What do you want in a new social network? | Hacker News Reader

What do you want in a new social network?

19 pointsferalhog33 comments

Looking for your ideas on how to build a better social network

The HN crowd always suggests technical aspects they want out of online communities. No one cares about that crap.

Instead, what about online communities that: don't incentivize shallow responses, don't incentivize like or karma gaming, do encourage great content, do encourage participation to a slightly greater degree than most places where 80% lurk.

I think good online communities are actually small. At a particular point in time, as population scale goes up, you don't find people familiar anymore and as a result no one has a reputation. The site has a reputation.

How do we create good online communities? Someone has done this homework, yes. At least, I believe there are studies out there somewhere which talk about the threshold of people that we can recognize with any meaningful context.

I agree with everything you're saying, but what you're describing isn't a social network. It's a private, invite-only community and those have serious limitations when compared to an open social network.

IMHO, HN and Reddit are at their best when random people whose opinions you wouldn't ordinarily hear from decide to comment. For example, It's pretty common here on HN for open source authors to chime in on threads where their product is being talked about and answer questions. On Reddit, you'll occasionally get highly detailed comments from people with hands on knowledge of the topic being discussed. One that stands out in my mind right now is when an LA city planner commented on a thread about building high rent condos vs building low rent units. He laid out all of the city building codes around new buildings and why the finances don't work out for the low rent units. It was one of the best comments I've ever seen on the topic on Reddit and it would never have happened had the subreddit been closed off or invite only.

Of course, then the problem becomes how much crap you have to sift through to find that nugget. But, If you deleted all the crap as "shallow responses", would the lack of posts still attract those nuggets of great content? I think a high comment count and a high karma count actually attracts higher quality commenters because there's a perceived greater chance a lot of people will read it.

The only solution I can think of is to have a lot of moderators constantly auditing threads, marking the high quality comments so they stand out at the top and outright blocking or banning anything too egregious. Crowdsourcing doesn't work for this because it gets weaponized and/or abused.

Ultimately, what makes or breaks a social network rests entirely on the decisions the mods make about what kind of content they want on their site.

You make some really good points. Thanks for your thoughts.

Limits and costs. You can only connect to 150 people. No celebrities / influencers. You can only write X messages a day, and copy paste is disabled. You cannot share for free, got to articulate at least 50 words. The reader got to click the share link if they want to see the original content. No one click karma, let people write 50 words or more if they want to express their feelings. Concession: Voice dictation, typing 50 words on a phone is too expensive.

Focus around offline activities: sports, food, children, church, charity, gardening, arts.

Thanks for the insights. Totally agree about keeping it small

I guess I'd want a social network where people aren't constantly tracked for monetisation purposes and where their personal information isn't sold to the highest bidder. Where any creators there can actually do well on the platform, and where the recommendation systems aren't ridiculously unfairly tilted in favour of the already super popular types.

And hell, one where the moderation system is fair all round. No preferences, no biases towards the rich or popular or whatever, just simple rules they enforce equally for all users, maybe with a nice way to counter the claim and get a person to listen to your response.

Plus somewhere a bunch of interesting people are posting interesting content on a regular basis. As in, stuff that isn't purely political in its nature, and isn't all about cryptocurrencies like bitcoin but about everyday topics instead.

That's not too complicated is it?

Haha it shouldn't be that complicated! This is a lot of good stuff...thanks for replying

I don't want a new social network. I want Web tech to be accessible enough that even the least experienced computer user can have their own website with RSS feed, IM over XMPP, group chat using IRC, and secure, spam-free email.

I want to the internet itself to be a social network using open, standardized protocols that have been proven to work.

Do you not think these things already exist? Seems like what you're asking for is solved. But o could be missing something

The tech exists, but the average schmuck has no idea how to use it, so it might as well not exist.

Plenty of average schmucks managed in the early days, though.

Granted, it was through services like Geocities and Tripod, no one was building their own server by intstalling and configuring Linux through a VM or anything, but "having your own website" has never been that complicated.

Fair enough

if you figure a way to remove spam, all the old protocols can be popular again.

Huh? There is no spam with RSS or IM. The user chooses what to consume.

And spam is a solved problem with email.

if you inevitably tried to build an RSS directory or search engine, there would be spam. IM is already full of spam, like IRC and email

> And spam is a solved problem with email.

you mean, with centralized online mail services

Distributed / self hosted. Information pattern like Git or Scuttlebutt. UX abstracted enough that the underlying infrastructure is never exposed to non-tech savvy users. Optionally ephemeral[1]. No dark patterns.

Also, I don't think I want a social network about humans lives, ala Facebook. I want a social network that is constructive. I want a social network that is about storing information, learning, discussing, growing together, etc. With the attributes I mentioned above.

[1]: I recognize that in almost any distributed system data inherently can't be truly ephemeral. Yet, I think there's a meaningful distinction between the system ensuring everything you ever say or do is recorded forever, vs just not caring to keep anything labeled as "ephemeral" past a month or w/e.

Really like the part about being constructive

Decentralized, peer to peer social network.

Basically preventing any platform ownership to go awry or sneaky against user's or group needs.

How would you deal with misinformation and malicious campaigns under this situation?

I'd steer more toward "use it at your own risk" vs. "we're good because we'll be policing things for you".

Certain self-policing, engaging communities proven to be quite an efficient in that. Sort of like multiple downvotes will kill the post quickly.

Makes sense

A strictly reverse-chronological feed.

This would be great

Our mission at overlooked.com is to build the social news network that ends fake news. We have every major news organization, run all articles through our Bias Detection Algorithm, and give each user their own personal profile, where they can like, comment, and rate news articles based on political bias. Shortly, users will be able to friend one another and tag their friends in news articles in a much safer, more efficient platform than Facebook or Twitter. Let me know what you guys think! We hate bots too

How do you define "Fake News" or political bias? How do you protect against malicious users who will flag anything they don't like as "politically biased"?

It should have more in common with traditional forums than Twitter or Reddit. It should also be decentralized to avoid monopoly-producing network effects.

Decentralized seems to be a big one

I want less bots

Bots are fine

friends that expire. that's where the trend is, private social groups where people come and go. perhaps its reflective of a broader social trend , dunno

Alternatively built on top of urbit: https://urbit.org/primer/

Ownership of my own data: It is not ok that Facebook gets control of everything i upload and write to the site and I have a hard time getting it back.

Censorship resistance: Even Nazis should have free speech. Also slippery slope, censoring Nazis and then more and more people also gets censored.

Decentralization: Trusting a single party to "be nice" is, as experience proves, unwise.

Downvotes and RSS.

Thanks

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