There are no new social networks | Hacker News Reader

There are no new social networks

7 pointsasim6 comments

It's interesting to see the launch of Threads but then realise there are actually no new social networks, just a rehash of old. Threads is piggybacking off the Instagram social graph. Twitter is now a pretty dated phenomenon as is Facebook and the rest of it. Our slacks and discords are showing their age as well as obviously reddit and what have you. HN in my eyes is a quality lasting network but at the same time, I find myself longing for something fresh, more real time, but to discuss topics of meaning beyond tech, politics, etc. A non-influencer network, a non-follower network. Somewhere the discussion is 1:1 in a way that everyone is on equal footing and there is no such thing as a voting system. We are missing something vitally new and different yet reminiscent of the 90s world of chat rooms. Where is the public open chats of cyber space?

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A social network's utility scales exponentially with size (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%27s_law). The front end can decay, but people will still use it since everyone else is on it.

This is especially true with dating sites -- why even try a small startup's dating site when you'll get way more matches on Tinder?

What makes it even more difficult to leave incumbents is that the industry has basically found a few replicable ways to effectively hijack attention/dollars. IMC has integrated them into each of their dating apps (Tinder, OKC, Match, etc). For example, one of the first hit dating sites was Hot or Not, of which Tinder is essentially a mobile phone version.

This is a good thing , yes? The last thing I want is for social networks to be like fashion that you need to use a new social network every 6 months

There are new social networks, such as Subreply:

https://subreply.com/

There are no new social networks. It's just human society wiring itself through Internet. And Internet is also an existing network. I mean, we all stand on the shoulder of giants.

This doesn't mean that Meta leveraging Instagram to create a Twitter replacement is not a significant step.

> Where is the public open chats of cyber space?

It used to be every tech-savvy person had their own PhpBB instance and built small communities with that. All that has largely migrated to Discord, Reddit, Facebook Groups, and to a lesser extent: Lemmy & Mastodon. There's also quite niche and bespoke communities like Subreply[0], Tildes[1], and Raddle[2] (Built with Postmill). I prefer the Reddit style Karma system over the 'Micro-blogging' system. Everyone has their preferences.

[0] https://subreply.com/trending

[1] http://tildes.net/

[2] https://raddle.me/

I don't understand the rationale for "micro-blogging". Why should a site limit the length of messages to an unreasonably low number of characters, say 200 or 400? Why?

I understand there was a case for that in mobile texting because of technological costs and the ability to charge more for more messages. But in the web, why should you put an artificial very low limit on how much people can say?

And as to Twitter, why would anybody prefer a platform where you can't even edit your messages?

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