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Comment by CitrusFruits | Hacker News Reader

Hey everyone, OP here.

I, like many others tend to waffle between loving and hating social media, so this is my take on what I think a better solution looks like. This is something I've been working on for the past couple of months and a concept that I think will be though provoking, if nothing else, to the HN community. If you want to read more on my thoughts and the story behind this, you can check out my blog post here: https://dev.to/duensing/introducing-slow-social-4a90

Besides that, I'm happy to answer questions and take criticism.

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If it hasn't been mentioned, you should learn from the social media app Path.

It limited the amount of friends you could have. As a result, people didn't add friends because they didn't want to give up a space for a potential future connection. The scarcity worked against Path.

You might find the same result where people won't post because they'll be afraid of using up their allotment when they may have a better one later.

Thanks, that's a good tip! I'll definitely check them out.

And yup, definitely a concern. Makes me think that perhaps there's a possibility to not cap the posts, but rather have any posts outside of the first one in a week have something like a "secondary" tag. Then again, you might run into the problem that Instagram has where everyone stopped posting as soon as stories caught on.

Alas, it's a tricky problem.

I think the weekly post idea really applies to the reader, not the writer. Perhaps you could get around this with a "digest" style of posting. I.e. I can write as many posts as I want, but it will only be published once a week as a digest of posts. This might fit better with human behavior too as it lowers the cost of a single post while still achieving the goal of updating friends on what's happening at a spaced interval.

Anyway, love the idea. Good luck!

Maybe you can only see one post per friend per week in the feed, but then you can click into their profile to see the whole of their posts.

I have nothing to add except I fully second this. Perhaps a counter icon indicating 'other posts exist'

I would definitely not cap the posts, nor would I limit in any way their consumption. If I have something to say, why should I not be able to? And if I am interested in what someone does, I don't want to wait for a week to read it.

That said, it is important how the posts are presented. A person who posts all the time about each plate of food... might not be as interesting as another friend who writes only once a month, but usually about really interesting things. A good UI which puts control in the hands of the consumer (but easy to use - convenience matters) is the most important thing here imho.

Best of luck!

A "I only want to see [5] posts a day from Freddy" function would be good.

Attenuate with a temporal component. Share short bursty material with the people you frequently interact with and dither out over time. Pin things you want your infrequent contacts to see. You keep your “free” speech while slowing the spread of batshit insane brain worms naturally.

Why not just allow your users to write their weekly post during all the week (and saving it while not publishing it) but just allowing to publish once a week ?

In doing so, there would be no real scarcity for the writer (the post can be edited to the infinity) and you encourage writing long prose.

Your UX should show that editing the post is the default option and publishing it should be some ritual (maybe send a notification when it is possible?)

I just tested, it works exactly this way. You start editing and do it over time until you publish it. It is not obvious from UX though.

Why not publish all the drafts, in whatever state they are. Just that for the whole week, you'll be able to work on that week's 1 post.

The ability to edit the weekly post seems like it could remedy this. Would probably see folks embrace the journaling approach by using headers to timestamp them.

That would be great!

I'm sick of articles needing follow ups or corrections instead get a separate, unlinked post.

Articles become stale but they get shared and referenced as if they're the final point on the subject.

Allow edits to the post, or allow the author to append short updates to it, or something else, but I think the rate limit is an interesting thing and worth sticking with at this stage. It's a principle that once you break would be hard to reestablish. The main risk is that slow posting probably means slow growth, and that is a reason to add some kind of exception -- but try to make it limited it, imo.

Maybe new users can make secondary posts, and as they post more and connect with people, you guide them somehow towards 1/week. Sort of reversing the traditional pattern that new users might need to be rate limited when they first sign up, instead what you want is for established users to post slowly.

Everyone should get a post refresh at the exact same time. So if you don’t use your post that week, you lose it.

That seems like a bad idea, i want to post shortly after an event, not wait for a week

Then use twitter

I feel like you could achieve your aim by just cutting out the content that isn’t even posted by your friends (or is lazily shared by a friend, but originates with a commercial entity).

Why don't you do something like consolidate any posts made within one week to one post? Some have suggested a blog-like digest that gets posted once a week. Why not do something like what you're doing but make it one long post with multiple updates (maybe with timestamps)

Say I post something about my weekend on Monday, it could be important about the loss of a family member or the birth of a child. Maybe I don't want to wait a number of days for that to appear on someone's feed...

But I could also post something new later that week. If it was consolidated into a weekly post it'd end up more like a digest at the end, and someone logging into the social network on Friday would see everything that happened to me so far that week.

