When you say "social network", do you mean Twitter Clone?
It seems like developers in particular have come to regard Twitter as archetypal social networks despite it's many problems and the way the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph. IE, N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality, just for example and Twitter isn't something most people enjoy being on but I think it's what people get on to seem/feel important.
I think by earlier terminology Facebook/Myspace/Friendster/linkedin are social networks and Twitter/Mastodon/etc are "microblogging services".
I think the clone-Twitter impulse is kind of terrible. Not even to say Facebook is inherently better but because I don't think ways of defining one's own social network have been exhausted by all the networks out there (Discord is another format with increasing presences which shows that new ways of organizing connections are still possible).
The character limit is the last of Twitters issue, in my opinion. I think the #1 issue is the retweet model, it leads to people just brainlessly sharing low effort content with a single click. It's similar to how fake news and misleading content thrive on Facebook. But notice how Instagram where it's impossible to easily re-share content (well, you can now in stories) is far less toxic.
I've never really thought of twitter as a social network more of a collection of grandstands or soapboxes or something all with people holding megaphones with a 10 second limit all yelling at the same time and sometimes the people around your megaphone will yell your message out to the people near their soap boxes. The more important you are, the taller your soapbox and and the farther the sound goes, but your megaphone still only works for 10 seconds at a time.
I very much want a Facebook for coding friends clone.
Lots of solutions out there but I for whatever reason I don't like any of them
Slack/Discord and similar interfaces are effectively chat. I want topics and replies. I know you can start a topic on both of those but it just feels less conducive to friends talking to me than talking on Facebook.
I could make groups on facebook. I can't put my finger on why this doesn't work. Maybe because it requires diligence. I have to remember to select the group of "programmer friends" that I want to topic to go to. Forget and my either my programmer friends get family posts or my family gets programmer posts. Also FB will spam non-programmer friends with "g posted about x over here".
A forum like discourse or phpbb doesn't have to social graph. Anyone that joins can participate in all discussion. I want to talk to friends only
Google+ and some features that seemed to kind of go in this directly but I feel like most people used it to spread news instead of discuss what they're working on or thoughts they are having. I don't need tech news. I can get that here.
I'm not even saying Facebook is the best UX for what I want. I used to enjoy a smf forum that was mostly friends and I liked that I could see the list of topics. But, I also just like glancing at my Facebook feed once a day or so and see what my friends are up to. I'd like a similar experience except for programming / tech only topics with tech only friends.
And of course it goes without saying that a coding FB should format code well and some how allow embedding live snippets in iframes
Note: I know lots of people say their FB news feed is a dumpster fire. For whatever reason I've unfollowed enough people or something that mine is fine. Unfollowed every political friend for example. Just don't want that on my newsfeed. Can get it elsewhere
> N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality
Is this an assumption or is there evidence?
I can see why at first glance that would seem true, but I also see conspiracy theories spread with or without character limits. What seems to do better for discourse is not char limits, but rather enforcing limits on misinformation and hate speech.
In my mind, it is only a social network if I know whom I am networking with and they know who I am in real life. Reddit isn’t a social network since no one on there knows who I am and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never interacted with the same person on there twice. Anonymous is not social.
> the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph
Far as I'm concerned, this is the main feature of Twitter. The only thing that really sets it apart is that every exchange is a public exchange.
This also (until recently) set a standard for statements, where if there are enough replies, and even the critical ones don't cast doubt on the statement, you could have more trust in it. Now of course it's uncertain, since Twitter automatically censors and pseudo-censors replies, including quality ones. Sometimes Twitter does this thing where it won't even show you a reply that you sent unless you have a direct link.
I wanted to see how it would handle non-ascii text so I typed 안녕하세요 and it romanized it to annyeonghaseyo. (This is "hello" in Korean). I did not expect that.
I really like the idea of a text-only social network, so I hope this takes off. I think the author should consider supporting other languages though. Seeing romanized text isn't very helpful to people that actually want to read or write in other character sets. It's a cute feature though.
>Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks.
[...]
>Limitations
>480 characters per reply
ASCII only because it works everywhere
I could see this being a xenophobic thing, but I could also see it being more about the limited character set (for minimalism). I'm not making a claim about the motivations, but either way your desire seems counter to his vision.
> I think the author should consider supporting other languages though
Maybe it's a moderation problem?
I personally wouldn't feel comfortable running a non-english service, as I feel it would be too hard to moderate it effectively (or at least until you rearch the point where you have paid or volunteer moderators fluent in both the "main" language (to communicate rules and policy clearly) and any other supported langage). You can try auto-translating foreign text but you won't necessarily get a good translation, let alone handle cultural references (not Korean, but e.g. [1])and so on.
