In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
Jeffrey McDaniel, “The Quiet World”
I first encountered this poem on a pamphlet handed out at my uncles funeral. It has remained one of my favourite poems of all time.
When I was younger it read as a sad poem about loving someone more than they love you. Now that I'm an adult, it feels more like a similar vibe to what I experience when I save the energy to make dinner for my partner when they get home from work.
Sounds like the point would be to keep the intrigued reader wondering what the significance or meaning was by leaving 42 or 'n' words--what is it that was of similar importance the author didn't share with us but used elsewhere, etc.
To keep things interesting, you have to leave openings for the imagination to wonder.
This keeps getting butchered. Now it's "answer to the universe" which was previously "answer to life the universe and everything".
It's actually "the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything". The fact that there's an answer to a question but no indication of what the question is is literally the underpinning theme running through all the HG2G books.
The books themselves are inconsistent on “answer to life, the universe and everything” vs “answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything”.
”O Deep Thought Computer,” he said, ”the task we have designed you
to perform is this. We want you to tell us ...” he paused, ”...the Answer!” ”The answer?” said Deep Thought. ”The answer to what?”
”Life!” urged Fook.
”The Universe!” said Lunkwill.
”Everything!” they said in chorus.
Thats why some languages started to join multiple words to one word. Like German (Schifffahrt), Russian (Белэнергоремналадка) or Lithuanian (Daugiaaukštis). I'm sure more languages has this.
This reminds me of the "The big word factory" interactive story, where words must be bought (or found) in order to say them. It is a very well made and extraordinarily beautiful app for small children.
I love this as an idea, but I suspect as a user, I would use either zero or one posts.
I do like the idea that the platform can actively disrupt the "addictive" patterns that develop elsewhere. Other things I've wanted:
- Instagram with an ML layer that auto-rejects pics with faces or text. Landscapes, vistas, animals, architecture etc all would be welcome.
- high latency Twitter, where no post is viewable until at least 2 weeks after it's published. Bickering threads become impractical. People learn to post stuff that will be worth caring about later.
- Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction of posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone quickly learns you can't trust it, but it can still be cute/fun/humorous.
I really like like the idea of a "high latency" social network, effectively bringing back the feeling of old snail mail (but more public).
2 weeks seems unnecessarily extreme to me though, even 24h would probably be enough to severely limit the flame potential. It would also potentially mean that one could have a daily routine of checking for the new content and replies and writing your own stuff and you're good to go for the day.
Although to really be effective I think it'd have to work on a global tick (i.e., all new content is published once a day at a certain time). Otherwise the new content would still slowly drip continuously and you'd still have the addictive nature of social networks.
At this point I'm sort of reinventing a collaborative version of a newspaper.
2 weeks would match up with certain snail mail geography especially around the horse/carriage era.
It might be fun/interesting to try to base the latency upon simulated geography: whether the entirely fictional geometry of something like classic GeoCities where you get assigned a random address in a digital "neighborhood" somewhere when you sign up, or use real world geography and filter it through ancient routing restrictions like "how long would it take in the post by horse/carriage".
A benefit to a dynamic latency such as simulated geography would be that it would make it even tougher to sync together how posts would be arriving from multiple users (unless you were targeting a specific user).
I really hope to be able to report back in about a year or so on ways to better communicate. At first I thought, maybe the best online dialectics is just walls of careful text rather than tweets. Now I try doing that, and I make careless mistakes and I can barely parse a paragraph without losing my train of thought.
The solution I think is explicit structure. Arguments usually form a (for now let's say) DAG, let's present them that way explicitly. Metadata, i.e. human emotion can be annotated onto that - emoji, good or bad vibes? If you can diff that graph even better.
In fact, working in a fully-remote, fairly high information density (finance) company, I think the work of the pioneer cyberneticists (and potentially Soviet ones, not sure on that as I can't speak Russian) could be immensely helpful for modelling and manipulating the spread of information and humanity within a company.
Email has a latency measured in seconds. Also, email is not usually public.
Explicit structure could be interesting, but structure from whose perspective? Arguments can be modeled many ways, such that there is no one correct answer. Also, that the argument could be modeled as a DAG might be very optimistic in many circumstances.
