The Secret to Better Social Media? Fewer Friends | Hacker News Reader

The Secret to Better Social Media? Fewer Friends

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134 pointsjkuria97 comments

This is one thing I think Google+ got right. I can have different types of “friends”, each in their own categories, such as “sharaholic” or “meme poster” and only visit those circles occasionally.

The only problem is the unpopularity of G+.

Facebook has also Friends lists which pretty much the same functionality if Im not mistaken.

But it's not as easy to use. One of the things that I'd like with the friends list is to include one list inside another. When I add a friend to the sub list, it should then automatically appear in the parent list.

For example, I have a list of friends who are into hiking that live nearby. I also have a list of friends that are into hiking who live all over the world and another list of those who just live nearby.

What I want to do is add a friend to the list of friends who are into hiking that live nearby and have them automatically added to the other two lists.

the problem with this model that sometimes the meme poster posts something that's not a meme and that's super relevant to you that you might not see.

Well now we need an algorithm that will make sure a relevant and engaging post gets sent to the top of your feed.

I have a different algorithm, it's called "anti-fomo"

Actually sounds spot-on with regards to the parent comment: by his/her logic one way to deal with social media is to make sure you see everything, else you might miss something relevant. Nerve-wrecking if you'd ask me.

On the other hand, some learning algorithm which figures out what is relevant to you sounds interesting at first but could, in my opninion, quickly lead to creating a bubble in which you only see what some algorithm considers relevant and nothing else. Now I get that some people like it that way, and in the end we all live in some kind of bubble, but still, I'd rather keep options open and actively look for new things I know nothing about.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but ... Facebook seem to classify posts as important if they get more than the usual number of peers attention, so you get major life changing announcements (births, deaths, marriages). I don't know if they solely use votes, or if they weight that with word analysis, or do something clever like matching you with other friends who upvote similar things and so boosting the chance you see posts if they upvote them (I imagine they do but perhaps use simple metrics for 'life event' indications).

In reality the ratio of meme versus useful info is generally not in favor of spending time in this way unless you derive great utility from memes by themselves.

such as “sharaholic” or “meme poster” and only visit those circles occasionally.

But people don’t fit neatly into those categories. You’ll miss an important life event from “meme boy” or “share girl” if you’ve filed them neatly away like that. G+ is unpopular because their solution to organising your friends is worse than the competition.

People can be in multiple circles, it's like a Venn diagram of sorts.

People can be in multiple circles

Sure, but how would you classify Meme Boy in circles so that you don't see his memes but you do see his important life events? Or Share Girl so you don't see what she had for lunch but do see important things?

For Share Girl, you can block the pages she shares from.

For Meme Boy, a baseball bat to the kneecaps works best.

I think the way it would naturally work on G+ is that Meme Boy will use circles this way. So if you get tired of his memes, you message him and ask him to make a Meme Circle and not include you in it.

But really, if Meme Boy enjoys posting memes, he likely already will have a Meme Circle. So you just ask him to remove you from the Meme Circle.

That's fine?

If you look at facebook's primary purpose as a contacts manager and the secondary purpose as a "keep up with other peoples lives feed", then the primary purpose is still served even if you choose not to see everything everyone shares.

This is what I have on WhatsApp. The only social network I use.

I was going to say that circles work much better in WhatsApp. Mainly because you define the group/circle before you send the message

I've found that casual chatrooms with a small group of friends is pretty effective at keeping in touch without the noise.

There are many common options like Slack, IRC, Keybase, and others. The hardest choice is finding a technology folks can agree upon; convenience and inertia go a long way towards maintaining a successful chatroom.

That was one great thing about gchat when I was in grad school - everyone had gmail, so chatting was easy. I had a number of groups that I would chat with almost daily, even after graduating. That petered out over the years and, of course, once I departed from gmail stopped completely. The ubiquity was nice while it lasted though. I wish there was a client that was as universal that was not so invasive with unrelated personal information.

You should look to the matrix protocol. That will be your new friend. Now, the most popular - though of course NOT only - client is https://riot.im Its similar in concept to IRC - chat rooms and such, and its decentralized. The web and mobile client for riot are really awesome...but you mentioned about personal information, hey, the matrix folks actually have a server you can self-host...so there is really no personal info you need to share with anyone that you don't want. My small family and i use matrix (via riot.im), and it works well for us. I encourage you to give it a try.