I tried カレーライス, 高田馬場, ﾀﾃｲｽｶﾝﾅﾆﾗｾ, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. Results were "kareraisu", "Gao Tian Ma Chang", and error message "Use spaces or shorter words" for the latter ones. Something funky is going on.
As seen on twitch, letting people put emojis in their name on a black and white site sets up a system where scanning eyes just see those eye-candies and skip over the rest. This is useful on twitch as it highlights the streamer's paying subscribers but here it's just whoever is more obnoxious.
I disagree. Using this thing for an hour, users with emojis are more distinguishable at a glance. I often face this issue with HN where I have to read the user's username to know if they're OP. Twitter usernames with emojis, however, is really obnoxious.
We can't embed media but we can still link to it? I welcome efforts to encourage higher-quality discussion on social media, but I don't see how this gets us there.
"Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks."
What does "untrustworthy" mean in this context, and how is Subreply easier to trust by comparison? The entire terms are "be nice or else". What exactly does "nice" mean and what are the consequences of violating this vague standard? It doesn't say. I don't understand how that's trustworthy.
And as with most moderation, how explicit can "I" be when advocating for genocide before getting booted? Do I have to just not spout slurs, or do I have to hide it even better?
I think moderators would do nicely to consider that not all negativity manifests as "niceness". If I were to say "trans women are just gay men trying to score straight men" (a real opinion of some) there's nothing contained just within that statement that makes it "un-nice", but the thought expressed is exceedingly vile. If someone else then replies "You're a horrible bigot" that would very much be a break with "niceness" or civility - is that allowed?
Moderation is harder than it looks, and I've seen forums descent into racist hellholes because moderators only cared about civility and niceness. This has slowly become my number one concern with new forums and places of discussion.
Tried registering, I usually try the username luc on sites to see if it's still free. But that is an "invalid username", no explanation given. So what, do I need to add numbers and special characters? Is my legal name too short? Is it already in use? This tells me nothing.
Also, the about page is contradictory:
> [brain][muscles] one or two emojis instead of avatars
> [...]
> ASCII only because it works everywhere
Hmm hmm, I see. Emojis work so everywhere that I have to [substitute] them to even talk about it here. Seems to me like "we don't do encoding because it's hard" more than because it works everywhere: any device with emoji support will also at least support the basic characters -- perhaps a unicode snowman won't exist in some fonts, but surely a character like µ should work... This is not just about other languages, either: °C, µm, different length dashes, etc. are regular non-ASCII symbols that occur in English.
And no, "ASCII only" is not meant in the sense of "plain text only". Any non-US ASCII is converted (ç->c, ÿ->y, ś->s, µ->u).
Clicked through and the username of someone who'd replied in the thread on the front page was a racial slur. That's enough to turn me away. I'm no prude, but allowing someone to drop a bomb like that in their handle is a big broken window. Doesn't instill hope that I'd have a lot of positive interactions with the folks in this community.
Bringing back social isn't about getting rid of images and focusing on ASCII text, it's about getting rid of URLs and article snippets, and refocusing solely on user created content. Remember when streams were only filled with updates from old friends and family with things like birthday parties, vacations, graduations, concerts, restaurant meals, etc., and nothing else? (Sort of like Instagram still is, but with text allowed, two-way authorization only and without the "influencers".)
Now you log in (FB, Twitter, etc.) only to find out which of your casual acquaintances are the most gullible, racist, sexist, homophobic, sociopathic or worse by the news items they're spewing into their increasingly extreme echo chamber. Sure, the same thing could be conveyed by a selfie wearing a MAGA hat, but it would happen much, much less often.
All these services would have to do to get back to their social roots is provide a default filter for news items. But they refuse, and in fact are increasingly manipulating your feed instead to increase "engagement" (read: anger and hate).
I'm amazed that a social-only network hasn't taken off yet that provides this basic functionality. It feels like the time is right for something like this.
I've been trying to make something along those lines at podaero.com, and I'm actually trying to get HN users to join some of the small groups... see here if interested https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod
I did try signing up. The second I ran into the activity requirement quota I quickly got out of there. That's a huge red flag for me, why is there a quota imposed on me? Are you paying users or something? Why expect free work to be done?
This is cool. I'm glad people are working in this direction.