I’ve considered something similar, call it The Morning Post or some such. Choose your delivery/send time, and all your content gets posted (and all previously posted content gets revealed to you). Put some sane limit on the number of times you can change your post/delivery time (once a day?).
It's not necessary to inject intentional latency in the manner the parent suggests via a rather extreme delay.
You can accomplish a lot of the same outcome by merely eradicating following feeds (that is, the combined stream of posts from users that you follow).
In the early days of Facebook when you had to manually visit user pages to see what was new with someone or what they were posting, it was dramatically lower velocity in terms of how fast bullshit would spread and how much content you could reasonably consume. It would reduce page views / content views spectacularly, by including just that little bit of time and labor cost to the consumption. People would focus that effort primarily on the users that really matter to them.
The social networks of course know this. They built the streams / feeds / walls for that reason, to turbocharge the addiction. They'll never give it up.
I currently use Twitter this way. I stay logged out (deleted the password from my password manager) and visit Twitter.com/username directly for a few folks I want to read. It’s indeed way less addicting.
(Twitter really wants you to log in and view your feed but they’ll still let you read the site this way)
Yet, the possible resistance is also on the consuming side. It requires a lot of willpower not to flow with the river, but tools like Fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/) help a bit in following people not trends.
I bought newsto.me like a decade ago with a plan to build a collaborative news site complete with gamification to really help the collaborative bit (eg one user writes a bit about a house fire happening, a photog in the area could earn points for snapping a photo and adding it to the story)
Never found sufficient time/motivation to execute on it. Still think it would be kinda cool though.
I'd love a high latency app as well, but there is undeniable magic in instant communication. My best writing is often when I'm "hot" on a topic and can quickly go back and forth with others on the idea. Steam could quickly run out for that type of thing without instant communication.
Say, the way some messaging platforms have threads which can branch off of the main channel. Maybe this platform has something like that, too; instantaneous and temporary, where messages disappear N minutes after they're sent. So you can post publicly on the time-delayed cadence, or chat semi-privately in realtime.
I'm not sure if that undermines the desirable properties of the time delay.
I wonder how much sense it would make for there to be some (simple) function you can tweak a number on to set a balance between the latency and lifetime of your message?
For example the lifetime of your message (counting from when it shows up) could be 2 times the latency of it, e.g. a message with a latency of 1 day would exist for 2 days.
Regarding high latency twitter: maybe someone should make FidoNet.social. For those who don't remember, back in the early 90's your local BBS's might offer message boards connected to the rest of the US/world. Not a continuous connection. Every day at 2 AM (or whenever), your favorite BBS would dial into some remote node and sync messages.
Practical effect was a roughly 24-48 (or more) hour wait for responses. Didn't stop bickering though. I was quite young at the time. Asked some question about a game. The first response was fairly hostile. Which started an argument. My first time flamed online, and my first online argument. Which went very slowly.
Still, slow social media would be interesting. I kinda like the FidoNet model. Where syncing only happens once a day. Maybe only at a set time overnight. Faster than snailmail but you have the full day to type out your response about why Ultima V did not suck as your opponent claimed. With the ability to submit a post any time, but also with the ability to edit it until sync. I think it would encourage long posting more than the current systems. Which may or may not be a good thing.
FidoNet didn't really mandate syncing once per day. It required the nodes to sync at least that often, and established a common hour for each zone to allow direct node-to-node connections for that purpose; but even in late 90s, larger nodes would already sync more often in practice.
FWIW FidoNet is still around, although most connections seem to be over IP these days.
I've always wondered about the practicality of doing something like fidonet over AX25/some other packet radio system. It'd be fabulous to be able to ditch the internet and participate in something slower and more humane. Your post has reminded me of that ambition. These days, I'd love an e-ink display to accompany it. Slow computing!
With AREDN, you get a whole TCP/IP ecosystem to play with. This could then be used to run protocols like UUCP or NNTP, that are tailored to disconnected scenarios.
Let me take this chance to mention the "Unhook" Youtube browser extension, which I recently added and which I think has been having a big positive effect for me. The extension allows you to remove (among other things, it's very customizable) the sidebar of suggested videos from Youtube.
