I agree with a lot of what you say here. I’ve been running a 3h daily time boxed social media site for the past 6 months and even though traffic is now a crawl compared to the initial burst of activity when I started it, there are users who check in daily and it ends up being a lovely experience I think.
I am working on mobile apps and redesigning and reengineering a lot of the site and I love your thoughts on a blog focus. I’d love to let people host a small blog on the site that would also connect to their actual blog. I’ll add that to the roadmap.
I like the concept though having the limited time would make more sense if the site was structured around a specific topic or interest. Otherwise, I don’t get the appeal of having a fixed time to social media with random people over nothing in particular. But if you told me that there’d me a gathering of <<insert fav hobby/interest>> for three hour block each evening (or even just a couple times per week), I’d be excited to check it out.
That's an interesting idea. If, for instance, there was a window of time for people interested in a show to come together to discuss the latest episode (assuming the episodes aren't just dropped all at once), then I think it would be an interesting place to visit since everyone is there for the very same reason and there's something of interest that happened recently that would focus the discussion.
I will say I did visit the site months ago and found that just hanging out with random people wasn't that compelling to me. In the early days, it was fun because it was new and there was a lot of energy, but after that, you really do need something to bring you back day to day.
What youre missing is that most people have self control issues, and your product is essentially a commitment device. As most addicts - they reject such devices.
I like what youre doing but just saying - youre dealing with a very difficult problem.
That’s a fair point. I don’t see it as the antidote for people who are addicted though. It’s just a nice place for people who want to engage less. I’m definitely aware it won’t be a big thing.
If you’re looking for an actual antidote to the addiction, I don’t think that will exist in the form of a product, that will come from individuals themselves if it ever does.
There's also a subset of users that embrace such devices. I'd wager that's OPs target audience. The ones that would reject it are a lost cause and shouldn't even be considered.
The author invented and then dashed against the rocks a few existing fediverse platforms in the course of a couple paragraphs.
These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from venturing outside the walls.
Friendica is one of several fediverse platforms the author basically describes. You can even self-host an instance for yourself and friends/family.
And you may say:
> I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.
Perfect. IMO, the minuscule friction to enter is the benefit. The walled gardens exist and hold people in such high numbers exactly because they've reduced the friction to enter and increased it to leave. The definition of a trap, yes?
> Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
So no, the problem isn't high numbers with friction to leave. The problem is that the sites' incentives are different than the users. Facebook had high numbers and a lot of lock-in and was a much better product before they decided to basically stop showing me any content from my friends that isn't controversial. Twitter has high numbers and a lot of lock-in but it's better there because I can still get a linear timeline of tweets from the people I follow.
Do any of those networks limit the number of posts you can make a day?
Do they limit forwarding? Or give users an option not to be shown forwarded messages?
For me, unlimited posts (or rather, minimal friction in posting), and blind forwarding are what destroy social media. If you can make only 3 public/group posts a day, chances are lower they will be crap.
I'm on Mastodon. It's only very mildly nice. The reality is that it still suffers from all of this. I still have to cut off connections because of the guy who's always ranting about some politician/political party.
Increase the friction for people who want to rant!
> I'm on Mastodon. It's only very mildly nice. The reality is that it still suffers from all of this.
Most of it, at least - it does give the option to not be shown forwarded messages. There's controls on the home timeline to not show boosts, quotes, and/or replies.
> > I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.
You use a quote angle bracket, indicating that it is a quote. It is not a quote, it's a straw man.
Nobody is saying "this isn't perfect, I won't use it." People are saying "I can't figure this out, I guess I won't use it."
I was about to say "Disallow forwarding". The problem with most networks (and in the old days, even emails), was that the bulk of the material I'd get from people I personally know were not original content, but memes, humor, or political content being forwarded.
But this may serve an equivalent purpose:
> And finally, there should be a reasonable cap on the number of times a user can post per day. Roughly 5 times per day feels like the upper threshold of what you can post while being intentional about what it is you're posting.
Amusingly, just yesterday I said in a comment:
"Imagine you have a quota of only 1 HN comment per day. You probably will be a lot more careful on what you reply to."
> Imagine you have a quota of only 1 HN comment per day. You probably will be a lot more careful on what you reply to.
1 HN comment a day is interesting as it would also introduce a lag into the speed of development of threads as you wouldn't know ahead of time what threads you would want to post in until they've all been created.
Something I think about personally is what would be the result of requiring people to invest a personally meaningful amount of time and/or money into posting. "I have to pay to speak?!" people ask. Well, yes.
Of course, this immediately seems to tie someone's ability to post to personal finances which isn't the intention. But the key idea is that it has to be something personally costly enough that it implies an honest and intentional signal, which always seems to end up as either time or money.
Some forums implement time-gated posting which is interesting. If you have to wait a minute to be allowed to post, can you still be bothered? But would I have paid to write this specific comment? I'm not sure, I guess that depends on the market rate for posts at the time. I have no doubt there are tens of ways this system breaks down that I haven't thought through.
I think time based is the way to go, with an exponential curve, such that one can only post 5 comments reasonably per day.
The first comment in a given day has no wait. The second requires waiting 10 minutes. The 3rd requires an hour. The 4th requires 3 hours, and the 5th another 12 hours or so.
Obviously: No edits (or let the edit count as the comment).
Lots of variables to play with. The nice thing about time is that it is egalitarian. Richer people don't get more access.
> If you have to wait a minute to be allowed to post, can you still be bothered?
At work, I often log out of HN. The need to log back in often does act as a deterrent. I also occasionally use LeechBlock, with a 60s delay. That too acts as a deterrent.
> I also occasionally use LeechBlock, with a 60s delay.
Interesting. I've tried blocking things via hosts file to add that kind of friction, but it's too easy and often I'm waiting on something that takes longer than the time it takes me to 'fix' the hosts file.
> At work, I often log out of HN.
This works for me for posting but doesn't help so much with the FOMO of new threads. If I had to be logged in to view I imagine I'd read far fewer threads.
Goodreads/book discussions -- the best class of social media.
Requires some (significant?) investment to have an opinion on a book. It's often pretty obvious if someone hasn't read a book and is commenting on it. The interval between comments is hours/days because users are off reading the book.
This is how LiveJournal was back in the day. I have some really fond memories of people just honestly writing about their life. It seemed more pure and less performative. Then of course the whole Six Apart thing happened but I know many Russians for whom LJ still serves the same purpose.
>I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right
What about a requirement "at least one direct interaction in a year"? Maybe with a reminder "you didn't catch up with X in 11 months, are you still connected"? This will both:
* Achieve the main reason of social network existence, i.e. give people an excuse to have a chat with a former friend and keep in touch. I sometimes thing about messaging a person I knew years ago, but it feels awkward enough that I don't do it usually.
* Naturally limit the number of connections, because now having connectione require (small but still) work. A very small dopamine addicted users may still try to collect connections, but I feel like this platform will be hostile enough for them and they will leave anyway, not finding what they want from SM.
Strava is the closest thing to effective social media that I use, because it is 'slow'.
You create 'content' by doing something orthogonal.
You pay for access vs selling attention for ads.
You only look at Strava when you are working out, so engagement is authentic vs contrived/performative. I care about my friend completing a run because I know they did it.
One of the best thing they did was allow the chance to add photos.
I also dream for this. Personally I would remove likes/reactions though. As we've seen with Instagram it's too easy to chase that dopamine rush/compare number of likes. Comments are enough in my opinion.
Likes/reactions should be hidden to everyone else except the poster, and not used for any kind of ranking.
And comments should be disabled by default. Users should have to take the extra step to enable comments ("I would like feedback") and if they're off by default, it won't feel strange or negative to the viewer.
Likes shouldn’t be visible to the poster either. Once you see the number of likes you quickly see that radical posts get the most likes and start posting more of it.
The best online discussions I have seen where at simple forums where the posts were listed in chronological order without likes or anything.
I completely agree but most people aren't that interested in some kind of socratic online dialogue.
I don't expect to learn much at all from internet discussion at this point. It serves a minimal socialization purpose and then my actual learning is from books and language models.
Limiting the # of shares in some way would be nice also. If people could only share one thing per day, they'd be more thoughtful of what to spend it on.
I actually had a moment just yesterday, imagining/hoping my toddler daughter will grow up and refer to my phone in the same way I did with my parents cigarettes when I was a kid. My mom always claims she had no idea they were dangerous when she started as a teen. I wonder if we'll all sound the same with social media and our devices to our kids.
Well intentioned, but never going to work. Social networks will always create financial incentives that have to be contended with. No network that can connect to “close” people, will always result in some nodes on the graph that connect to a “large portion of people”.
Always. This broadcast ability is then a path to financial renumeration, which will see the rise of copy cats and another arms race to gather attention from people on the network.
Fundamentally, information / clout / something is resistant to being distributed equitably on information networks, especially online networks.
Agreed. Our local instance of NextDoor, which is explicitly aimed at forming online social forums for geographically close users, forbids self-promotion of businesses in the general chats.
The admins regularly ignore this, because the users like seeing posts from "I'm a carpenter looking for work right now!".
So, even with a supposedly sequestered monetization area, it bleeds into everything.
There are local chapters of the Society for Creative Anachronism that uses Facebook heavily. The thing is that the use of FB grew out from the in-person community that had formed, and people would rather interact in-person than only through social media. The community already has its own customs and ceremonies for recognition; people there upvote and collect following in an attempt to get the FB algorithm to spread the word for each other (on events and happenings).
When there is an already-existing community like that, I think a dedicated social media platform for that particular community can be beneficial. That platform then does not have to be the social media for everyone.
However, funding (for hosting and maintenance) is still an issue.
As a small +1 — I built mood.site to be an easy way to share galleries of images with people. The idea being like "hey send me some photo inspiration for the party we're planning" and having a throwaway way to do that (kind of like a pastebin for images).