It's a play on some of the ideas others have had, but the trick is timing. If my posts are digested to a weekly summary, it's going to reduce incentives for anyone to log in and use the platform on any day but "post day". Additionally if I'm free on Friday to spend time on there, but your new digest won't be posted until Saturday, I'm going to miss everything that's happened to you all week.

People should be afraid to post. Erring on the side of less content is better, as the content isn’t all that valuable in the best of times.

It might very well be that the best social media is simple private messaging.

The app BeReal is getting press lately. The one post a day is a photo and they solve the holding back problem by making it an impulsive post at a preset time. It’s not supposed to communicate everything you did in a day only what you are doing in the scheduled moment.

https://text.npr.org/1092814566

I think your general vibe is good here, but I don't think you need the posting limit, necessarily. Compared to Facebook, to make it less about re-sharing spam and the like, and more like a conversation, what you need is:

* More emphasis on text (which you already have, great)

* Less emphasis on photos. I hate how when you create a post on FB with a lot of text and photos, photos get much more space within the post layout, it should be reversed if you want a conversation, and if people want to see a bigger version they can always click them to blow them up.

* Links aren't treated as special. You can include them in your posts and people can click them, but they shouldn't result in including a photo+description on the post.

* No sharing other people's posts. You can copy+paste and link to their post (which will only work for other friends of them), but no re-sharing.

Especially those last two mean that you don't get the 'spam' of people sharing content from other people or websites.

Anyway, overall great job, this is definitely something I wanna see. Facebook is full of news spam/hot takes and the like, Instagram is largely just photos and videos, I really want something that's focused on what my immediate friends and families wanna talk about (not just share photos of).

Just a word of caution on soliciting product feedback on here, HN users are a notoriously unrepresentative bunch (with a lot of bad ideas). Better to try ways to get it into the hands of more normal people and see what makes it go 'viral'

Maybe looking for what makes it go 'viral' is not the right approach for "a social network built for friends, not influencers".

They’re not mutually exclusive. WhatsApp had viral growth and it used mainly for friends. If it doesn’t have viral growth how else is it going to grow?

The rate limitation sounds good for a general audience of one's connections, but there are a lot of times when life calls for more frequent updates, particularly in times of emergency and medical crisis where the changes to one's life circumstances change by the day, if not by the hour. Posting, "Andy is in the hospital", then needing to wait a week to post, "Andy died 1 hour after being admitted to the hospital". One suggestion might be to allow posts to be threaded, so that updates to an initial post can be added without waiting an entire week.

Not the OP but I think the answer for this is that communication of medical/health issues is best handled by a more private form of media.

I'd want to use both. Using private media is more reliable if you remember everyone relevant but that's hard.

For medical issues, I agree that private is usually best; or at least restricted to close friends and family. Imminent death often has an adjacent position, where people commonly wish to share with a broader audience.

However it was just an example of an emergency where one might strongly desire to update a broad range of friends and family quickly. Other situations might be natural disasters or a house fire where one "We're alive!" post might require a follow-up the next day with more details, needs, or grief.

It's just to say that an unyielding, global rate limit would not serve peoples' interests well.

I sometimes wonder whether our goal of making everything as convenient & frictionless as possible is part of our problem. By serving some of our short-term interests, are we jeopardizing our long-term interests?

I'm personally okay with seeing products that have well-intended friction built into them.

I don't have skin in this game and will probably never use it anyways, but to me that is a non starter for this whole project. Why would I want to limit how often my friends can post? The problem with FB isn't that my friends post to much, it's that I never see what my friends post.

Why would I want to limit my speed in my own car?

Because others exist

If there was anything that we learned from the pandemic is people are not in any way considerate of others needs.

This argument makes sense to me in a public space, like twitter. But among a close knit group of friends? Not one bit. They are directly advertising this as a space built for "friends", not influencers. Having to time-filter your friends sounds like a really negative friendship dynamic.

Then you can already use a Telegram channel. (Or an RSS feed if your friends can bother.) It fits your needs pretty well. You don’t need a new social media app.

Maybe. The only reason I keep facebook active is because I have 25 first cousins, and that doesn't include their spouses, or the 25 children that comprise my younger first cousins once removed, some of who are adults already.

So when one of my 2 score aunts and uncles has a medical emergency, nobody wants to play phone tag around the world, even with group text messages.

Point being, even people without huge families like mine sometimes have big social groups.

I think there's a case to be made that whatever you write after a week of reflection will be of more value or at least higher quality than what you'd be able to send off immediately when someone dies. Certainly there's a need for a space that puts quality over immediacy. There are already a dozen channels by which you can update people with short bursts of information, but by their nature those channels are not well suited to more thoughtful posting.

