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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

#91

Post by xixixao »

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…

This is true for messaging social networks and they thrive. I don’t think this is necessarily a huge blocker.

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

#92

Post by darawk »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #56
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 c…

Totally get that, and to be clear I think what you're doing is super cool. I should have given a more relevant example to you. I think the general category of "user autonomy" over how/what kinds of content they see or don't see is a better abstraction than restrictions on behavior.

So, for something like your network, that might mean rather than limiting how frequently people can post, give users the option to aggregate content from frequent posters in their feed. So, maybe I have a switch I can toggle that says, "show a unit of content from one person no more than once per day", where that single block of content is expandable, and gives some aggregated summary of how many things they posted / what its content was, that I can drill into if I want to, or quickly skim over if I don't care.

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

#94

Post by ubicomp »

Re-doing social networks based on one size fits all social activity streams seems like it's going in the wrong direction. Especially since these social shapes typically necessitate funding requirements like ads or pay to play.

I wonder when we'll go back to forums to connect. Earlier "slow social" methods (mailing lists / message boards). Forums can be free. People can self-host. They can run for years and years and years. Folks can organize around a single subject or a series of subjects and grow together over time at various levels of engagement without resorting to a one size fits all model that social networks force on users.

I really enjoyed running forums for my friends. I never had to pay giant server fees because it was just a few of us. We had 100K page views per month. We never had to have ads. We had forum permissions and mods and a lot of fun times.

I see Discord being similar to this vs. social media, where you can slowly join communities and get nearer to the core. More of an onion model of community. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in this space.

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

#95

Post by throwaway892238 »

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.

Couchsurfing converted to a B-corp, but that didn't work out well (for the members). I think co-op would put the emphasis back on the member experience and would have prevented Couchsurfing from killing its community and ruining its brand. CS also claimed that the B-corp meant it couldn't accept donations or do open source development, though I have no idea if that was true.

If you go for co-op, you could go one further and try for a non-profit co-op: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/nonprofit-coop-66008.html

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

#96

Post by blondin »

pandesmos wrote: post #69
pandesmos wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 oth…

google+ loss was a true tragedy.

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

#97

Post by bityard »

murphyslab wrote: post #85
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". On…

Not the OP but I think the answer for this is that communication of medical/health issues is best handled by a more private form of media.

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

#98

Post by distantsounds »

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.…

It's called RSS. and a feed reader.

I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the same system to ingest exactly what you want.

We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting since.

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

#99

Post by jimkleiber »

distantsounds wrote: post #98
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.…

It's called RSS. and a feed reader. I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the same system to ingest exactly what you want. We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting since.

That works for the consumption side, but at least from what I've seen (it's been a while), the feed readers don't have so much share/comment/like side to them. Frankly, they seem to miss the social side. Again, maybe I'm just not using the right feed readers, but when I use some these days, they feel somewhat isolated, just receiving info, not also sending it.

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

#100

Post by CitrusFruits »

omoikane wrote: post #78

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…

You can share old posts with new friends, it's just on a post by post basis. But yeah, more fine grained control would be a nice feature.
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