Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

> I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean.

My idea was to give people IP-like addresses like the early internet. And start off (until we find something better) with the ol’ Class A, B, and C networks of sizes roughly 16M, 64k, and 256 respectively.

The value I think is in having groups as small as 256 and each group has an admin/moderator. Why are we ‘automating’ people out of a job in the tech space when we could be ‘automating’ them into one.

Keep in mind, the existing IP networks stay. This is just a logical layer.

There are better ways to do it but I think this is an interesting start. There’s even a planned obsolescence built in as the world has more people than the 4 billion or so that a 32 bit address space gives.

Which to me is perfect. A chance to try some new things but a built in expiration date so nothing becomes too entrenched.

In my opinion, this is a tarpit idea [0]. It's not that it's impossible, it's that the user expectations are high, the marginal utility of the new features is negligible and, even if you had a vastly superior product, you would still need to somehow convince some critical mass of people to migrate over and use it. I think there's a reason new social networks succeed from a fresh set of users rather than somehow convincing people who are already established on FB/Twitter/Whatever to migrate over.

In addition, any new service will be fighting against the tendency to centralize, create a walled garden and prioritize tools for advertisers and user management rather than enabling users. There was a recent quote of Jack Dorsey to that effect [1]:

""" The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. """

That being said, I don't think it's impossible but it's almost going to be a "worst is better" solution and one that at least has some traction now, like Mastodon [2] or Scuttlebutt [3] (I'm on Mastodon but haven't used Scuttlebutt). Maybe IPFS thrown in there somewhere [4]? There might even be a way to bootstrap a social web through some web3 solution, though that's pretty speculative at this point (or maybe overlaps with IPFS?).

All of the FOSS/libre alternatives have major problems, not the least of which is that they're not tested at scale, have growing pains or just don't have the critical mass that any of the other platforms do (though maybe Mastodon is getting more popular?).

I go where the people are. The major feature, in my opinion, is Metcalfe's law. Any other feature might be necessary for long term survival but for to even get started, the value added from Metcalfe's law dwarfs any new feature that people might think up. I'm willing to put up with some pain for a libre/free/FOSS solution but even then, it needs to be decentralized in some way or else we're most likely to be doomed by a repeat of something like Reddit open sourcing their stack, it being a mess and them just close sourcing it again, without any major benefit to the public or users.

Put it this way: Why is some idea going to work when so many other people have tried and failed? This is not a rhetorical question. There's bound to be a social network that takes over FB/TWitter/Whatever. What are the conditions for this new social network to take over? A new breed of users? Cheaper compute? Web3 adoption? Cheaper storage leading to easier data distribution? Continually cheaper communication costs?

Sometimes it's good to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, that's certainly how a lot of startups succeed, but that's not something I'm going to invest a lot of emotional energy into.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMIawSAygO4

[1] https://twitter.com/BillyM2k/status/1603135805039382529

[2] https://mastodon.social

[3] https://scuttlebutt.nz/

[4] https://ipfs.tech/

> implies nothing

Nothing is a strong word.

A similar idea was tried, by one of the largest tech companies in the world, pushing it on to their already established user base, and it didn't catch on. Will it fail again? No idea, but it doesn't imply nothing.

Most social networks make posting (or whatever specific terminology is being used) equivalent to talking at someone. The correct model would foster conversation and thus impact engagement. Small social groups discuss topics. Offering a topic for conversation implicitly earns a response.

Rarely do groups of friends get together to declare simple and unrelated one-liners. An "ideal" social network might be more related to group sms than Twitter or Mastodon.

I stand by my statement.

One might argue correlation, but any argument about causation is devoid of logic.