What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).
There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please.
What Reddit and similar sites bring to the table is a single pool of authenticated users. Once a user is logged into Reddit, posting on different subreddits is frictionless. Even with oauth and the like, it is hard to replicate that with a distributed set of sites.
1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it
2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the various information sources and present options that users find interesting is the biggest reason lurkers&voters (90% of it's users) keep returning.
Honestly, I have a strong interest in US, Chinese, European, and now Russian politics, and how they relate to the future of the humanity and all life on earth. It is clear that most real innovation happens much more quickly and decisively if centralized under a government that decides to spend a lot of money on research, so those are discussions and reading materials that I have to find on places like reddit. Ultimately, many of the decisions and things occurring today, while political, have deep personal philosophical roots. Discussions in particular spaces regarding that simply can't happen here due to the rules; rules that differ on different subreddits and for each community I agree with.
I wouldn't be too sure about the statement that innovation happens faster under centralization (especially government). Rather I'd guess you get certain types of innovations.
How many years after we went to space using a central authority did it take before private enterprise could do it? How much did private enterprise depend on the technological development that arose from central and shared commitments to scientific development in that space?
We can have the same discussions about the NIH and new drug development (since most drugs simply can't make money). The internet, chips, Google itself was started as a federally funded post-grad project.
Things move much faster when we devote shared resources into risk taking that cannot make money. It might sound like waste, but government spending, I surmise, is what creates great economies. This occurs because technological advancement, especially those that can't obviously be exploited for financial gain in the market, are the true drivers of our economy.
Either way, we will soon begin to see who is right. There are several countries now competing with the US who were far behind when we went to our current model of low taxation, high free market. It should be interesting to see if their centralized scientific/technological systems outdo us over time.
And then no more. The real innovation happens today is more real and substantial. Whenever you use public fund even under dictatorship like Soviet Union and china today you just have a legitimacy issues - children vs space. I am on the space side but have Soviet Union got voyager ? And I also understand the stress NASA has.
Clearly pure centralization doesn't work, and pure decentralization is chaos. The sweet spot is in between. Right now China seems to be in a better position than the US in that sense. They promote the same type of startups we have in Silicon Valley, and yet have an overarching centralized policy for the long term. In a way, the Chinese government acts as a sort of Facebook or Google.
Since you're interested in Russian politics I'd recommend checking out https://www.ridl.io/en/ if you haven't already. Online forums are great, and it's nice to combine that with some gatekeepered stuff
What I would recommend is that you spend some time on reddit and find them for yourself. Reddit has so many well-built communities, that it's difficult for me to suggest some. Even really vile parts of the site are good for understanding propaganda and how it works, and what it's saying today.
I've found that Reddit (in terms of content, not UI) has gotten somewhat better in recent years, while most discussion venues have either gotten much worse or gotten rid of commenting altogether.
In relative terms, it's superior to most of its alternatives (present site excluded, of course).
I really don't see much actual discussion on Reddit.
For all that it was a ghost town, if you could find some good conversation hosts / moderators on Google+, that site had some really good discussions. Probably mostly because it didn't try to scale.
(Yes, this was a hugely subjective experience, and depending on who you did or didn't follow, quality varied dramatically. The core G+ user group was probably ~100k or so English-literate participants, of whom a good 10-20k have ended up on the Pluspora Diaspora pod.)
I've both tried to start and gone looking for conversation on Reddit. The site conspires against this, in several ways.
If you're aware of specific subs that really shine and aren't afraid to name them, I'd appreciate it. (I can completely understand not wanting to out good discussion.)
Mind I'm contrasting discussion with merely good information, which Ask Historians, Ask Science, and a small set of other subs manage to achieve, with draconian (and much needed & welcomed) moderation.
I didn’t see a lot of discussion at Reddit. I saw echo chambers. I have since deleted my account and abandoned Reddit as a result. If I want focused discussion I find somewhere without a visible vote marker like HN or IRC.
And the obverse is r/sanfrancisco with moderation that has turned the sub into a sunset travel pic slide show punctuated by golden gate bridge pictures. What a wasted opportunity for something interesting. And it is leaking into r/bayarea ruining it as well.