People definitely use it for this, but what has really surprised me is people's capactiy for expression inside of the bounds of the program I created, and how people are clearly using in as a sort of ad hoc social network of loosely collected boards and inspiration. There are no actual _social_ features in the app (no discovery, etc.), but what has been sort of inspriring is that The Will is just there for people to find ways of expression outside the idea of a "feed" and "posting".
I think those models have indeed become synonymous with "social media", but my only point here is to bring up a possibility of "social media" as something that can be much more expansive and look very different compared to the primary models we think of today.
Another person favorite of mine along the same lines is how the comments section of this Pilsburry recipe for "veggie pizza" has become it's own sort of ad-hoc social media for grandmas to share their own experiences with each other about the dish:
https://www.pillsbury.com/recipes/veggie-pizza/4b2c60ae-69e5...
I think modern social media is a huge problem but don’t see we can fix it without regulation. It’s clear that all the current incentives point companies towards engagement and rage bait and away from anything actually “social”, and I think it’s unlikely that any new social network that tries to fix these issues would achieve widespread usage.
Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would that legislation look like? My main idea is to simply outlaw ML-based recommendation algorithms, but obviously that is not as simple as it sounds and is mostly based on looking fondly on the earlier days of social media, when I felt like it was making my life better instead of worse.
China already has such legislation. They have placed restrictions on social media and internet use for children, and they censor content on these platforms.
Personally, I'm against government intervention for this sort of thing. I prefer government to be constrained to securing my liberties, rather than restricting my behavior "for my own good".
As a parent, I talk to my kids about social media like I talk to them about junk food. I want them to recognize that it's bad for them - it's addictive, and provides short term pleasure that results in long term misery. Avoiding it, or making good decisions about how you interact with it, is a personal responsibility issue.
Is it possible that the current form of social media is actually contributing to the erosion of your liberties because it is so widely used in society and is likely contributing to polarization and antisocial behavior?
I see this (and, honestly, most problems) as much more than a personal responsibility issue. To me, it’s an issue of misaligned incentives and unpriced downside costs. It’s clear that market forces push companies to build an addictive service that produces long term misery. It’s also clear that social media has a cost on its users (producing long term misery, reducing acute productivity) But this cost is not paid by the social media company.
I’d argue that widespread use of the social media that today’s market incentives create is bad for society as a whole, not only for any one individual. Correcting market incentives that don’t align with social good is, in my opinion, one of the most essential purposes of legislation.
I agree that regulation is likely the only option.
With the caveat that it is very clear people want this horrible social media we have. They consume outrageous content, they pass it on, they create it for these platforms.
A lot of proposed regulation frames it as big bad tech companies making people do things like they're victims. But without people participating there would be nothing on there and in reality the human factor feeds back into these loops ... and keeps them going.
I think a lot of the proposed legislation comes at it at the wrong angle and is unlikely to fix it because in the end the users are a key component, not just some terrible algorithm or creepy CEOs.
Hm. To me it is indeed the big bad tech companies at fault for implementing _obviously_ user-hostile functionality (mandatory suggested posts, for example) that exploit human nature to keep people engaged, even if people prefer not to. The existence and widespread use of screen time limits on phones seems like strong evidence that tech companies have built something nefarious here. And to me, it’s clear that they have done so intentionally to drive profit.
Never thought about it but banning non personal accounts sounds like a good start. I doubt such social media would gain any meaningful popularity though.
It's not, that's why people want a regulatory body to do it. The only way to get people to use such a system would be to regulate the current ones out of existence.
It’s a tricky one, but something that I repeatedly come back to is that publishers are regulated, but social media is a free for all. A newspaper can’t just make up something without consequences (in the UK), for example they may be sued for libel.
Social media companies, by contrast, can publish posts from their anonymised users that contain almost anything, and it is permitted. It can be racism. It can state that £300M a week could be spent on the NHS if only the UK would leave the EU. And those posts can be sent to millions of people without regard to truth or the damage they can do.
The classic response to this is “well, you can’t expect us to police such a large amount of content, it’s impractical” - a fair response - but then there’s a bit of sleight of hand from Meta et al: they conclude that they should therefore be allowed to broadcast anything a user shares. But an alternative conclusion is _well, then perhaps you shouldn’t be broadcasting inflammatory nonsense from any person/bot who posts_ and you have to find a new operating model.
It’s tricky because free speech is important, but I think we’ve seen enough times how dangerous, divisive, and destructive social media is. If there’s no way to prevent people and states from abusing it, then it probably shouldn’t exist. When the retrospective is written on the fall of America and the west, social media will be one of the key explanatory factors, along with hypercapitalism.
Newspapers have had a much longer history than social media.
I get why youre making the comparison, but, regulatory bodies tend to be averse to acting quick because they want "all the data" to be more certain in decision making. Such data only comes with time.
People are basically looking for a standalone Facebook groups that's not owned by a corporation. Or Twitter for small groups but not what mastodon has become. I think honourably some people have tried and many continue to build niche products like micro.blog. Personally I just want a service that is not commercially owned, for profit or by a US corporation. My own attempts/ambitions get in the way of being able to achieve it, so I started working on something that slowly solved my own problems e.g news feed aggregation, videos without shorts or the algorithm, chat with AI based on a model from Qatar. Soon I'll add posting but only because I feel like I need some sort of personalised way to bookmark and share my thoughts within it being about gaining attention or validation from a world of likes and retweets.
There are no good answers, because the reality is the next medium is probably quite different from the last. But yea personalised small group chat, feed, news makes sense.
Media was always already social. If I email my friend a link to a YouTube video, is the Internet a social network? I think what we think of when we think of 'social media' or a 'social network' is an integrated platform that lubricates particular potentials, like being able to create and share content with friends and fans. But there are other ways to realise those potentials, including ones that require the interfacing of different platforms (or media, in the McLuhanian sense), or what might be perceived as different platforms at one scale, and the same platform at another scale, as per my Internet example. And, the multiplicity of platforms, and the interfacing between them, might confer additional advantages and open up yet more potentials.
What are people using now instead of Facebook (for broastcast and interaction with friends/family)?
Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.
Nothing. I see them when I see them. If there’s something urgent we call each other or send an SMS. There’s no need for daily, weekly or even monthly updates. This makes meeting and talking in person always interesting because there’s so much to sync that we’ve all had time to digest beforehand.
In the beginning when I left Facebook over ten years ago it felt alienating. Then it felt too quiet. Then whenever I met people, months apart or even years for distant family, I realised it didn’t matter. We connected like it had been days since our last meeting. Eventually more and more of them have also quit social networks entirely, though most use group chats for their immediate family — parents and kids to orchestrate activities etc.
I think culture is more private again. In the early social media phase, people very nonchalantly posted all their random thoughts and drinking pics, vagueposting publicly about a breakup etc. People now feel more surveilled, and feel that the public internet is icky. HR sees all etc. It's similar to how people changed their behaviors in response to ubiquitous phone cameras.
It feels paradoxical to say that, but I think it's true both that social media is bigger than ever in terms of flurry and activity, and that normal people participate less (outside scrolling the feed passively). A few people are semi-professionalizing in it now, influencers with sponsorships, local celebrities and trendsetters etc., while normal people's normal life updates are dwindling. The Pareto split is sharper.
I think that's definitely a part of it. I also think the signal to noise ratio has simply gotten so low that it's started taking up too much energy for most people, so the value is lost. There will always be "feed junkies", I suspect, but they're a dwindling minority.
WhatsApp and Signal are considered "social media" technically, though plenty of people are still on FB telling the world about their trips and what they ate for breakfast.
I'm always surprised at how HN folks are either unable or unwilling to admit that the fediverse exists beyond Bluesky or Mastodon. I far prefer lemmy to reddit, and Friendica is essentially that the author is describing. This stuff exists already, and it's the perverse incentives of social media such as walled gardens and a critical mass of people that are what keep them alive.
Nothing mostly. Closest family have a group chat, and I have a few friends hanging out on IRC. For broadcasting, nothing, and I probably never will again.
One thing many forget when presenting new ideas for social media platforms is that we've been burnt by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Imgur and even LinkedIn to some extend. I'll never trust a social media platform again because of people like Mark Zuckerberg. There's nothing you can say or do that will convince that your new platform won't turn to shit just as fast as Facebook did.
The business model doesn't work out, because not enough people will pay and you cannot run these platforms on ad revenue and be trustworthy.
Most everyone is on facebook that I know of and they're not going anywhere and I'm not. I actually missed that an old coworker had died recently. Frustrating.
Facebook just mostly show me ads now. I don’t have many friends active on it anymore. I did find out a few years ago that a coworker has passed away though. It’s really useful, pity there isn’t a similar viable alternative
FB is practically dead, particularly from an innovation stand point. Theyre just pumping as much cashflow as they can out of it before its inevitable death.
That's all I use now for REAL social media. My family is in one Signal chat, and my in-laws in a other one. All the social media I need. School groups are unfortunately on Facebook Messenger groups.
The problem is whenever wise people sit out of the popular platforms like today’s social media, society continues most of its speech and politics on those big popular fast social media platforms. So we are all still exposed to its risks.
> I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right. Any more than that and you're a collector, and not using the platform to foster connection.
Path[1] did that, but with a cap of 50, and then 150 (based on the Dunbar number of meaningful human connections one can retain). They had a crazy growth period but eventually went kaput.
WhatsApp and Telegram are my slow social media. They ring only for the very few people I really care about. Everything else accumulates in their chats.
I get some link to FB and TikTok in my chats and groups but I don't open all of them. I don't have the apps, so if I do I open them in the browser. I'm not logged in. No TikTok account. Links to Instagram are very rare. No account. I check WhatsApp and Telegram when I feel like, no pressure.
A lot of his ideas remind me of the BeReal app, it limits posts per day and is geared toward 'friends in real life' and with just a few friends on it I've stayed engaged. But it's sparse for me and can be a ghost town much of the time, but that may be just because my friend group isn't using it much. There needs to be sufficient network effect to maintain and grow it's reach as a network, which may be antithetical to its founding principles.
