Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

[shanebellone]

I have a concept for a social network that would eliminate many pain points. I'm sure others do too.

How could we build a communal product for the public? Theoretically, this approach would result in a better product. Practically, it seems nearly impossible.

What are your thoughts?

Edit:

Let me give an example that I have been thinking about since 2009.

It requires a fundamental change from the reach model towards concentric social circles. The social network would allow users to arrange into small topical groups called social circles. These social circles would have a cap of 10 (arbitrary number) members. Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation, abuse, and moderation.

This model closely mirrors real social interactions and allows for both private and intimate communication. It also offers a profitable advertising opportunity. A social circle reflects its members’ interests and context.

[ineptech]

Fleeting idea that could be combined with that: a web-of-trust social network where you can only "friend" people in real life, by tapping phones.

When you do so, the app might say, "The person you just met claims to be Joe Schmoe, do you want to vouch for them?" If you approve them, they can message you and vice versa. A friend of Joe's can see you in his friend list, and try to message you, and you can accept it if you trust Joe, but they won't be a first-tier friend until you meet them. Your tweet-like posts can be seen by anyone, or your friends only, or people within N connections of you, as you prefer.

I think it could be implemented in a distributed way, with no central server, if some proportion of the users are willing to serve their traffic from a VPS rather than just their phone. If someone cheats (uses a fork of the app that lets them "friend" people they haven't met, create fake identities, lie about their friends graph, etc), it wouldn't affect you unless you trust them. Over enough time and with enough use, this might be good enough to figure out whether someone distant from you (e.g. someone you're about to make an Ebay purchase from) is using their real identity or not, as the "main" part of the overall friend graph that a real user with a lot of friends is connected to would be structurally distinguishable from the subnets created by cheaters.

(This is not a cherished idea I've been working on for years and am prepared to defend, just a random idea I thought I'd post in case it sparks an idea for someone, so be polite in ripping it to shreds pls)

[kayodelycaon]

The first problem I see is separating my online identity with my real identity. I really don't want anyone at my job finding out which dog I am on the internet.

My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting. :)

The second is friends of friends can get really awkward. There are some people who are friends with me that are also friends with people who never want to see me again.

[olah_1]

Threema has a concept of "levels" for contacts:

> Level 1 (red): The ID and public key have been obtained from the server because you received a message from this contact for the first time or added the ID manually. No matching contact was found in your address book (by phone number or email), and therefore you cannot be sure that the person is who they claim to be in their messages.

> Level 2 (orange): The ID has been matched with a contact in your address book (by phone number or email). Since the server verifies phone numbers and email addresses (via an SMS or email with the activation link), you can be reasonably sure that the person is who they claim to be.

> Level 3 (green): You have personally verified the ID and public key of the person by scanning their QR code. Assuming their device has not been hijacked, you can be very sure that messages from this contact were really written by the person that they indicate.

[birdman3131]

You seem to be under the impression that real life access is the indicator of closeness of relationship. It is usually not.

Out of my set of close friends the vast majority I have never met in person. Most family I might add are in entirely separate states. Most of my IRL friends no longer live near me.

[uxamanda]

Reminds me a bit of PGP and a key signing party. In that case the goal is to verify government docs to help someone verify they are who they say they are, but you can also give greater trust levels to the people you actually know.

[unsupp0rted]

I would hate this because I’m physically nowhere near any HNers I’d trust, and vanishingly few HNers at all.

[shanebellone]

This is actually really interesting.

Marrying digital with physical is an interesting approach. The problem of proximity is a unique point of friction which might also temper digital communication.

If the application "lived" on cellphones and communicated with a P2P protocol, users could truly own their data (excluding the data they share with their network).

[paxys]

One of the primary utilities of a social network is being able to connect with people who aren't around you. If everyone on my Twitter was within shouting distance why would I need to Tweet at all?

[mcv]

I'm not sure that would work for me. One of the things I like is actually making new friends. Google Plus was absolutely perfect for that: I got to know a lot of people with similar interests (hobbies, politics) to mine.

In fact, I'm not even connected to my real life friends on any social media, as far as I'm aware. Maybe they're not even on it. They may be wiser than I.

[sdwr]

To shreds you say? And his wife?

Hearing a lot on this thread about folding real life back into social networks, making the system designed to keep people on the happy, healthy, human-scaled social path. Today's SMBC lines up pretty neatly - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/addicted

[wylie39]

scuttlebutt[0] is like this.

0:https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/

[vmc_7645]

Currently working on implementing a similar feature, where instead of direct interaction it's location based relative to that users recent posts. That way if you don't want to be "found" you don't post and vice-versa.

[kyleyeats]

I've always liked this idea! I think it should be device-level too, and not have a separate ephemeral identity. In other words if you get a new phone you have to start over.

[bil7]

I think what would really be great is a social media site that doesn't offer direct image or video hosting. A bit like how reddit used to be. You just have link aggregation, voting, and comments. That's it. Maybe in a nice, clean, minimal UI as well. This would lend itself to tech folk I think. If only it existed.

[baxtr]

Great idea. To add: I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean. Also maybe it would be great to have a voting system where one could downvote as well! But only after a certain number of upvotes I think.

[bcjordan]

Actually it could lend itself to a great business model as well — hackers both start startups, and often are looking for jobs at startups. You could use it for lead generation for startup founders to join your accelerator (once that concept exists), and an added benefit to founders would be access to hiring from the pool of hackers on the site. Win/win.

Sounds like bit of a schlep though. Would need to draw an audience e.g. by producing a ton of your own content early on. Lots of legal processes involved with operating an accelerator. Probably not worth it.

[cheschire]

We have to be careful to not simply crowd-source the moderation either. Keeping a crowd-moderated social media site from devolving is a dang hard task.

[time_to_smile]

> link aggregation

One thing I've noticed over the years is that most social media companies have slowly started to discourage outbound links.

On reddit a surprising number of subs no longer allow you to just submit links, and a growing number require review before posting external content.

Even Twitter (before Musk) was clearly deprioritizing external links.

This is a bit troubling because it further leads to the "dead internet" where it gets harder and harder for people making interesting content independent of major sites to get visibility.

I think of the main reasons HN remains relatively high quality is its primary function is still aggregating pointers to elsewhere.

[asddubs]

so hacker news

[seydor]

But how can i friend you? This is not social

[holler]

No voting but working on a clean/minimal link aggregation + live chat site at https://sqwok.im

bonus points: "hacker theme" to make the hacker feel at home https://i.imgur.com/AleBLed.png

https://sqwok.im/p/TXmiluFNUILE_Q (cross-post)

[NaturalPhallacy]

>voting

This always leads to a hivemind. Because even if you're supposed to use it for rewarding good posts, what the horde ends up doing is using downvotes as a disagree button. Especially if the admins/moderators have authoritarian powers to hide content on top of the users' individual powers or rate limit posting by those with differing views. Because everyone's bias sneaks in - no one is exempt from this - and it's very hard to see your own biases if you don't deliberately venture out of your filter bubble regularly. The best tool I've found for this so far (and I maintain a search) is https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news It gets trickier when one side completely ignores a story, which both do.

[DoreenMichele]

When I was a moderator for tagfam.org, I was privy to internal research that the founder had done. About 20 percent of members were active on a regular basis and about 10 percent more were occasionally active. The rest lurked and just read.

People can readily navigate a community of about 150 members. On two different forums, once current membership got past about 750 people, things started splintering off into new groups. Do the math: 20 percent of 750 is 150.

Above that figure of 150, the way people handle social interaction is with formal processes and protecting their privacy. They try to limit what they share about themselves on a "need to know" basis. Some people are better at this than others.

This is where my life got very painful when I first went online: I didn't know how to do that. I had never really interacted with "the public" though I thought I had. I had been a homemaker and before that a student. I knew lots of people, but those people were mostly family and friends. I had extremely limited experience with customers, bosses, etc. and didn't really know how to be selective about the details I shared with an eye towards protecting myself and this went weird places.

To remedy that, I have had to consciously think about such things a whole lot. I've even collected data at times and so forth.

Many people are not super clear about such distinctions. If they grew up in a big city, maybe they don't readily share intimate details with anyone and don't really think about how much they leave out. If they grew up in a village, maybe they make no real distinction between friends and strangers and just let it all hang out and don't understand when it comes back to bite them.

A lot of the problems we have currently online exist because the internet puts us rather unnaturally in touch with a much broader selection of people than in-person interactions are likely to for most people. It's harder to say things online that won't have someone up in arms because you stepped on their toes without realizing it.

