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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Small, decentralised communities should be the way forward. We could call them forums ;-)
I miss forums. Discord has replaced forums in most of the communities I cared about and it’s been for the worse.
Discord is a replacement for IRC/chat/AIM/other synchronous and informal conversation.
It's not a replacement for forums, archives, or formal communication.
Google tried this, and failed. Actually they failed from their point of view: Google Plus had some good points over Facebook, but they wanted it to become #1 in no time, which simply couldn't be done because it was already too late. Had they kept the project alive, they could have benefited from the current situation at Twitter.
There is really only a single barrier: adoption. You have to figure out how you can get thousands of users to join and then if it's a good product it should start to snowball.
I am sure it will work in browser with javascript disabled.
Not quite a social network but a new version of the web where documents are just markdown or something very similar and the browser is an unglorified document reader with no JavaScript has been on my mind for a while.
What does HN afford? Comments. Is that how a social network works, I don't think so. In my experience comments on HH for example often tend toward negative or off topic.
There was some study quite a while ago talking about how if you had 25 people and asked them to solve a problem the solutions that were provided were much better when 5 groups of 5 people decided, then voted for the best solution. This was compared with one group of 25. Not sure whether there is real science there, but it sounds right to me.
We also live in the time of "cult of personality". Biden. Trump. Musk. Bezos. We follow people. We want to be infuencers. I think this is the result of our social media (and paying for things by advertising). I believe it is antithetical to effective communities. So no cult of personality. (And no advertising :-).
A few times in my life I have been part of something that was bigger than myself. A high school play, a 30 person startup. How do you get that sense?
A surprising truth to me is that I think much better when I am in conversation with sensible people. Not ones with the same opinions, but ones who actually think. I find that even when I immediately reject what they are saying, their thoughts somehow become part of mine. Artist often use the term of other work "informs" theirs and other mental constructs often "inform" my own. To my great benefit.
So for a started I would just ask if people were in agreement that "the mechanism of the social interaction determines effectiveness of the community"
If you disagree, end of conversation. If you agree then what is your thinking on how that works?
Just my 2cents
I think what would really be great is a social media site that doesn't offer direct image or video hosting. A bit like how reddit used to be. You just have link aggregation, voting, and comments. That's it. Maybe in a nice, clean, minimal UI as well. This would lend itself to tech folk I think. If only it existed.
Actually it could lend itself to a great business model as well — hackers both start startups, and often are looking for jobs at startups. You could use it for lead generation for startup founders to join your accelerator (once that concept exists), and an added benefit to founders would be access to hiring from the pool of hackers on the site. Win/win. Sounds like bit of a schlep though. Would need to draw an audien…
Unpopular opinion: any social network, no matter how it’s architected will become terrible past a certain size. Perhaps some architectures will have different “maximum tolerable sizes” than others, but all will become intolerable once there is a large enough user base. More users, however, means more ad / tracking revenue, so these two ideas will always be at odds.
Agreed. Small, decentralised communities should be the way forward. We could call them forums ;-)
A second idea I had, especially relevant to HN, is to setup a barrier for use. Similar to old BB systems from the 80s and 90s, in order to participate it takes more effort than an email and password setup. A `vi` or `emacs` interface where there is a true learning curve but that also invites the user to learn more as they on-board into the social media service. You could spin this idea around other niche interests and hobbies though.
Network effects mean that these ideas likely won't be break-out hits for the general public. However, I find that to be ok as the easy approaches are solved challenges, the new challenges for social media are making those services more of a positive/healthy (as in eat your Broccoli) experience for everyone who interacts with it.
- novel sounding (interesting) or emotionally triggering, and - poorly checked information
(see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559).
Regardless of algorithm, Twitter promotes fast re-sharing without thought (retweet is easy), short messages which make it difficult to explain a nuanced position. Even without an algorithm, this produces a Darwinian environment which favors replication (retweeting) of certain types of tweets over others.
I suspect a lot can be changed by changing the base environment. For example, retweeting could become "intent to retweet", which isn't applied until information gets a peer review. Peers can be calculated via a per-topic reputation system + reference users (examplars). Automatic reviews could at least check that you've included references...