The social aspect is important though because in this architecture what you see is determined by who you follow (and who they follow, etc.)
What I mean to say is, Usenet's social model hardly prevented it from drowning in a sea of low-value content.
Maybe I'm not thinking about it right or use it differently than most :P
See also Joel Spolsky on the topic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communiti...
The deciding factor between what came before and facebook and twitter is the ability to broadcast to the entire social network at once, so all of the world can see your brilliance! Feeding into that narcissism is the killer feature of modern social networks.
But yes, for the majority of people, talking about themselves is exactly what they do. They talk about their vacation to the beach. They talk about the drama going on at work. They talk about their sister's date. They don't talk about advances in database design.
I was at a live event (a play) recently and was fascinated by a small group of women in their late 20s / early 30s. They spent a good 10-15 minutes before the play started just taking pictures of themselves being at the play and posting it to their social networks. They talked about the pictures, asked others to send them their copy of the picture. They took pictures from one angle and then another. They talked about who "liked" the picture they just uploaded. It went on and on and on. Not once did I overhear them talking about the play they were about to see. It seemed to be not the point at all. The play was just a hashtag for their social media posts.
Most good conversationalists are good at it because they explicitly draw the other person into talking about themselves and their interests. Whether things become narcissistic is more a factor of personality I think. Perhaps its more than that, though. A good conversationalist would steer the conversation to more interesting content - ie why he person is passionate about their hobby rather than just talking about their accomplishments. Perhaps we need to think about social network features that model what good conversationalists do? Not sure what that looks like though.
[edit for typo]
See, for example, the indiewebcamp[1] people, who are against "silos", as they call Facebook et al., but are recreating their same functionalities with personal blogs and a new version of Pingbacks called "webmentions".
That's what "webmentions" do.
> That way my feed was a mix of the discussions I'm having with others as well as my own stuff.
Here's something I like: everything you say is part of a public discussion, so you're talking alone, also comments have about the same weight as standalone posts, also outsiders can join the discussion, it isn't restrict to your current circle of friends.
Yes, but just because no one has tried to create a different social network. That's why I made my initial comment in the first place.
> What you are describing has existed for years and we called it Usenet. Or a forum. Or a mailing list.
I don't know about Usenet, but forums and mailing lists are generally oriented to narrow topics, it is not something in which you'll see your school friends or people with multiple areas to discuss varied subjects.
Tumblr has some pretty good discussion about movies and books.
Twitter not so good for discussion because off the length limit, but there's plenty of people posting concise observations and jokes rather than posting about themselves.
On both systems, people can reply to content from strangers, and there's lots of conflict arising from that.
I do think Tumblr would be improved by making it easier to have discussions that don't go to all your followers by default, for example like on Twitter where if you tag people at the start of your tweet, it doesn't go into the main feed for your followers who aren't tagged.
Or you can go all the way to partitioning a system into topics, as with Reddit. I wouldn't call that a social network though, you don't just casually start a conversation with people you've chosen to connect with, you start a conversation with a subreddit.