I've been trying to sort out how to interact positively with people on Twitter (and in other online spaces) for a long time, people I may not know at all but may have interests in common with. I think a lot of our online social media issues ultimately will be solved -- if they get solved at all -- by working on this issue.

[AndrewKemendo]

I feel like we already have

I have gotten jobs off of HN, started organizations with people I met here, hired people from posts, argued and agreed and flamed and shared ....all the stuff you do with social networks

It's just that this network minimizes the "personality" driven aspects of social networks because it's not driven to optimize profit or engagement. It's seemingly driven to optimize for civility. I think that's why we have the longevity we do.

I've been kicking around on here since 2012 and I only recognize a handful of handles when I see them post and honestly it makes very little difference because the goal is to evaluate the argument.

I think we're good, and don't really need to change what we have. Just my 2c

[2color]

I love the idea. In terms of numbers and caps, I think going with Dunbar's number of 150 might work best.

Cal Newport makes a point about how in the early days of Facebook, it was essentially mirroring your real world social network. In fact, I remember how fun and innocent Facebook was in its early days.

Perhaps the biggest shift in Facebook's evolution is towards algorithmic feed optimisation and expansion into more public areas that exceed dunbar's number.

Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/) avoids this shift in its design by doing away with the "global singleton" network that Facebook, Instagram and other have.

Another interesting project that is bringing back self-sovreign identity is Bluesky's At protocol (https://atproto.com/) which also make the "algorithm" part of a feed open source.

Some building blocks that are worth considering: IPFS/IPLD (https://ipfs.tech/) and Hypercore (https://hypercore-protocol.org/).

Disclaimer: I work full time on IPFS

[runlaszlorun]

I’m sure at least 75% of you guys in here are stronger technically than me. And 99% of you have probably seen more success in their careers than I have.

But I’ve been building little throwaway code experiments for the last three years and its totally doable.

I haven’t seen a regular paycheck since March 2019 when I was fired from a Director of Engineering role from a firm so shitty and a job so toxic I actually do think I have PTSD from it. Ironic given that my first job out of college was chasing warlords in Bosnia for the US Army in the 90s and helping the UN investigated mass grave sites.

I’m poor enough that when I finally went to the VA to get benefits for my injuries from 20+ years ago, they actually put me in their homeless abatement program and I now live in Section 8 housing in Austin. And it’s actually pretty great.

We’ve had 60 years of Moore’s law. At this point you can totally stuff the entire searchable internet on 4 good size hard drives (75-85 TB compressed) and 1 to 2 Gbps pipes are everywhere. And folks globally are rightly freaked out about a world driving towards totalitarianism and hungry for a change.

I’ve been trying out various approaches over the last three years but have zero attachment to any ideas I have on the topic.

But clearly this won’t get anywhere with just me or others sitting in our living rooms knowing that it’s fixable.

I’m 100% willing to help anyone with ideas in this space however they might need help. Full stop.

I know folks are sheepish about putting their contact info out there but here’s mine:

Alex Ross [email protected] +1.213.500.5925

Feel free to drop me a line with: ideas you have, something you need, a word of encouragement, tell me I’m a moron or a drama queen, whatever.

But for god sakes, guys, don’t look the other way. It’s 1939 Germany but this time we have no one to blame but ourselves…

[shanebellone]

I'm an Army Veteran too. Afghanistan though as Bosnia was before my time. I'll shoot you an email, it would be nice to discuss technology with (presumably) another self-taught developer with similar life experiences.

I also think we're on the precipice of something previously unthinkable. I'm undecided whether that outcome is authoritarianism or the country's implosion.

On a less grim note, I do believe nuclear fusion has the potential to save us from ourselves. Indirectly, of course.

[dennis_jeeves1]

Alex, I presume that your post was basically directed at the whole social circle thing, if i understood you.

I guess as the end of the day one has to ask as to what social circles achieves.

I don't think any code or online solutions will in itself achieve anything, however it can be certainly an amplifier if there are the right people involved. Go ahead have a look at my profile and the link ( 5 minute read) that I put in the profile and see if it is something that perks your interest. Heads up: most people I think are repulsed by my idea, or at least would think I'm a nutcase.