Lol I dont know how to say this but BeReal is flawed from the start. IG is not about being real at all for the most part - hence its popularity. People enjoy being able to cosplay and show their best self, not revealing their true self.
That's been my experience with BeReal as well. I seldom see posts from people I'm close with, and so I post less as well, and presumably that contributes to a similar feeling for other friends of mine.
In fact, these days, I only post in it so that I can record the moment, to add it to the record of fotos which are convenient and fun to look back through.
I liked BeReal while it was still just post 1 picture a day. Now you have 'your brands' there, they try to increase 'engagement' by trying to get people use the app more... I was there when it happened on Facebook, I was there when it started on Instagram – not again, thx.
I'm building an app builder (getmocha.com) and one of my favorite use cases I have seen is "small private social network":
some people are building custom, tailored social networks only available to their family, church, community, sports team, school, etc...
This was previously impossible but now AI changes that. I don't know if it will materialize, but a more federally distributed web with tons of small private social networks could be a future of healthy social
That's an interesting concept. We could take that concept in general, and a person could write 100 essays (that they publish on whatever platform), and these 100 essays could comprise their magnum opus.
“blog as a social network” was/is pretty much Tumblr. Most of the content was structured as posts and updates on your personal page. You didn’t even need to engage with the social part.
It’s hard to explain the difference between it and Twitter if you never used it, but the platform itself creates very different posting ideologies.
I agree for the most part here. The biggest barrier to this sort of platform is that people love convienence and low effort use, but that's not what social interraction is about. I really think going out of your way to do things in a more difficult way (inconvience) is the secret to living in the real world again. That's why I prefer DIY to whatever standard solution to any given problem there might be already.
I relate to so many points here. I have a desire to share my thoughts and ideas, but no format (except for my personal blog) feels right.
Just started building autogram.bio to help people create their personal corner of the web, and this post was exactly the motivation I needed to continue. Thank you!
I don’t want to be limited to „meaningful connections!“ I stay in close contact with those who are dear to me outside of social media. I want to stay connected to some random coworker I enjoyed working with in 2011, because I enjoy watching them from a distance, getting married, settling down, that kind of stuff, and occasionally comment on these things.
This used to be a strength of social media before algorithms came in and decided that because I am not liking every post of that person it follows that I am not interested.
This desire to follow people’s lives from a distance without necessarily interacting with them in the world is the root of the very unhealthy parasocial tendencies driving social media. It seems quite innocent and benign on the scale of one person just wanting to keep up with the life of a cool coworker from the past, but it quickly adds up to a bunch of people passively following other people with very little actual interaction. It is more akin to reading a novel or watching a movie except that social following tricks our brain into thinking we really are keeping up a relationship with the people that we’re voyeuristically watching.
I've never heard of anyone thinking that they are keeping up a relationship with someone by watching them via social media from a distance.
This sounds like a made-up concern to me. There is no difference to asking someone how someone else is doing, a phenomenon as old as humankind, probably.
Counterpoint: This ability to "follow people's lives from a distance without necessarily interacting with them in the world" is the only way I have of renewing old friendships with childhood friends, schoolmates and friends from college.
It is a HUGE social benefit to me, as I've moved far away. I don't need Abe's phone number, Betty's email, and I don't expect even Christmas cards updating me on Charlie's family. But if any of them post on FB that their parent or child or dog just died, graduated, or got married (in a progressive animal-rights nation), I can make an effort to let them know I care.
I wonder if that voyeuristic use case is good for people/society. People used to naturally fade from each other's lives, maybe you saw each other in the street if you stayed in the same area, you could ask them about their life in person. If you were closer friends, they'd show you the photos of their wedding or vacation when you visited for dinner or hung out.
Even in the early version, these life updates became a competition of who has the fancier wedding pics, who went to a trendy vacation spot this year etc., leading to an idealized picture of how the life of everyone else is going.
It's a bandaid on the lifestyle of having to move cities all the time and cutting connections. Seeing their life updates doesn't really keep the connection alive, it's an illusion.
Is it voyeuristic to read and observe what people are broadcasting, either publicly or to a closed circle?
I dunno, if I don't want anyone to see the post I will not post it or limit its visibility, I am very much in the same camp as the person you're replying to.
People who I lost regular contact with but am totally happy to meet again once a year or every couple years. (Does not mean more often would be bad, just being realistic). Which we actually do, from time to time.
We also have a Slack with old colleagues form one company, but it's mostly a way to contact them or for the occasional tech question and chitchat, so it's even more closed off - but no different than broadcasting events, really.
But I'm also not arguing that it's strictly needed.
Maybe that's not the right word, it's too pejorative. What I mean is looking at someone's private life without them narrating it to you specifically and being aware in real time that you're looking at it. I'm not claiming anything negative about its ethics or similar. That's not my point at all. I'm just asking whether it is conducive to real social connection and whether it really produces and maintains the kind of ties that it supposedly maintains or if it's an illusion. Sure, it's nice to reconnect with a long lost classmate or "interesting" to see the baby pics of that one college friend you last talked to in 2012. But to what end exactly? If it actually leads to regular IRL hangouts that's great. Otherwise it's just some kind of nostalgia trap.
> if I don't want anyone to see the post I will not post it or limit its visibility
Yes, and nowadays people tend to share less. Exactly because in the 2000s these instincts were less sharp and then people realized that a wider circle of people is looking than they thought and things remain online for long.
I disagree that being interested in the life updates of someone as being equivalent to a voyeur.
There are people who fade out of one’s lives for various reasons, but it doesn’t mean that the relationship has to end at that. There are many schoolmates, coworkers, etc. who I wish l I had some idea where they were now, which I don’t have right now because of my general avoidance of social media.
This is just a way of keeping on the pulse and generating common context if said pair were to meet again, instead of simply awkwardly smiling and trying to end a conversation as soon as possible.
Reading someone’s life updates and watching their videos is not keeping up a connection though. It’s a parasocial relationship that makes us feel like there is a connection whereas an actual connection would require interaction between people. As you rightly noted, one of the main outcomes of the parasocial relationship is that it replaces real life interactions - you no longer have to ask people questions about their lives or figure out how to make conversation when you do see them; you can just reference their social media posts.
But if I had the possibility of being updated in someone’s life, or even just having a contact option, would help me evaluating if this relation is worth being kept or refreshed or terminated.
Example: I was an employee with my first fulltime job for nearly ten years. After I quit the job I instantly lost contact to all people. I would have needed to actually go the company building to chat with them (or calling at work), which I didn’t because it was Covid time. But on XING (LinkedIn-like platform for Germany) one former colleague left his private phone number for me, and I messaged him (after some years, because I was in a depressive phase), and now we meet every two or three months.
So it’s not about voyerism for me but keeping contact or at least give me some hints if any relation might be worth pursuing. I don’t want (or need) people in my list just for being a watcher of their life.
Yes, getting to know someone used to be a gradual process. During the time window when public posting about frankly quite private moments of life was common (Facebook ~2010s), it was weird how much you would see of a person upfront. You saw surprising overlapping acquaintances, prior vacations, party photos, hobbies etc... See photos of your teachers or profs with their spouse etc. I don't think it's normal. It was a weird phase.
Now I have been using Whatsapp as my only "social media app" basically as stated in another comment: Whatsapp updates, you can see the updates of your contacts, then you can react or send them a message.
And these updates only contain the people who you have as a contact and they have you as a contact, so you only receive the updates of the people you care about and if there is someone you don't want to see their updates you can turn off updates for them.
Should internet based chat platforms develop a common protocol (like SMS for mobile networks) so that people don't all need to use the same app (Whatsapp and the like) to be able to have 1:1 or group chats?
(Before someone says I have rediscoered email -- I know email exists for a similar reason but not for instant messaging for a smartphone weilding generation)
The original Facebook Messenger and Google Talk both used XMPP, it has support for encryption and push notifications.... For a brief period, you could actually chat across ecosystems.
And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
We do have matrix now, but it's still largely irrelevant, and doesn't really feel fully baked yet.
At this point, all the major companies have a huge vested interest in keeping things closed.
Without blue bubble lock-in, I, and quite a few people I know, would ditch increasingly mediocre iPhones for Android, so apple has to keep building iMessage exclusive features and has to avoid ever releasing an iMessage android app (most recently, Apple Invites, which integrates with iMessage cleanly and is impossible for third-party apps to integrate so neatly).
I expect Apple to continue to leverage "Apple Intelligence" as a feature that only integrates well with iMessage so that they can continue to lock users in, and keep the conversation as far away from open chat protocols as they can.
In the AI age, unencrypted textual conversations are a new source of training data, so Instagram, Twitter, and Google want to keep their own messaging systems to themselves.
... Really though, if you've got a whitepaper from 2020 about "building a protocol", and 6 years later you've got exactly 0 users actually using the protocol, it's maybe not even worth linking.
Writing a vague hand-wavy paper that says "We need a distributed graph, we'll use blockchain, there are IDs" is very easy.
Getting enough users that people can talk to each other, that's hard, and real usable applications help with that, while whitepapers do not.
I always wonder what goes on in the minds of people who focus intensely on the technology and not the experience...
The experience is what people want. Not the technology. The technology is this thing that delivers the experience but the consumer does not need to know of its existence nor how it works.
I also wish there will be a lot of diverse social media for specific interest groups. I am fine that not many people would use them. I would actually prefer that because I can at least expect people with genuine interest on the topic. Discord in this regard is pretty close to this direction I think.
The article is basically describing Friendster, which was the first big social media platform after MySpace. I have zero social media accounts (for all the reasons described) but wouldn’t mind a Friendster-like platform.
Replacing the current social media giants is incredibly hard because of network effects and lock-in. Could we instead implement most of the OP's ideas with a client for an existing social media site that filters out all the crap?