This extension has been more effective for me than any other at cutting down how much youtube I watch. Maybe the biggest factor in this is that it doesn't ban me from youtube entirely - When I've tried extensions like that in the past, I've always ended up uninstalling the extension when I needed to watch a youtube video for work. This way, I can watch a little, but the lack of constant new recommendations keeps me from spending hours and hours on the site.
Seconded, but just a note that if you're using ublock origin you can just block the sidebar with a content filter.
I've blocked the sidebar and the comments section. The former has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on YouTube. The latter has dramatically reduced my exposure to the inanity of the YouTube comments section. Both are huge quality of life improvements.
Usenet used to be like this for me. With high cost dialup, I'd download batches of posts, read them and respond offline, uploading my responses at the same time I download the following day's batch.
Have you tried slowly.app?
It's an app that simulates snail mail
Pairs you with someone based on your preferences and you can write them a letter / email that will be delivered in a few hours / days, based on your distance with said person
I emulate it by deactivating as many notifications as possible, and manually checking replies after a few days or weeks, when I remember. I have noticed that what was a "hot" discussion often becomes pointless and laughable after enough time has elapsed. I usually don't feel the need to reply to these old bickerings anymore.
>- Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction of posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone quickly learns you can't trust it, but it can still be cute/fun/humorous.
Aren't we pretty much there now with a so many bots posting?
I think a bunch of people still credulously believe most of what they read. But if some days the bot actively impersonated _you_, and people reacted to stuff it said on your behalf, I think you'd have to grok pretty quickly that a lot of content is fake. So let's do that for every user, unpredictably, a reasonable percentage of the time.
scorched earth, why not? I think this is just about right though. Humans were not ready for social media, so burn it to the ground. however, if what the bot says on my behalf brings disrupte to my name, no repurcursions should be bestowed on me.
> Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction of posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone quickly learns you can't trust it, but it can still be cute/fun/humorous.
Billy Chasen developed faux-social network called Botnet. Unfortunately, it looks like it's gone and I doubt that name would have lasted long in the App store let alone how he managed to get it through.
+1 for the high latency idea. I recently witnessed a really bad screaming match on an NGO mailing list between a bunch of anti-vaxxers and, for lack of a better term, the reasonable people. Emails were flying at a rate of 1 every few minutes for long into the nights. What ended up solving it was appointing a moderator that has to approve all the posts beffore they go out. They don't actually block any, they just have to press the approve button. This meant that it usually takes anywhere from half a day to 2 days for a post to go through, so people started thinking a lot more about what they posted and what they read. It became not only slower, but a more civilised and though-out discussion.
The trouble with making a worse option is that people still have choice and will simply use the more entertaining version instead. You can't just make a new social network that's not as engaging as the existing ones because nobody would use it. The moment you're really curious about the thing being hidden from you in the degraded service, you'll sneak a look at the real one to find out. If you had so much self control that you don't, then why do you even need a service for it? Just limit the number of hours you spend on social media yourself.
In this case the community would be a self-selecting group of people with self control and a value for more thoughtful communication. The resulting content would presumably be different from what you'd get if you just viewed mainstream social media on a restricted schedule.
This product seems to combine a few unrelated ideas. No monetization, reverse-chronological feed, no notifications: sweet. Easier to have cleaner, more meaningful conversations with people, hopefully. In short, a nicer, ad-free, less-harmful Facebook. How will you pay for it if it ever gets popular?
I'm not sure how limited posts play into this. I think the intention is to make users really think about what they're posting. But the arbitrary, "nice, round number" limit just feels existentially dreadful at best, and like a headline-generating schtick at worst. Surely there's some other mechanism that can nudge people towards more thoughtful, less self-promoting posts (or whatever the goal is); maybe limiting posts to one a day?
> But the arbitrary, "nice, round number" limit just feels existentially dreadful at best, and like a headline-generating schtick at worst.
From TFA:
> Minus was created by Ben Grosser and commissioned by arebyte Gallery (London, UK) as part of the solo exhibition Software for Less [https://www.arebyte.com/software-for-less].
It's an art project. Headline-generating schticks and existential dread are to be expected.
By coincidence, earlier today I had the same idea. I was thinking about how so much of what you encounter in social media is biased towards people who post a lot.
