Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 271 posts

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#61

Post by kick »

freehunter wrote: post #51
tossAfterUsing wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

annecdotally, my attention isn't usually held for long by people who are unwilling to engage with a service because of it's weird name... https://scuttlebutt.nz/

And that’s fine for you. But it’s not fine for the service. Technically anyone can use the dating service Christian Mingle. But you might not find a lot of atheists or Jewish people on there, simply because of the name and the implication of the people who would use a service with that name.

It's not a "service." They owe you nothing, and they don't need you to use it for them to keep using it. Especially given you aren't the target audience, all that really happens is you become a waste of bandwidth for anyone hosting a public peer.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#62

Post by psweber »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #14

I can't see this as a Facebook rival. From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking. I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family, and get updates on my nieces and nephews since I moved from Houston, TX to NYC 5 years ago. Until someone replaces that aspect in a way that works while still enabling my family to do their memes and quizzes, and all that crap I avoid, there will be…

I fantasize about a product like that sometimes. A private, pay social site geared towards families. Your family pays a yearly subscription. Photo/video sharing. Event planning. Family news timeline. Everything purely linear. No manipulation to maximize engagement. No ads. Just real information about your family that you care about.

One side of my family has about 30 people that are all willing to travel to meet somewhere every few years. Compared to that expense, it would be trivial for us to share the cost of such a service, even if it were a few hundreds dollars a year.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#64

Post by gaius_baltar »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #45

I signed up, was waitlisted (number 180-thousand something on the list), sent out a couple of invites to friends with the url it generates, as soon as one of them accepted, it gave me access. So I guess if you don't want to pay the $13/month, you can avoid it by getting a friend to join.

Why spam a friend for this? Just grab the URL and create another dummy account.

Social media sites are data-vampires, not entities deserving any kind of respect.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#65

Post by type0 »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #30
jermaustin1 wrote: post #14

I can't see this as a Facebook rival. From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking. I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family, and get updates on my nieces and nephews since I moved from Houston, TX to NYC 5 years ago. Until someone replaces that aspect in a way that works while still enabling my family to do their memes and quizzes, and all that crap I avoid, there will be…

>From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking. That makes sense, I don't think a social network and privacy advocating (WikiPedia donating, HN type) go hand in hand. I like the premise of WT.Social. Facebook is where it is because it cracked 'real identity' when others were encouraging dog/cat names for profiles.

> when others were encouraging dog/cat names for profiles.

My dog had a facebook profile, so the Zuck doesn't allow it anymore? Keep in mind that was a very social dog.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#67

Post by Barrin92 »

dawg- wrote: post #29
jandrese wrote: post #2

Is that headline damning with faint praise? Mere "thousands" doesn't seem like enough to get critical mass on a social network. For comparison Google+ had something on the order of 300 million users and failed to get traction.

>Mere "thousands" doesn't seem like enough to get critical mass on a social network. It's kind of like running for president of the United States and bragging that you got "hundreds" of votes.

I don't think the purpose here is to be the proverbial president of the US but to simply have a community of people who are willing to chip some money in and who want healthier discourse.

If you're going to blow up to the size of facebook you're just going to suffer from the very same problems. More diversity and more competition and more alternatives is what this is supposed to be part of. I think the point here is to build an ecosystem of saner social networks, not the next Franken-network.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#68

Post by type0 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #40

Will they also offer an alternative to Facebook login? Because it’s not just the social network itself that’s all-pervasive on the internet, and locks you into its network.

They need to provide tribute-hailing buttons on other websites otherwise it won't become pervasive enough.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#69

Post by capableweb »

jandrese wrote: post #2

Is that headline damning with faint praise? Mere "thousands" doesn't seem like enough to get critical mass on a social network. For comparison Google+ had something on the order of 300 million users and failed to get traction.

How many users do you think HN has? No matter how many, I think I would call HN mostly a success (currently/temporary?). Seems that to have a good social network, it's less about quantity of content and more about quality. Most of Twitter is shit, but it contains some average content too, and a small amount of gold nuggets. HN feels to have much better signal/noise ratio and judging by myself and others who hang around here, it's way better here than what other "critical mass" social networks have.
Post reply on HN