(Oh I didn't even mention the bridges to other platforms like gitter, irc, slack, etc. that matrix contributors develop...I honestly don't know why matrix has not crushed every other chat platform yet.)

EDIT: To clarify, matrix-based platforms like riot.im are chat platforms not really what most might call "traditional social media/networks".

I never even used gmail, but I have fond memories of google chat! It used to be my best way of keeping in touch with people. Not sure why people stopped using it; I imagine that maybe Google changed something about the gmail UI, or maybe it was because people started using phones instead of computers for email. In any case, it had all faded away naturally long before Google stopped supporting XMPP.

Why can't email do this? Serious question, I've never understood why people refuse to use email for chat. Everybody has email, we don't need to convince people to adopt it or agree on a provider. It should be perfect, and yet for some reason we don't use it for this. Does anybody have any thoughts on this?

Because so many other things come into email – marketing emails, notifications, work-related emails, etc. that people don't check it as often.

Texting and other chat applications are instant.

Email used to be a more instantaneous thing, but it has evolved into something that many people want to take a break from, so sending an email might mean that the recipient doesn't see it for hours or days.

This isn't a fault of email but the way we use it. I think what you're really saying is that we like to keep personal chat separate from impersonal spam, and I agree with this 100%. Couldn't we do this by keeping two separate email accounts? I just feel like we have spent thousands of man-years trying to come up with the one chat application to rule them all that everybody will adopt, that has no privacy concerns, that doesn't rely on a single service provider, meanwhile email is right under our noses.

Texting and chat applications being instant is a downside sometimes, in that people have questions that they want an answer to, but won’t send an email because of the reasons you listed. Instead they send you an instant message, and the expectation is generally an instant response.

I’m trying really hard to get people to use email again for questions that they need answered but not immediately. But I seem to be losing that battle.

This is why I treat IM at work the same as email. I show up as unavailable and check a few times a day. If someone really needs me instantly they can come to my cube.

Because multiparty email sucks (CC/BCC hell), and the delivery is not particularly real time.

Emails are just "bigger" entities, in the minds of people than chat messages. They are more massive to use, and for some communications something smaller, simpler is just a better fit.

The "bigness" of an email come from the most usual workflows in mail programs: to respond you have to go through 2-3 clicks first, you usually have to wait some small time for sending them, the contents are usually bigger, there are quotations automatically added, there are signatures, there are more buttons and fields and options in the window - the whole thing is just more massive.

Because you end up with emails that are 24 pages long as the entire history is included in there, because it doesn’t thread properly and 90% of the email I receive is meaningless crap that I just delete or spam (which in turn means that my daughters generation only use it to sign up for services which send them crap so they use it even less)

this is more a problem with misuse and not email itself. * actual threading is better as you always see to which mail the reply belong (except for the retarded Gmail conversation view...) * quoting - if you are doing 'char like then turn it off / remove), for more in-depth discussions it's very handy. * keep your address private and sane - I rarely receive spam and if some website sends me crap I unsubscribe (or cancel account).

there is a' delta chat app that uses email as 'backend' and it works quite well)

> this is more a problem with misuse and not email itself.

That's true, but the vast majority of users misuse email and the vast majority of clients do not bother with properly threading it. So conversations become very cumbersome.

On usenet, it was easy to have threads that were hundreds of posts long with multiple conversations going on, and pretty easy to jump into one of the subthreads to post a response. Email could be the same way, but not with the way things are today.

But usenet and email use the same technique for threading (message-ids and refs). It works like a charm in Thunderbird and Outlook for example. The problem is that this seems to complex for "regular Joe" so more and more providers are ending up with "conversation view" where they group all mails in single thread and then display it in linear way, which is "odd" to say the least…

If you want it to become common place then it has to be easier to use it "correctly" than "wrongly".

So… we end up with more and more dumbed down version of everything because "too difficult"? Also - hitting reply button is quite natural and it works like a charm and threads correctly. The problem is - predominance of gmail, which threw away concept of threads in favour of conversation and now we are all screwed…

In my country most people have Whatsapp group chats with their friends. Usually more than one group for your different social circles. In my opinion it doesnt work that great. I find that most groups have people with too much time on their hands so when I end up having 100+ messages on the group and I just give up trying to catch up.

This what WhatsApp and Telegram do around here. Even just in my direct family we have three different groups: everyone, siblings, and a subset of the siblings. Works quite well.