A common theme that I've noticed among recent upstart social efforts is a focus on platform and/or policy differentiation. I personally believe this is not very important during the phase where a social network is working to reach critical mass. It seems to me that most successful social networks got their start by offering users unique content, by targeting existing, tight-knit communities, or through some combination of the two. Platform and policy help shape the social network, but there needs to be a network to be shaped in the first place - they don't form magically.
How about adding a `latest top level posts' page? Many posts that you see on the search page don't make sense without seeing the post they're in reply to.
Oops! I made an account and logged out from within Settings so I could read over more of the about page, but I got stuck with Internal Server Error on the whole site. I deleted the "identity" cookie from site storage, which was an empty string after logging out. I logged back in and it seems to be working as normal. Other than that, I really like the vibe of Subreply, nice work.
[+] [-] thrownaway65535|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|5 years ago|reply
It seems like developers in particular have come to regard Twitter as archetypal social networks despite it's many problems and the way the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph. IE, N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality, just for example and Twitter isn't something most people enjoy being on but I think it's what people get on to seem/feel important.
I think by earlier terminology Facebook/Myspace/Friendster/linkedin are social networks and Twitter/Mastodon/etc are "microblogging services".
I think the clone-Twitter impulse is kind of terrible. Not even to say Facebook is inherently better but because I don't think ways of defining one's own social network have been exhausted by all the networks out there (Discord is another format with increasing presences which shows that new ways of organizing connections are still possible).
[+] [-] ehsankia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman3|5 years ago|reply
Lots of solutions out there but I for whatever reason I don't like any of them
Slack/Discord and similar interfaces are effectively chat. I want topics and replies. I know you can start a topic on both of those but it just feels less conducive to friends talking to me than talking on Facebook.
I could make groups on facebook. I can't put my finger on why this doesn't work. Maybe because it requires diligence. I have to remember to select the group of "programmer friends" that I want to topic to go to. Forget and my either my programmer friends get family posts or my family gets programmer posts. Also FB will spam non-programmer friends with "g posted about x over here".
A forum like discourse or phpbb doesn't have to social graph. Anyone that joins can participate in all discussion. I want to talk to friends only
Google+ and some features that seemed to kind of go in this directly but I feel like most people used it to spread news instead of discuss what they're working on or thoughts they are having. I don't need tech news. I can get that here.
I'm not even saying Facebook is the best UX for what I want. I used to enjoy a smf forum that was mostly friends and I liked that I could see the list of topics. But, I also just like glancing at my Facebook feed once a day or so and see what my friends are up to. I'd like a similar experience except for programming / tech only topics with tech only friends.
And of course it goes without saying that a coding FB should format code well and some how allow embedding live snippets in iframes
Note: I know lots of people say their FB news feed is a dumpster fire. For whatever reason I've unfollowed enough people or something that mine is fine. Unfollowed every political friend for example. Just don't want that on my newsfeed. Can get it elsewhere
[+] [-] greendude29|5 years ago|reply
Is this an assumption or is there evidence?
I can see why at first glance that would seem true, but I also see conspiracy theories spread with or without character limits. What seems to do better for discourse is not char limits, but rather enforcing limits on misinformation and hate speech.
[+] [-] irrational|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CathedralBorrow|5 years ago|reply
This feels like a "everyone is mostly like me" fallacy. A whole ton of people use Twitter because they actually enjoy it.
[+] [-] microcolonel|5 years ago|reply
Far as I'm concerned, this is the main feature of Twitter. The only thing that really sets it apart is that every exchange is a public exchange.
This also (until recently) set a standard for statements, where if there are enough replies, and even the critical ones don't cast doubt on the statement, you could have more trust in it. Now of course it's uncertain, since Twitter automatically censors and pseudo-censors replies, including quality ones. Sometimes Twitter does this thing where it won't even show you a reply that you sent unless you have a direct link.
[+] [-] FailMore|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unityByFreedom|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, it’s fun to build a clone, but what we really need is something innovative.
[+] [-] andreygrehov|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://subreply.com/static/script.js?v=6
[+] [-] jekrb|5 years ago|reply
Really a joy to read.
[+] [-] jcun4128|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moneywoes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6510|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbaudanza|5 years ago|reply
I really like the idea of a text-only social network, so I hope this takes off. I think the author should consider supporting other languages though. Seeing romanized text isn't very helpful to people that actually want to read or write in other character sets. It's a cute feature though.
[+] [-] blotter_paper|5 years ago|reply
>Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks.
[...]
>Limitations
>480 characters per reply ASCII only because it works everywhere
I could see this being a xenophobic thing, but I could also see it being more about the limited character set (for minimalism). I'm not making a claim about the motivations, but either way your desire seems counter to his vision.
