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Comment by The-Bus | Hacker News Reader

Not to rain on your specific parade but I think enough "sharing" options have emerged (whether through regular chat, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, let alone existing social networks) that I'm not sure what this is trying to solve. Looking at your first five features on the landing page:

I already have a set of grouped contacts across different apps ( Circles, Private Interactions) all with encryption (Encrypted Posts) and it's trivial to switch across apps to share anything, especially via the phone, which stores any media I'm sharing ( The Vault).

The friction from downloading a specific app then also getting all of my different contacts on that app so I can replicate functionality that already exists makes this seem like a non-starter for me.

Is there some additional functionality or hook I'm missing? Not trying to be snarky, asking genuinely.

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I disagree here. I strongly believe there's a market for a better social media app, that messaging apps are not hitting. Why? messaging apps (chat, discord, WhatsApp, Signal) are not really social media - they're organized differently with communication at the center and content sharing on the edge (as opposed to Facebook, with content sharing at the center and communication on the edge).

That edge v. center distinction dictates the use patterns, and social media is therefore used differently than a chat app. With a chat app, the social media aspect is drowned out by the sheer volume of communication, largely text based and not media based.

But why is there a market? There is a growing movement to get away from Meta-based social media apps, because they're incredibly addictive and rob users of their attention / time. That being said, I still want to see what my friends are doing... but I'm sick of needing to choose between getting life updates from friends or having my brain back.

Build me a platform that isn't Meta-based and isn't addictive and lets me share fun things with my friends and I'll gladly pay a monthly fee for it.

Appreciate this, thanks! The points you've made here hit the nail on the head for taking the choices we have.

Would love to chat about your current social usage and what you would expect from us in a way that you'd be happy to pay for. Can get me via email at james@oncircles.com if you'd be up for chatting!

Telegram is very much about content sharing. News, hobby groups, paid adult content, crypto scams, memes - it has it all. Although primarily in Russian.

That's fair enough! We're definitely not trying to build for everyone and it's good you have solutions set for yourself. Our proposition is simply to have a place to share/broadcast to the different sets of people in your life, away from social media.

In that, chat apps are great but are not designed for sharing individual updates, without running several different conversations & dealing with notifications.

Appreciate the feedback though & hopefully we'll develop into something that can gets you excited.

Just go try it out?

How to try a social-sharing-network thing without the social-network?

All that does is share content with nobody. To what? Practice pressing the share button in yet-another app? (I'm sure the workflow is common as the others)

Let's agree that spending 3 minutes typing an essay asking "what does it do" could be better spent actually evaluating the product and reporting back with info for the rest of us

Appreciate this! We really welcome the feedback & are happy to hear it, positive or negative.

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