Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

Oooooh! So it's like email, but worse? Worse because:

It doesn't scale to infinity like email does.

Someone else centralises the data and you have to trust them to keep it safe. Email doesn't have this problem because I can take my emails elsewhere and/or change my address, something I've done plenty of times.

You don't know what they're doing with the data and you don't now who can access it. The same applies with email, except I know who Google are and I know they're "reading" it. I accept this cost. I don't know who "Slow Social" are.

It's a whole new system for elderly (and even not-so-elderly) relatives to get to grips with. They get email today. They use email right now.

It's another website that needs another login for my mum to remember, except she'll just use the same password again (and again), until one day it's breached.

I think growth, innovation, and ideas are important, but I also wish we'd focus on building on and improving the systems we already have.

So I guess I have to ask: why not (better) email? Why not a new email system that's interoperable with the existing system, but offers a better UI focused on sharing stories with each other?

> Someone else centralises the data and you have to trust them to keep it safe. Email doesn't have this problem because I can take my emails elsewhere and/or change my address, something I've done plenty of times.

I'm not going to defend any social network, and I think that in essence you are right; but using email is a terrible idea.

Is just that people don't understand email any more

When I've been added to a email chain (last time at the end of the 2010s), it was an awful experience: you can't get out, people including addresses in "To" so they get added to all recipients address book (they keep a copy of each email, security depends on each user of the chain!), windows users get infected with viruses and you start getting those as well, nobody will remove anything from the emails so you get huge emails with top-posts without context on what they are replying to, ... it was a mess!

I have no reasons to think things have improved.

So perhaps a better email is needed, and I wonder if it may look like a social network.

> It doesn't scale to infinity like email does. The article clearly states you can turn your posts into e-mails

> Someone else centralises the data and you have to trust them to keep it safe. That goes for any public medium. At least these guys have a clearly stated mission not to harvest, package and sell your data. Also, see above for your email remark.

> You don't know what they're doing with the data and you don't now who can access it. See both replies above

> It's a whole new system for elderly Again, it can be turned into emails

> It's another website that needs another login for my mum to remember, except she'll just use the same password again (and again), until one day it's breached. See above + unrelated issue

> Why not (better) email? Because rebuilding email and convincing everyone to use that is a lot harder than trying to launch a new, experimental social media platform.

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