You overestimate the skills of moderators... I doubt very much that true experts in their fields would spend any time doing moderation Reddit... most likely, people doing that would be recent graduates trying to learn and impart their recently gained knowledge upon laymen.
There are several subs I'm aware of which do seem to garner expert-level moderation.
The Asks -- Science, Historians, possibly Economists (I'm trying to decide there -- the mods talk expertise, though quality IMO lags). Several of the Fitness subs are quite good. Various technical subs attract high-quality contributors, and the CSS support sub (specifically for styling old-style Reddit custom stylesheets) is simply superb. I've dug into energy topics, and though there's a bit of BS flung about, there's also quality expertise.
Posting online actually is a form of shingle-hanging and getting a sense of issues people are facing in the real world. There's value to that.
I feel like I've seen more of the opposite (piss poor moderation) than the good. This is why on your average subreddit, the average quality of discussion is extremely low, with the top comments being low-effort one liners. In worse cases, sometimes the moderators because straight up authoritarian, censoring opposing views even if they're well-reasoned and thought out (any politics-related subreddit).
And 3. Quality Control
As problematic as the voting system is, in the end the quality of the contribution is better vetted than any Google result. I often search even for products only on reddit first to get real customer insights and contradicting options than the overoptimized Google and Amazon reviews.
Do you know if old.reddit doesn't do the horrible trick the "normal" Reddit does when you hit the browser's back button, where it fucking reloads the page or something so you get up to the top of the page instead of to the part of the page where the link you'd clicked was, so you could go to the comments? Specially on mobile, that makes me hate Reddit!! Trying on desktop, old.reddit seems to not do that.
There have to be some folks there fully aware of the dark-pattern hell of their redesign, and smart enough to keep old.reddit running to appease the people who appreciate what the old style offers. And I hope they keep it up! Reddit is pretty much the last forum I frequent other than here, and the day they kill off the older version is the day I stop visiting.
Which contributes to the easy of use/good user experience factor
You don't come there for because "it has a consistent user interface". You come there because "it's easy to use!" (and you find it easy because it's consistent, like you said)
Basically, just put a bunch of html/css files in a GitHub repo, then use the above page to let Netlify publish that on the net... it can even set up DNS for you so you can your own domain.
That seems appropriate for people who understand terms like “continuous deployment” and “serverless functions”, but I thought we were discussing a far, far more widespread audience. Nerds can set up websites with just an ssh password - we need something for the remaining 99.9%
You don't even need Netlify. You can host basically any static sites directly on GitHub. I've got one pure HTML/CSS site, six React apps, and two Jekyll sites running on GitHub Pages.
What are the best current options for 'creating your own website'? Are we talking primarily blogging, or are we seeking a more general solution? As a geek, my first instinct is github pages, but that’s far from user-friendly, as-is.
I guess, if we’re talking about 'creating your own website', we do literally mean any site, not just a limited subset. Clearly, server-side scripting is out of scope, so we're talking content rather than apps - so any form of HTML+Js+css, with a very accessible UI, and lots of 'templates' available for each of the three technologies.
You can't upvote though. One of the nice things same Reddit is that you can go to a subreddit about something you want to learn about and sort for the most popular posts from last year (for example). Some kind of system like that for websites could become a killer feature.
You could treat a link to the post as a proxy for an upvote, and then rank posts based on how many other posts link to them. Of course you wouldn't be able to charge for this service so you'd have to sell ad space on the front page.
That would be an exceedingly thin signal. Very few posts will have incoming links, so you'll get very little scoring data.
The signal will be hugely susceptible to outlier bias -- The Post That Goes Viral, and generates a huge number of incoming links -- will dominate the rankings.
Because the signal is so thin, distorting and manipulation (through link farming) will be cheap and difficult to detect (a small number of links across a large number of sites).
Don't get me wrong: looking at incidental behaviour is useful, and can often be much more beneficial than direct actions. But remember that all of these signals are actually proxies for some ineffible quantity you're trying to measure, quality.
(The very definition of which should leave you crying on the floor after a few hours. Or days. Or weeks. Or months. Or years....)
May minds have attempted this task. All have fail.
Your correspondent included.
(Small site, many moons ago, since surrendered its electrons back to the Great Disk in the Sky.)
If I may go on a tangent, I’ve thought a bit about the problem of link farms and how it might be addressed.
