Make it a command line tool. Then you will have a very targeted audience.
Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
231–240 of 399 posts
Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can relate to this. Most people don't like me. The problem is they don't like me for the things I love about myself. Minimizing social friction produces lubricant, not "quality" humans.
What is a quality that turns people off to you but you don't think is worth changing?
I am extremely direct, often play devil's advocate, and rarely react with emotional equivalence.
Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
#233Fleeting idea that could be combined with that: a web-of-trust social network where you can only "friend" people in real life, by tapping phones. When you do so, the app might say, "The person you just met claims to be Joe Schmoe, do you want to vouch for them?" If you approve them, they can message you and vice versa. A friend of Joe's can see you in his friend list, and try to message you, and you can accept it if…
I've always liked this idea! I think it should be device-level too, and not have a separate ephemeral identity. In other words if you get a new phone you have to start over.
This is an interesting concept. The biggest disadvantage would be losing a digital archive every two years (or as necessary).
Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
#234Fleeting idea that could be combined with that: a web-of-trust social network where you can only "friend" people in real life, by tapping phones. When you do so, the app might say, "The person you just met claims to be Joe Schmoe, do you want to vouch for them?" If you approve them, they can message you and vice versa. A friend of Joe's can see you in his friend list, and try to message you, and you can accept it if…
You seem to be under the impression that real life access is the indicator of closeness of relationship. It is usually not. Out of my set of close friends the vast majority I have never met in person. Most family I might add are in entirely separate states. Most of my IRL friends no longer live near me.
This marks you as a tremendous outlier.
Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
#235Another thought is to wonder how we build social networks in real life. The mechanisms are hard to isolate because they are so normal, but attempting to transpose those to the internet is interesting. People have reputations. This acts as an incentive for people to behave. If you get known as a jerk then you don't have much of an audience.
But reputation is complicated. There is a lack of civility - someone who breaks the laws or is otherwise a danger/problem/nuisance. Then there are people who are civil but have different social customs/expectations. One of these perhaps has to do with trust - is the person safe. The other has to do with engagement. I'm not interested in having a discussion about Trump so I won't engage. I suspect there is a lot more to it. Like if you go to a bus stop at night and there is someone there, what really determines how you react to that person? It seems to me that people are generally very good at "clues".
HN has karma, but not really a reputation. You can go look at someone's comments. You can pay attention to how they react. It would be interesting to know how many down votes a person uses for example. How many up votes.
Another different issue, but perhaps related, is the idea of boundaries. If you have a community that is productive, what happens if someone can easily come in and be divisive. Imagine a gardening group talking about how to control aphids without pesticides and someone comes in and starts saying "it is stupid not to use pesticides" (or vice versa).
Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
#236I've always wanted to follow HN users. 10+ years ago I built multiple iterations of a solution (http://akkartik.name/hackerstream, http://akkartik.name/post/hackerstream), all now defunct because the upkeep on the crawler got too onerous.
For the past few months I've been enjoying using https://www.hnfollow.com
Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
#237As someone else pointed out, that was Google Plus.
The number one thing to realize is: this is not a technical problem. It's a marketing, political, and social problem.
Facebook and Twitter have vast numbers of users who are not at all technical. How you reach people like that and get them to join is your problem, and it has nothing to do with deep understanding of the technology.
Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
#23899% of the value of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram is reach. Posting 140 characters is not much of technical challenge. Getting 400M people to sign up and giving people a platform to build an audience is really, really hard. In terms of creating narrower social platforms, I think we have 100 good options. HN is already a pretty good platform, reddit has a nice balance of broad and niche topics, and if I want to go smaller I'll find a special-interest group that has a standalone forum, Discord or Slack channel.
There's a fundamental difference between platforms built around truly personal social networking. Following people you know personally or within a few degrees of separation. The other is the much debated "Global Town Square" which Twitter has been the de facto best option for and is the hardest to replicate or improve upon.
Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
#239Re: Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?
#240This is somewhat what we're trying to do with OpenDolphin [1]. Contributions are really appreciated as this is a community driven project.