Social media as it is works perfectly and does not need to be changed for extroverts. We just need a product made for those who care about small private groups.
back in 2009 in Spain we had what the author describes in Tuenti (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuenti).
at first it was invite only and by default people's profiles were private, you'd need to be friends to see their activity and pictures.
your feed was just your friends statuses and new pictures in chronological order.
later on it got some games and a realtime chat but it ended up dying because of newer social networks.
it was great to keep your actual friends and family connected.
In Hungary, we had iWiW, one of the earliest "social media" sites. (=international who is who - though it never went really international, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWiW, started as WiW in 2002).
It was also invite based and it was exciting to get an invite back then. It was more like a phone book, it had detailed profiles where you could specify your favorite things, introduce yourself, upload a few pictures etc. It didn't have a newsfeed. Later they would introduce some kind of notification when someone uploaded new pics. But it was mainly "poll-based", i.e. you'd go to specific profiles to see if they uploaded anything new.
This was a significant break from the pseudonymous forum and chat culture (A/S/L?), and blended your real life with the previously totally separate online world for the first time. Now you could look up classmates, see who viewed your profile, of course it drove a lot of teen drama as you'd expect. It was a more public companion to the nascent MSN Messenger culture (which replaced the SMS-based more private teen comms culture, which replaced the family-landline-phone-based gossip culture and of course IRL-based one, feels weird to have lived through all those transitions - we didn't even have a family landline phone in the early 90s and would use phone booths to call family members in other cities).
The mainstream dominance of iWiW in Hungary was actually quite short-lived (~2004-2009), though it feels longer in my memory, there was so much happening, so much new stuff popping up. Note also that iWiW got bought by the local subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom already in 2006. So it was quite obvious that there's commercial value in such sites.
Initially Facebook was also more profile-focused, where the main activity was looking up profiles, checking their friends, reading bios, looking at galleries etc. (where you actually clicked links to explore, instead of being fed a feed and just scrolling), and the newsfeed-focus only got introduced later.
Nowadays, Facebook is mostly a public agora in Hungary, the platform for politicians and pundits and social critique etc (instead of Twitter like in other countries). I think the eager culture to post updates for real friends has dwindled, people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates. Real personal "social media" is mostly in private Whatsapp groups I think.
> people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates
Young people do care - but the "checking on friends" and "showing off my glamourous life/vacation" has moved to Instagram and Snapchat. Partly because Facebook is full of "old people" and thus less cool. As the Insta generation starts to have their own kids, those kids indubitably will look for another platform...
I was recently inspired on this front by an interview[1] with a recommender system engineer that explored the idea of a "good" recommender algorithm:
> It feels like smartphones have saturated the available time. It's like the famous quote from the Netflix CEO: "Our main competitor is sleep." There aren't many more biological hours in the day to capture. At this point, it's mostly a war between recommender systems for your attention, as they've already consumed roughly all the available time.
...
> For me, the big issue with recommender systems isn't that they will destroy our minds, though that is a possible risk. It's the incredible waste of potential. Billions of hours of human time will be allocated today, guided mostly by clickbait incentives. The goal is to entertain people, not in a joyful way, but to help them dissociate.
> You have such an opportunity. There's probably a video on YouTube right now that, if I watched it, would inspire me to call my dad, talk to a stranger, or start a new relationship. Google could probably introduce me to a good friend, a co-founder, or my future life partner.
> They have the data, but they aren't using it that way. Instead, they're optimizing for a few more cents of advertising revenue, which is a colossal, civilizational-level failure.
...
> That is the crux of the incentives problem we've been discussing. One thing that gives me hope is we're no longer in the era of free software. Paradoxically, now that intelligence is cheap enough, people are willing to pay for software. It's more reasonable to charge for a subscription now because you can provide measurable value to someone's life. Paying $10 or $20 a month for a social media service that actually helps you live according to your goals is a much less crazy proposition than it was 10 years ago.
I think something like a Whatsapp that recommends contacts that can be close is good enough. Something like friends of friends recommendations. But no more.
Whatsapp groups are as terrible as the alternatives. Every group I've been a part of that has more than N people (all who know each other) has devolved into endless memes, political talk etc, and very little connecting.
Give me Whatsapp where I have a setting to simply not show me any forwarded message, and I'll be happy.
At the exact same time that Instagram launched, another platform that is also almost exactly what this post describes also launched: Path - and it's long dead, too. The author's views represent such a tiny minority that is not worth the required effort to build and maintain a platform for. Let's not forget network effects. You might love this utopian platform, if it were to exist, but good luck convincing everyone you care about to move over with you. You may as well then just use a journaling app if you're talking to yourself.
The largest social platforms right now are hardly showing any signs of slowdowns. The market signal is clear: this is what most people want and are fine with.
Perhaps a journaling-focused platform where social is a second-class aspect might succeed. You're documenting things for yourself anyway and if friends happen to see them and engage with them, that's an added bonus. Network effects would not matter here. In fact, this is how I used Path back in the day. I intentionally kept no friends on it and started using it like a journal, recording my thoughts, adding photos and checkins.
The one key element I added was privacy. If your posts are private to your social group then there is no mechanism to try appealing to a broader "viral" audience. Also--if it is decentralized then the company (or person in my case) building it can't change their mind and start selling your data/eyeballs.
I have a LOT of thoughts in this space. Lots of people think they want some sort of healthier social-media alternative, but we're fighting against systems that are so finely tuned engagement monsters that is hard compete to protect your attention and time.
> I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized.
The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you receive both got monetized. They monetized Attention by adding View, Like, Share and Follower counts to everything.
And those counts started acting like Currency does in the real economy.
For example a key feature of Currency is that it acts as Store of Value. That value can then be exchanged at whatever time for something else in the real economy.
But in the real economy the Money Supply is regulated and controlled by the Central Bank. Why did that happen?
Before Central Banks (a very recent invention) showed up individual Banks printed their own currency. If they printed "too much" all kinds of strange phenomenon started emerging in the real world. For centuries no one connected that back to how much money was being printed. Because people had no idea what the level of the money supply was. Just like on social media there is no tracking or visible signal of the global Money supply and interest rate setting to control it.
So any time there was a price rising in the market, bank runs, bubbles in the market people would blame everything under the sun other than those responsible for money printing. After centuries of chaos Central Banks started emerging to control what individual Banks could do. Same story will repeat with Attention(which is acting just like a Currency).
This is why Elon and Trump rush to start their own Attention Banks cause they understand better than anyone being able to print a store of value that everyone else uses gives you power.
This is also why having China influencing the money supply (Attention) of US is via TikTok is non-optional.
So people eventually land on 2 paths forward -
1. Demonetize Attention - which is what the post is talking about
2. Remonetize Attention - where there is tracking of how much Attention anyone can receive, and how much Attention anyone can pay. Similar to what controls exist on Banks in what they lend and how much cash they need to hold. And Banks can then run for-profit without doing as much damage as they did when they controlled the money supply.
Yeah the government - the large and powerful institution designed to take care of its people - has to step in.
Lots of scamming behaviour takes place on those platform by means of acquiring wealth on the platform in the form of social currency (likes, followers and so on). And Meta is there to help them exploit - and perhaps hopes to dumb people down further - so they get hooked to the platform more.
Agreed in general. Only appropriate regulation will convert for-profit social media into its healthy version. We're already seeing the seeds of it with bi-partisan bans on smartphone use at school.
tl;dr: people have a huge diversity of preferences for social media, we need to rearchitect social networks to allow them to express those preferences while still connecting with each other, I think atproto enables this and is where I'm betting on.
I expect that by suggesting something that is quite literally what the author described, we'll both be downvoted to hell because HN has a staunch "fediverse, ew!" mentality.
I agree with a lot of what you say here. I’ve been running a 3h daily time boxed social media site for the past 6 months and even though traffic is now a crawl compared to the initial burst of activity when I started it, there are users who check in daily and it ends up being a lovely experience I think.
I am working on mobile apps and redesigning and reengineering a lot of the site and I love your thoughts on a blog focus. I’d love to let people host a small blog on the site that would also connect to their actual blog. I’ll add that to the roadmap.
Definitely stop by some time! https://seven39.com/
Due to the time difference, I only login when I’m out for a night out or staying up late. But it’s still an enjoyable experience when I get to log in.
I like the concept though having the limited time would make more sense if the site was structured around a specific topic or interest. Otherwise, I don’t get the appeal of having a fixed time to social media with random people over nothing in particular. But if you told me that there’d me a gathering of <<insert fav hobby/interest>> for three hour block each evening (or even just a couple times per week), I’d be excited to check it out.
That's an interesting idea. If, for instance, there was a window of time for people interested in a show to come together to discuss the latest episode (assuming the episodes aren't just dropped all at once), then I think it would be an interesting place to visit since everyone is there for the very same reason and there's something of interest that happened recently that would focus the discussion.
I will say I did visit the site months ago and found that just hanging out with random people wasn't that compelling to me. In the early days, it was fun because it was new and there was a lot of energy, but after that, you really do need something to bring you back day to day.
You could segregate by regions. Your evening is not my evening.
What youre missing is that most people have self control issues, and your product is essentially a commitment device. As most addicts - they reject such devices.
I like what youre doing but just saying - youre dealing with a very difficult problem.
That’s a fair point. I don’t see it as the antidote for people who are addicted though. It’s just a nice place for people who want to engage less. I’m definitely aware it won’t be a big thing.
If you’re looking for an actual antidote to the addiction, I don’t think that will exist in the form of a product, that will come from individuals themselves if it ever does.
There's also a subset of users that embrace such devices. I'd wager that's OPs target audience. The ones that would reject it are a lost cause and shouldn't even be considered.
The author invented and then dashed against the rocks a few existing fediverse platforms in the course of a couple paragraphs.
These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from venturing outside the walls.
Friendica is one of several fediverse platforms the author basically describes. You can even self-host an instance for yourself and friends/family.
And you may say:
> I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.
