131–140 of 216 posts
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I thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.
Google's Circles is a classical example of something that seems like a great idea on paper but doesn't work in practice. It had too much friction: categorizing people by circles and then also deciding which circle should receive what. Apparently nobody liked it and it's one of the reasons Plus failed so spectacularly.
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I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks. The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by tryi…
You’ve misrepresented the core of your argument. Wikipedia on dark forest hypothesis: “The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…” > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.
Google's Circles is a classical example of something that seems like a great idea on paper but doesn't work in practice. It had too much friction: categorizing people by circles and then also deciding which circle should receive what. Apparently nobody liked it and it's one of the reasons Plus failed so spectacularly.
Circles is group chats (WhatsApp, or whatever's popular in your neck of the woods), which I'd argue is how (most?) people in 2025 actually do “social networking.”
Instagram/TikTok/Xitter is… something else entirely.
> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…
There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
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I had a relative threaten his daughter, because her daughter-in-law posted some political stuff he disagreed with. Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.
This goes both ways (old to young and reverse), but family goes before politics. You don't cut out, or disown, or stop visiting, or badmouth family because you disagree with their politics... If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.
Typically that has to be some extreme form of bigotry people won’t let go of after repeated coaching. Extreme bigotry or conspiracy thinking is arguably a form of abuse directed at other family members and it’s 100% ok to cut people off for being abusive.
> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…
—xkcd 1320
It doesn’t really matter though. If you target a DB like Yugabyte and use distributed storage like an s3 bucket or minio, you can get pretty far as long as you keep the core components memory efficient and stateless.
I keep them private because for a lot of them, if others had access to the same tools, my tool assisted efforts in these areas would become ineffective if others were all doing the same thing as me.
Its only a small few tools that i'll actually share with the world.
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You’ve misrepresented the core of your argument. Wikipedia on dark forest hypothesis: “The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…” > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
It's just seeing it from the other side, still applies IMO. E.g. not talking about politics ("making yourself 'dark'").
> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…
There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse