media platform I used was Reddit where you really can choose to be fed thirst traps or rage bait for the next hour by exclusively browsing one or two specific subreddits and I'm not sure I'd say that's much more healthy than fully algorithmic social media, it just has different problems.

Particularly the rage bait: I basically had to quit reddit because I realized the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.

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