Minus
minus.social
minus.social
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
Jeffrey McDaniel, “The Quiet World”When I was younger it read as a sad poem about loving someone more than they love you. Now that I'm an adult, it feels more like a similar vibe to what I experience when I save the energy to make dinner for my partner when they get home from work.
To keep things interesting, you have to leave openings for the imagination to wonder.
It's actually "the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything". The fact that there's an answer to a question but no indication of what the question is is literally the underpinning theme running through all the HG2G books.
”O Deep Thought Computer,” he said, ”the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us ...” he paused, ”...the Answer!” ”The answer?” said Deep Thought. ”The answer to what?” ”Life!” urged Fook. ”The Universe!” said Lunkwill. ”Everything!” they said in chorus.
> And when this we rightly know
> Thro the World we safely go
> Joy & Woe are woven fine
> A Clothing for the soul divine
> Under every grief & pine
> Runs a joy with silken twine
Blake
I do like the idea that the platform can actively disrupt the "addictive" patterns that develop elsewhere. Other things I've wanted:
- Instagram with an ML layer that auto-rejects pics with faces or text. Landscapes, vistas, animals, architecture etc all would be welcome.
- high latency Twitter, where no post is viewable until at least 2 weeks after it's published. Bickering threads become impractical. People learn to post stuff that will be worth caring about later.
- Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction of posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone quickly learns you can't trust it, but it can still be cute/fun/humorous.
2 weeks seems unnecessarily extreme to me though, even 24h would probably be enough to severely limit the flame potential. It would also potentially mean that one could have a daily routine of checking for the new content and replies and writing your own stuff and you're good to go for the day.
Although to really be effective I think it'd have to work on a global tick (i.e., all new content is published once a day at a certain time). Otherwise the new content would still slowly drip continuously and you'd still have the addictive nature of social networks.
At this point I'm sort of reinventing a collaborative version of a newspaper.
It might be fun/interesting to try to base the latency upon simulated geography: whether the entirely fictional geometry of something like classic GeoCities where you get assigned a random address in a digital "neighborhood" somewhere when you sign up, or use real world geography and filter it through ancient routing restrictions like "how long would it take in the post by horse/carriage".
A benefit to a dynamic latency such as simulated geography would be that it would make it even tougher to sync together how posts would be arriving from multiple users (unless you were targeting a specific user).
I really hope to be able to report back in about a year or so on ways to better communicate. At first I thought, maybe the best online dialectics is just walls of careful text rather than tweets. Now I try doing that, and I make careless mistakes and I can barely parse a paragraph without losing my train of thought.
The solution I think is explicit structure. Arguments usually form a (for now let's say) DAG, let's present them that way explicitly. Metadata, i.e. human emotion can be annotated onto that - emoji, good or bad vibes? If you can diff that graph even better.
Argument Maps are kind of a non-technological approach to this: https://fbistudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/20150417_R... really impressed me.
In fact, working in a fully-remote, fairly high information density (finance) company, I think the work of the pioneer cyberneticists (and potentially Soviet ones, not sure on that as I can't speak Russian) could be immensely helpful for modelling and manipulating the spread of information and humanity within a company.
Email has a latency measured in seconds. Also, email is not usually public.
Explicit structure could be interesting, but structure from whose perspective? Arguments can be modeled many ways, such that there is no one correct answer. Also, that the argument could be modeled as a DAG might be very optimistic in many circumstances.
You can accomplish a lot of the same outcome by merely eradicating following feeds (that is, the combined stream of posts from users that you follow).
In the early days of Facebook when you had to manually visit user pages to see what was new with someone or what they were posting, it was dramatically lower velocity in terms of how fast bullshit would spread and how much content you could reasonably consume. It would reduce page views / content views spectacularly, by including just that little bit of time and labor cost to the consumption. People would focus that effort primarily on the users that really matter to them.
The social networks of course know this. They built the streams / feeds / walls for that reason, to turbocharge the addiction. They'll never give it up.
(Twitter really wants you to log in and view your feed but they’ll still let you read the site this way)
Though I haven't used it much, this sounds like substack + RSS, that only refreshes once a day.
It's missing some interactivity I suppose
Never found sufficient time/motivation to execute on it. Still think it would be kinda cool though.
Say, the way some messaging platforms have threads which can branch off of the main channel. Maybe this platform has something like that, too; instantaneous and temporary, where messages disappear N minutes after they're sent. So you can post publicly on the time-delayed cadence, or chat semi-privately in realtime.
I'm not sure if that undermines the desirable properties of the time delay.
