Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads. The need to drive engagement and sell things to people tends to limit the types of social media. It's nice to see an experiment like this but I don't know if it will go anywhere.

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?

> take turns with people in your circle to become a 'star' for a period of time

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....

> if it wasn't dependent on selling ads. The need to drive engagement

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.

Well, there always has been a substantial difference in the quality of journalism between newspapers (subscription based) and tabloids (sold individually), wasn’t there?

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.

If old movies are to be believed, you could always buy newspapers individually from little boxes on the sidewalk for from the kiosk of a friendly guy who knows everyone in the neighborhood.

I honestly don't know what you're talking about.

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. ;)

>Netflix tries to aggressively drive engagement too and it doesn't have ads.

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

> Driving engagement is necessary for a business period, no matter how they're funded.

Wikipedia is doing fine without driving engagement though.

>I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads.

I suppose you could skim through Usenet archives.

> I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads.

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

I've found some fantastic content through Gemini but it's difficult finding content when several of the half dozen search engines are down at once or the links themselves are dead. Is this a common issue?

> I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads.

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 wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads.

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.

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