I dont want to see 3rd party stuff my friends share. I want to see my friends content.
Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
81–90 of 271 posts
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#82Is 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 arou…
I don’t think it makes sense to compare HN to other social networks. It wasn’t started as a business that would need to turn a profit, it was started as a side project by a rich guy (Paul Graham) who wanted to see what smart people thought about things.
If HN fails to ever hit 1M users, PG (or Sam Altman) isn’t going to shut it down or cut off its funding, and neither he nor Y Combinator are expecting or relying on it to generate revenue. It continues to exist after over a decade because the Y Combinator folks find the content and discussion interesting.
And hey, that’s all well and good. I’m glad that HN sticks around when a more profit-driven site would’ve failed years ago. But it’s important to note that what works for HN likely wouldn’t work for anyone else.
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#83Is 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 arou…
Is HS a social network? I think of it more like a forum. On HN I don't really care exactly who I interact with. It's just as good to me without my family and friends being users (better, in fact :). Real social networks aren't like that.
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#84To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...
Seriously. Mastodon started at thousands. People wrote articles insisting it would never go anywhere. It's still growing with thousands of instances for every sort of community three years after the dismissive op-eds started, and it didn't have the benefit of a major profile promoting it.
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#85To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...
I agree with everything you said, but I still think "thousands" is way too low for newsworthiness. Social networks need a critical mass before they are good for anything. Surely that number has to be in the millions, right?
The metric relevant for social network sustainable growth seem unlikely to be total user count. It’s probably a mixture of metrics around inter-connectivity and rate of adjacent edge growth.
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#86To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...
I agree with everything you said, but I still think "thousands" is way too low for newsworthiness. Social networks need a critical mass before they are good for anything. Surely that number has to be in the millions, right?
That number is multiplied by the social cred of Wikipedia. Right?
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#87Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#88Another Facebook killer? 4329847328943298th time's the charm!
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 arou…
I don’t think it makes sense to compare HN to other social networks. It wasn’t started as a business that would need to turn a profit, it was started as a side project by a rich guy (Paul Graham) who wanted to see what smart people thought about things. If HN fails to ever hit 1M users, PG (or Sam Altman) isn’t going to shut it down or cut off its funding, and neither he nor Y Combinator are expecting or relying on i…
> The platform says it will never sell user data and relies on "the generosity of individual donors" rather than ads.
Sounds like this isn't envisioned as a profit-making business, either. I'd happily donate some money to have a place my friends and family can easily hang out online that isn't trying to sell us to anything.
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#90To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...
I agree with everything you said, but I still think "thousands" is way too low for newsworthiness. Social networks need a critical mass before they are good for anything. Surely that number has to be in the millions, right?
The "critical" mass however doesn't refer to absolute numbers. A million users with no relation to each other don't make it work. A few thousand with a tight network relationship cn make a busy place.