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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?

#201

Post by martindbp »

danielovichdk wrote: post #160
martindbp wrote: post #150

Personally, despite its reputation I've gravitated more and more towards Twitter, because at HN I can't really trust what people are saying. People may sound smart and like they know their stuff, but you can come up with great sounding arguments for and against anything. It takes a lot of time and energy to figure out if someone is worth listening to, so to me it makes more sense to seek out the known experts and fol…

Interesting. I find the discussions here on HN much more useful than pretty much any other so-called social media. There is nothing social about them. They act as echo chambers imo and very easily become cargo cults surrounded by the usual suspects.

It depends on who you follow. I try to follow mostly technical people who post about technical things, or other musings. If they tweet too much about politics I unfollow them, no matter how important they are otherwise. If you do this, you get a high signal to noise ratio, but Twitter unfortunately lacks in the depth of discussion. And also it's not very social as you say, it's mainly a way for me to listen in on conversations between experts rather than as a way for me to chime in personally.

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

#202

Post by snarf21 »

elefantastisch wrote: post #164

Every year at Christmas, I get a card from a family member with a short, personal hand-written note and a 1-page, generic printed update on how their year has been, usually with some pictures. This is what I want from a social network. I want to be able to keep up some regular connection with people I don't see on a regular basis. I want us to remember each other, know about major life events, and have a convenient w…

I think that is what most people want.. However, I don't know how to make that self-sufficient let alone profitable .. People want free and free means ads and ads means click-bait/faux outrage/addiction.

The old model was this (MySpace) but you had to go look at people .. They didn't come to you and it wasn't addictive enough or profitable enough.

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

#203

Post by ineptech »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #190
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…

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.

I mean, nothing would stop you from making a fake identity, and friending other anonymous people, and posting spicy memes. But you can do that on mastodon today, right? This is for the cases where you want to prove your identity. If most people use it that way, then the anonymous people would be little subnets that are either separate from the main graph or connected by only a few nodes. Typical users would* have dozens of people vouching for them, who each have dozens of people vouching for them, etc, which is strong evidence that they're who they say they are.

* in some hypothetical future where this gets made and is wildly successful

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

#205

Post by birdman3131 »

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…

You seem to be under the impression that real life access is the indicator of closeness of relationship. It is usually not.

Out of my set of close friends the vast majority I have never met in person. Most family I might add are in entirely separate states. Most of my IRL friends no longer live near me.

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

#206

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #132
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 would hate this because I’m physically nowhere near any HNers I’d trust, and vanishingly few HNers at all.

Around here, I'm pretty unwelcome at things like tech meetups. I stopped going, after experiencing the "circle of avoidance" thing, a few times.

New York ageism is even worse than Silicon Valley.

No one wants to know me, and I'm OK with that, as I get a lot done, anyway, and the people that matter to me (all over the world) are part of my circle.

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

#207

Post by kyledrake »

ovao wrote: post #47
kyledrake wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite a social network but a new version of the web where documents are just markdown or something very similar and the browser is an unglorified document reader with no JavaScript has been on my mind for a while.

Sounds interesting. Let’s call the markup language “Hypertext Markup Language”, and we’ll make it XML-like versus Markdown-like so we have at least have a well-designed spec to work with. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll work well enough. And let’s support JavaScript, but you can turn it off if you’d like.

As someone that runs a platform for people to get to edit and control the HTML of their content I extra appreciate the snarkiness, but the point is to use a format humans can more easily/cleanly edit, and focus on document oriented display of data where the browser/reader decides/controls styling vs the platform and you don't have to fight back against a trustless code execution engine trying to attack you while you read a news article.

It would be a pleasant and interesting contrast to the giant anti-user Rube Goldberg machine browsers have turned into (err actually just two browsers both funded by the same company because the nightmareish complexity makes it impossible to do competing browser implementations).

Feel free to call my idea stupid (it is) but let's not pretend HTML and the current implementation of the web is some sort of perfect ultimate gold standard we can't improve upon.

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

#208

Post by mattdesl »

One idea would be something like RSS that supports social media like activity (posts, reposts), but with a user alias namespace that is registered by a shared and distributed ledger. I wrote about this here:

https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...

Related, see the protocol spec and design for Farcaster, which aims to be a "sufficiently decentralized social network":

https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol

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

#209

Post by holler »

bil7 wrote: post #6

I think what would really be great is a social media site that doesn't offer direct image or video hosting. A bit like how reddit used to be. You just have link aggregation, voting, and comments. That's it. Maybe in a nice, clean, minimal UI as well. This would lend itself to tech folk I think. If only it existed.

No voting but working on a clean/minimal link aggregation + live chat site at https://sqwok.im

bonus points: "hacker theme" to make the hacker feel at home https://i.imgur.com/AleBLed.png

https://sqwok.im/p/TXmiluFNUILE_Q (cross-post)

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

#210

Post by sgallant »

philip1209 wrote: post #170

I think the answer is personal newsletters. Email is (sufficiently) distributed, and (about) everybody uses it. I've replaced most of my social email with a monthly update. On the first day of every month, I publish a post on my website titled “What I’m up to this month.” In it, I have three simple sections: - Highlights from last month - Things to share - What I’m up to this month It sends to my mailing list. I find…

Using email as a slower social platform. Love it!
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