[martindbp]

> 99% of you have probably seen more success in their careers than I have. > Director of Engineering > chasing warlords in Bosnia for the US Army in the 90s and helping the UN investigated mass grave sites

Very modest, or I guess I'm in that one percent.

[fleddr]

In any social media design you have to take well known power laws into account. You may consider HN currently to be a highly engaging site but you have to consider why that is: a huge amount of eye balls is watching a tiny set of content, a list of a few dozens links. Next, if as little as 1% joins in discussion, the result is threads with substance.

Great outcome, but you're probably ignoring that 99% didn't engage. And you'll be bitten by that dynamic when creating tiny circles or bubbles. Because 1% engagement within something small approaches...nothing.

Mastodon is a great way to see it in action on a small scale. I've been following an instance of some 2,000 members for a few weeks now. The power laws emerge perfectly.

A handful of people post daily. 90% of posts get zero engagement. No like, boost, reply...nothing at all. The posters are puzzled by it. Some have 500 followers yet have never received engagement from a single one of them.

Another interesting aspect is a word I only learned about this week: toxic positivity. A small unit of like-minded individuals has funny downsides. When coming from a war zone like Twitter, it feels rather boring. There's no drama and stirring the pot is frowned upon. So you'll end up reading about how somebody watered their favorite plant, leaving you wondering what the purpose of it all is.

"Not stirring the pot" on Mastodon can go quite far. I saw an instance demanding people put a content warning on photos of food, as it may trigger people with an eating disorder. Yesterday a post had a warning (EYE CONTACT). When clicking away the warning, indeed a photo of a person looking into the camera was revealed.

So you're already dealing with near-zero engagement in a tiny place, and then discourage a massive portion of common conversation. The result is perfect peace, because nobody posts anything.

[shanebellone]

Most social networks make posting (or whatever specific terminology is being used) equivalent to talking at someone. The correct model would foster conversation and thus impact engagement. Small social groups discuss topics. Offering a topic for conversation implicitly earns a response.

Rarely do groups of friends get together to declare simple and unrelated one-liners. An "ideal" social network might be more related to group sms than Twitter or Mastodon.

[jacooper]

Content warnings on Mastodon are just ridiculous

[everdrive]

Unpopular opinion: any social network, no matter how it’s architected will become terrible past a certain size. Perhaps some architectures will have different “maximum tolerable sizes” than others, but all will become intolerable once there is a large enough user base.

More users, however, means more ad / tracking revenue, so these two ideas will always be at odds.

[AlbertCory]

As someone else pointed out, that was Google Plus.

The number one thing to realize is: this is not a technical problem. It's a marketing, political, and social problem.

Facebook and Twitter have vast numbers of users who are not at all technical. How you reach people like that and get them to join is your problem, and it has nothing to do with deep understanding of the technology.

[ctvo]

> I have a concept for a social network that would eliminate many pain points.

And what is this concept? Hidden in this question is a strong undercurrent of "I'm an ideas person with a world changing idea. I can't share it because I believe that it's valuable. I just need engineers".

[HatchedLake721]

Building a social network “product” is easy, entry level engineers build Reddit and Twitter clones during bootcamps.

I think the right question is “How could we build a network and keep people coming back?”

That’s the hardest thing to do, even with millions behind your back.

Ask Google Buzz, Orkut, iTunes Ping, Vine, Google Plus…

[dennisnedry]

Vine was killed by Twitter. A foolish move given how popular TikTok is now.

[fakedang]

Vine definitely had people coming back iirc. Don't take into account Twitter's boneheadedness.

[philip1209]

I think the answer is personal newsletters. Email is (sufficiently) distributed, and (about) everybody uses it.

I've replaced most of my social email with a monthly update. On the first day of every month, I publish a post on my website titled “What I’m up to this month.” In it, I have three simple sections:

- Highlights from last month

- Things to share

- What I’m up to this month

It sends to my mailing list. I find it works great - I can stay in touch with people, and people bring it up in conversations. It lacks the dopamine hits of "likes", but I think that it's ok to have a calmer, stupider system for staying in touch.

[sgallant]

Using email as a slower social platform. Love it!

[SpeedilyDamage]

Step 1: BUILD IT!

Ideas are addicting; the longer you have them the more you idolize them and become over time immune to the idea's criticism.