In politics, for example, most people are relatively moderate. People who spend more time talking about politics are more likely to hold extreme positions. And people who spend the most time talking about politics are the ones who spend the least time evaluating their and others' positions. So the political social media is dominated by uneducated extremists with hot takes. (I admit this often includes myself, though I do try to put effort into my comments).
A possible solution to this would be reducing the amount of allowed posts per time, which would quiet the noise and give high-effort interactions a more level playing field. Of course, that sucks for engagement and interferes with topics like humor that benefit from low-effort contributions. I wonder if there's a client-side way to bias your feed towards people who post less frequently.
I think the question of "how will you pay for this if it gets popular" is so important for how often it gets ignored.
I know I've had many hobby projects I've just fallen short on because of fears of how I'd pay for it. Of course these might just be for the fun of making it, but the problem then is that, at least for me, I'd dread what should be a moment of celebration, it getting popular. It could easily put you in massive debt.
Of course a lot of people seem to be of the "I'll cross that bridge if I come to it" type but me, I just couldnt work like that. So congrats to those people I suppose
The way I've always prepared for that was to run things on fixed-cost hosting and if it crashes, it crashes. No way I could get a 10k€ AWS bill overnight if my project blew up on HN because they all run on one dedicated machine that costs me almost exactly 1 espresso per day.
If people end up liking something enough to need more capacity, I can scale the server manually to however much I'm willing to spend and immediately set up Patreon/Kofi/whatever. If people contribute enough to pay for a bigger server, I do that. If they don't, it's their problem that it's slow or keeps crashing. My IPs are always prioritised by the load balancer, so it makes little difference to me.
I had a similar idea a few months ago, basically have a patreon/whatever monthly goal, if it doesn't get hit (enough to pay for the server costs), it doesnt get paid for and goes down. You could even have a "stretch goal" for dev time (basically what would be your profits), if it earns enough you spend time fixing bugs and adding features, if it just gets enough to keep it running, it just keeps running.
It seems like a nice and safe idea, but it does somewhat limit profitability I suppose, but thats an entirely different matter
I went to https://www.arebyte.com/ and right-clicked the Twitter feed icon. Right click for this had been disabled.
So then I looked at the source, and saw it was done on Sharespace. So, not sure how much dog food is being eaten in
> Each work is presented as a product that could have come out of an alternative Silicon Valley, interrogating and reimagining how software is created, operated, and sold.
And,
> Utilising custom methods such as software recomposition, techniques such as data obfuscation
But use Google Analytics.
And then, from the speech...
> The last twenty years have been characterized by the rise of software.
Twenty years ago was recovery period from the .com boom. It's been a little more than 20 years. If anything I'd call the past 10 years dull, where walled social networks have sought to raise their walls ever higher, that might be interesting.
I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads. The need to drive engagement and sell things to people tends to limit the types of social media. It's nice to see an experiment like this but I don't know if it will go anywhere.
I was thinking the other day of an idea where you take turns with people in your circle to become a 'star' for a period of time(day, days, week, hour, whatever) every so often. During that time you get the limelight, and become the focus of the group. Imagine that, during that tie period, you're encouraged to share more of the boring details of life. Like 5 minutes of every hour or two maybe.
Something like this appeals to me because I feel like I don't really connect with my friends on social media the way I would in real life. If I hung out with a friend, I'd experience more of the banalities and have a more complete picture of what their day to day life was actually like. Obviously that's not something you want to get blasted with every day in your feed, and it's not something you want the responsibility to produce every day, but let's say it happens once a year for each person.
I just feel like the Facebook/Instagram model promotes a focus on curated highlights of a persons life, which is fine, but doesn't really feel like friendship. I want something that replaces the experience of spending a day with someone. With all the distance between us these days, either from economic migration, the pandemic, or whatever, I really feel like I'm losing touch with my friends. Seeing their highlights on my feed or even communicating with them via text/im/voice just doesn't cut it. How can we provide that sense of connection remotely?
> take turns with people in your circle to become a 'star' for a period of time
I like this idea. For a while, "day in the life of a ____" posts were very popular on imgur, and I really enjoyed it, even though they were strangers.
The downside I figure might be that after someone's star-time, they get a lot of incoming attention, which then fades out. Some people might react quite well to that and others quite poorly, so I figure you'd need a set of other functions (say, blast-from-the-past auto-regurgiations, or week-delayed emails as suggested in another post here) to mitigate that and help people of various social proclivities all feel comfortable.