The problem is essentially this: since pagerank is basically the probability that a random walk through the link graph will end up on your site, linking back to yourself, and no other websites, gives a big boost to your pagerank because a random walk will get stuck on your site. Of course it’s easy to just ignore self-links, but you can get essentially the same effect through clique-like groups of websites and this can be more difficult to detect.
What’s interesting is that an algorithm based on how electrical current flows (so a link is a one-way resistor, i.e. a resistor in series with a diode) would not have this problem. Attaching a conductive loop to some point in a circuit does not change how current flows. Electrons don’t get stuck in loops because they don’t drift around randomly, they move from lower voltage to higher voltage.
Tangents are disallowed. But I'll grant you a hyperbolic trajectory.
Link graphs remind me of lightning descending leaders. If you can have a sense of charge potential between cloud and ground, there might be a circuit equivalent which drains largely self-referential link-farms.
Or is that rephrasing your description? My circuit physics / EE-fu is exceedingly weak.
I think so? There is an obvious circuit equivalent where links are interpreted as one-way resistors. You get a charge potential automatically given the circuit and a choice of source / sink nodes (which you need to decide on anyway to apply pagerank).
The notion of a potential & sink seems to be key, and the idea that if you identify a collectively chained circuit, it cannot be both source and sink to itself. Which is what link farms (self-referral) or "mutual admiration societies" are. The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness. Since DNS obscures true ownership relations, that's a challenge.
Cluster analysis generally shows such relations though.
(I'm pretty sure these questions have generated multiple PhDs at Google.)
“The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness.” I’m not sure what you mean by this. The algorithm I'm describing doesn't require any data beyond what is already used by PageRank.
I have a feeling that you think the electrical potential must be defined by some ad-hoc method before applying an electrical algorithm, and this requires fancy techniques like cluster analysis and the like? This is not the case. Let me re-emphasize that you only need to specify the network of resistors (which is the link graph) and the source and sink, and then the potential is defined automatically in terms of those things (the same way as in physical circuits).
Hacker News starts to severely rate-limit replies in deeply nested threads so if you want to continue discussing this you can email me (email in profile).
In regards to the question, the latter. The source corresponds roughly to the E vector of the pagerank whitepaper. It's a set of websites that's axiomatically good. The pagerank paper suggested the Netscape home page and John McCarthy's homepage as examples, or alternatively making every website a source, although the last option is more prone to abuse. The sink is harder to find a good analogy for. I think a reasonable choice would be to add a new node to the graph representing the sink, and then connect every website via a directed resistor. Then websites could be ranked by how much current flows through the resistor to the sink.
Edit: By the way, upon thinking about this more, I've just realized that I'm not sure about the exact mechanism by which link farms boost pagerank. As far as I can tell there are two possibilities:
A. The original "stuck in a loop" explanation, by which you can illegitimately magnify legitimately earned rank.
B. With the every-page-as-source strategy, you can boost the rank of a website by creating a new website and linking to it, even if nothing links to the new website. Then the other extra links in the link farm just exist to avoid detection of this sort of thing. So you are illegitimately creating rank from scratch, rather than magnifying existing rank.
Admittedly the electrical circuit thing only addresses mechanism A. Mechanism B can be addressed by being more discriminating about which websites are in the source. That applies whether you use pagerank or the electrical thing.
It’s a little more than just auth. Websites have different codes of conduct, different attitudes to humour/off topic content, and crucially different moderation and user safety policies. Remember on most random web forums you have no idea who can see your IP address (if anonymity is important).
Much of this is true on Reddit too, except mods seeing your IP address, but most of the important info is consistently in the subreddit sidebar.
But those aren't free necessarily and they're detached from one another. The thing that's attractive about Reddit is:
1. It's free
2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join
3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum
Websites are great for displaying information but they are not ideal for discussion
Blogger is free. LiveJournal is free. There's plenty of free offerings. Taken as an ecosystem, they are decentralized.
> 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join
The question was for a decentralized service. You can't really have everything under one site and be decentralized, because that one site can filter anything they want. I agree that people want that, but it wasn't the question.
> 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum
Not really part of the question, which was whether the average person can make a forum through a web page.
