Show HN: A Socialist Social Network
karma.fm
karma.fm
In short, the thinking here is that instead of building a community with the intent to monetize the users and their data, we can become sustainable through patron contributions - half of which get redistributed to the users. My thinking is that this incentivizes us all to keep costs very low and also incentivizes members to impress one another, instead of exploiting one another with clickbait or "lead-generation" (advertising for-profit stuff is strictly disallowed).
RE "socialism": this isn't intended to be socialism as a religion ~ more like, "the model we're working with right now is having some painful side-effects and maybe it's worth trying a hypermodern coop / WSDE model that addresses some of the root causes of these symptoms (data abuses, CCP exerting control over our information flow / free speech, cambridge analytics stuff, LGBTQ+/small creators struggling on YouTube, etc)" which happens to align with some socialist principles, from what I gather.
Here's the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/karmafm
This is very young and experimental, and so far there's only been a single distribution (a whopping $4 (post-fees) sent to a member from a $10 patron contribution) but the Patron contributions have since quadrupled to $40!
Forgive my brevity as I attempt to keep this thing breathing and thank you for taking a look.
People paying an amount that they feel is fair vs prescribed is very forward thinking and I wish you luck!
PS: I'd avoid anything that actually returns funds since its likely to end up being called a Ponzi scheme...
RE ponzi scheme... hmmm... so when a Patron makes a $10 contribution, they can then choose which user receives half of their contribution. I wonder how to prevent the perception from turning Ponzi with this model...
HN just uses karma points for moderation/access so its not quite as handy but I think people respect people with lots of Karma. Like I know there's one person with over 300k karma points here, he's a pretty cool dude and I think his points reflect that.
My "cobbled together" implementation is as follows: every user begins with a fixed number of "bolts"; they can unlock more bolts through various "virtuous deeds" (TBD), or they can earn bolts through their comments/posts; their general "bolt throughput" is a proxy to how much "karma" they've earned and given to others.
Though this was cobbled together without any real understanding of behavioral economics and with a whole bunch of untested assumptions, so as it evolves, I'll have to study the tried-and-tested models of Medium, Reddit, HN, and think about what works, what doesn't, what Karma users need/want, and then innovate upon that assessment if needed. I have some thoughts on that but I'm still battling some stability dragons over here...
Thanks again for poking around and helping out.
It was a poor choice of words to put it in the tagline then, for a number of reasons.
* Anything with a sign-up feature needs an elevator pitch somewhere on the homepage: "What" and "Why" for the layman, two short paragraphs but ideally a single-sentence elevator pitch.
* Eliminate the ideology, focus messaging on the value and support. "Socialist" is a very broad and burdened term.
* Explain how tf this is socially owned. All I see a dictator, however benevolent, and a very inefficient donation system.
* Player Guide is... bad. Super hand-wavy on the stuff that should be specific (community guidelines), lots of ideology, and straight up fluff. Write assuming every reader is blind and ADD - some of them are, and everyone else will benefit.
https://www.karma.fm/p/67VCB/karma-retrospective-1014
RE the first bullet: did the introduction modal not pop up for you? If not, there's a bug. Anyone who hasn't visited should see the following:
https://i.imgur.com/p4J4oib.png
Thanks for taking time out of your day for this.
No. Eliminating the ideology is never possible. If you try, you implicitly support the dominant one. Avoiding the term is a good idea though.
On the other hand, even the most faithful anti-socialist should recognize that you aren't building a totalitarian dictatorship here. So it may make them think after all.
Many thanks for the impact.
While someone else sorts this problem out (or you just wait for it to subside) perhaps you could explain the concept and goals here in the meantime. Don't feel bad, this happens to lots of people.
In addition, having user-driven content from the start will (hopefully) lead to a community and a unique style forming - with people sticking around because they enjoy the content and discussion already there, and posting more of the same themselves. If you want to shape the community, the best way would be to make one or two posts yourself, and try hard to comment and engage with other user's posts in the way you hope future users will.
Also, the personality of the first few active users will have a large effect on how the site's culture will evolve. If you're interested in left-wing politics, perhaps try to publicise the site in the kinds of places people already talk about left-wing politics - specific subreddits or discord servers. Of course a lot of places won't like straight-up advertisement, but if you pitch it as an ongoing project and ask for ideas, people will likely be happier to accept it.
https://www.karma.fm/p/SGXFV/once-upon-a-time-i-accidentally...
My response:
Thanks so much @Rugnir. This is absolutely a problem; I'll quote you over on the most recent retrospective.
I have a question: when you visit the homepage, all posts are human (filtered for "non robot posts"). You can then include bot posts by manually disabling this filter. On Tribe pages, the filter is "off" by default. Would you like to see the filter controls on the Tribe pages, with it "off" by default?
~~~
In addition, having user-driven content from the start will (hopefully) lead to a community and a unique style forming - with people sticking around because they enjoy the content and discussion already there, and posting more of the same themselves. If you want to shape the community, the best way would be to make one or two posts yourself, and try hard to comment and engage with other user's posts in the way you hope future users will.
Also, the personality of the first few active users will have a large effect on how the site's culture will evolve. If you're interested in left-wing politics, perhaps try to publicise the site in the kinds of places people already talk about left-wing politics - specific subreddits or discord servers. Of course a lot of places won't like straight-up advertisement, but if you pitch it as an ongoing project and ask for ideas, people will likely be happier to accept it.
^ YES! This is all gold. Thank you.
I am interested in how a social network can be socialist, per se.
Like a weird way of saying people who like to be social?
And hopefully not the kind of socialism that Russia/DPRC employ, that would be the worst of all worlds.
Welcome back! A lot has changed in the 30+ years you were in coma.
We could talk about the USSR but not everyone gets what that is anymore...
We have a problem with people seeing Ms. Scott from England, thinking her skirt is a kilt and getting angry when she claims she can't play the bagpipe.
Still, even correcting for those historical factors, I think every -ism, or school of thought, suffers from similar problems in subjective perception: it's easy to find nuance and diversity of opinion if one looks for it, and equally easy to find bad actors, tribalist talking points, sloppy thinking, etc, if one looks for it.
> We have a problem with people seeing Ms. Scott from England, thinking her skirt is a kilt and getting angry when she claims she can't play the bagpipe.
:)
I.e. backend stuff
The application architecture is simple - it's an n-tier app (front end > business layer > SQL server).
The business layer is .NET/C#. I use Entity Framework as an ORM and then migrate the slower bits to Dapper + raw SQL whenever I need to trade maintainability for performance.
I'd be happy to expand on anything specific you're curious about :)