The general principle in startups is that you know remarkably little about what actually is valued in the market until you do some very specific validation research, which involves putting some kind of real, meaningful solution to a person's pain in front of them to see how they react.

[elefantastisch]

Every year at Christmas, I get a card from a family member with a short, personal hand-written note and a 1-page, generic printed update on how their year has been, usually with some pictures.

This is what I want from a social network.

I want to be able to keep up some regular connection with people I don't see on a regular basis. I want us to remember each other, know about major life events, and have a convenient way to reconnect more personally when that makes sense.

For people I see (or want to talk to) regularly, I'll just send messages or group messages.

For more of the topic-centered type of internet community I may want in my life... well HN already does that perfectly.

[outsidetheparty]

You've just re-invented group texts.

The thing is: people don't want limited reach. Why would anyone sign up for a network that limits everything they say to be visible to less than a dozen people? What's the incentive? With numbers like that I could just go outside.

So many "Let's solve a problem about social networks" ideas turn out to be "let's remove or limit the reason people use social networks in the first place"! The last one I saw -- also posted here on HN -- wanted to replace LinkedIn with a network that only allowed you to connect with people via their email addresses. So..... it was email.

(Of course, to be fair I thought the same thing when Twitter was introduced. "Why would anyone want to limit themselves to 160 characters?" I thought. So hey, who knows, maybe your group text simulator really is the next big thing)

[shanebellone]

What piece of technology do you use that wasn't pitched like this: Like product but differentiating feature.

Reach is the fundamental flaw from both operational and social standpoints. It makes the world worse.

We regulate heroin for the same reason. Although this argument makes me a bit of a hypocrite because I do believe all drugs should be legal and regulated. I'm not entirely sure which opinion will hold after I reconcile this conflict.

[n4r9]

> The social network would allow users to arrange into small topical groups called social circles.

This sounds like Google+ : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B

I loved the idea back then. As other commenters have pointed out, the structure and design of the network is not the biggest factor influencing its success.

[rendall]

I really think that any walled-garden website or app is going to replicate all of the problems of all of the social network apps that we love to hate. These problems are endemic to the format.

We need our social networks to really focus on interoperability and communication protocols between them. The RSS feed is an excellent first iteration, and I don't see why it could not form the basis for a truly transformative, open, ubiquitous, user-centered social network. Each user owns their own feed and subscribes to anyone they like, as now. To this we could add discoverability, showing what feeds are common among one's subscribers. We could also add comments. Profile pages. Each user hosts their own.

A properly created protocol could allow users to subscribe to each other's feeds, ban anyone they want to from their own feed, limit content to specific social circles... while not controlling what other people do. Each individual can be their own moderator and control their own algorithm.

[dymk]

You’ve got one already, it’s called Hacker News.

[martindbp]

Personally, despite its reputation I've gravitated more and more towards Twitter, because at HN I can't really trust what people are saying. People may sound smart and like they know their stuff, but you can come up with great sounding arguments for and against anything. It takes a lot of time and energy to figure out if someone is worth listening to, so to me it makes more sense to seek out the known experts and follow them on Twitter instead. HN has also become more and more anti-hacker, anti-technology and negative in general. Life's too short to be immersed in negativity, even if it's right, which it rarely is.

How would the ideal social network look like? A mix of HN and Twitter perhaps. There are rarely any discussions on Twitter with deep comment trees.

[matt_s]

Simple: non-profit, worker cooperative is the corporate structure, dunbar number for the max social circle size, users moderate content, and no global/public/viral content at all. Open source software running on open source software.

Here's my counter thought to some huge platform technically speaking. We have these massively powerful devices in our pockets and everything is a web app, use the device to do more. Make content decentralized (no, not that crypto-bro or crypto-hater). Decentralize the storage of content to people's devices for things received. Then the platform itself is more of a message broker. Let users pick their cloud storage drug of choice (icloud, onedrive, google, dropbox, etc.) or abstract it away where you provision storage for them and charge beyond some sane limit but the client app gets the content from cloud storage (user defined or brokered). Once the content has been delivered to all users for a circle (max 150) its gone off the platform and when users view that historical content its local/cloud delivered (some caching algo to make it fast). Provide users the ability to tag content as archivable which just gives them a timeline feed of it they can browse whenever. Users literally own the content.