Perfect. IMO, the minuscule friction to enter is the benefit. The walled gardens exist and hold people in such high numbers exactly because they've reduced the friction to enter and increased it to leave. The definition of a trap, yes?
from the article:
> Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
So no, the problem isn't high numbers with friction to leave. The problem is that the sites' incentives are different than the users. Facebook had high numbers and a lot of lock-in and was a much better product before they decided to basically stop showing me any content from my friends that isn't controversial. Twitter has high numbers and a lot of lock-in but it's better there because I can still get a linear timeline of tweets from the people I follow.
Do any of those networks limit the number of posts you can make a day?
Do they limit forwarding? Or give users an option not to be shown forwarded messages?
For me, unlimited posts (or rather, minimal friction in posting), and blind forwarding are what destroy social media. If you can make only 3 public/group posts a day, chances are lower they will be crap.
I'm on Mastodon. It's only very mildly nice. The reality is that it still suffers from all of this. I still have to cut off connections because of the guy who's always ranting about some politician/political party.
Increase the friction for people who want to rant!
> I'm on Mastodon. It's only very mildly nice. The reality is that it still suffers from all of this.
Most of it, at least - it does give the option to not be shown forwarded messages. There's controls on the home timeline to not show boosts, quotes, and/or replies.
> And you may say:
> > I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.
You use a quote angle bracket, indicating that it is a quote. It is not a quote, it's a straw man.
Nobody is saying "this isn't perfect, I won't use it." People are saying "I can't figure this out, I guess I won't use it."
I was about to say "Disallow forwarding". The problem with most networks (and in the old days, even emails), was that the bulk of the material I'd get from people I personally know were not original content, but memes, humor, or political content being forwarded.
But this may serve an equivalent purpose:
> And finally, there should be a reasonable cap on the number of times a user can post per day. Roughly 5 times per day feels like the upper threshold of what you can post while being intentional about what it is you're posting.
Amusingly, just yesterday I said in a comment:
"Imagine you have a quota of only 1 HN comment per day. You probably will be a lot more careful on what you reply to."
> Imagine you have a quota of only 1 HN comment per day. You probably will be a lot more careful on what you reply to.
1 HN comment a day is interesting as it would also introduce a lag into the speed of development of threads as you wouldn't know ahead of time what threads you would want to post in until they've all been created.
Something I think about personally is what would be the result of requiring people to invest a personally meaningful amount of time and/or money into posting. "I have to pay to speak?!" people ask. Well, yes.
Of course, this immediately seems to tie someone's ability to post to personal finances which isn't the intention. But the key idea is that it has to be something personally costly enough that it implies an honest and intentional signal, which always seems to end up as either time or money.
Some forums implement time-gated posting which is interesting. If you have to wait a minute to be allowed to post, can you still be bothered? But would I have paid to write this specific comment? I'm not sure, I guess that depends on the market rate for posts at the time. I have no doubt there are tens of ways this system breaks down that I haven't thought through.
I think time based is the way to go, with an exponential curve, such that one can only post 5 comments reasonably per day.
The first comment in a given day has no wait. The second requires waiting 10 minutes. The 3rd requires an hour. The 4th requires 3 hours, and the 5th another 12 hours or so.
Obviously: No edits (or let the edit count as the comment).
Lots of variables to play with. The nice thing about time is that it is egalitarian. Richer people don't get more access.
> If you have to wait a minute to be allowed to post, can you still be bothered?
At work, I often log out of HN. The need to log back in often does act as a deterrent. I also occasionally use LeechBlock, with a 60s delay. That too acts as a deterrent.
> I also occasionally use LeechBlock, with a 60s delay.
Interesting. I've tried blocking things via hosts file to add that kind of friction, but it's too easy and often I'm waiting on something that takes longer than the time it takes me to 'fix' the hosts file.
> At work, I often log out of HN.
This works for me for posting but doesn't help so much with the FOMO of new threads. If I had to be logged in to view I imagine I'd read far fewer threads.
>Roughly 5 times per day feels like the upper threshold of what you can post while being intentional about what it is you're posting
Not sure about social media, but in the days of forums I posted way more thoughtful and helpful posts on the forum I attended.
(I'll be honest, I didn't read the post yet. I'm doing this now)
Goodreads/book discussions -- the best class of social media.
Requires some (significant?) investment to have an opinion on a book. It's often pretty obvious if someone hasn't read a book and is commenting on it. The interval between comments is hours/days because users are off reading the book.
This is how LiveJournal was back in the day. I have some really fond memories of people just honestly writing about their life. It seemed more pure and less performative. Then of course the whole Six Apart thing happened but I know many Russians for whom LJ still serves the same purpose.
>I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right
What about a requirement "at least one direct interaction in a year"? Maybe with a reminder "you didn't catch up with X in 11 months, are you still connected"? This will both:
* Achieve the main reason of social network existence, i.e. give people an excuse to have a chat with a former friend and keep in touch. I sometimes thing about messaging a person I knew years ago, but it feels awkward enough that I don't do it usually.
* Naturally limit the number of connections, because now having connectione require (small but still) work. A very small dopamine addicted users may still try to collect connections, but I feel like this platform will be hostile enough for them and they will leave anyway, not finding what they want from SM.
Strava is the closest thing to effective social media that I use, because it is 'slow'.
You create 'content' by doing something orthogonal. You pay for access vs selling attention for ads. You only look at Strava when you are working out, so engagement is authentic vs contrived/performative. I care about my friend completing a run because I know they did it.
One of the best thing they did was allow the chance to add photos.
The closest platform that is a somewhat known group of people coming together in a semi-private space seems to be Discord.
You can have as large or as small a community you want, you can have known people, unknown people.
Mastodon comes close as well, but the effort to start a discord community is so much smaller compared to running a Mastodon instance.
Wouldn't this also extend to Matrix/Mumble/XMPP/TeamSpeak then?
See the aforementioned ease of adoption.
I also dream for this. Personally I would remove likes/reactions though. As we've seen with Instagram it's too easy to chase that dopamine rush/compare number of likes. Comments are enough in my opinion.
Likes/reactions should be hidden to everyone else except the poster, and not used for any kind of ranking.
And comments should be disabled by default. Users should have to take the extra step to enable comments ("I would like feedback") and if they're off by default, it won't feel strange or negative to the viewer.
Likes shouldn’t be visible to the poster either. Once you see the number of likes you quickly see that radical posts get the most likes and start posting more of it.
The best online discussions I have seen where at simple forums where the posts were listed in chronological order without likes or anything.
I completely agree but most people aren't that interested in some kind of socratic online dialogue.
I don't expect to learn much at all from internet discussion at this point. It serves a minimal socialization purpose and then my actual learning is from books and language models.
Limiting the # of shares in some way would be nice also. If people could only share one thing per day, they'd be more thoughtful of what to spend it on.
I actually had a moment just yesterday, imagining/hoping my toddler daughter will grow up and refer to my phone in the same way I did with my parents cigarettes when I was a kid. My mom always claims she had no idea they were dangerous when she started as a teen. I wonder if we'll all sound the same with social media and our devices to our kids.
Everybody just forgetting bulletin boards. Dirt cheap to host, can be invite only if desired and, most importantly, asynchronous.
Well intentioned, but never going to work. Social networks will always create financial incentives that have to be contended with. No network that can connect to “close” people, will always result in some nodes on the graph that connect to a “large portion of people”.
Always. This broadcast ability is then a path to financial renumeration, which will see the rise of copy cats and another arms race to gather attention from people on the network.
Fundamentally, information / clout / something is resistant to being distributed equitably on information networks, especially online networks.
Agreed. Our local instance of NextDoor, which is explicitly aimed at forming online social forums for geographically close users, forbids self-promotion of businesses in the general chats.
The admins regularly ignore this, because the users like seeing posts from "I'm a carpenter looking for work right now!".
So, even with a supposedly sequestered monetization area, it bleeds into everything.
There are local chapters of the Society for Creative Anachronism that uses Facebook heavily. The thing is that the use of FB grew out from the in-person community that had formed, and people would rather interact in-person than only through social media. The community already has its own customs and ceremonies for recognition; people there upvote and collect following in an attempt to get the FB algorithm to spread the word for each other (on events and happenings).
When there is an already-existing community like that, I think a dedicated social media platform for that particular community can be beneficial. That platform then does not have to be the social media for everyone.
However, funding (for hosting and maintenance) is still an issue.
As a small +1 — I built mood.site to be an easy way to share galleries of images with people. The idea being like "hey send me some photo inspiration for the party we're planning" and having a throwaway way to do that (kind of like a pastebin for images).
People definitely use it for this, but what has really surprised me is people's capactiy for expression inside of the bounds of the program I created, and how people are clearly using in as a sort of ad hoc social network of loosely collected boards and inspiration. There are no actual _social_ features in the app (no discovery, etc.), but what has been sort of inspriring is that The Will is just there for people to find ways of expression outside the idea of a "feed" and "posting".
I think those models have indeed become synonymous with "social media", but my only point here is to bring up a possibility of "social media" as something that can be much more expansive and look very different compared to the primary models we think of today.
Another person favorite of mine along the same lines is how the comments section of this Pilsburry recipe for "veggie pizza" has become it's own sort of ad-hoc social media for grandmas to share their own experiences with each other about the dish: https://www.pillsbury.com/recipes/veggie-pizza/4b2c60ae-69e5...
I think modern social media is a huge problem but don’t see we can fix it without regulation. It’s clear that all the current incentives point companies towards engagement and rage bait and away from anything actually “social”, and I think it’s unlikely that any new social network that tries to fix these issues would achieve widespread usage.
Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would that legislation look like? My main idea is to simply outlaw ML-based recommendation algorithms, but obviously that is not as simple as it sounds and is mostly based on looking fondly on the earlier days of social media, when I felt like it was making my life better instead of worse.
China already has such legislation. They have placed restrictions on social media and internet use for children, and they censor content on these platforms.
