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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

#81

Post by grumple »

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.…

When Facebook was first created, there was no feed. We flocked to it because it was useful for a few important reasons: 1) communicating with friends, 2) finding events to go to, 3) organizing groups, 4) storing and sharing photos, and 5) meeting new people (sometimes). It was great as a tool to supplement your social life.

When they introduced the feed, Facebook gradually became worse at all of those things. Facebook became less about being a useful tool and instead became a media sharing instrument for serving advertisements. Your entire post is about that aspect of it though, and really it's the problem with all social media. The feed design is fundamentally incompatable with providing the utility that was initially offered by Facebook. The feed is purely a tool for distribution and consumption, not forging connections or otherwise improving the lives of users.

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

#82

Post by alephaleph »

mountainriver wrote: post #76
alephaleph wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

oof it's probably worse now than it was for me lol, when I used it I don't think they even had an algorithmic feed, just a subscribed and /r/all.

and yeah the hivemind stuff is pretty bad. I'm reminded of a talk that ViHart of all people did where they argued that in a McLuhanist "the medium is the message" way, reddit's focus on up and down votes and karma creates an extremely judgy and kind of adversarial experience that eventually breeds hiveminds. I'd also argue that reddit's focus on small communities managed individually by specific moderators creates an undercurrent of site drama that reliably rears its ugly head every few months or so, but I guess that's neither here nor there.

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

#83

Post by civilized »

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.

Social engineering isn't just a security term. The use in security is inherited from a broader and pre-existing concept. It's about setting up conditions that influence people to behave in a desired way.

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

#85

Post by murphyslab »

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…

The rate limitation sounds good for a general audience of one's connections, but there are a lot of times when life calls for more frequent updates, particularly in times of emergency and medical crisis where the changes to one's life circumstances change by the day, if not by the hour. Posting, "Andy is in the hospital", then needing to wait a week to post, "Andy died 1 hour after being admitted to the hospital". One suggestion might be to allow posts to be threaded, so that updates to an initial post can be added without waiting an entire week.

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

#86

Post by civilized »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #57
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I must be some sort of freak libertarian. People are always talking about how they want or need their lifestyle to force them to do this and that. I would always rather have the choice.

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

#87

Post by scarface74 »

grumple wrote: post #81
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.…

When Facebook was first created, there was no feed. We flocked to it because it was useful for a few important reasons: 1) communicating with friends, 2) finding events to go to, 3) organizing groups, 4) storing and sharing photos, and 5) meeting new people (sometimes). It was great as a tool to supplement your social life. When they introduced the feed, Facebook gradually became worse at all of those things. Faceboo…

The feed was introduced in 2006. Facebook was founded in 2004. Not many people “flocked” to Facebook before the feed.

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

#89

Post by civilized »

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.

RStudio, in my opinion one of the greatest companies in the world today, is a public benefit corp.

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

#90

Post by hrdwdmrbl »

Anyone interested building a social network should read: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

tl;dr - There is a specific reason that we like to use social networks, and it's the receiving of status or accumulate capital. From this theory, a network like Slow Social cannot succeed because there isn't enough social capital that can be consumed.

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