Show HN: A social feed with no algo where communities decide what gets seen | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A social feed with no algo where communities decide what gets seen

veridonia.com

10 pointssmnkgv7 comments

Love the decentralized and open source approach. I'm building Exogram (Django/AGPL-3.0) to solve the same 'engagement' problem, but using semantic similarity of book highlights instead of voting.

No popularity metrics, just readers connecting through ideas. Would love to exchange 'failure mode' notes!

Repo: https://github.com/matzalazar/exogram

Good to see a fellow anti-engager! If you send me an invite, I will definitely give it a try. As for the "readers connecting by using semantic similarity of books" - That is a great idea. I wonder, how have you addressed the "formation of echo chambers" problem? Or is it not the goal of this particular project (now/ever)?

Actually, the invitation tree (with its user-defined depth levels) is our primary defense for privacy and trust, ensuring you only interact with people within a certain 'social distance'.

To counter the echo chamber effect, we rely on the semantic engine. Since Exogram connects you through shared ideas across different books, it often surfaces perspectives from outside your immediate social circle. It prioritizes intellectual affinity over social or popular consensus.

Looking forward to seeing you on the waitlist! :)

as a user of the digg revival(another social network that died but had good backing), i'm highly skeptical of the new approaches of 'anti-reddit/botting/addictive design'

the reason being I don't think people address the supply side of the equation: why should I an individual contribute to your ecosystem of content? I personally left digg because there wasn't any new content and I wasn't getting enough satisfaction with the current engagement? Ironic right? Any new subreddits also suffer from this same problem, little engagement until a threashold is crossed-1k members,5k members,etc it depends on the community. To get to their is extremely hard and it would make more sense to go to an existing ecosystem like X, LinkedIn, Reddit,Instagram etc

plz don't take this as criticism of the idea, but rather the blind spot that I've seen many times with these new social media sites.

Thank you for your comment! That is a very valid observation - network effect is hard to beat. Moreover, because of how our voting system works, the project becomes even more dependent on community size than, say, reddit, that has a top-down moderation structure. And it is also dependent on volunteers voting on the content and on moderation proposals. That is more work than, say, clicking upvotes sometimes or just consuming content. But hey, if in exchange you get better bot resistance, better content, and full transparency, would the additional effort not be worth it?

And, of course, as the hero section of the landing page says, this is still an experiment. Indeed, it does not matter whether it works mathematically if it does not work psychologically - this is what we want to test!

Just saw this, it still feels like youre focusing on what demand side of the equation.

Stuff like better content, bots, and transparency don’t really affect me. Now engagement with me=>now you got my attention.

It can be hard or tedious to even get comments on other platforms. TikTok you need 1 month of videos while on LinkedIn the sweet spot is around 2k+ followers. I don’t really care how you do it, but if you’re able to create a hacker news ecosystem but for mass social media-that’s awesome

a few years ago, when I was trying to "return back" to social media, I realised there was kind of nowhere to go. All social feeds were either engagement-driven and wanted too much of my attention at the cost of content quality, or chronological, where the burden of sorting was on me, or editorial, where there were fixed elites doing all the sorting/filtering.

This is our attempt at making a feed that answers a more human-centric question. Instead of collecting likes, upvotes, views, etc. to answer the question of "What is getting the most traction today", or "what is most popular today" - it does none of that and just lets users decide what gets published (and, consequently, seen by everyone) through randomised majority voting. Basically, it tries to answer the question: "What does each community as a whole decide is worth attention today?"

Answering this question was not easy. After trial and error, we can reliably say that it does work mathematically, on simulation, and "on the paper". But it still remains to be seen whether there are other failure modes we did not think of, such as psychological, game theory-based, etc. After all, as far as we're aware, such a design hasn't been tried before, and there may be solid reasons for why - please help us see them!

on this experimental note - I hope you'll like it, and I am here to answer any questions you may have! Cheers!

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