Personally, I'm against government intervention for this sort of thing. I prefer government to be constrained to securing my liberties, rather than restricting my behavior "for my own good".
As a parent, I talk to my kids about social media like I talk to them about junk food. I want them to recognize that it's bad for them - it's addictive, and provides short term pleasure that results in long term misery. Avoiding it, or making good decisions about how you interact with it, is a personal responsibility issue.
Is it possible that the current form of social media is actually contributing to the erosion of your liberties because it is so widely used in society and is likely contributing to polarization and antisocial behavior?
I see this (and, honestly, most problems) as much more than a personal responsibility issue. To me, it’s an issue of misaligned incentives and unpriced downside costs. It’s clear that market forces push companies to build an addictive service that produces long term misery. It’s also clear that social media has a cost on its users (producing long term misery, reducing acute productivity) But this cost is not paid by the social media company.
I’d argue that widespread use of the social media that today’s market incentives create is bad for society as a whole, not only for any one individual. Correcting market incentives that don’t align with social good is, in my opinion, one of the most essential purposes of legislation.
I agree that regulation is likely the only option.
With the caveat that it is very clear people want this horrible social media we have. They consume outrageous content, they pass it on, they create it for these platforms.
A lot of proposed regulation frames it as big bad tech companies making people do things like they're victims. But without people participating there would be nothing on there and in reality the human factor feeds back into these loops ... and keeps them going.
I think a lot of the proposed legislation comes at it at the wrong angle and is unlikely to fix it because in the end the users are a key component, not just some terrible algorithm or creepy CEOs.
Hm. To me it is indeed the big bad tech companies at fault for implementing _obviously_ user-hostile functionality (mandatory suggested posts, for example) that exploit human nature to keep people engaged, even if people prefer not to. The existence and widespread use of screen time limits on phones seems like strong evidence that tech companies have built something nefarious here. And to me, it’s clear that they have done so intentionally to drive profit.
I think banning algorithm based feeds is a start
Getting rid of any non personal accounts also. So no companies, brands, or meme accounts, and accounts that exist for non personal content only.
I've seen a lot of algorithm type proposed legislation, sorting by date is an algorithm ... I kinda want that.
I think legislating what is good and bad math is going to be exceptionally difficult.
Never thought about it but banning non personal accounts sounds like a good start. I doubt such social media would gain any meaningful popularity though.
Lol it would be dead. IG is running off of the fact that people utilise its platform to make money... I dont see how this is going to be practical.
It's not, that's why people want a regulatory body to do it. The only way to get people to use such a system would be to regulate the current ones out of existence.
Yes. We should only allow social media in a printed format.
I think this is a joke but it’s interesting to note that Amish people have essentially this.
https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/2022/09/30/ohios-a...
I'd go further and stipulate spoken word only. Or shouted in town squares by someone wearing a tricorn hat.
I am more partial to various jester caps. Good range of options.
It’s a tricky one, but something that I repeatedly come back to is that publishers are regulated, but social media is a free for all. A newspaper can’t just make up something without consequences (in the UK), for example they may be sued for libel.
Social media companies, by contrast, can publish posts from their anonymised users that contain almost anything, and it is permitted. It can be racism. It can state that £300M a week could be spent on the NHS if only the UK would leave the EU. And those posts can be sent to millions of people without regard to truth or the damage they can do.
The classic response to this is “well, you can’t expect us to police such a large amount of content, it’s impractical” - a fair response - but then there’s a bit of sleight of hand from Meta et al: they conclude that they should therefore be allowed to broadcast anything a user shares. But an alternative conclusion is _well, then perhaps you shouldn’t be broadcasting inflammatory nonsense from any person/bot who posts_ and you have to find a new operating model.
It’s tricky because free speech is important, but I think we’ve seen enough times how dangerous, divisive, and destructive social media is. If there’s no way to prevent people and states from abusing it, then it probably shouldn’t exist. When the retrospective is written on the fall of America and the west, social media will be one of the key explanatory factors, along with hypercapitalism.
Newspapers have had a much longer history than social media.
I get why youre making the comparison, but, regulatory bodies tend to be averse to acting quick because they want "all the data" to be more certain in decision making. Such data only comes with time.
People are basically looking for a standalone Facebook groups that's not owned by a corporation. Or Twitter for small groups but not what mastodon has become. I think honourably some people have tried and many continue to build niche products like micro.blog. Personally I just want a service that is not commercially owned, for profit or by a US corporation. My own attempts/ambitions get in the way of being able to achieve it, so I started working on something that slowly solved my own problems e.g news feed aggregation, videos without shorts or the algorithm, chat with AI based on a model from Qatar. Soon I'll add posting but only because I feel like I need some sort of personalised way to bookmark and share my thoughts within it being about gaining attention or validation from a world of likes and retweets.
There are no good answers, because the reality is the next medium is probably quite different from the last. But yea personalised small group chat, feed, news makes sense.
Media was always already social. If I email my friend a link to a YouTube video, is the Internet a social network? I think what we think of when we think of 'social media' or a 'social network' is an integrated platform that lubricates particular potentials, like being able to create and share content with friends and fans. But there are other ways to realise those potentials, including ones that require the interfacing of different platforms (or media, in the McLuhanian sense), or what might be perceived as different platforms at one scale, and the same platform at another scale, as per my Internet example. And, the multiplicity of platforms, and the interfacing between them, might confer additional advantages and open up yet more potentials.
What are people using now instead of Facebook (for broastcast and interaction with friends/family)?
Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.
Nothing. I see them when I see them. If there’s something urgent we call each other or send an SMS. There’s no need for daily, weekly or even monthly updates. This makes meeting and talking in person always interesting because there’s so much to sync that we’ve all had time to digest beforehand.
In the beginning when I left Facebook over ten years ago it felt alienating. Then it felt too quiet. Then whenever I met people, months apart or even years for distant family, I realised it didn’t matter. We connected like it had been days since our last meeting. Eventually more and more of them have also quit social networks entirely, though most use group chats for their immediate family — parents and kids to orchestrate activities etc.
I think culture is more private again. In the early social media phase, people very nonchalantly posted all their random thoughts and drinking pics, vagueposting publicly about a breakup etc. People now feel more surveilled, and feel that the public internet is icky. HR sees all etc. It's similar to how people changed their behaviors in response to ubiquitous phone cameras.
It feels paradoxical to say that, but I think it's true both that social media is bigger than ever in terms of flurry and activity, and that normal people participate less (outside scrolling the feed passively). A few people are semi-professionalizing in it now, influencers with sponsorships, local celebrities and trendsetters etc., while normal people's normal life updates are dwindling. The Pareto split is sharper.
I think that's definitely a part of it. I also think the signal to noise ratio has simply gotten so low that it's started taking up too much energy for most people, so the value is lost. There will always be "feed junkies", I suspect, but they're a dwindling minority.
WhatsApp and Signal are considered "social media" technically, though plenty of people are still on FB telling the world about their trips and what they ate for breakfast.
I'm always surprised at how HN folks are either unable or unwilling to admit that the fediverse exists beyond Bluesky or Mastodon. I far prefer lemmy to reddit, and Friendica is essentially that the author is describing. This stuff exists already, and it's the perverse incentives of social media such as walled gardens and a critical mass of people that are what keep them alive.
Nothing mostly. Closest family have a group chat, and I have a few friends hanging out on IRC. For broadcasting, nothing, and I probably never will again.
One thing many forget when presenting new ideas for social media platforms is that we've been burnt by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Imgur and even LinkedIn to some extend. I'll never trust a social media platform again because of people like Mark Zuckerberg. There's nothing you can say or do that will convince that your new platform won't turn to shit just as fast as Facebook did.
The business model doesn't work out, because not enough people will pay and you cannot run these platforms on ad revenue and be trustworthy.
Nothing :(
Most everyone is on facebook that I know of and they're not going anywhere and I'm not. I actually missed that an old coworker had died recently. Frustrating.
Facebook just mostly show me ads now. I don’t have many friends active on it anymore. I did find out a few years ago that a coworker has passed away though. It’s really useful, pity there isn’t a similar viable alternative
FB is practically dead, particularly from an innovation stand point. Theyre just pumping as much cashflow as they can out of it before its inevitable death.
We have a shared iCloud photo album which works pretty well, and a group chat in iMessage
> What are people using now instead of Facebook
Email, phone, text.
I have a few friends who won’t communicate outside of Meta products and I just don’t interact with them any longer.
That's all I use now for REAL social media. My family is in one Signal chat, and my in-laws in a other one. All the social media I need. School groups are unfortunately on Facebook Messenger groups.
Whatsapp updates, you can see the updates of your contacts, then you can react or send them a message
Ah. Kind of "decentralized" in a sense. Thanks.
The problem is whenever wise people sit out of the popular platforms like today’s social media, society continues most of its speech and politics on those big popular fast social media platforms. So we are all still exposed to its risks.
> I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right. Any more than that and you're a collector, and not using the platform to foster connection.
Path[1] did that, but with a cap of 50, and then 150 (based on the Dunbar number of meaningful human connections one can retain). They had a crazy growth period but eventually went kaput.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)
I'm not sure vc funding and ads are compatible with a slow, quiet and healthy social network.
WhatsApp and Telegram are my slow social media. They ring only for the very few people I really care about. Everything else accumulates in their chats.
I get some link to FB and TikTok in my chats and groups but I don't open all of them. I don't have the apps, so if I do I open them in the browser. I'm not logged in. No TikTok account. Links to Instagram are very rare. No account. I check WhatsApp and Telegram when I feel like, no pressure.
A lot of his ideas remind me of the BeReal app, it limits posts per day and is geared toward 'friends in real life' and with just a few friends on it I've stayed engaged. But it's sparse for me and can be a ghost town much of the time, but that may be just because my friend group isn't using it much. There needs to be sufficient network effect to maintain and grow it's reach as a network, which may be antithetical to its founding principles.