I don't agree here. This social network is a tool for one method of communication. It doesn't need to be a platform for all types of communication. By trying to excel at everything, it would do nothing particularly well.

You choose the right tool for the job. If a friend is in critical care at the hospital with life threatening injuries, do you really think "slow social" is the appropriate service to use? That's just being silly. As the name suggests, this service is designed for the opposite type of communication. It's like complaining that Sharpie markers should make thinner lines because sometimes you need to write complex notes. Or, that Ferrari should modify their cars because sometimes you need to tow a boat.

This is exactly the app idea I pitched my wife with the working title “What’s Happening”. Which she had turned into a joke at my expense. I wish you luck!

FYI: when I gave my email address to sign up, the very bare email that hit my gmail inbox went straight to spam.

You're going to need to do more to keep it on the 'not spam' list, I think.

The link to follow 404s for me… perhaps because I put a plus sign in my email?

I'm really curious what your business model is and how you make money. I looked under those sections on the about page, but they don't actually answer the question.

The app is just launching, and it's a side hustle. Everything right now can run on a free tier, and I'm fairly certain I can support a _very_ sizeable amount of users for < $100 of operating overhead, which is cash I'd totally be willing to spare if I had thousands of users enjoying the app.

But, if I get there, the plan would be to explore charging something reasonable for a plus tier which would offer more formatting options, more pictures per post, and a couple other things, for something nominal like $3 of a month. That could help cover the overhead, and maybe would result in some cash on the side.

I think there's a lot of honesty and practicality in your response but not the transparency or clarity needed for this to scale. These networks require buy-in / critical mass to function as intended, and not knowing if I (or my friends) will agree to the pricing terms after I get my network on board is a hard stop for me.

I do like the idea. Well designed limitations can add a lot of appeal, and in social spaces especially they can be fun to play within.

None of the other social networks you were an early adopter of told your their future monetization plans did they?

The two that I used to maintain personal connections and communicate in ways worth archiving were Myspace and Facebook. For Myspace I was a teen. Same with Facebook. My connections were from school so if either disappeared I'd just have to talk to them the next day. Also both had attained critical mass at some sort of scale by the time they popped up on my radar, and were fairly new ideas so it's not like I was able to shop around. I just went where my friends were.

Exactly. They’ve learned from experience what happens.

I think perhaps an option is not to limit how often people can post, but limit how little they post, i.e. there is a minimum word limit for each post. Add the 'like' options for any general short response (agree, like, love, sad, angry, +1, haha, shock, thanks, etc), but having a minimum demands at least some effort into posting.

The obvious problem is people just posting /10char type responses to hit the character limit, but if it's a word limit with some AI that can recognise 'bad' patterns in structure it could be mitigated to an extent.

You could add a grammar checker and advise corrections or perhaps prompt to improve the message if particularly poor. This would be implemented for public posts only, because for private conversations it is not so relevant to positive discourse.

For years I've thought that dating sites could benefit from such post limits. If one could write 3 posts per day I think one would be more careful about what is posted and success might be shifted a bit from quantity of posts to their quality instead.

I like the idea. I think it would be nice to read in SlowSocial how will posts be treated. Will the company's algorithms read them? parse them? Put users into categories? I assume not, but it might be nice to display this in the front page.

And maybe there are useful ideas in https://www.humanetech.com/technologists ?

Have you talked to Joe Edelman? He would have all kinds of good ideas for you.

Who is Joe Edelman?

http://nxhx.org/

Def talk to Joe Edelman.

I like the idea because the restrictions on new friends seeing old posts is a similar vibe to one I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

I keep dreaming about an ephemeral social network that functions more like a party — posts expire after a time. I appreciate that there’s not a permanent record of every conversation at a party for people to review later.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic for FidoNet. We expired posts in Echomail groups because we had small hard drives. I appreciate that most of my youthful rants aren’t on archive.org. Unfortunately, some of the dumb nonsense I wrote in 1987 will outlive me.

I would enjoy the freedom to talk with friends and know it vanishes a few weeks later.

Looks great and love the concept. What’s the tech stack behind it?

I'm using Supabase, Sveltekit, Tailwind, SendGrid, and Netlify.

SvelteKit has been a lot of fun but definitely has a few rough edges. Supabase has been awesome, but as you can probably see, from the comments elsewhere, has some kinks around magic link based authentication.

Do you understand the underlying technologies of Supabase and these other frameworks? Just curious.

And how are you liking supabase as opposed to other quick start solutions?

