[godot]

> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small.

I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.

When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.

[wincy]

I remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.

[saghm]

> I don’t think she even noticed honestly.

From her perspective, the post disappeared, and then you never posted anything like that again! Everyone wins

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I had a relative threaten his daughter, because her daughter-in-law posted some political stuff he disagreed with.

Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.

[dlock17]

TIL Kendrick Lamar has a HN (/s)

[brentjanderson]

There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

[saubeidl]

Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..

[andai]

That's a great point. In the mid 2000s I remember thinking about this. "You don't talk to your parents the same way you talk to your friends. So it's like, you are different people to different people."

[dghlsakjg]

This meshes deeply with "The medium is the message" from McLuhan.

[sugarpimpdorsey]

I remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.

[pier25]

Facebook around 2008 was pretty cool. Just me hanging out with my irl friends.

And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.

[xgkickt]

I thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.

[amelius]

You could run something like Facebook but in tiny shards. It would be better. And require 1/1000th of the engineering workforce.

[NikolaNovak]

I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome.

I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.

[hnaccount_rng]

You can't though. The problem is, that humanity is a web. Not a set of communities (at least on the scale of 1000s of people). And since those webs overlap you will either need to solve the overlap problem at the boundaries (taking engineering effort) or you will end up with essentially one big shard again. On the other hand, you really don't need to change anything on the backend. Simply limit the number of "tier 1" friends to 50, have a "tier 2" category for your 1000 and put everything else in "acquaintances" and split engagement between those.

The problem with that though is: You will generate an enormous amount of social friction "why am I tier 2, but (without loss of generality) Karen is Tier 1?" and reduce monetizability. So truly nobody will feel happy about those restrictions. And since it doesn't solve any engineering problem you run into (see above) there is no one incentivised to build such a thing. (Ironically this may not be completely true, given that this is pretty much how Chinese social media apps work. So maybe states [or at least power structures] are incentivised to build such a system)

[xnx]

I can see many way where you can only follow (and be followed) by 1000 people would be better in many way. An audience of 1000 isn't monetizable so the network wouldn't be poisoned by ads ("sponsored content" AKA "sponcon").

[Seanambers]

At some point, everyone on Facebook realized almost at the same time, that it was no longer a place to share, but a place to compete.

Then everyone basically stopped sharing and started curating.

[wat10000]

The problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that.

I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.

There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.

[xp84]

This is pretty true, but funny because it’s maybe the simplest problem to solve at least on Facebook, with the group visibility. People just either don’t care or are too incompetent to select the correct audience when posting.

[thewebguyd]

Yeah, Facebook's best days were when it still required a .edu email to sign up.

Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.

[ipaddr]

This is the reason for facebooks success the rollout. Regardless of when you joined it was always better for you then the next group.

Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.

There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.

[fullstackchris]

https://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/new/index.php

comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters

[jszymborski]

This is sorta something people are discovering with Mastodon. Lots of instances are realizing it's better to cap registrations before they get too large and just have someone spin up another instance.

You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).

[ajsnigrutin]

Google + solved this issue with 'circles' or whatever it was called.

For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.

The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)

[Jbird2k]

Telegram is a platform where you can connect with people on a small scale

[rco8786]

Yea the first few years of Facebook were magical. It felt like suddenly you could connect with your peers in a new way, discover old friends, etc. Went downhill pretty quickly though.

[30minAdayHN]

Once a sister of my friend messaged me asking to take down a picture of him with a beer mug. It was because they were looking for matches for him (Indian wedding). I said no and told her that it is better to lose such a match :p

At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)

[tombert]

SomethingAwful is still fun precisely because they don't have too many people. At any given time, there's about ~2500 active users, which is enough to keep the chats funny and interesting and avoiding "dead mall" vibes, but not so much that it's horrible like LinkedIn or Facebook.

[derefr]

I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks.

The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.

Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.

The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)

Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.

In real-world terms:

• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.

• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.

• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.

• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.

Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)

• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)

• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.

Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)

It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.

[xp84]

I think this is really insightful. I would add that modern Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok add another dimension in that they try as hard as possible to discourage interactions among friends, by focusing on algorithm-based curation (and push everyone to vertical-video-swipe-mode for all but Twitter). It seems obvious that someone did the math years ago and determined ad dollars are better when people see friend posts nearly 0% of the time, replaced by posts from random mysterious “Pages” you don’t follow, celebrities you don’t follow, and viral public posts by complete strangers. People’s posts are increasingly for nobody to see, because unless they are public and go viral, they’re invisible.

So it’s like most of these “social media” sites are no longer social. They’re more like “targeted media feeds.”

[Velorivox]

You’ve misrepresented the core of your argument. Wikipedia on dark forest hypothesis:

“The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…”

> not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions

Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

[para_parolu]

The best social network I ever used was private one with a few thousand users. Over time you just know most active users.

[doctorpangloss]

Ha ha, the authors says do things that don’t scale, but he used Gemini to write that cliche prose.

[andai]

"What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too."

—xkcd 1320

[xgkickt]

Digital Heaven. We may not get it, but our AI death masks will.