Lol I dont know how to say this but BeReal is flawed from the start. IG is not about being real at all for the most part - hence its popularity. People enjoy being able to cosplay and show their best self, not revealing their true self.
That's been my experience with BeReal as well. I seldom see posts from people I'm close with, and so I post less as well, and presumably that contributes to a similar feeling for other friends of mine.
In fact, these days, I only post in it so that I can record the moment, to add it to the record of fotos which are convenient and fun to look back through.
I liked BeReal while it was still just post 1 picture a day. Now you have 'your brands' there, they try to increase 'engagement' by trying to get people use the app more... I was there when it happened on Facebook, I was there when it started on Instagram – not again, thx.
I'm building an app builder (getmocha.com) and one of my favorite use cases I have seen is "small private social network":
some people are building custom, tailored social networks only available to their family, church, community, sports team, school, etc...
This was previously impossible but now AI changes that. I don't know if it will materialize, but a more federally distributed web with tons of small private social networks could be a future of healthy social
Yes, just put people in charge of the algorithm.
The feed (etc.) algorithm could be written in natural language and executed by AI.
>This was previously impossible
Isn't this what Mastadon is?
Minus is a finite social platform where users get 100 posts--for life. https://minus.social
That's an interesting concept. We could take that concept in general, and a person could write 100 essays (that they publish on whatever platform), and these 100 essays could comprise their magnum opus.
“blog as a social network” was/is pretty much Tumblr. Most of the content was structured as posts and updates on your personal page. You didn’t even need to engage with the social part.
It’s hard to explain the difference between it and Twitter if you never used it, but the platform itself creates very different posting ideologies.
How about https://slowly.app/ ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_(app)
I agree for the most part here. The biggest barrier to this sort of platform is that people love convienence and low effort use, but that's not what social interraction is about. I really think going out of your way to do things in a more difficult way (inconvience) is the secret to living in the real world again. That's why I prefer DIY to whatever standard solution to any given problem there might be already.
I’ve been dreaming of building this.
I miss chronological feeds the most.
I relate to so many points here. I have a desire to share my thoughts and ideas, but no format (except for my personal blog) feels right.
Just started building autogram.bio to help people create their personal corner of the web, and this post was exactly the motivation I needed to continue. Thank you!
I love this. It is close to what we've built with Peergos [0].
1. People have to accept you as a follower, and the default is bi-directional.
2. There are no visible follower/friend counts.
3. Chronological feed which has an end (no infinite scroll)
4. No arbitrary character limit
5. No analytics (enforced by E2EE)
We don't have a max friends/number of posts per day though.
[0] https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media
I don’t want to be limited to „meaningful connections!“ I stay in close contact with those who are dear to me outside of social media. I want to stay connected to some random coworker I enjoyed working with in 2011, because I enjoy watching them from a distance, getting married, settling down, that kind of stuff, and occasionally comment on these things. This used to be a strength of social media before algorithms came in and decided that because I am not liking every post of that person it follows that I am not interested.
This desire to follow people’s lives from a distance without necessarily interacting with them in the world is the root of the very unhealthy parasocial tendencies driving social media. It seems quite innocent and benign on the scale of one person just wanting to keep up with the life of a cool coworker from the past, but it quickly adds up to a bunch of people passively following other people with very little actual interaction. It is more akin to reading a novel or watching a movie except that social following tricks our brain into thinking we really are keeping up a relationship with the people that we’re voyeuristically watching.
I've never heard of anyone thinking that they are keeping up a relationship with someone by watching them via social media from a distance. This sounds like a made-up concern to me. There is no difference to asking someone how someone else is doing, a phenomenon as old as humankind, probably.
Counterpoint: This ability to "follow people's lives from a distance without necessarily interacting with them in the world" is the only way I have of renewing old friendships with childhood friends, schoolmates and friends from college.
It is a HUGE social benefit to me, as I've moved far away. I don't need Abe's phone number, Betty's email, and I don't expect even Christmas cards updating me on Charlie's family. But if any of them post on FB that their parent or child or dog just died, graduated, or got married (in a progressive animal-rights nation), I can make an effort to let them know I care.
Youre touching at something subtle and nuanced that most dont understand.
I wonder if that voyeuristic use case is good for people/society. People used to naturally fade from each other's lives, maybe you saw each other in the street if you stayed in the same area, you could ask them about their life in person. If you were closer friends, they'd show you the photos of their wedding or vacation when you visited for dinner or hung out.
Even in the early version, these life updates became a competition of who has the fancier wedding pics, who went to a trendy vacation spot this year etc., leading to an idealized picture of how the life of everyone else is going.
It's a bandaid on the lifestyle of having to move cities all the time and cutting connections. Seeing their life updates doesn't really keep the connection alive, it's an illusion.
Is it voyeuristic to read and observe what people are broadcasting, either publicly or to a closed circle?
I dunno, if I don't want anyone to see the post I will not post it or limit its visibility, I am very much in the same camp as the person you're replying to.
People who I lost regular contact with but am totally happy to meet again once a year or every couple years. (Does not mean more often would be bad, just being realistic). Which we actually do, from time to time.
We also have a Slack with old colleagues form one company, but it's mostly a way to contact them or for the occasional tech question and chitchat, so it's even more closed off - but no different than broadcasting events, really.
But I'm also not arguing that it's strictly needed.
Maybe that's not the right word, it's too pejorative. What I mean is looking at someone's private life without them narrating it to you specifically and being aware in real time that you're looking at it. I'm not claiming anything negative about its ethics or similar. That's not my point at all. I'm just asking whether it is conducive to real social connection and whether it really produces and maintains the kind of ties that it supposedly maintains or if it's an illusion. Sure, it's nice to reconnect with a long lost classmate or "interesting" to see the baby pics of that one college friend you last talked to in 2012. But to what end exactly? If it actually leads to regular IRL hangouts that's great. Otherwise it's just some kind of nostalgia trap.
> if I don't want anyone to see the post I will not post it or limit its visibility
Yes, and nowadays people tend to share less. Exactly because in the 2000s these instincts were less sharp and then people realized that a wider circle of people is looking than they thought and things remain online for long.
I disagree that being interested in the life updates of someone as being equivalent to a voyeur.
There are people who fade out of one’s lives for various reasons, but it doesn’t mean that the relationship has to end at that. There are many schoolmates, coworkers, etc. who I wish l I had some idea where they were now, which I don’t have right now because of my general avoidance of social media.
This is just a way of keeping on the pulse and generating common context if said pair were to meet again, instead of simply awkwardly smiling and trying to end a conversation as soon as possible.
Reading someone’s life updates and watching their videos is not keeping up a connection though. It’s a parasocial relationship that makes us feel like there is a connection whereas an actual connection would require interaction between people. As you rightly noted, one of the main outcomes of the parasocial relationship is that it replaces real life interactions - you no longer have to ask people questions about their lives or figure out how to make conversation when you do see them; you can just reference their social media posts.
But if I had the possibility of being updated in someone’s life, or even just having a contact option, would help me evaluating if this relation is worth being kept or refreshed or terminated.
Example: I was an employee with my first fulltime job for nearly ten years. After I quit the job I instantly lost contact to all people. I would have needed to actually go the company building to chat with them (or calling at work), which I didn’t because it was Covid time. But on XING (LinkedIn-like platform for Germany) one former colleague left his private phone number for me, and I messaged him (after some years, because I was in a depressive phase), and now we meet every two or three months.
So it’s not about voyerism for me but keeping contact or at least give me some hints if any relation might be worth pursuing. I don’t want (or need) people in my list just for being a watcher of their life.
Yes, getting to know someone used to be a gradual process. During the time window when public posting about frankly quite private moments of life was common (Facebook ~2010s), it was weird how much you would see of a person upfront. You saw surprising overlapping acquaintances, prior vacations, party photos, hobbies etc... See photos of your teachers or profs with their spouse etc. I don't think it's normal. It was a weird phase.
Now I have been using Whatsapp as my only "social media app" basically as stated in another comment: Whatsapp updates, you can see the updates of your contacts, then you can react or send them a message. And these updates only contain the people who you have as a contact and they have you as a contact, so you only receive the updates of the people you care about and if there is someone you don't want to see their updates you can turn off updates for them.
I hope meta doesn't ruin this feature.
It's Also available in signal I think
Should internet based chat platforms develop a common protocol (like SMS for mobile networks) so that people don't all need to use the same app (Whatsapp and the like) to be able to have 1:1 or group chats?
(Before someone says I have rediscoered email -- I know email exists for a similar reason but not for instant messaging for a smartphone weilding generation)
What you've re-invented is XMPP.
The original Facebook Messenger and Google Talk both used XMPP, it has support for encryption and push notifications.... For a brief period, you could actually chat across ecosystems.
And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
We do have matrix now, but it's still largely irrelevant, and doesn't really feel fully baked yet.
At this point, all the major companies have a huge vested interest in keeping things closed.
Without blue bubble lock-in, I, and quite a few people I know, would ditch increasingly mediocre iPhones for Android, so apple has to keep building iMessage exclusive features and has to avoid ever releasing an iMessage android app (most recently, Apple Invites, which integrates with iMessage cleanly and is impossible for third-party apps to integrate so neatly).
I expect Apple to continue to leverage "Apple Intelligence" as a feature that only integrates well with iMessage so that they can continue to lock users in, and keep the conversation as far away from open chat protocols as they can.
In the AI age, unencrypted textual conversations are a new source of training data, so Instagram, Twitter, and Google want to keep their own messaging systems to themselves.
> And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
I think this is more accurately
> And it was killed, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
Not to say there were not problems with XMPP or Matrix, "innovation" always feels slow because its federated, committee, opensource, etc.
XMPP it's still alive.
https://dsnp.org/dsnp_whitepaper.pdf
Begone blockchain whitepaper.
... Really though, if you've got a whitepaper from 2020 about "building a protocol", and 6 years later you've got exactly 0 users actually using the protocol, it's maybe not even worth linking.