[+] [-] waste_monk|5 years ago|reply
Maybe it's a moderation problem?
I personally wouldn't feel comfortable running a non-english service, as I feel it would be too hard to moderate it effectively (or at least until you rearch the point where you have paid or volunteer moderators fluent in both the "main" language (to communicate rules and policy clearly) and any other supported langage). You can try auto-translating foreign text but you won't necessarily get a good translation, let alone handle cultural references (not Korean, but e.g. [1])and so on.
[1] https://www.italki.com/article/92/the-dark-meaning-of-5-chin...
[+] [-] grishka|5 years ago|reply
(I wonder how it would tell the difference between Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian though?)
[+] [-] numpad0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|5 years ago|reply
Looks simple enough that someone could clone it to run "Subreply for Korean."
IMO: I find mixed language social networks and threads difficult because I usually don't understand the other language.
[+] [-] 0-_-0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carrolldunham|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pippy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Willamin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smhmd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismartin|5 years ago|reply
https://subreply.com/about
"Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks."
What does "untrustworthy" mean in this context, and how is Subreply easier to trust by comparison? The entire terms are "be nice or else". What exactly does "nice" mean and what are the consequences of violating this vague standard? It doesn't say. I don't understand how that's trustworthy.
[+] [-] herbstein|5 years ago|reply
I think moderators would do nicely to consider that not all negativity manifests as "niceness". If I were to say "trans women are just gay men trying to score straight men" (a real opinion of some) there's nothing contained just within that statement that makes it "un-nice", but the thought expressed is exceedingly vile. If someone else then replies "You're a horrible bigot" that would very much be a break with "niceness" or civility - is that allowed?
Moderation is harder than it looks, and I've seen forums descent into racist hellholes because moderators only cared about civility and niceness. This has slowly become my number one concern with new forums and places of discussion.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ulisesrmzroche|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lucb1e|5 years ago|reply
Also, the about page is contradictory:
> [brain][muscles] one or two emojis instead of avatars
> [...]
> ASCII only because it works everywhere
Hmm hmm, I see. Emojis work so everywhere that I have to [substitute] them to even talk about it here. Seems to me like "we don't do encoding because it's hard" more than because it works everywhere: any device with emoji support will also at least support the basic characters -- perhaps a unicode snowman won't exist in some fonts, but surely a character like µ should work... This is not just about other languages, either: °C, µm, different length dashes, etc. are regular non-ASCII symbols that occur in English.
And no, "ASCII only" is not meant in the sense of "plain text only". Any non-US ASCII is converted (ç->c, ÿ->y, ś->s, µ->u).
[+] [-] masukomi|5 years ago|reply
wow... way to give the finger to the majority of the world.
[+] [-] onefuncman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viklove|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moxplod|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waheoo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristaps|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ketanmaheshwari|5 years ago|reply
This should be in the features. It is the strongest selling point of the site as I see it.
[+] [-] kyoob|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russellbeattie|5 years ago|reply
Now you log in (FB, Twitter, etc.) only to find out which of your casual acquaintances are the most gullible, racist, sexist, homophobic, sociopathic or worse by the news items they're spewing into their increasingly extreme echo chamber. Sure, the same thing could be conveyed by a selfie wearing a MAGA hat, but it would happen much, much less often.
All these services would have to do to get back to their social roots is provide a default filter for news items. But they refuse, and in fact are increasingly manipulating your feed instead to increase "engagement" (read: anger and hate).
I'm amazed that a social-only network hasn't taken off yet that provides this basic functionality. It feels like the time is right for something like this.
[+] [-] aymeric|5 years ago|reply
Design wise though, I suggest making the content (text written by users) easier to read / scan.
Right now, the usernames are more prominent than the comments.
Have you tried putting the username and timestamp on the same line as the content?
Also maybe use grey colors for less important text.
[+] [-] cosmotic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mudlus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newman8r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aahortwwy|5 years ago|reply
A common theme that I've noticed among recent upstart social efforts is a focus on platform and/or policy differentiation. I personally believe this is not very important during the phase where a social network is working to reach critical mass. It seems to me that most successful social networks got their start by offering users unique content, by targeting existing, tight-knit communities, or through some combination of the two. Platform and policy help shape the social network, but there needs to be a network to be shaped in the first place - they don't form magically.
[+] [-] Upvoter33|5 years ago|reply
The End.
[+] [-] jtvjan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _zllx|5 years ago|reply