I miss letter writing. When you'd sit down and put real thought into it because you'd know it would be the only time you'd communicate for the next week or two. Or even tape swapping -- my dad and uncle used to mail tapes back and forth, hour-long audio rambles because it was more fun than the written word. Every tape started with a delay to make sure the leader was past the head, then the "pk-ssht" of a beer can being opened....
> if it wasn't dependent on selling ads. The need to drive engagement
Driving engagement isn't a consequence of ads. Netflix tries to aggressively drive engagement too and it doesn't have ads.
The reason is simple: the less people use a service, the more likely they are to unsubscribe. The more likely they are to spend their time on a competing service that's doing a better job at driving engagement.
Driving engagement is necessary for a business period, no matter how they're funded.
Well, there always has been a substantial difference in the quality of journalism between newspapers (subscription based) and tabloids (sold individually), wasn’t there?
What the internet adds, of course, is the constant competitive pressure of other content which will always be flashier, clickbaity, and emotion-triggering than yours. So people will switch faster if you don’t compete on these terms.
By contrast, a NYT reader 30 years back never got exposed to much of the competition’s content. So there was no reason for switching. You just stuck with the partner you had chosen, simply because there was no “Tinder”, so to speak.
You've always been able to buy newspapers individually and subscribe to tabloids.
And a NYT reader 30 years ago was exposed to the competitions content literally every time they walked into a drugstore or supermarket, with a stack of competing newspapers with competing headlines yelling for attention.
And if you think people stuck with the partner they chose 30 years ago... I've got news for you. ;)
If old movies are to be believed, you could always buy newspapers individually from little boxes on the sidewalk for from the kiosk of a friendly guy who knows everyone in the neighborhood.
> I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads.
This is why I got interested in Gemini. It's a modern take on Gopher and the network already has a lot of folks posting content and sharing ideas completely free of the normal commercial goals you see on most http sites. I even made a small Twitter clone, Station, which has about 260 users right now. If you're a Gemini user, come hang out: gemini://station.martinrue.com
I've found some fantastic content through Gemini but it's difficult finding content when several of the half dozen search engines are down at once or the links themselves are dead. Is this a common issue?
> I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads.
Probably there are two best answers to this.
1) hn. No ads. Social network (in the way that Reddit is).
2) build it! FB monetizes each person on the order of $10-20 per human per year. So just start up a social network that costs $10/year. Pick a few principles you want to stick to and see if it survives.
Edit: I see my estimates are wrong since time has passed; it's now more like $40-50 per human per year, but I think maybe some of the properties are worth more per person (almost certainly instragram is worth more per person than fb proper).
>I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads.
I hope we, as a society, can rediscover publicly funded infrastructure. If I was in a position of power in my national government I would push for some amount of cloud storage, a web presence and a public image hosting site (among others, this is just off the top of my head), accessible to all citizens, free of charge.
It's neat but seems ephemeral. Maybe that's the point.
I had a not similar but related idea, basically borne from my hatred of Twitter. Basically, you'd only be able to make a comment if you have a credit. Credits would be time based, probably 1 or 2 a day. The only other way to get credits is if the person you replied to likes your comment. Basically, the idea being to quit getting people being so controversial and argumentative.
Edit:
I kept replying below describing some vision that doesn't exist, which I feel is rude to the OP and Minus, so I'll not reply further. As I have little intention in building anything at the moment, feel free to take anything you like from it, Minus et al.
Well, not more. Sending a comment takes you down to zero, you're done. Unless that person likes your comment. Popular posts or number of likes per comment would be irrelevant. The idea I guess is to allow and even encourage a friendly back and forth without burning all your credits.
Example.
A -I released this tool!
B - Wow nice how long did that take
A - Thanks, 6 months.
At this point, the conversation is done unless both like each other's comment, which in such an exchange would be encouraged.
If C comes along and says 'this tool sucks', even if 50 people like it, if A doesn't, C is done commenting for the day.
In fairness, I haven't really thought the whole thing out in detail, just some rough ideas. I appreciate pointing out challenges and dislikes with it though.
Very interesting idea. C can still come back and comment the next day/after a fixed time frame. I think it provides a much needed balance between lack of interaction and over interaction. I guess it can prevent bickering and unnecessary arguments.