For example the lifetime of your message (counting from when it shows up) could be 2 times the latency of it, e.g. a message with a latency of 1 day would exist for 2 days.
Practical effect was a roughly 24-48 (or more) hour wait for responses. Didn't stop bickering though. I was quite young at the time. Asked some question about a game. The first response was fairly hostile. Which started an argument. My first time flamed online, and my first online argument. Which went very slowly.
Still, slow social media would be interesting. I kinda like the FidoNet model. Where syncing only happens once a day. Maybe only at a set time overnight. Faster than snailmail but you have the full day to type out your response about why Ultima V did not suck as your opponent claimed. With the ability to submit a post any time, but also with the ability to edit it until sync. I think it would encourage long posting more than the current systems. Which may or may not be a good thing.
FWIW FidoNet is still around, although most connections seem to be over IP these days.
This extension has been more effective for me than any other at cutting down how much youtube I watch. Maybe the biggest factor in this is that it doesn't ban me from youtube entirely - When I've tried extensions like that in the past, I've always ended up uninstalling the extension when I needed to watch a youtube video for work. This way, I can watch a little, but the lack of constant new recommendations keeps me from spending hours and hours on the site.
I've blocked the sidebar and the comments section. The former has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on YouTube. The latter has dramatically reduced my exposure to the inanity of the YouTube comments section. Both are huge quality of life improvements.
Have you tried slowly.app? It's an app that simulates snail mail Pairs you with someone based on your preferences and you can write them a letter / email that will be delivered in a few hours / days, based on your distance with said person
I would recommend it to anyone looking to experiment with a "high latency social network".
Aren't we pretty much there now with a so many bots posting?
Billy Chasen developed faux-social network called Botnet. Unfortunately, it looks like it's gone and I doubt that name would have lasted long in the App store let alone how he managed to get it through.
https://www.wired.com/story/botnet-social-network-where-ever...
This seems easy enough for current twitter-fediverse-clones to implement.
I'm not sure how limited posts play into this. I think the intention is to make users really think about what they're posting. But the arbitrary, "nice, round number" limit just feels existentially dreadful at best, and like a headline-generating schtick at worst. Surely there's some other mechanism that can nudge people towards more thoughtful, less self-promoting posts (or whatever the goal is); maybe limiting posts to one a day?
From TFA:
> Minus was created by Ben Grosser and commissioned by arebyte Gallery (London, UK) as part of the solo exhibition Software for Less [https://www.arebyte.com/software-for-less].
It's an art project. Headline-generating schticks and existential dread are to be expected.
By coincidence, earlier today I had the same idea. I was thinking about how so much of what you encounter in social media is biased towards people who post a lot.
In politics, for example, most people are relatively moderate. People who spend more time talking about politics are more likely to hold extreme positions. And people who spend the most time talking about politics are the ones who spend the least time evaluating their and others' positions. So the political social media is dominated by uneducated extremists with hot takes. (I admit this often includes myself, though I do try to put effort into my comments).
A possible solution to this would be reducing the amount of allowed posts per time, which would quiet the noise and give high-effort interactions a more level playing field. Of course, that sucks for engagement and interferes with topics like humor that benefit from low-effort contributions. I wonder if there's a client-side way to bias your feed towards people who post less frequently.
I know I've had many hobby projects I've just fallen short on because of fears of how I'd pay for it. Of course these might just be for the fun of making it, but the problem then is that, at least for me, I'd dread what should be a moment of celebration, it getting popular. It could easily put you in massive debt.
Of course a lot of people seem to be of the "I'll cross that bridge if I come to it" type but me, I just couldnt work like that. So congrats to those people I suppose
If people end up liking something enough to need more capacity, I can scale the server manually to however much I'm willing to spend and immediately set up Patreon/Kofi/whatever. If people contribute enough to pay for a bigger server, I do that. If they don't, it's their problem that it's slow or keeps crashing. My IPs are always prioritised by the load balancer, so it makes little difference to me.
It seems like a nice and safe idea, but it does somewhat limit profitability I suppose, but thats an entirely different matter
So then I looked at the source, and saw it was done on Sharespace. So, not sure how much dog food is being eaten in
> Each work is presented as a product that could have come out of an alternative Silicon Valley, interrogating and reimagining how software is created, operated, and sold.
And,
> Utilising custom methods such as software recomposition, techniques such as data obfuscation
But use Google Analytics.
And then, from the speech...
> The last twenty years have been characterized by the rise of software.