Don’t forget Discord! I finally got my entire family in a server on there.

Originally, I used facebook in some weird, dystopian and usually ineffective courtship ritual. Then I used it to keep in touch with distant friends, which is the stated use case, but actually isn't that interesting, but would have been well-served by curating my friends list.

Lately, I moved to San Francisco and started doing stand-up comedy. Facebook is the single best tool for self-promotion and for finding out where good open mics and shows are. Both goals are served by adding randomly every single person I meet, not by curating my list.

How's your stand-up career going?

It's in its infancy. I've done one showcase, but mostly just open mics.

I realize the above comment may have implied that comedy is my job - it's not, but it's the primary appeal Facebook has for me now.

http://archive.is/Z7uIq

Blessed be

Private slacks, private google groups, private and close knit email lists will always make for better sharing and discussion. I suppose by their nature they're much smaller too.

The one thing social media could do very well that these cannot, but still consistently fails at, for some reason, is discovery. How do I find the other literati nearby? How do I know who the next great addition to the secret slack might be?

I actually find Facebook reasonable for that (though I am trying to quit). There are pages for relatively niche groups in your city or country.

> Private slacks, private google groups, private and close knit email lists will always make for better sharing and discussion.

I found the same thing on usenet years ago, and it was much more discoverable compared to the private options you mention. But I did need to use some degree of client side filtering to handle the junk that would be posted.

Its true. I have no friends on hn and hn is my best "social media"

There have been apps in the past that limit friends. I've thought a bout a 2 person network for you and your partner as well as one with maybe 20 friends. As well as one where you only see updates from friends who include you in their 20 as well. But it breaks the financial model of running targeted ads so it wont work.

Seems like targeting small groups could be a way to overcome the network effect of Facebook. Just convince a handful of friends to join. Maybe a free trial or freemium model would work?

> 2 person network for you and your partner

Chat apps?

Yeah but would be cool to have an area to share "stories," text messages, video calls, grocery lists, etc. Maybe there is money in integration wherein if my partner likes a Chanel purse on FB or Pinterest the partner app let's me know so I can buy it dir her.

Or... you could just have a conversation like normal people.

He's saying more along the lines of having a social media profile (like Facebook) that represents 2 people.

That actually doesn't seem to be what he's saying. "Share grocery lists." That's what a couple would share with each other, not to their other friends.

> my partner likes a Chanel purse on FB or Pinterest the partner app let's me know

And seriously, it sounds awful. This is how you expect technology to benefit humanity?

Yes. And what's wrong with that? Until the brightest minds apply themselves to solving real problems the least they can do is solve small problems instead of making solutions for problems that dont exist.

Or you could kiss my ass and stop being snippy. Online interaction is not exclusive to conversation and intimacy. I dont have time or inclination (nor does she) to sit on the couch and say "look at this photo I took at lunch" or "what does next weeks evening calendar look like.."

An app could solve that. Well.

You don't have time to sit on a couch and talk about your day together?

Of course we do. And that's for the important stuff. Social media is largely garbage so sharing the small stuff would be useful.

Have you never been to a restaurant and see a couple together more interested in their phones than each other.

(A casual observation of mine is that it is usually better looking couples that do this, but not exclusively. Maybe the constant need to be on social media forces them to pay more attention to their appearance and less on their conversation).

But all of that already exists. A million chat apps that also do video calls, todo apps, etc. Even Google photos casually asked me to add my SO so they can view my photos.

I think that most people could do all of that adfree without installing another app.

The innovation would just be centralization. Which only benefits the company centralizing.

"But it breaks the financial model of running targeted ads so it won't work."

By "it", do you mean the software won't work?

What if someone wrote the software to do this, it worked and he distributed it for free?

To the entrepreneur, this perhaps is not interesting.

Is it interesting to the user?

I mean that targeting ads comes from harvesting lots of info. If the only thing the data shows is a single relationship then it is an order of magnitude lesser than if you are pulling data from hundreds of relationships.

Could this property be of interest to the user that wants communications free from advertising, e.g., if she understands that the "social network" architecture created by the users of the software is such that there is no incentive for ads.

For example, if the software allows users to create many small groups all communicating separately, peer-to-peer, not aggregated into the same "network" via an enormous third party website.

