181–190 of 399 posts
One crazy idea is to build a basic messenger and let the users write channel policies in Datalog, a-la Biscuits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You wouldn't be first-tier friends with people you only know from the internet. You'd be first-tier friends with neighbors and cousins and the other parents at your kids' school. Then when I prove (keybase style) that I, HN user ineptech, am also "ineptech" on this social network, you would know that I really am a 48-year-old guy in Portland and not some other person because I have also friended all my irl friends, a…
But why ? Why would you expose your entire real life social circle to the internet?
Like the notification feed and the "timeline" feed are 2 separate things, maybe? I can click on a notification and it opens in a different client. Like apple can remove a podcast from the podcast app, but the podcaster can still publish on the rss feed and you can subscribe on a different client.
In any social media design you have to take well known power laws into account. You may consider HN currently to be a highly engaging site but you have to consider why that is: a huge amount of eye balls is watching a tiny set of content, a list of a few dozens links. Next, if as little as 1% joins in discussion, the result is threads with substance. Great outcome, but you're probably ignoring that 99% didn't engage.…
I think of HN as being a social network already. There is no need for another 'social network' in the world, actually less would be best.
I consider social networks to be a subset of social media where the focus becomes following specific users and having a feed consist of posts made by specific users, whereas reddit has a feed consisting on posts on specific topics.
Better to just make a "bland"/"vanilla" social network and focus on differentiating yourself by having a sterling reputation and "new car smell". Be like Google when Google was new:Just another search engine, but eh, it seems nicer than the rest somehow!
Facbook/Instagram is haunted by Cambridge Analytica and ongoing investigations and lawsuits around the world. Twitter has become Musk's playpen. LinkedIn is full of dark patterns (and that was even before Microsoft bought it!) TikTok is banned in several countries.
You also need to be able to make enough money from the project to keep the servers running, and pay engineers to fix bugs, and pay customer support people to do GDPR deletions and stuff like that. And you'll need moderators to keep the Nazis away. So, you'll need to build an advertising platform also.
Your Ask HN is you collaborating on a social network. Without your content, and the content of users like you, this social network wouldn’t exist.
This reminds me of Google+. They had circles of people that you could share to. I actually thought it was quite brilliant, but in typical Google fashion, they killed it and had horrible marketing.
Personally, I think something like mastodon is better for this purpose. You can post your HN related stuff hashtagged #hackernews and others might follow. That being said - IMHO if you want a social network or community, don’t call it a “communal product”. Products are for making money and whatnot.
Should social media be a profit-driven enterprise as a civilization-scale product?
Running a world-scale social network requires immense computing power. Those bills have to be paid, and there's not going to be much difference between "break-even-driven" and "profit-driven" at that scale.
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…
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.