Twenty years ago was recovery period from the .com boom. It's been a little more than 20 years. If anything I'd call the past 10 years dull, where walled social networks have sought to raise their walls ever higher, that might be interesting.
I was thinking the other day of an idea where you take turns with people in your circle to become a 'star' for a period of time(day, days, week, hour, whatever) every so often. During that time you get the limelight, and become the focus of the group. Imagine that, during that tie period, you're encouraged to share more of the boring details of life. Like 5 minutes of every hour or two maybe.
Something like this appeals to me because I feel like I don't really connect with my friends on social media the way I would in real life. If I hung out with a friend, I'd experience more of the banalities and have a more complete picture of what their day to day life was actually like. Obviously that's not something you want to get blasted with every day in your feed, and it's not something you want the responsibility to produce every day, but let's say it happens once a year for each person.
I just feel like the Facebook/Instagram model promotes a focus on curated highlights of a persons life, which is fine, but doesn't really feel like friendship. I want something that replaces the experience of spending a day with someone. With all the distance between us these days, either from economic migration, the pandemic, or whatever, I really feel like I'm losing touch with my friends. Seeing their highlights on my feed or even communicating with them via text/im/voice just doesn't cut it. How can we provide that sense of connection remotely?
I like this idea. For a while, "day in the life of a ____" posts were very popular on imgur, and I really enjoyed it, even though they were strangers.
The downside I figure might be that after someone's star-time, they get a lot of incoming attention, which then fades out. Some people might react quite well to that and others quite poorly, so I figure you'd need a set of other functions (say, blast-from-the-past auto-regurgiations, or week-delayed emails as suggested in another post here) to mitigate that and help people of various social proclivities all feel comfortable.
I miss letter writing. When you'd sit down and put real thought into it because you'd know it would be the only time you'd communicate for the next week or two. Or even tape swapping -- my dad and uncle used to mail tapes back and forth, hour-long audio rambles because it was more fun than the written word. Every tape started with a delay to make sure the leader was past the head, then the "pk-ssht" of a beer can being opened....
Driving engagement isn't a consequence of ads. Netflix tries to aggressively drive engagement too and it doesn't have ads.
The reason is simple: the less people use a service, the more likely they are to unsubscribe. The more likely they are to spend their time on a competing service that's doing a better job at driving engagement.
Driving engagement is necessary for a business period, no matter how they're funded.
What the internet adds, of course, is the constant competitive pressure of other content which will always be flashier, clickbaity, and emotion-triggering than yours. So people will switch faster if you don’t compete on these terms.
By contrast, a NYT reader 30 years back never got exposed to much of the competition’s content. So there was no reason for switching. You just stuck with the partner you had chosen, simply because there was no “Tinder”, so to speak.
You've always been able to buy newspapers individually and subscribe to tabloids.
And a NYT reader 30 years ago was exposed to the competitions content literally every time they walked into a drugstore or supermarket, with a stack of competing newspapers with competing headlines yelling for attention.
And if you think people stuck with the partner they chose 30 years ago... I've got news for you. ;)
Do you really believe that or are you not seeing all the product placements as advertisment?
proceeds to slowly sip from branded bottle, carefully placing it on the table with the labels towards the camera
Wikipedia is doing fine without driving engagement though.
I suppose you could skim through Usenet archives.
This is why I got interested in Gemini. It's a modern take on Gopher and the network already has a lot of folks posting content and sharing ideas completely free of the normal commercial goals you see on most http sites. I even made a small Twitter clone, Station, which has about 260 users right now. If you're a Gemini user, come hang out: gemini://station.martinrue.com
Probably there are two best answers to this.
1) hn. No ads. Social network (in the way that Reddit is).
2) build it! FB monetizes each person on the order of $10-20 per human per year. So just start up a social network that costs $10/year. Pick a few principles you want to stick to and see if it survives.
Edit: I see my estimates are wrong since time has passed; it's now more like $40-50 per human per year, but I think maybe some of the properties are worth more per person (almost certainly instragram is worth more per person than fb proper).
I hope we, as a society, can rediscover publicly funded infrastructure. If I was in a position of power in my national government I would push for some amount of cloud storage, a web presence and a public image hosting site (among others, this is just off the top of my head), accessible to all citizens, free of charge.
I had a not similar but related idea, basically borne from my hatred of Twitter. Basically, you'd only be able to make a comment if you have a credit. Credits would be time based, probably 1 or 2 a day. The only other way to get credits is if the person you replied to likes your comment. Basically, the idea being to quit getting people being so controversial and argumentative.
