21–30 of 48 posts
I think this is cool! Maybe not your focus, but is there a place for using AI to help figure out who to send photos to / which pockets to send to?
As a none American I point out that WhatsApp groups have functionally replaced old Facebook for a long time.
Features of Old Facebook: - It's a photo album. Anyone who can view your page can see your photos. - You can also post status updates. - It publishes a list of your friends. Anyone is free to check that out. - Your friends can write on your wall, where anyone can see what they wrote. - It publishes your biographical data: where you go (or went) to school, where you work, whether you're single, and if not what kind of…
As a none American I point out that WhatsApp groups have functionally replaced old Facebook for a long time.
Features of Old Facebook: - It's a photo album. Anyone who can view your page can see your photos. - You can also post status updates. - It publishes a list of your friends. Anyone is free to check that out. - Your friends can write on your wall, where anyone can see what they wrote. - It publishes your biographical data: where you go (or went) to school, where you work, whether you're single, and if not what kind of…
Used to be there was a whole section of the site meant for connecting with people at the same college/university as you, that you were automatically included in based on your email domain. It had a calendar and events and was geared towards real-world interaction.
So were heroin and cocaine, which were sold commercially for 25 and 40 years, respectively
So they started to loosen things: you can follow others, posts can be public, your feed becomes a mix of posts in your network and friends posts, etc. Now it is resembling Reddit. Numbers go up!
That is to say: these pure friend social networks start off with the right intentions. But with a similar product and incentives, you’ll end up right around where Facebook is now. If you want a different outcome, you must start from a different place.
I think there's merit in a privacy first, no ads, no global/viral content app/service like this; there have been a lot of threads here on HN with related sentiment. I think the challenge is more a business problem - how do you pull users in when people may be scattered across various platforms? Are you finding that a single user purchasing a $2/mo plan pulls in additional users?
The reason Facebook is where it is now is that when it was novel there was a lot of engagement. But as the novelty wore off, it became clear that your friends were not going to be able to produce the amount of interesting content you’d need to stay engaged. Most people probably don’t have enough friends on FB making the problem worse. In addition, Facebook’s privacy model requiring a double opt-in friendship makes it…