Writing a vague hand-wavy paper that says "We need a distributed graph, we'll use blockchain, there are IDs" is very easy.
Getting enough users that people can talk to each other, that's hard, and real usable applications help with that, while whitepapers do not.
I always wonder what goes on in the minds of people who focus intensely on the technology and not the experience...
The experience is what people want. Not the technology. The technology is this thing that delivers the experience but the consumer does not need to know of its existence nor how it works.
Not as slow as Scuttlebutt, but fairly laid back is twtxt (https://twtxt.dev/). The community is small, but thriving!
I also wish there will be a lot of diverse social media for specific interest groups. I am fine that not many people would use them. I would actually prefer that because I can at least expect people with genuine interest on the topic. Discord in this regard is pretty close to this direction I think.
The article is basically describing Friendster, which was the first big social media platform after MySpace. I have zero social media accounts (for all the reasons described) but wouldn’t mind a Friendster-like platform.
Replacing the current social media giants is incredibly hard because of network effects and lock-in. Could we instead implement most of the OP's ideas with a client for an existing social media site that filters out all the crap?
Social media as it is works perfectly and does not need to be changed for extroverts. We just need a product made for those who care about small private groups.
back in 2009 in Spain we had what the author describes in Tuenti (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuenti). at first it was invite only and by default people's profiles were private, you'd need to be friends to see their activity and pictures. your feed was just your friends statuses and new pictures in chronological order.
later on it got some games and a realtime chat but it ended up dying because of newer social networks. it was great to keep your actual friends and family connected.
In Hungary, we had iWiW, one of the earliest "social media" sites. (=international who is who - though it never went really international, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWiW, started as WiW in 2002).
It was also invite based and it was exciting to get an invite back then. It was more like a phone book, it had detailed profiles where you could specify your favorite things, introduce yourself, upload a few pictures etc. It didn't have a newsfeed. Later they would introduce some kind of notification when someone uploaded new pics. But it was mainly "poll-based", i.e. you'd go to specific profiles to see if they uploaded anything new.
This was a significant break from the pseudonymous forum and chat culture (A/S/L?), and blended your real life with the previously totally separate online world for the first time. Now you could look up classmates, see who viewed your profile, of course it drove a lot of teen drama as you'd expect. It was a more public companion to the nascent MSN Messenger culture (which replaced the SMS-based more private teen comms culture, which replaced the family-landline-phone-based gossip culture and of course IRL-based one, feels weird to have lived through all those transitions - we didn't even have a family landline phone in the early 90s and would use phone booths to call family members in other cities).
The mainstream dominance of iWiW in Hungary was actually quite short-lived (~2004-2009), though it feels longer in my memory, there was so much happening, so much new stuff popping up. Note also that iWiW got bought by the local subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom already in 2006. So it was quite obvious that there's commercial value in such sites.
Initially Facebook was also more profile-focused, where the main activity was looking up profiles, checking their friends, reading bios, looking at galleries etc. (where you actually clicked links to explore, instead of being fed a feed and just scrolling), and the newsfeed-focus only got introduced later.
Nowadays, Facebook is mostly a public agora in Hungary, the platform for politicians and pundits and social critique etc (instead of Twitter like in other countries). I think the eager culture to post updates for real friends has dwindled, people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates. Real personal "social media" is mostly in private Whatsapp groups I think.
> people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates
Young people do care - but the "checking on friends" and "showing off my glamourous life/vacation" has moved to Instagram and Snapchat. Partly because Facebook is full of "old people" and thus less cool. As the Insta generation starts to have their own kids, those kids indubitably will look for another platform...
I was recently inspired on this front by an interview[1] with a recommender system engineer that explored the idea of a "good" recommender algorithm:
> It feels like smartphones have saturated the available time. It's like the famous quote from the Netflix CEO: "Our main competitor is sleep." There aren't many more biological hours in the day to capture. At this point, it's mostly a war between recommender systems for your attention, as they've already consumed roughly all the available time.
...
> For me, the big issue with recommender systems isn't that they will destroy our minds, though that is a possible risk. It's the incredible waste of potential. Billions of hours of human time will be allocated today, guided mostly by clickbait incentives. The goal is to entertain people, not in a joyful way, but to help them dissociate.
> You have such an opportunity. There's probably a video on YouTube right now that, if I watched it, would inspire me to call my dad, talk to a stranger, or start a new relationship. Google could probably introduce me to a good friend, a co-founder, or my future life partner.
> They have the data, but they aren't using it that way. Instead, they're optimizing for a few more cents of advertising revenue, which is a colossal, civilizational-level failure.
...
> That is the crux of the incentives problem we've been discussing. One thing that gives me hope is we're no longer in the era of free software. Paradoxically, now that intelligence is cheap enough, people are willing to pay for software. It's more reasonable to charge for a subscription now because you can provide measurable value to someone's life. Paying $10 or $20 a month for a social media service that actually helps you live according to your goals is a much less crazy proposition than it was 10 years ago.
[1] https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/forecasting-the-future-of-r...
As the saying goes, dont hate the player, hate the game.
[dead]
Most people wouldn't enjoy something like https://github.com/dimkr/tootik
I think something like a Whatsapp that recommends contacts that can be close is good enough. Something like friends of friends recommendations. But no more.
It exists: Whatsapp
Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.
> It exists: Whatsapp
Whatsapp groups are as terrible as the alternatives. Every group I've been a part of that has more than N people (all who know each other) has devolved into endless memes, political talk etc, and very little connecting.
Give me Whatsapp where I have a setting to simply not show me any forwarded message, and I'll be happy.
It's still possible to host a phpbb as well. Easier than it was in 2005, but harder than using a big platform.
I miss all the old phpbb forums. I occasionally toy with the idea of hosting one.
What he describes existed and didn’t scale comparing to modern social media. It was called LiveJournal.
At the exact same time that Instagram launched, another platform that is also almost exactly what this post describes also launched: Path - and it's long dead, too. The author's views represent such a tiny minority that is not worth the required effort to build and maintain a platform for. Let's not forget network effects. You might love this utopian platform, if it were to exist, but good luck convincing everyone you care about to move over with you. You may as well then just use a journaling app if you're talking to yourself.
The largest social platforms right now are hardly showing any signs of slowdowns. The market signal is clear: this is what most people want and are fine with.
Perhaps a journaling-focused platform where social is a second-class aspect might succeed. You're documenting things for yourself anyway and if friends happen to see them and engage with them, that's an added bonus. Network effects would not matter here. In fact, this is how I used Path back in the day. I intentionally kept no friends on it and started using it like a journal, recording my thoughts, adding photos and checkins.
And MySpace and GeoCities.
Bluesky and Mastodon are exactly this IMO. No algorithm, just following people.
Um, I'm building this? [1]
The one key element I added was privacy. If your posts are private to your social group then there is no mechanism to try appealing to a broader "viral" audience. Also--if it is decentralized then the company (or person in my case) building it can't change their mind and start selling your data/eyeballs.
I have a LOT of thoughts in this space. Lots of people think they want some sort of healthier social-media alternative, but we're fighting against systems that are so finely tuned engagement monsters that is hard compete to protect your attention and time.
Herman- I'll reach out to you by email!
[1]: https://havenweb.org
> I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized.
The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you receive both got monetized. They monetized Attention by adding View, Like, Share and Follower counts to everything.
And those counts started acting like Currency does in the real economy.
For example a key feature of Currency is that it acts as Store of Value. That value can then be exchanged at whatever time for something else in the real economy.
But in the real economy the Money Supply is regulated and controlled by the Central Bank. Why did that happen?
Before Central Banks (a very recent invention) showed up individual Banks printed their own currency. If they printed "too much" all kinds of strange phenomenon started emerging in the real world. For centuries no one connected that back to how much money was being printed. Because people had no idea what the level of the money supply was. Just like on social media there is no tracking or visible signal of the global Money supply and interest rate setting to control it.
So any time there was a price rising in the market, bank runs, bubbles in the market people would blame everything under the sun other than those responsible for money printing. After centuries of chaos Central Banks started emerging to control what individual Banks could do. Same story will repeat with Attention(which is acting just like a Currency).
This is why Elon and Trump rush to start their own Attention Banks cause they understand better than anyone being able to print a store of value that everyone else uses gives you power.
This is also why having China influencing the money supply (Attention) of US is via TikTok is non-optional.
So people eventually land on 2 paths forward - 1. Demonetize Attention - which is what the post is talking about
2. Remonetize Attention - where there is tracking of how much Attention anyone can receive, and how much Attention anyone can pay. Similar to what controls exist on Banks in what they lend and how much cash they need to hold. And Banks can then run for-profit without doing as much damage as they did when they controlled the money supply.
Yeah the government - the large and powerful institution designed to take care of its people - has to step in.
Lots of scamming behaviour takes place on those platform by means of acquiring wealth on the platform in the form of social currency (likes, followers and so on). And Meta is there to help them exploit - and perhaps hopes to dumb people down further - so they get hooked to the platform more.
Agreed in general. Only appropriate regulation will convert for-profit social media into its healthy version. We're already seeing the seeds of it with bi-partisan bans on smartphone use at school.
I wrote a lil blog post after reading this this morning: https://awarm.leaflet.pub/3lyzchme2d22b
tl;dr: people have a huge diversity of preferences for social media, we need to rearchitect social networks to allow them to express those preferences while still connecting with each other, I think atproto enables this and is where I'm betting on.
Slowcial Media
This is what we need
So—slowcial media? :D
Minor formatting quip: At the top, the "dd mm yyyy" format should not use a comma.
use nostr. it can be anything you want it to be.
Anything? Better than Zombo.com ?
I guess if you could convince your friends & family to use something like https://friendi.ca/ it could work for you.
Exactly the same thing I thought of.
I expect that by suggesting something that is quite literally what the author described, we'll both be downvoted to hell because HN has a staunch "fediverse, ew!" mentality.