Though if anyone wanted to set up an information farm, by creating a bunch of accounts, where they post and like each other, acting like different individuals, it could still create engagement with other innocent people who could eventually become biased, hateful and misinformed.
Unfortunately this doesn’t help with flame wars where people can go over to a sub thread they get agreement on to harvest credits to then brigade the ones they disagree with.
This doesn't work in the described way. Commenting takes you to zero, only one person could agree to take you back to 1.
So going to a subgroup of your likeminded people would do nothing. You can comment 'like me pls', which would take you from one credit to 0. The responder liking it would take credit back to 1, which is where it was initially. So, nothing gained.
However, one would have to solve the multiple account problem, which every site has to deal with.
I think this is still bad, because it heavily encourages people to post stuff that others will respond to, which isn't necessarily what's honest, authentic, valuable, etc.
That won't stop organizations with lots of money unless the cost for more credits raises exponentially. Everyone will have to stop when millions and billions get into play.
10 years ago, I launched a small modification to a social network I was running at the time - you could only post once per day. The quality of the content went through the roof, but it turned the product into more something like Medium. It had some upsides, but also some downsides. It was amazing to see how such a simple change can dramatically alter the nature of the product.
This to me is the equivalent to the war on drugs. If you limit someone's ability on your platform, they will find a different platform. Until you squash the need/desire, those with the need/desire will find a solution.
Reddit needs this but for upvotes. Tons of low quality posts starting with a barely funny joke that goes 15 replies deep with almost the same joke but less and less funny. If you only have say 5 upvotes a day, you won’t contribute garbage to a barely useful thread.
I know, I know, this is more art than a serious social medium (if social media can be serious): but I don't think the concept is as clever as it tries to seem. A project like this, even as an objet d'art, ought to inspire someone to interact with it, to poke at it and see what happens — but would anyone really bother? The limitations would make you think carefully about what you share with the community, but that caution works against building any sort of community, even an ephemeral one. It's just not attractive or engaging, like a painting you'd see in a gallery and walk past after a glance.
Nothing and that's exactly what would happen if it became popular.
You'd get @kanyewest7, @kanyewest289, @kanyewest3058, etc.
Also, the younger you are when you join the network, the fewer posts you get per year. If you join as an 18 year old, you have a little over 1 post per year remaining. If you join at 90, you have 10 posts per year, etc.
But yeah 100 posts per year or 1 per day would be interesting too and wouldn’t render your account as useless when you max out temporarily instead of permanently.
Inconvenience. With the second account one has to re-friend all the users from the first account. Also it would lead to bad social standing as by re-friending it will be obvious they are breaking the 100 posts per person per life rule. This could even lead to automatic bans by studying the connection structure.
That's what I want... this would force me to make a different account for every topic I might comment/post on, and they can have their own local networks. If it's a topic that I know a lot about (eg what I do at my day job), it would force a fresh start every few years.
This is in contrast to my twitter account, which is such a mess that I don't like posting b/c "most" people who will see it followed me for some other topic.
There was a social network "this" some years back, the idea being that you could make just one post a day. I enjoyed it a bit, and IIRC it didn't do too terribly.
I have one of their stickers. It was nice! IIRC it was doing fine, but they ran of out funding and their next round of financing fell through unexpectedly.
What's always difficult when trying out projects like this one is that none of my friends are willing to join it with me, so I have to either talk to myself or to strangers. And this weakens the feeling of engagement for me.
An interesting concept. Are there limits to just creating a new account when the 100 posts are used?
It could be interesting to have an account with a maximum number of posts, use the last post to announce your next account and thus periodically it forces each of your followers to make a conscious decision on whether or not to remain following you.
It strikes me as strange that "Social Networks" assume or differentiate based on "social media". Social networks moved from connecting people to posting to create an inventory where ads could fit. It seems like removing the posts from a social network could be an interesting unlock.
> Correctly configured it is a static site with a minimal stub in PHP
Maybe there's a 1001 plugins being used which means the Wordpress site has to make boatloads of requests to the backend. Many Wordpress sites make that mistake. I keep my plugin count to at least five plugins. And they're obviously plugins which I really need, and they're not chatty in any way.
