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Comment by derekzhouzhen | Hacker News Reader

I tried, and see that it does what it claims to do. For this kind of alternative social networks you need to answer this question first:

If there is no network effect, which you don't have and will not have in the foreseeable future, what value do you provide?

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Thanks for trying it out. It's not really meant to be a social network, it's more like a multiplayer tool. We wanted a lightweight piece of software where you can post links and your friends can see them in a feed. Something like newsletters or RSS feeds or Twitter without ads, recommended topics and replies. When you have a couple of friends with a similar need, blnk instantly provides value, no network effect needed.

Network effects do matter of course, but more in a context of app’s distribution, I think.

I like the idea of network, but also I have some negative feelings about HN/Redit.

The problem with the comments is that it is way to easy to go out of rails, then you need moderation and "karma" what I think is awful, because pushes everything to the uniformity of the "majority".

One idea (did not think it through, just a shoot in the blue): what if you can replay to other links, but you have to reply with a link? Yet one notch: you can replay positive or negative, that is a link in the same spirit/direction, or a link stating the opposite opinion.

Cool idea! I can imagine something like that going viral. A social game of sorts.

The Oldest Game, in link format? That's actually pretty clever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZOwaeAEIw0

> When you have a couple of friends with a similar need, blnk instantly provides value, no network effect needed.

So you still need a network to have value, only that you don't need a large network? You mentioned newsletter and RSS, which you don't have, so people have to visit your site to get the links. So compare to newsletter and RSS, your site has less value on the same scale of network, right?

When all the onlookers are gone, there will be only yourself on your site. Do you still want to post links there, when no one else is looking?

Yeah, I get what you mean. But we've been using it for the last couple of months just the three of us (the team behind it) and we found it valuable. Now of course it would be more useful to me if I could follow a hundred people posting high-quality links instead of just two, but I think the diminishing returns kick in pretty soon.

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