I think your points have merit, but they don't necessarily apply to the question that was posed, at least as I interpreted it and intended my response to apply to it.
> It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join
In theory you can find new subreddits starting from the main page, but it's more often because of people cross-posting things from somewhere you weren't previously aware existed.
There isn't any technical reason why a decentralized system couldn't work the same way. Basically just need a standard way to designate posts as permissible to repost on other sites with a link-back, and then a button on the site that makes it easy to do that.
> You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum
Small sites should go the other way and use an email as the login name (distinct from the public display name if you want). Then you don't even have a password, to sign in you get an email with a token in it. Paste the token or click the link from the email and you get a cookie that keeps you signed in. Lose the cookie or want to sign into another device and they send you another email.
Then "signup" takes five seconds, there's no login to forget (it's your email) and no password to forget (it doesn't even exist), so doing this on a hundred independent websites doesn't matter. You don't even have to use the email you actually read, you could use one exclusively for this type of account and then ignore anything that comes to it that isn't a site login token.
Try. My blog got 16 visitors from another blog today.
(edit: it is now 23!)
Won't make me rich.
But it makes me happy that I am part of rebuilding an old style web.
If you write about interesting stuff, post your website below and I might add a link and I don't care about nofollow and all that SEO stuff. Maybe 5 of my visitors visit you.
You won't get rich but you will be part of something.
Activitypub is one solution. Write.as implements a blogging platform that federates with other platforms using the same protocol, such as Mastodon or Pleroma.
They still haven't implemented support for seeing comments on the blog post itself, but once they have that it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.
Seems like that'd be a good way to avoid the eternal September of the modern web. If "normals" are massing on Reddit and Facebook, maybe the wild west of independent websites is poised for a Renaissance?
Not to mention that some subs have associated / affiliated Discord servers- where you can directly chat with those at the forefront of the community directly.
Why?
Published an oauth API and let peeps go nut!
I bet if some one like reddit did that I bet that there would be PHP modules and the like in days!
There would be ways to cover the costs either by landing page or charging the child site per block of calls.
Maybe a federation of blogs is needed? Everyone has their user pool so that a user on `blog-a` named `user` can post on `blog-b.com` as `user@blog-a.com`.
Users would be free to explore a huge network while admins and creators would truly own their own little domain.
that sounds like mastodon for blogs. you can have an account on the main site mastodon.social & message someone on a different instance. Your username will show up as [user]@mastodon.social. you can also follow people on other instances & in turn content from them & others on their instance will be easier to find on your own instance.
Yesterday I needed to find the websites for around 20 Danish accounting companies based on their official company names. I thought it was so few that it would take longer time to ask someone to do it than to just do it myself.
The names are rather unique, mostly made out of a string of personal names like "Watson, Sherlock & Lestrade Accountants LLC" or of geographical locations "Central Dartmoor Accounting LLC". Such accounting companies are small businesses with around 5-10 employees and mostly local clients. Their real world competition is the other handful of local accounting companies in the rural areas they are in. However, with few exceptions, I had to go to page 3 or even 4 on Google to find the companies' own website because page 1 and 2 were cluttered with ads for other accountants or accounting applications, and, to my surprise, for different SEO optimized collections of company data on accountants.
I used to think that it was just hotel and restaurant websites you have to find on page 3 buried below Bookings, Tripadvisor, Expedia and the like. But even something as mundane as accountants now have to fight SEO websites to get some attention.
I'm a little surprised no one's tried reviving newsgroups for discussions. Decentralized, not privacy-invading, can be rendered by a large variety of front-ends. Somewhat censorship resistant. There would be a huge potential spam problem, but that can be controlled by filters and moderators.
Maybe Usenet would be more of a headache than it's worth, but it seems perfect for what you're describing.
Usenet still exists. Outside very small pools, it's dead, or a spam wasteland.
Peter da Silva, an early heavy user (the first and fourth most prolific poster one month in the late 1980s / early 1990s, according to a reply he made to me at G+), created, and still runs, Usenet II. Which is also a wasteland.
The client-independence is a benefit only up to a certain degree. Consistent characterset (8-bit ASCII largely), no binaries / multimedia (uuencoded excepted), and consistent forms of address and reply (mostly), kept things sane.
