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

slowsocial.us

171–180 of 391 posts

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

#171

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!

[deleted]

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

#173
Never ever I would sign up into a social network that doesn't publish any real-world contacts. Who are you, guys? Americans? Russians? Chinese? Why should I trust you with my online life, if I don't even know, where you live, what are your names and how your faces looks like?

And, in Germany, publishing of the real-world information is mandatory.

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

#174

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

This is a really interesting concept! I'm trying to solve the problem of creating space for people to share more thoughtful, potentially longer form content, while this seems to be solving for transient "what are you doing right now" type content. I'd say they're different enough, but both seem to be a reaction to similar concepts.

Try it out! Maybe you can incorporate it into your sentiment of solving this goal for a broader population

I know some people whose lives it changed by not being able to curate their images they post during their 1 minute (a prerequisite to viewing others images in the 1 minute). They realized they were sitting at a desk every time and didnt want their life to be that way so it was a catalyst to taking more drastic steps to doing something else.

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

#175
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.

Are there some readers that do some content curation for you on top of your subscriptions? The biggest issue I had with RSS (besides content discovery) is that some people blog multiple times a week while others only once in a while. I would like something that limits the amount of content I get based on how much they post: posts from people who blog only once in a while should be more prominently visible than others. Some way to mark posts as "I want more of that" or "I don't want more of that" would also be helpful to improve the curation without having to manually tweak parameters.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a choice. The choice is: I will only write/read once a week, that is you making a choice about how you want to allocate time.

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

#177
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: Does encouraging people to sign up with FB (bc it is faster/easier) also have the unwanted consequence of preventing them from leaving FB in the future? If they are signed up through to Slow Social via FB, can they still log in manually if their FB account has been deleted?

I see it as more of providing a false signal of adoption or success: if people need the friction to be as little as clicking a single button to "sign up" then they're not very convinced or committed to trying something new and likely not willing to invest time actually engaging with the system; all major platforms today used tricks or first mover mechanics for engagement to keep enough people on the platform long eno…

A lot of human time is sacrificed to maintain passwords for different websites; having a one-click sign in option saves a lot of people the time and headache of having to deal with a compromised account or forgotten password years in the future.

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

#178
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For medical issues, I agree that private is usually best; or at least restricted to close friends and family. Imminent death often has an adjacent position, where people commonly wish to share with a broader audience.

However it was just an example of an emergency where one might strongly desire to update a broad range of friends and family quickly. Other situations might be natural disasters or a house fire where one "We're alive!" post might require a follow-up the next day with more details, needs, or grief.

It's just to say that an unyielding, global rate limit would not serve peoples' interests well.

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

#179
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

Maybe you can only see one post per friend per week in the feed, but then you can click into their profile to see the whole of their posts.

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

#180

Nice to see what I think is a trix[0] editor for the rich text posts. [0] https://trix-editor.org/

Yup! It's Trix alright. I was pretty amazed out how heavy and complicated most rich text editors are. But then again, it's a pretty complex interaction they have to design around.
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