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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I really like like the idea of a "high latency" social network, effectively bringing back the feeling of old snail mail (but more public).

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.

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I picked 2 weeks because I wanted to discourage talking about the news. Or responding/reacting to something dumb a public figure did or said.

Even just 24 hours would do a lot to disrupt the echo chamber.

2 weeks would match up with certain snail mail geography especially around the horse/carriage era.

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).

Is this not email?

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.

No, it's not email.

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.

I’ve considered something similar, call it The Morning Post or some such. Choose your delivery/send time, and all your content gets posted (and all previously posted content gets revealed to you). Put some sane limit on the number of times you can change your post/delivery time (once a day?).

It's not necessary to inject intentional latency in the manner the parent suggests via a rather extreme delay.

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.

I currently use Twitter this way. I stay logged out (deleted the password from my password manager) and visit Twitter.com/username directly for a few folks I want to read. It’s indeed way less addicting.

(Twitter really wants you to log in and view your feed but they’ll still let you read the site this way)

Yet, the possible resistance is also on the consuming side. It requires a lot of willpower not to flow with the river, but tools like Fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/) help a bit in following people not trends.

I like the "collaborative-newspaper" idea a lot.

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

Thus usenet was reinvented

I bought newsto.me like a decade ago with a plan to build a collaborative news site complete with gamification to really help the collaborative bit (eg one user writes a bit about a house fire happening, a photog in the area could earn points for snapping a photo and adding it to the story)

Never found sufficient time/motivation to execute on it. Still think it would be kinda cool though.

I'd love a high latency app as well, but there is undeniable magic in instant communication. My best writing is often when I'm "hot" on a topic and can quickly go back and forth with others on the idea. Steam could quickly run out for that type of thing without instant communication.

Continuing to brainstorm--

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.

I wonder how much sense it would make for there to be some (simple) function you can tweak a number on to set a balance between the latency and lifetime of your message?

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.

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