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Comment by anvandare | Hacker News Reader

If I were not of the opinion that social media is more damaging than beneficial to humanity, I'd like to see a social network that limits the number of people you can interact with to ~100. Want to add a new person? Then get rid of an old one.

Similarly, hard-coded limits to contact lists, e-mail address books, etc. It'd never work, but I'm curious what the effects would be.

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Remember Path? It came, got huge in Indonesia, and collapsed under mismanagement. Right idea, wrong execution?

http://service.path.com/customer/portal/articles/257552-why-...

> I'd like to see a social network that limits the number of people you can interact with to ~100. Want to add a new person? Then get rid of an old one.

You can do this on your own if you so care - I use Twitter in pretty close to this way (I follow 158 accounts as of today, and ~10 of them are service status accounts). Anything over that I might also be interested goes on a List and I check them whenever I'm bored (and I also cap lists at ~150 or so accounts, but none of them are even close to that).

I'm of the opinion that software shouldn't build limitations, it should only be a tool for how users want to use it. (It could be a better tool by instead telling users "Hey, you're following a lot of users, things are probably pretty noisy for you huh? Maybe you want to use a list for {these similar accounts} or something?")

Do you think Twitter, a social network famous for its character limit, shouldn’t build limitations in how its used?

> If I were not of the opinion that social media is more damaging than beneficial to humanity, I'd like to see a social network that limits the number of people you can interact with to ~100. Want to add a new person? Then get rid of an old one.

Better yet, come up with a platform that naturally incentivizes users to engage in more sophisticated interactions with a smaller number of people instead of shallow interactions with large numbers of people.

I don't think this would work since users would protest and the limits would be eventually be lifted. I have friends who already purge their FB lists now and then, so people who want to do that already can.

Also, Path [1] was social network app that had these kinds of limits back in the day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)

It says in that article that their limit was 500, which might explain why there wasn't as much benefit from it as one might have hoped. Dunbar's Number is around 150; 500 is way past the point where we can effectively manage relationships.

The section of the Wikipedia page probably needs updating. The very next section describes how they went from 50 people, to 150, then lifted the limits entirely.

> ...which might explain why there wasn't as much benefit from it as one might have hoped.

I think you've got this the wrong way around. The users probably didn't like being constrained to an arbitrary number. My main point was that any service that tries to impose such limits is going to feel pressure to raise/abolish them.

You can create groups of people on Facebook. I’m pretty sure you could get something very similar to that using Facebook and some active management of lists.

That (and discipline) can make you follow that rule, but it can’t make the rest of the world follow it.

That makes it quite different, as what you think are your closest friends won’t be forced to choose between you and somebody else in their size-limited friend list.

Because of that, I doubt it would be very similar.

I think this would work brilliantly. Especially amongst teens. Probably wouldn't be a net positive for society though (I imagine there'd be more social outcasts, bullying, etc - particularly in high schools).

You would have to decouple what Path did right from what it completely did wrong (overinvest in design, CEO who cared about his own status more than company, fire sale).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)

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