Edit:
I kept replying below describing some vision that doesn't exist, which I feel is rude to the OP and Minus, so I'll not reply further. As I have little intention in building anything at the moment, feel free to take anything you like from it, Minus et al.
Example. A -I released this tool!
B - Wow nice how long did that take
A - Thanks, 6 months.
At this point, the conversation is done unless both like each other's comment, which in such an exchange would be encouraged.
If C comes along and says 'this tool sucks', even if 50 people like it, if A doesn't, C is done commenting for the day.
In fairness, I haven't really thought the whole thing out in detail, just some rough ideas. I appreciate pointing out challenges and dislikes with it though.
B might have just logged off, or maybe their question was bait to intentionally silence A. Either way, A is probably annoyed with B.
Though if anyone wanted to set up an information farm, by creating a bunch of accounts, where they post and like each other, acting like different individuals, it could still create engagement with other innocent people who could eventually become biased, hateful and misinformed.
So going to a subgroup of your likeminded people would do nothing. You can comment 'like me pls', which would take you from one credit to 0. The responder liking it would take credit back to 1, which is where it was initially. So, nothing gained.
However, one would have to solve the multiple account problem, which every site has to deal with.
So if you want to write mean things, do so in your own posts without bothering others' discussions.
Addiction is more complicated.
You'd get @kanyewest7, @kanyewest289, @kanyewest3058, etc.
Also, the younger you are when you join the network, the fewer posts you get per year. If you join as an 18 year old, you have a little over 1 post per year remaining. If you join at 90, you have 10 posts per year, etc.
But yeah 100 posts per year or 1 per day would be interesting too and wouldn’t render your account as useless when you max out temporarily instead of permanently.
This is in contrast to my twitter account, which is such a mess that I don't like posting b/c "most" people who will see it followed me for some other topic.
Predictably, it's now gone.
Here's the intro video: https://vimeo.com/587261149
It could be interesting to have an account with a maximum number of posts, use the last post to announce your next account and thus periodically it forces each of your followers to make a conscious decision on whether or not to remain following you.
And if you want to go further you can bypass that stub and serve the static pages directly from your web server.
Best of both worlds, really.
Maybe there's a 1001 plugins being used which means the Wordpress site has to make boatloads of requests to the backend. Many Wordpress sites make that mistake. I keep my plugin count to at least five plugins. And they're obviously plugins which I really need, and they're not chatty in any way.
The gp isn't "wrong": putting Varnish in front of WP is a possible solution to the fact WP doesn't scale, not a disproof of the fact.
Furthermore it's a highly limited solution: WP is only static if you limit it's use to its static features, and configuring Varnish for the unholy mess of 3rd-party dynamic/interactive/form-handling WP plugins is nightmare territory.
Wordpress doesn't scale.
A content management system that doesn’t produce cacheable html isn’t scalable and one that does is. It’s not the job of the content management system to serve the cached pages. That’s what CDNs, browsers, and caching layers in general are for.
Also, see the final paragraph of the comment above for discussion of the extent to which WP "produces cachable html"
i do like the sentiment behind it though
Since that way you're never at the end of your line and it would still avoid a lot of the noise which I think this site hopes to achieve.
Concept seems flawed.
The game itself seems pretty trivial. What makes it really interesting is that you get only one chance to play it.
It flopped everywhere I promoted it, but it is still online since I am on free tier of the host service.
If anyone wants to check it:
If you have a social network like you made it requires that groups of people join it together, and that they know the other has it in advance, and that costs money to post beyond a certain number of posts - it's not clear what that they can get from you that they can't get from facebook or instagram already for free. It's not clear what you're offering that's better than those two.
The features of 'no feed, no notifications, no way to find people' isn't necessarily a plus to the overwhelming majority of users, and from your page I don't understand what you offer in your service that even someone who journals wants.
Have you considered lowering the barrier-of-entry from $19? For what is effectively a journaling app, you're driving an incredible amount of margin out of a scenario where your audience has no incentive to pay.
Even my comment above mentioning has been downvoted twice. It is pretty clear it’s not something people want.
But while the failure of the current crop is evident (well not in terms of shareholder value), what should be a "good" replacement is not all that obvious. Even beyond sustainable business model issues, there are so many configurations, platform features, constraints, user incentives etc. There are two general principles I can think of:
* Let a thousand flowers bloom (in a fediverse context) and let evolutionary trial-and-error determine what works
* Source some insights from the surveillance capitalists as they are the ones who have accumulated the largest empirical factbase about what we should definitely avoid 8-)
Will be followed by some copycat's Minus++, which will be montetized.