Comment by tikimcfee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tikimcfee | Hacker News Reader

After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about."

That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together.

I may start using it, even if that's a highly marketed phrase just because it's so much better than, "CLICK HERE TO LIKE AND SHOW PEOPLE HOW MUCH GOOD YOU ARE AND HERE ARE POINTS YOU CAN MEASURE AND NOW WE OWN YOUR WHOLE LIFE HISTORY ALSO GIVE US MONEY AND HERE'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR YOU KTHXBYE".

And yes, that's exactly what I hear in my head when I hear someone works for Facebook or Google or the socials out there that aren't decentralized or at least trying to be some form of humane. Sorry, I don't know you, but you choose to work there. That's the image you're siding up to.

/rant

Cause and effect is reversed here. The trends leading to collapse of the family , neighborhoods and friendships predate facebook by at least 40 years. Bowling Alone describes the collapse covering the 80s & 90s, and the trends were 20-30 years mature by then.

IIUC, Bowling Alone pointed the finger at TV. If you looked at time-use surveys in the 50s, versus when Putnam was writing in the late 90s, it looked like TV watching had eaten much of the time that used to be spent doing IRL social activities.

TV was one factor, along with migration/ commuting, two-income households (and now divided households), and more generally that boomers were more individualistic, though he didn't explain why really.

Those , and other factors are more influential than facebook. If anything, facebook helped remote friendships stay connected ( better than phone, letters).

Your theory is that Facebook not only had no impact on that but could have done nothing to improve things?

That seems implausible to me. I think at best you could claim that cause and effect are quite tangled here.

I wouldn't say no impact, but a trailing impact. They understood the cultural changes demanding new ways for people to status signal and maintain connections with friends & family.

That's what I mean about reversing cause and effect. There are larger causes (see my other comment below) that Facebook was innovative to take advantage of.

I thoroughly disagree. Did Facebook take advantage of existing issues? Yes. Did they magnify those issues while creating new ones? Absolutely yes.

fair enough, but among the movement between around 1970-2020 -- what were the top 3 factors in degradation of communities? would facebook be in the top 3?

I don't understand why that matters. We can't act in 1970. We can act today. So we should be looking at biggest current problems and the highest-ROI fixes.

taking action requires understanding the leading factors that lead to the decline. If you only see one train car , you won't know that the engine needs to be alerted to stop 2 miles down the track.

I have been using it for a couple of years. Not always using all the features but it is at least a good carddav server to synchronize your contacts and auto add birthday reminders to your calendar via caldav as well.

I am not the target audience for this product, but I can’t get over the irony of building a CRM specifically to track details about people you genuinely care about

I use Obsidian as my personal CRM, and I get this a lot.

It feels like people put more value on memorizing facts than writing them down, as if it’s somehow more noble to remember something about someone, but if you write it down to not forget it, it’s suddenly not as valuable a gesture.

I never understood that.

I had a problem (bad memory), I cared enough to find, and create a solution, and consistently use and maintain it, it’s way more work that I’m putting in to make sure I remember things about the people I care about vs just having it memorized better than another person by the virtue of my genetics.

This is not a criticism or a shot at smugglerFlynn here though, they already said they’re not the target audience. It’s just my personal experience and this looked like a good starting thread to post it under.

Interestingly, I took a different route: the problem was not quality of my memory, but all the overblown expectations I've put towards myself remembering all that stuff.

Turns out most people are not even trying to juggle all these facts. Interestingly, just removing this pressure helped to remember more about the people I care about.

Not saying this will work for you (everyone is different), just sharing my 2c.

My brain is not wired to remember certain details about people. I can have a conversation with them for an hour, truly engage with them and pay attention to what they say because I care to do so, and a week later remember almost nothing about the talk.

I have a Notes.app record listing my coworkers and the important things I want to remember about them. I wish I could remember all these things without writing it down, but I can't, even when it's important to me and something I'm genuinely interested in. Something like Monica to keep track of all those social details in an organized, completely private and self-hosted way, would be a godsend for me.

Exactly this if I would not track it in my Calendar I would forget the birthday of my grandparents who I love dearly. It just cannot compute in the web of information that is in my brain. I need a crutch for it.

I feel seen. Yes. It’s the same fundamental reason to-do apps exist. “Do you really need an app to remember to pay the rent on the first of the month?” “Demonstrably yes.”

And there are events less personably important to me that matter to others, like “tell your son happy anniversary!” I barely know their kid, but it makes the person hearing it happy that someone thought of a nice happening in their life. Now their day is slightly brighter. Darned if I’d ever remember that without something to nudge me.

It may be a comforting idea to believe that our affection should require no assistance at all, and expect from all others that it should flow quite effortlessly from a caring mind. But human capacity, I have come to realize with both age, health, and genetic variations is rarely so simple a matter. When a person admits quite vulnerably that their memory falls short as the author has, yet their desire to care for their relationships remains entirely intact, there is something very moving in that alone. But to spend ten years quietly building as the author has is an act of love for people they care for are not lost to memory and forgotten in time.

But then I also remember looking at Monica previously and deciding against it. And in reading this article, the author mentions that this will be v3 and one of the headline features will be:

> This means treating relationships as first-class concepts and letting people decide what information matters to them.

Uh? This is a CRM, even a personal one. How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"?

> How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"?

In the article's words:

> Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently.

> I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for the new version, and I now see relationships as their own domain rather than an attribute attached to a contact. It seems obvious to me now. It wasn't obvious when we designed the first versions of Monica.

Huh. Those sound like the sorts of things that sound trivial until you actually try to build them, and that they're re-engineering the model to correctly handle all the unusual edge cases.

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