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

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

#351

Post by prawn »

p2hari wrote: post #258

Cool, this came up. Hey HN! I’m building Overlapp, a true social network connecting everyone over the things we like, dislike, and want to do: our Overlapps! Imagine instagram with a sliding scale to share just how much you like or dislike something and also a button to easily add to your wish list. From there we show you friends, colleagues or people nearby (or around the world) that also want to see that quirky ban…

I wonder if having to manually set your interest/disinterest in each topic would get a bit annoying, but I do like the end result of seeing your common ground with other people.

Ditching the slider and having discrete 1-5 buttons (face emoji) could make it quicker. Combines the slider and the buttons in one.

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

#352

Post by prawn »

Minor49er wrote: post #213

- No friends or follows - The feed can be organized by top/new stories or threads - Posts and submissions can be upvoted/downvoted with a karma-like system - The more someone's posts are downvoted, the more transparent their entire profile page becomes - dang is the only moderator

I get your joke, but I actually find that the faint posts draw the eye more. I tested something similar on a forum of mine, where unverified/anonymous posts were collapsed by default, but found that I and others were just expanding them to check for drama.

Reddit collapses threads too, but I actually find that what's left is "enough" to get a read on a thread (in a subreddit like r/NBA for example, probably less so in something political) and I rarely expand for more.

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

#353

Post by ineptech »

some_furry wrote: post #288
benji-york wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea may not fulfill every use case.

It's fine if it doesn't fulfill all use cases, but demonstrating any thought to some of them would help flesh out the details of what's being proposed. Are you building a social network, or a chain of trust? Are identities fungible, or irrevocably linked to a person's legal name and physicality? Etc.

The whole point of vouching for someone is so they can prove they are who they say they are. If you don't want to do that, then don't do that. Or, if you have two identities, I suppose you'd have two accounts.

Anyway, things don't have to be for everyone. In the unlikely scenario in which this gets built, there would still be other websites too.

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

#354

Post by NigelThornberry »

some_furry wrote: post #268
SoftTalker wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting. Shit posting is one of the biggest forms of toxicity online. It would be nice if it went away by tying posts to real people. Some people don't care and would shitpost anyway, but most people only shitpost because nobody knows who they really are.

This comment rhymes with the justifications for Real Name policies. They don't work. All real name policies do is make many LGBTQ+ people feel unwelcome.

No post body was provided.

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

#355

Post by DoingIsLearning »

SoftTalker wrote: post #253
kayodelycaon wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first problem I see is separating my online identity with my real identity. I really don't want anyone at my job finding out which dog I am on the internet. My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting. :) The second is friends of friends can get really awkward. There are some people who are friends with me that are also friends with people who never want to see me again.

> My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting. Shit posting is one of the biggest forms of toxicity online. It would be nice if it went away by tying posts to real people. Some people don't care and would shitpost anyway, but most people only shitpost because nobody knows who they really are.

I am not even sure how this is an actual position to be defended.

Writing anonymously or with pseudonyms is as old as feather pens. It allowed people to denounce tyrants and allowed women to publish their writings.

To force everyone to show an id to publish is either very naive or ill-intented to push us into a full Orwellian framework.

'Shitposting' or scorn writing is the price to pay so that anonymity is there for when you _truly_ need it.

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

#356

Post by mcv »

Personally I still think Google Plus got a lot of things right. It was a very pleasant place where people had real, meaningful discussions, and was quite unlike Facebook or Twitter. Nothing else I've tried since its disappearance had quite the same sense of content and community.

What exactly made it so different is hard to say. Was there something about the way you organised your friends into circles? You could share things either publicly or to specific circles, or to your "extended circles", which meant all your circles, and it was readable to their circles too I think, but it still wasn't completely public.

But it could also simply have been the kind of crowd it attracted. Maybe it was helped by the fact that it wasn't the biggest. It also had a ton of extra features (agenda and hangout integration) that a lot of people loved, but unfortunately Google kept messing with that.

Of course it was still corporate, and a real social network needs to be open source and federated, like the Fediverse. Maybe another thing to consider is: is ActivityPub a suitable protocol? Does it do everything we need? Does the sharing between conceptually completely different social media on the Fediverse work well?

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

#357

Post by mcv »

ineptech wrote: post #129

Fleeting 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'm not sure that would work for me. One of the things I like is actually making new friends. Google Plus was absolutely perfect for that: I got to know a lot of people with similar interests (hobbies, politics) to mine.

In fact, I'm not even connected to my real life friends on any social media, as far as I'm aware. Maybe they're not even on it. They may be wiser than I.

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

#358

Post by shanebellone »

svnt wrote: post #338
shanebellone wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am extremely direct, often play devil's advocate, and rarely react with emotional equivalence.

Excuse me for being direct, but do you mean to say you don’t care about other people, only whether what they say is accurate and whether they can communicate it without emotional reaction?

I view all interactions as transactional. Some interactions are net-positives, but most are net-negatives. I value those who reciprocate and avoid those who do not.

From my perspective, your question is quite nuanced. I do not value people (in general) because I place no value on life. We are born, we live, and then we die. In time, we will all be forgotten. The outcome is absolute.

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

#359

Post by fragmede »

mcv wrote: post #356

Personally I still think Google Plus got a lot of things right. It was a very pleasant place where people had real, meaningful discussions, and was quite unlike Facebook or Twitter. Nothing else I've tried since its disappearance had quite the same sense of content and community. What exactly made it so different is hard to say. Was there something about the way you organised your friends into circles? You could shar…

IMO the reason it failed is the same reason it was great. It didn't have Facebook's stickiness and way of getting you to add everybody because of the way circles worked. If it had been less privacy minded and just copied Facebook's lack of respect for user privacy and glued everyone together in one big pot, then it would have done better.

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

#360

Post by pydry »

You've basically described signal/WhatsApp groups.

I'd be keen on any kind of social network that is end to end encrypted, decentralized and puts the user in control but the more centralized and the more you (the person running it) can see or potentially change what goes on inside it the less interested I am.

IMHO social networking needs some heavy disambiguation, too. Speaking candidly to my friends and publishing stuff to the world are two entirely distinct use cases that shouldn't really fall under the same umbrella but on, say, Facebook it does.

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