Slow social media • Hacker News Board

Re: Slow social media

#101

Post by rhetocj23 » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

TheDong wrote: post #15

NathanaelRea wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://dsnp.org/dsnp_whitepaper.pdf

Begone blockchain whitepaper. ... Really though, if you've got a whitepaper from 2020 about "building a protocol", and 6 years later you've got exactly 0 users actually using the protocol, it's maybe not even worth linking. Writing a vague hand-wavy paper that says "We need a distributed graph, we'll use blockchain, there are IDs" is very easy. Getting enough users that people can talk to each other, that's hard, and…

I always wonder what goes on in the minds of people who focus intensely on the technology and not the experience...

The experience is what people want. Not the technology. The technology is this thing that delivers the experience but the consumer does not need to know of its existence nor how it works.

Re: Slow social media

#102

Post by davidcollantes » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

Not as slow as Scuttlebutt, but fairly laid back is twtxt (https://twtxt.dev/). The community is small, but thriving!

Re: Slow social media

#103

Post by jrjvv » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 5:18 PM UTC

rhetocj23 wrote: post #96

j-wags wrote: post #90

I was recently inspired on this front by an interview[1] with a recommender system engineer that explored the idea of a "good" recommender algorithm: > It feels like smartphones have saturated the available time. It's like the famous quote from the Netflix CEO: "Our main competitor is sleep." There aren't many more biological hours in the day to capture. At this point, it's mostly a war between recommender systems fo…

As the saying goes, dont hate the player, hate the game.

[dead]

Re: Slow social media

#104

Post by virgil_disgr4ce » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

3RTB297 wrote: post #47

The author invented and then dashed against the rocks a few existing fediverse platforms in the course of a couple paragraphs. These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from ven…

> And you may say:

> > I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.

You use a quote angle bracket, indicating that it is a quote. It is not a quote, it's a straw man.

Nobody is saying "this isn't perfect, I won't use it." People are saying "I can't figure this out, I guess I won't use it."

Re: Slow social media

#105

Post by virgil_disgr4ce » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

So—slowcial media? :D

Re: Slow social media

#106

Post by stronglikedan » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

rhetocj23 wrote: post #94

mklyons wrote: post #89

I agree with a lot of what you say here. I’ve been running a 3h daily time boxed social media site for the past 6 months and even though traffic is now a crawl compared to the initial burst of activity when I started it, there are users who check in daily and it ends up being a lovely experience I think. I am working on mobile apps and redesigning and reengineering a lot of the site and I love your thoughts on a blog…

What youre missing is that most people have self control issues, and your product is essentially a commitment device. As most addicts - they reject such devices. I like what youre doing but just saying - youre dealing with a very difficult problem.

There's also a subset of users that embrace such devices. I'd wager that's OPs target audience. The ones that would reject it are a lost cause and shouldn't even be considered.

Re: Slow social media

#107

Post by fnordlord » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

qweiopqweiop wrote: post #35

I also dream for this. Personally I would remove likes/reactions though. As we've seen with Instagram it's too easy to chase that dopamine rush/compare number of likes. Comments are enough in my opinion.

Limiting the # of shares in some way would be nice also. If people could only share one thing per day, they'd be more thoughtful of what to spend it on.

I actually had a moment just yesterday, imagining/hoping my toddler daughter will grow up and refer to my phone in the same way I did with my parents cigarettes when I was a kid. My mom always claims she had no idea they were dangerous when she started as a teen. I wonder if we'll all sound the same with social media and our devices to our kids.

Re: Slow social media

#108

Post by vjvjvjvjghv » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

emseetech wrote: post #37

qweiopqweiop wrote: post #35

I also dream for this. Personally I would remove likes/reactions though. As we've seen with Instagram it's too easy to chase that dopamine rush/compare number of likes. Comments are enough in my opinion.

Likes/reactions should be hidden to everyone else except the poster, and not used for any kind of ranking. And comments should be disabled by default. Users should have to take the extra step to enable comments ("I would like feedback") and if they're off by default, it won't feel strange or negative to the viewer.

Likes shouldn’t be visible to the poster either. Once you see the number of likes you quickly see that radical posts get the most likes and start posting more of it.

The best online discussions I have seen where at simple forums where the posts were listed in chronological order without likes or anything.

Re: Slow social media

#109

Post by hosh » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

There are local chapters of the Society for Creative Anachronism that uses Facebook heavily. The thing is that the use of FB grew out from the in-person community that had formed, and people would rather interact in-person than only through social media. The community already has its own customs and ceremonies for recognition; people there upvote and collect following in an attempt to get the FB algorithm to spread the word for each other (on events and happenings).

When there is an already-existing community like that, I think a dedicated social media platform for that particular community can be beneficial. That platform then does not have to be the social media for everyone.

However, funding (for hosting and maintenance) is still an issue.

Re: Slow social media

#110

Post by Brendinooo » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

3RTB297 wrote: post #47

The author invented and then dashed against the rocks a few existing fediverse platforms in the course of a couple paragraphs. These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from ven…

from the article:

> Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.

So no, the problem isn't high numbers with friction to leave. The problem is that the sites' incentives are different than the users. Facebook had high numbers and a lot of lock-in and was a much better product before they decided to basically stop showing me any content from my friends that isn't controversial. Twitter has high numbers and a lot of lock-in but it's better there because I can still get a linear timeline of tweets from the people I follow.