Hacker News Reader

Comment by murphyslab | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com