Comment by v_london | Hacker News Reader

Comment by v_london | Hacker News Reader

This is very interesting and insightful. I 100% agree with the notion that small communities require an organiser to keep things going.

I personally believe social media can be a positive force in building better human connections online. Because I think none of the existing platforms are optimising for this (better connections and discussions), I've been working on it myself. I believe group chats with a small circle of friends are the rare form of social media that actually works well today, so we're trying to build something where you could be connected to group chats with people you may not know in advance. In this way, the social media app would act as the "organiser" of these micro-communities, which would hopefully grow into real friendships.

Thoughts? We're looking to launch a landing page next month, and the app itself (which will run on the web browser) in a couple months.

I thought you were going to take your pitch in a different direction.

I have found myself a part of a community organizations which practically live in the stone age. There are a lot of people and groups who are GREAT at organizing, but there aren't any technologies (besides phoning, text, and email) that one can use to enhance their ability to organize.

My best advice would be to unplug from the engineering community - see what real people are living through. Use technology to enhance arms length organization. I feel like you are doing what MeetUp is doing - creating a platform for human connections. I apologize in advance, I'm certain that I don't have the full picture.

People are tired of platforms. Give them a tool and let them use it how they see fit. Consider the blog post author. Think of a tool that allows them to better organize and communicate with their community of hobbiest painters. Tool to engage with other humans, not platform to spread your seed.

Ideas like this come and go every month. If someone open sourced something like that, so I could host it myself, I'd be down. But these ventures always either fail completely, or are bought up by some big company, which guts the core product and leaves it to whither into obscurity.

I would love something like this, I just wouldn't trust it to last more than a few years. I'm sorry to be negative about your venture, and I truly do hope it works out, because the world needs a small scale technology platform for sending chats and files easily.

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