Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobbygoodlatte | Hacker News Reader

Yep. A very sad truth.

It would be quite a challenge to re-create what FB circa 2006-2010 or so was like. Before influencers and engagement farming. Before it became "social media" and was just a "social utility"

The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.

Group chat apps somewhat fill this product void, but not completely. There was something magical about a social network being somewhat open & organic that group chats can't capture

View on HN

> The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.

We need the Craigslist of friends and family social networks. A company that is just aggressively disinterested in bloat or hyper engagement.

Something where "re-sharing" doesn't exist and links are deemphasized in the UX, so it's more focused on your content (hopefully you talking about your own life, thoughts, etc.). Especially text content, with photos/videos present, but a bit deemphasized.

Absolutely no business or "influencer" pages, of course.

There is an app like that. It’s called mewe, when Facebook was being especially egregious in some privacy overreach a bunch of people I know checked it out, but we were so burned from all the other social networks that we weren’t willing to use it like we had used to use Facebook. I think that time has just passed.

Yeah, getting the necessary momentum is really hard.

Isn’t this just an internet forum? Or are you still interested in maintaining the social graph which brings it outside the realm of Craigslist.

> We need the Craigslist of friends and family social networks.

It was already starting to go downhill in mid-2006 (when it became available to anyone). The golden age was 2004-2006. I remember after it opened to the public most college students already decided it wasn't that cool anymore.

> The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.

This doesn't make sense to me: the Facebook from back then didn't support "engagement optimizers" as it didn't have a pervasive programmatic newsfeed trying to show you posts from random people you might like: it showed you posts from your friends, and if none of your friends were "influencers" you simply couldn't see any influencer content even if every other user on the site who wasn't your friend was an influencer.

Just limit the number of people that a person can follow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com