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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

#71

Post by tsuujin »

charcircuit wrote: post #37

One big issue with this model is that you can't build an audience. You can't make friends. What's the point of using the site when all of your posts go to the void. Even if you add a friend all of those posts you worked hard on are gone. If it takes a long time before there is new content to see, why would people visit the site instead of forgetting about it? How are you going to make it a rabbit for people to go the…

You make friends in real life and then include them in this platform, not the other way around. Not building an audience seems to be a feature.

I view this as a great way to keep in touch with people you actually know.

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

#72

Post by severak_cz »

I like the idea of experimenting with a different styled social network.

I have built one such network myself. It's called Kyselo and it's for refugees from now-defunct social network Soup.io.

It's very different from today's social network in these things:

- it has strictly chronological timeline

- everything (except DM) is public (this makes leaks from seemingly private spaces impossible)

- but it encourages pseudonyms

- you can colour/style your profile page as you like - see for example my page - https://kyselo.eu/severak

- it's small and mostly meme based

Small userbase size and chronological timeline makes it very time saving (except when you are trying to find a right meme in your collection :-D).

It works fine for me but it will need some polishing before it's open to wide public. Now it's in semi-open beta (you have to ask me for invitation code).

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

#73

Post by DennisP »

alephaleph wrote: post #70
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 rag…

It can have that problem if you make that choice. I use reddit extensively, mainly subscribed to a bunch of mostly small subs for my own set of narrow interests, and it works great.

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

#74

Post by alephaleph »

mhink wrote: post #62
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.

I kind of disagree about this: maybe it's different if you're more mature but reddit was my first social media platform, I used it a lot in middle school, and in my experience rage bait was a huge problem. Rage bait subreddits become more and more extreme over time, losing the ability to distinguish the people they hate from parodies of the people they hate and effectively building up an effigy/totem of "the other side" to concentrate that hate onto. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I eventually realized I had to quit reddit because the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.

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

#75

Post by fabianhjr »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #17
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…

That's an interesting idea! No I haven't considered that. B-Corp is what I was imagining, but a co-op is a great idea as well.

There are several advocacy groups that could help out:

https://ioo.coop (Internet of Ownership Coop) (Edit: currently down, a snapshot is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20211207224925/http://ioo.coop/ )

https://platform.coop (Platform Cooperativism site)

A good short read on the topic could be Nick Srnicek's Platform Capitalism; it covers concisely a lot of the economics involved.

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

#76

Post by mountainriver »

alephaleph wrote: post #74
mhink wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I kind of disagree about this: maybe it's different if you're more mature but reddit was my first social media platform, I used it a lot in middle school, and in my experience rage bait was a huge problem. Rage bait subreddits become more and more extreme over time, losing the ability to distinguish the people they hate from parodies of the people they hate and effectively building up an effigy/totem of "the other si…

Yeah I agree, had the same experience. I found I literally couldn’t get away from the rage bait either. They keep putting things in your feed even if your aren’t subscribed.

Reddit is also just an awful hive mind.

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

#77

Post by alephaleph »

DennisP wrote: post #73
alephaleph wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rag…

It can have that problem if you make that choice. I use reddit extensively, mainly subscribed to a bunch of mostly small subs for my own set of narrow interests, and it works great.

yeah, that's fair. I was also in middle school at the time which is probably a bit too young to be using reddit, but I think that it's important to recognize that a social media platform that gives you high level control of the kind of content you see won't completely solve the problem of unhealthy social media usage, it will just make it easy for your usage to be either very healthy or very unhealthy. And that those unhealthy users will end up causing problems for the healthy users.

In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff twitter has been doing to try to make it look like they're doing something about unhealthy social media usage (all the "remember the human" stuff) would probably be more effective on a reddit-type social media platform.

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

#78

Post by omoikane »

The "new friends do not get to see old posts" seems very limiting, I would certainly want the option of being able to share some of my old posts with new friends, given that often new friends are made because of some overlap in real life history.

I understand that this platform is perhaps deliberately not trying to attract strangers, but other platforms that had taken this stance eventually all faded away because all my friends want to play at where the parties are at, and those tend not to be private networks of this sort. It might be possible to avoid this demise if this network grows to be sufficiently large, but it's hard to grow when all existing contents are invisible to new users.

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

#79

Post by Husafan »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #64
typeofhuman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the weekly post idea really applies to the reader, not the writer. Perhaps you could get around this with a "digest" style of posting. I.e. I can write as many posts as I want, but it will only be published once a week as a digest of posts. This might fit better with human behavior too as it lowers the cost of a single post while still achieving the goal of updating friends on what's happening at a spaced interval.

Anyway, love the idea. Good luck!

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

#80

Post by gglon »

nsomaru wrote: post #33
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…

I’m not sure how this works in the US but I would be worried about attracting liability for what happens on the platform. How does that work?

That is exactly why I think one post per week and lack of global space is a great solution for a startup; it massively simplifies spam and other hostile content early detection and removal.
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