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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

There's social modeling suggesting that simple ideas (anger etc) dominate in overly-connected networks. That's why the friction you mention is important. This has bothered me for a long time, so I made the opposite of Artifact a while back: https://www.recents.cc

You follow a few people, and you get whatever links they post, no algo or frontpage. You repost good stuff, so a link can travel several hops to someone, but it must have been filtered through a friend. Kinda like real life. In the time that I've used it with my friends, I've seen a nice balance of mainstream and niche stuff in my feed.

HN is great too, but it's a niche.

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I think it is more about an exploration-exploitation problem. I think you're focusing on the exploitation aspect too much. Algorithms like TikTok's do well with respect to exploration because there is a low cost for a bad recommendation. The quick content allows the algorithm to update quickly to the users current mood. This isn't going to be true for articles, where you are going to have spend more time and energy on the content being provided. This means that you have to more quickly model a person's mood/energy levels when they are using the app (you can determine this faster with quick content because you are iterating faster). Exploration is an important part of the overall reinforcement strategy because as humans our cost function is constantly changing, we do crave novelty (just in different levels). If you don't have the exploration side, and only have exploitation, then you just end up in a bubble (a bit can be good, but life needs spice). Worse, you'll end up bored.

> Worse, you'll end up bored.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU

> Apathy's a tragedy

> And boredom is a crime

But if you’re bored then you’re boring

The agony and the irony, they're killing me (uhh ooo)

Dream Song #14, John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn,

and moreover my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored

means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature,

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes

as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag

and somehow a dog

has taken itself & its tail considerably away

into mountains or sea or sky, leaving

behind: me, wag.

> You repost good stuff, so a link can travel several hops to someone, but it must have been filtered through a friend.

This is exactly how Tumblr works, and is a big part of why Tumblr is actually a great social network for the people who have stuck it out there.

I tried Tumblr, and it felt like a way better version of Twitter. Had me follow some trending accounts for a few topics. Then I get three feeds, default being those I follow, others being the algo or my tags. I can like, share, or repost stuff. The UI is clean, it doesn't lag my laptop, and signup took me about 1/3 the time vs signing up for Twitter.

So the social difference from Twitter is they kept the chrono following-only feed? It's nice but not what I envisioned for Recents. I wanted to avoid any kind of global "trending" aspect and focus all interaction on reposts. I'm probably reinventing a wheel somewhere, but not one that I've seen.

Can't wait for ActivityPub support so I can control the UX better with a different client.

Come to think of it, this what User Agents were supposed to be, but we just added a few more layers on top (for that sweet sweet ad revenue juice), and now are stripping some of it with the likes of Mastodon.

Tumblr was very close to the perfect social media network. It's a shame it succumbed to corporate greed after the Yahoo acquisition. I really hope someone manages to recreate it as a decentralized protocol

It's no longer owned by Yahoo! but by Automattic (WordPress) now. As for decentralized, they've posted recently about their intent to support ActivityPub.

The problem is not about the broadcast capabilities, they already support RSS.

The problem is about their content censoring. I don't reckon Automattic reversed the "sexually explicit" purge initiated by Yahoo. I'm not interested in a social network that censors ~30% [1] of the global art production. For now Twitter is the better place for relatively free content sharing.

[1]: Number pulled out of my hat, but the human nude being the most popular drawing subject ever, I wouldn't be surprised if this is close to reality.

The comment I was going to write initially:

You might enjoy "Rage Inside the Machine" by Robert Eliott Smith which describes how systems like social networks can be manipulated by introducing a small group of highly motivated, but strategically placed actors (human or algorithmic).

And now, unsolicited UX feedback, Hacker News style™!

1. put the content of "?" in the front page for users who are not logged in, instead of "you're not following anyone" 2. split the 3 key points you mention there into three columns with titles, so the user (no need to do anything more complex, just throw in a flexbox in CSS)

I like the idea of the site, but 1. would make its purpose a bit more obvious/save you some time explaining the idea, and 2. would make the now obvious easier to digest by a new user/scan visually

Thanks for the tips. As you can maybe tell, I'm pretty new to UI dev. A lot of those divs are using fixed pixel sizes calculated by hand in React because I lost my patience with CSS, but yeah I'll put the (?) page into a flexbox.

> social networks can be manipulated by introducing a small group of highly motivated, but strategically placed actors

I should read the book and see if there's anything I didn't think of, cause one of my top concerns was making something hard to exploit.

Hmm, reading the comments elsewhere here have given me the idea of giving each Recents user an RSS feed, cause why not.

Someone should one day write a desktop RSS aggregator that finally makes use of <rating> element. (with a website producing the feeds)

It's a bit of a pain figuring out PICS rating and rating services but I think it is a fantastic idea (that found only stupid implementation in parental supervision and porn filtering)

It seems to close to what you describe to not mention it.

https://www.w3.org/PICS/services-960303.html

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/rss/pics-rating.htm

I'll read through that later today before I start with the RSS feature.

This is a great idea. I totally agree. It's the same design we've chosen for the social network in Peergos. Two main differences are we enforce no server-side algorithmic curation by being e2e encrypted, and posts can be anything, text, images, videos, links. If you're interested you can read more here:

https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media

I'm glad more people are coming around to this idea.

Impressive! Yeah, I think this is the natural evolution. Chat apps were the hot thing after social networks, and things are appearing in the middle. Though you're going for ambitious security.

Thanks! The security is partially a defense against future owners/operators of your server. But I'm totally sold on the idea of only seeing things shared by people you follow.

This is basically how I use twitter. I follow a few friends and some stuff I like. I retweet stuff that I like and that I think they might potentially like. They do the same. Add to that some microblogging, and conversations that emerge from that, and you have a great social media. At least for me and them.

As it should be!

Signed up... is there any way I can read anything? I was hoping for a list of users or something.

Heh, maybe I should've posted the link to follow my own account (hotgril2) on there, but I didn't want to seem too advertise-y. This also makes me follow you back. I post a mix of tech, history, world politics, and music.

https://www.recents.cc/#/refer?code=gsil5ltfvf

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