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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

#321

Post by onion2k »

baq wrote: post #299
onion2k wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first tranch of social networks (Friendster, Friends Reunited, MySpace, etc) were very much based on people keeping up to date with their friends. They worked quite well for users , but were hard to monetize succeasfully. There was value there, but not much in the way of ideas about how to extract it besides sticking a skyscraper ad down the side. I don't see any reason not to try that model again. Maybe it'll wo…

I’ve found long running chats like WhatsApp, telegram or signal fulfill that role.

Chat works well for close friends, but now I'm middle-aged I have lots friends from school, previous jobs, etc that I still want to know and I'm interested in significant events in their lives (having kids, changing job, getting married, moving house, etc) but who I'd have nothing to say to on a regular basis. If I rely on anything that requires active participation that just means I won't talk to them. I want to passively read about their lives, and maybe comment if I feel like it. Most of the time I don't.

This is a problem that you don't really start to understand until you're getting on a bit. When you're young you usually have a close group of friends from school or college, and maybe a job or two, and your extended family, and that's pretty much it. Fast forward 25 years and there loads of people who you've met and consider people you'd like to keep in touch with but who aren't friendly enough to want in a chat app. Social networks fill that gap really neatly.

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

#322

Post by samarama »

The issue is you have built in a mechanism to prevent the site from gaining critical mass.

In order for a user to check the site, there would need to be 50 posts from their friends that they can read through.

For that to happen, they would need 500 friends for them to make 50 posts a week.

In order to reach 500 friends, you would need 100 million users, before that the network would be empty with nothing happening.

It’s better to limit the number of posts to 1 per day.

This way, you would be able to have some stuff going with 50 friends in some areas and 3 million users.

However, you need to get to 3 million users somehow with no value in your network, maybe you can get this through posts like this, but very difficult.

You also need to let users upload their contact list otherwise you won’t be able to build your social graph.

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

#323

Post by rogual »

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…

Wow, Google+ sounds like it was actually pretty good. These are all features I've wished Twitter had.

When Google+ came out, I do remember avoiding it mostly out of spite, because Google were so overwhelmingly aggressive in trying to make me use it. And these days I'd probably never type my personal info into any Google property. Still, sounds like a shame it failed.

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

#324

Post by mrweasel »

civilized wrote: post #6

Respect the effort, but I think it's not going in quite the right direction. I don't think people need paternalistic restrictions on post frequency. People need to be liberated from engagement-optimizing algorithms and allowed to choose which activity is presented to them and in what order.

Personally I believe that the era of Facebook style social media networks have come and gone. It’s on the road to becoming a niche product, like family newsletters, not completely dead, but also not completely alive.

I can respect the work and the idea, but not many are going to sign up, the first mover types have been burned so badly by Facebook that they’re going to pass.

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

#325

Post by nicoburns »

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 feel like you could achieve your aim by just cutting out the content that isn’t even posted by your friends (or is lazily shared by a friend, but originates with a commercial entity).

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

#326

Post by alxndr »

mabbo wrote: post #135
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…

FYI: when I gave my email address to sign up, the very bare email that hit my gmail inbox went straight to spam. You're going to need to do more to keep it on the 'not spam' list, I think.

The link to follow 404s for me… perhaps because I put a plus sign in my email?

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

#327

Post by bartread »

samarama wrote: post #322

The issue is you have built in a mechanism to prevent the site from gaining critical mass. In order for a user to check the site, there would need to be 50 posts from their friends that they can read through. For that to happen, they would need 500 friends for them to make 50 posts a week. In order to reach 500 friends, you would need 100 million users, before that the network would be empty with nothing happening. I…

> You also need to let users upload their contact list otherwise you won’t be able to build your social graph.

In the context of legislation like GDPR and CCPA is this even legal in some jurisdictions any more? Genuinely not sure so any insight gratefully received.

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

#328

Post by smaudet »

samarama wrote: post #322

The issue is you have built in a mechanism to prevent the site from gaining critical mass. In order for a user to check the site, there would need to be 50 posts from their friends that they can read through. For that to happen, they would need 500 friends for them to make 50 posts a week. In order to reach 500 friends, you would need 100 million users, before that the network would be empty with nothing happening. I…

This seems a bit arbitrary?

I would be happy with one, or two posts a day...I only need 5 friends to post a week, at 10 I always have something to read, at 50 friends I am positively awash...

Introverts are a big crowd - a fact the socialites like Zuckerberg tend to forget. This will easily grow...

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

#329

Post by aleken »

This looks nice. If I were to use it, I would rely mostly on the mail-feature as none of my family/friends have signed up. That’s a nice feature!

But there’s one thing I reacted to, @citrusfruits. If I click the “start private conversation”-button, the email address of the user is revealed. That’s not bad in itself if the user is informed about it. But I didn’t see any information in the otherwise user friendly onboarding about revealing my email address.

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

#330

Post by jack_riminton »

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…

Just a word of caution on soliciting product feedback on here, HN users are a notoriously unrepresentative bunch (with a lot of bad ideas). Better to try ways to get it into the hands of more normal people and see what makes it go 'viral'
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