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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?

#61

Post by tedeba »

dxbydt wrote: post #46
agentwiggles wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can even argue here!

I don’t know man. There are times when I genuinely want an argument to clarify my thoughts. There is zero argument- it just gets downvoted minus three. So then I sadly delete my comment. I usually assume since I’m not an American (wasn’t born here), am not able to get the nuances right, or maybe there’s some deep underlying social dynamics I’m unaware of. So better to just delete my comment and move on. These days I…

What do you like to argue about?

Personally I'm a big fan of the ChangeMyView forum on Reddit. Pretty much anything goes there, as long as you're civil and interested in productive discussion that aims toward clarifying your views. Which is a refreshing change from the ideological echo chambers of most of the rest of the site, where if you say the wrong thing you'll be banned.

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

#62

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

everdrive wrote: post #37

Unpopular opinion: any social network, no matter how it’s architected will become terrible past a certain size. Perhaps some architectures will have different “maximum tolerable sizes” than others, but all will become intolerable once there is a large enough user base. More users, however, means more ad / tracking revenue, so these two ideas will always be at odds.

Is this really an unpopular opinion? Seems most people have acknowledged then general toxicity of large social networks by now.

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

#63

Post by solardev »

blowski wrote: post #11

If Hacker News tried building a social network, we'd spend the whole time arguing about every single micro-decision and getting nowhere.

We can just make two versions, one is a reddit clone Next.js site backed by a boring database, the other is a dockerized CLI written in Rust that you have to deploy locally and persist on a blockchain, after you sign in with a hand soldered hardware authenticator, and where every post is written in XML with no Unicode support. Once a night a cron job transpiles and mirrors posts between the two systems, and you only see votes from your home system.

That would probably settle most arguments.

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

#64

Post by ilyt »

baxtr wrote: post #60
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.

Great idea. To add: I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean. Also maybe it would be great to have a voting system where one could downvote as well! But only after a certain number of upvotes I think.

Let's also have zero notification whatsoever that someone answered to your comment so you have to keep engaged in constantly looking thru it manually

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

#65

Post by talkingtab »

cheschire wrote: post #39
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.

We have to be careful to not simply crowd-source the moderation either. Keeping a crowd-moderated social media site from devolving is a dang hard task.

Just curious do you have experience with this and if so, what was it

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

#67

Post by baxtr »

ilyt wrote: post #64
baxtr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great idea. To add: I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean. Also maybe it would be great to have a voting system where one could downvote as well! But only after a certain number of upvotes I think.

Let's also have zero notification whatsoever that someone answered to your comment so you have to keep engaged in constantly looking thru it manually

This is a very neat "engagement" feature idea! Love it. I would probably then just bookmark the site and check it constantly.

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

#68

Post by shanebellone »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #51
shanebellone wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should social media be a profit-driven enterprise as a civilization-scale product?

¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ I mean this question is way too big for this sort of thread. I would say that simply calling it a “product” already reveals a certain ideological bias to begin with. It’s like the difference between a city square and a shopping mall as a place for a society or community. What is unique about this place is that many people here are more than qualified to build pretty much anything. So, it would be safe to…

Financial and intellectual resources are being diverted to projects with large markets but low utility.

Also, "product" is a semantic argument. Product also means sum. Every application is a product of technology.

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

#69

Post by ilyt »

fleddr wrote: post #58
blowski wrote: post #11

If Hacker News tried building a social network, we'd spend the whole time arguing about every single micro-decision and getting nowhere.

Plus, the new site is useless because it doesn't work on SnowLinux Puppy v3.1 with HTML, CSS, JS and electricity disabled. Also don't like the scrollbar.

Nah, the complainer would clearly be BSD user

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

#70

Post by solardev »

hardnose wrote: post #59

Seems like a recipe for elitism. The groups of interesting people would be virtually impossible to get into, and the pleb groups would be boring. One of the things that worked about internet discussions of the past is that they prioritized quality of ideas, not importance of identity or who you know or any of that. Social media turned that on its head, I think a successful model might involve turning it back. More li…

The early net was nice because it didn't have billions of people on it. It was a self selecting crowd of early tech adopters who had the time and money to have an online presence, a rarity back in the day. It was its own moderation system because there weren't that many people. Even the web index used to be manually curated.

Then the internet became a victim of its own success and the signal to noise ratio plummeted. You can't replicate the early internet with less moderation, you either need selective participation or heavy curation (not moderation).

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