But the sites that are slow or performance sensitive often aren't just static sites. If it's more than just a simple CMS to you, you need to be enough of a WordPress expert that you probably don't need WordPress in the first place (or you're just using it for the themes or plugins). Weird WP performance cliffs are hard to avoid for dynamic content and "correctly configuring" either means rolling a custom solution or getting neck deep in your infra—both of which smell a lot more like engineering than not.
I've only run one wordpress site (and reluctantly), but I found it very hard to configure correctly. I was very happy when I was able to convince my boss to replace it with a much simpler blog system that only supported exactly what we needed.
The energy derived from a potato should probably be enough to serve a static webpage with 100 req/s. Even the highest-ranking HN posts should not result in more than five requests per second. It's beyond me how the "HN hug of death" has ever come to be an issue in any scenario.
you couldn’t be more wrong. wordpress is one of the easiest apps to scale, put a varnish in front of it as you mostly have static content. you can go even further, move the comments to an external tool and you can have a very long cache.
All your comment has communicated is that Varnish can scale. Wordpress is not Varnish.
The gp isn't "wrong": putting Varnish in front of WP is a possible solution to the fact WP doesn't scale, not a disproof of the fact.
Furthermore it's a highly limited solution: WP is only static if you limit it's use to its static features, and configuring Varnish for the unholy mess of 3rd-party dynamic/interactive/form-handling WP plugins is nightmare territory.
Producing cache friendly output is how you scale easily.
A content management system that doesn’t produce cacheable html isn’t scalable and one that does is. It’s not the job of the content management system to serve the cached pages. That’s what CDNs, browsers, and caching layers in general are for.
Caching is one facet of scaling (albeit a large one). It's not necessarily the job of a CMS to serve cached pages but there's a bunch of other considerations in scaling, particular where database writes are concerned; something that will be relevant in a system where users post content.
Also, see the final paragraph of the comment above for discussion of the extent to which WP "produces cachable html"
In my mind the best social network would limit people to 1 post per week (or month?). Then no one is creating more noise than anyone else, you get to what's really important, and you can actually catch up with everyone.
my biggest problem with this idea is that many people are already hesitant to write/post online. limiting the number of posts they are allowed to make might make their post anxiety even worse.
It would be interesting to have a network with a time bank like BBSs were. You get x time every Y hours to read or comment. It would be like noprocrast but not configurable. I think I may make it...
I don't use social media, so I'm probably not the target audience anyway -- but I don't understand this at all. It just seems like an arbitrary and stupid limitation.
I think you built something that was by design a niche product. Big social networks experience network effects - when a bunch of your friends/family/etc are already on a free social network it makes the barrier/effort low.
If you have a social network like you made it requires that groups of people join it together, and that they know the other has it in advance, and that costs money to post beyond a certain number of posts - it's not clear what that they can get from you that they can't get from facebook or instagram already for free. It's not clear what you're offering that's better than those two.
The features of 'no feed, no notifications, no way to find people' isn't necessarily a plus to the overwhelming majority of users, and from your page I don't understand what you offer in your service that even someone who journals wants.
Have you considered lowering the barrier-of-entry from $19? For what is effectively a journaling app, you're driving an incredible amount of margin out of a scenario where your audience has no incentive to pay.
It is a _shared_ journaling app, not many of those around. I believe $19 annually is pretty low already ($1.58/month). And people have to pay only after they have a lot of posts, so anyone can try for free. If people aren’t willing to pay that, it does not make sense to lower the price, but rather give up the idea.
Even my comment above mentioning has been downvoted twice. It is pretty clear it’s not something people want.
It's not a privacy issue for me, more a labor issue. I don't want to make the effort to create an account (and verify my email address) without at least checking out the activity on the site.
Love this. People are craving a different social media experience or at least quite a few articulate and imaginative ones do.
But while the failure of the current crop is evident (well not in terms of shareholder value), what should be a "good" replacement is not all that obvious. Even beyond sustainable business model issues, there are so many configurations, platform features, constraints, user incentives etc. There are two general principles I can think of:
* Let a thousand flowers bloom (in a fediverse context) and let evolutionary trial-and-error determine what works
* Source some insights from the surveillance capitalists as they are the ones who have accumulated the largest empirical factbase about what we should definitely avoid 8-)