FYI my magic link went to spam. Dunno if it's the gmail spam filter or the one in Apple Mail. But that's where it ended up. There was also a typo in the onboarding process ("from thos[e] close to you").

The email-based create-an-account link is 404ing for me, using an iPhone and Brave browser.

I’ve not used your service because I don’t know anyone who’s on it and I won’t invite anyone to a new social network right away. Too many burnt fingers. So what I am sharing is my social network wish list.

Give a minimum characters/words post and same for photo posts.

Do not show amount of reshares/likes (if at all you allow that; you should not - just let people reply to posts). Definitely add minimum words limits to comments/responses. Let the low effort appreciations or disagreements propagate heart to heart.

Have an idea of a non-searchable ID (I like that from https://slowly.app/ - very similar names as well :)) that one can have - it’s unique and decently readable and completely avoids “reserve the username as a real estate” bullshit of many social networks. You have one to but it isn’t apparent it can be used that way.

And I know it may not sound reasonable or even feasible but I wouldn’t mind some kind of federation. I am slowly tending to hate the walled gardens more and more.

As a general social network it may not take off and if it doesn’t then one wouldn’t want to just post in a circle of 3.5 people (that two and half being people who just opened accounts but are not active).

Once a week seems too less and too limiting. Will the weeks when one didn’t post be accumulated to a max accumulation (and even these can’t be used more than once a day, or once in a two days maybe)?

There’s no way to delete the old posts, or I can’t see one.

Clicking start conversation shares the other person’s email and intimates an email compose. Is that intentional? Or is it pre-alpha build?

Anyway, there was an old submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731419. I don’t really remember a lot from it (definitely nothing from the post) but maybe give it a look.

Sorry, but why not just send an email to all your friends once a week?

I have no idea why we think we need to complicate our relationships with any third party...

The only reason why social media works is because it is horrible and addictive, Your product is neither of those, so it will never work.

3rd parties like email hosting providers or messaging services?

Pull works better for stories/updates because then the reader has control over how often they want to check in an see what their friends are doing.

“Oh but if you wanted that you could just something something with e-mail rules something something Dropbox curl ftpfs.”

This is great!

Coincidentally I've been working on a prototype that is almost the exact same idea. I had very similar motivations and a feeling that "slow social" (I was calling it the same thing even!) is something that can potentially break some people free from cycles of nonstop engagement and the unexpected downsides of always on, public and sharable social networks.

I hope you have success with it! Know that you're not alone in feeling like we need a solution like this. I think I'm far enough along with my prototype that I might as well see it through to completion anyways, but either way it's heartening to see that folks are feeling the same way I am about social networks.

Congrats on the build! I had a similar idea and worked on a similar project a few months back: https://infreq.social/ it obviously doesn't have the same polish that your project has, but the mission as far as what the end goal is for the frequency of the user viewing posts, and the ideal way of monetizing the platform are very much the same.

It's great to see that I'm not the only one with this crazy idea!

I wonder if a "leaky bucket" analogy might be interesting, with a bucket size >1. Say, 5 posts a week, you can make 5 today and then another one once the bucket empties enough.

Or maybe a couple categories: Cat 1, limited to 1 a week, cat 2 limited to 1 a day, cat 3 limited to, I dunno, a few times a day. Or 1/month, 1/week, 1/day? Then when I subscribe to someone I can pick which level I want?

I, personally, tend to prefer more smaller things, as opposed to a big wall of text. But, I'm also willing to admit this just might not be for me.

This is great, and I really appreciate the time you took to explain your thinking. I have similar feelings about the social networks out there, and I’m working on my own take on what I want. It’s very different than what you did, so I’m curious to try yours out and see what everyone has to say. We need more experiments like this - unabashedly anti-engagement and pro-utility.

Good luck with this!

Looks like this may work for older generations where the pace of life is different and things are less spontaneous. I’m looking forward to see where it will go.

older folk seem to have zero issues with facebook though. All over my feed and groups is 60+ people posting. Younger people have largely abandoned ship

I mean 35-40 and older, not the retirement age. 90% of my friends in this age have gone offline or keep their old blogs for posting. They may keep the accounts or even read some stuff sometimes, but social networks of 2010s are dead for them. This is in Europe though, maybe in other parts of the world it is different.

Does the .us TLD mean you are only interested in US users?

I’m guessing it’s “us” as in “something for all of us.”

Typo on the welcome - onboarding page: "get updates from thos close to you." /thos/those

One post per week is too limiting!! There are days when I want to talk to or mention 10 friends!

Why not IM those friends?

How do you plan to sustain this as user base grows? Ads, subscriptions, donations?

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