The beauty of capitalism. You only get the stuff built that makes someone money, not the stuff that is genuinely useful. (Obviously there will be some overlap, but "most useful to the consumer" isn't always going to line up with "makes most money for the company").

What if the "stuff" already exists? What if economics had no bearing on its creation?

I've thought a WhatsApp equivalent for just families or even for specific events (like a wedding) would be cool. In addition to the regular chat window, there would be shared photos and so on.

But I think the challenge is not the financial model, the problem is product/market fit. Path (founded by a former FB exec) tried for a few years to create an intimate social network but couldn't retain enough users to make the biz work.

Path, Peach, Vero, Ello, I don't think we need another one to remind everybody that "intimate social networks" are a failed experiment. If someone wants to communicate within a small group, they are inclined to use group chat. Forget monetizing, first it's difficult to get users to stay on these platforms because:

1. Even if you get amazing press and hype, the churn rate can exceed your growth rate due to how limited the network effect is e.g. Peach and Vero.

2. People can already choose to unfollow celebrities and limit their friend groups on any existing social platform. It's simply a matter of willpower or creating an alternate account ala how "Finstagrams".

3. Celebrities and influencers are what drives growth to a platform. Donald brought Twitter tens of millions of new users. Hundreds of millions of guys use Instagram just to follow bikini models etc

There is no need to start as a social app. You could start as a to-do app. For example, if Todoist would add a persistent group chat to shared lists, it might replace the WhatsApp conversations with my wife.

There are apps that are used in intimate settings. They can be made "social".

I think it's very dangerous to add social to a non-social service.

Evernote tried adding a chat functionality they, for some reason, named "work chat".

No other Evernote user I know wasn't hostile towards this feature.

It is not intuitive to me why that would be bad. Care to elaborate?

Path may have been a case of timing. They arrived right during peak Facebook buzzsaw growth, where Facebook was taking over. They stepped in front of that. It would be interesting to see how it - or something equivalent - would fair were it starting out today.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that there is no future market for an all-encompassing social network. That Facebook will stick around perpetually, like a moss. It's primary purpose will be to act as that one giant connection point with three billion users. The future growth markets are in the specialized segments that splinter off, of which there will be hundreds. They'll be targeted social networks, that do specific things dramatically better than Facebook ever can (and things that FB will never bother with). The early examples are well known: LinkedIn, Reddit, HN, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Stack Exchange, Genius, Yelp. Over time there will be one for everything imaginable that has at least a modest audience.

There was one for couples: https://www.fastcodesign.com/1669435/pair-a-social-networkin...

There's a bunch. Even Avocado IO but some suffer from laggy chat. Once you got enough messages the app takes forever as it tries to download every single message. Skype has the same damn problem... Just sync the last 10 then slowly poll for the rest and poll the rest fully if I scroll up... Never understood why they did that.

Ehh I’m not convinced. I deleted my Facebook a long time ago (hard delete, not just a deactivation) and I’ve managed to replicate the same value I got from Facebook in Slacks and Discords - except it’s just stuff I want, and people I want to hear from. When some congressmen asked Zuckerberg about monopoly, I thought this: I actually think there are plenty of alternatives. I derive a lot more value from the Slack channels I’m on with friends who are now lawyers or tech gurus or thinking about doing a startup...and none of it is interrupted by ads or annoying posts from my parents and their friends. If the point here is “delete most of your ‘friends’” then why keep Facebook at all?

> except it’s just stuff I want, and people I want to hear from.

Part of the value of Facebook for me is the opposite of this -- stuff I don't want, sometimes from people I don't want to hear from. It pops the bubble (which I'm VERY much covered by as an expat in Japan) and keeps my mind flexible while reminding me that other people think/believe different things, usually for reasons that make a lot of sense to them.

Yes, I think a concentrated community like a Slack channel is a great way to stay in touch with people, but it's usually so ultra-focused that when I focus on communities like that, I can really see/feel my worldview and perspective narrowing to the one I use every day for communicating with them.

I agree with you, that concentrating your worldview can become a problem. But at least now I’m doing it intentionally, and I don’t have Facebook’s algorithm doing it for me. Or, in the opposite, exposing me to things I don’t like just to get me to engage with it.

except it’s just stuff I want ... why keep Facebook at all

FB can do this, or at least close enough for me.. I mainly have it for chatting with certain friends (the chat UI is pretty terrible, but unlike IRC/Slack/Discord/... the percentage of people I know using it is extremely high), and to keep track of events from bands and other organizations. And it's fairly ok for that and there aren't really all-in-one alternatives for tracking bands imo.

It would also help if Facebook let you hide shit content - shared posts, tags, memories etc. But noooo you can only "see less of this" which doesn't really do anything.

I just ruthlessly unfollow people now. And ignore Facebook - WhatsApp has effectively replaced it.

Many tech people want a better social network plan.

I'm asking for opinions and advice here:

https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social_network_plan

The repo looks at issues of purpose, funding, audience, identity, topology, implementation, a MVP, and more.

As alternative to Fb, there's MeWe and Vero. Both of them will not display ads and mine user info.

Unless they gain traction. Which is the time they will start monetizing their users.

Thanks! I am adding these to the repo now.

Are you trying to create yet another open social network like Mastodon?

That would mean more standards we have to choose from, and isn't the effect exactly the opposite of what you want to achieve, i.e. more barriers in communication?

> Are you trying to create yet another open social network like Mastodon?

No because Mastodon is solely a decentralized network and is self-described as for microblogging.

My research interest includes possibilities for centralized networks (more akin to Wikipedia and Craigslist) and more kinds of sharing (more akin to Dropbox and Slack).

I've unfollowed most real people on Facebook as it's all about the interest or location-oriented groups for me rather than pictures of people's kids or vacations. It's so much better this way.

So the accounts most likely to target you with ads? Sounds great!

No. Facebook groups are different to "pages" which do target you. They're relatively open, free for all discussion areas, a little akin to newsgroups back in the day if you're on the right ones.

I'm way ahead of everyone. I'm on Diaspora, and I have 0 friends.

We might stretch that to

The secret to better politics : fewer citizens.

Which is a little bleak.

Fewer ignorant citizens*

If you keep the ignorance distribution stable, then nothing changes.

...which is a pretty popular and persistent idea in social sciences and loosely links to cultural capital.

My point is, a smaller system is a more easily managed system for everybody involved.

You don't even need to "educate" them. It might be enough to judge a prospective leader's character.

The secret isn't fewer friends, it's only having actual friends on social media and not following/friending random people.

My facebook feed is usually things I care about as a result. Except for 1 guy, who is a great guy but I don't need to see another sad dog who needs a home or missing child article.

How many are few? Because messaging apps work that way (chat groups) and most groups with over ~10 people is a tsunami of terrible jokes and fake news. What works though is creating temporary groups around events (trips, concerts etc.)

Create a new Facebook and just add the people you've talked to recently and get message notifications from your old account sent to your e-mail. It's like getting a new phone number and only informing recent contacts.

I think that ephemeral WhatsApp groups add a lot of value here. <plug> And if you'd like persistent, private photo/video sharing, a site like www.famipix.com fits the bill.</end plug)

"Social network" vs "Social media"

It is arguable that the primary purpose of Facebook originally was to allow two friends to communicate over a third person's website. There was no "news feed".

Is this a "social network" or is it "social media"?

Later the website became a means to broadcast "news".

Is it a "social network" or is it "social media"?

Later the website became a means for third parties other than Facebook to broadcast advertisements to specific users of the "network".

Is it a "social network" or is it "social media"?

Why might this distinction matter?

This is a quote from Van Jacobsen's 30 August 2006 tech talk entitled "A new way to think about networking":

"The raison d'etre of today's networking, both circuit switched and TCP/IP, is to allow two machines to have a conversation.

The overwhelming use (>99% by most measurements) of today's networks is for a machine to acquire named chunks of data (like webpages or email messages).

Acquiring named chunks of data is not a conversation, it's a dissemination (the computer equivalent of "Does anybody have the time?")"

What is Facebook?

Is it particular communications between two friends? Is it a "network"?

Is it dissemination? Is it "media"?

Is it both?

Does Facebook communication between friends upset the traditional media? Does it "threaten democracy"?

Does Facebook dissemination upset the traditional media? Does it "threaten democracy"?

The tech talk cited above discusses why in the case of dissemination the data matters, not the supplier.

In the case of dissemination it is desirable that data being disseminated must be trustworthy. Once this is achieved it should not matter the source from which the reader obtains it (whether via a Facebook page being surveilled by Facebook, or via some random address elsewhere on the internet).

The talk describes how this might be accomplished.

aka private group chats

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