But even between the tin/rtin and emacs newsreader camp, quoting styles differed. I don't recall if it was @gumby or others (and I'm positive one case was someone else, involved in xemacs development), but even one emacs-variant style of reply-quoting turned disruptive when trying to nest multiple levels deep.
("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Don't do that then.")
These aren't insurmountable obstacles. But they are obstacles to be mounted. On which deciding is likely the hardest part.
It's full of really bizarre spam, though - and I got the feeling that it isn't technically straightforward to stop people from spamming, beyond everybody just keeping thousand-entry killfiles.
It's also very slow. And the posting format is very hard to follow sometimes, especially when you get people that don't do hard line breaks (or the other way around, depending on the program you're using) or have funny ideas about quoting.
Also, the lack of moderation seems to create a very wild-west style of conversation, where apparently rational people can start spewing really hardcore invective at the drop of a hat.
Newsgroups with an extension that signed your post as a verified account (handled by whatever the moderators decide is good) and with some middleware to accept signed/allowed posts automatically would probably do it, if you could get people to actually use it enough to get momentum.
Edit: I suspect something like this probably existed. It seems straightforward and obvious enough that I'd bet it did exist, but couldn't get much usage in a world where spam wasn't quite as bad, numbers of users were smaller, and people were already shifting to HTML based platforms.
I assume that it suffers from the same problems that make me usually give up when I find that a FOSS project's only venue for support and bug reports is a mailing list: search and discovery is less than optimal, conversations just randomly die and as an outsider you get the UX of shouting at a wall (usually nobody will respond, and you will never figure out if this is because your message was filtered, the mailing list is dead or slow-moving or everybody there just saw your message, quietly shook their head and moved on; sometimes someone randomly responds to you 3 years later after you have long moved on, which you only randomly find out when googling your name another two years after that).
If someone resurrected Compuserve, I’d pay. Again. The signal to noise ratio was insane. Having to part with real money tends to focus the mind and the tongue.
> What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs
Isn't this basically what Disqus was trying to do? There were a lot of these. I think moderation ended up being a huge problem that none solved.
> Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content
I've had the opposite experience. I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. I think it's reddit's right to do either -- purge or not purge -- but I'm not interested in the old reddit.
The redesign is bad, but I'm not really a power user, so it's not a deal-breaker for me. You can always just use old.reddit.com anyway, right?
> I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site.
Reddit, as a site, is built around you having to subscribe to things to see it on your front page.
Are you saying that opinions you disagree with (toxic) merely existing invisibly prevents you from using a platform? Because if that's not the case you were never forced to interact with those subs unless you explicitly sought them out. The one exception would be /r/all, but again the default is your "home" page so you'd never see that content.
The toxic elements didn't exist invisibly. They bled out regularly into unrelated subreddits. For example, the fat phobia of /r/FatPeopleHate seemed ever present for a time. Popped up in many different places. And then after the sub was banned and many of its users banned, that particular form of insults & speech mostly vanished. It was a huge quality of life improvement for the site overall. There have been similar results from banning some of the more virulent racist and misogynistic subs.
I suppose if you never read the comments, then the subscriptions would keep you away from certain types of content. But if you wanted to participate in the community, only banning and active moderation worked. Subscriptions weren't any barrier at all.
I feel like I’m in between both of you. On the one hand, stuff like fatpeoplehate never had any influence on my usage of reddit, on the other hand I never felt like there was a big difference between before and after the ban (of this or any other subreddit). The big subs are still utter shit, any decently sized sub without strong moderation is utter shit. Small subs are most of the time amazing.
I forget the name of the subreddit. The old subreddit which captured man's manipulative, controlling & dark side of relationships and general coaching of male sexual behaviour aimed at maximum recreation, has been quarantined a while ago and now the female version with basically the same content about how to deal with the dark side of relationships for women is in vogue. They both overlap with multiple political groups and generally attract the unsavory. They use the same language and have information structured in same format.
Reddit, like HN, was never as good as it used to be, though many like to pretend it was.
The locus has shifted, though. Early Reddit was decidely techy, it's now exceedingly popular/memey. There were and are many cesspits. As well as numerous dead or stagnent fora, several of which I can lay claim to myself.
One of the reasons that reddit can avoid 'blog spam' is because as a centralized service, they can control user registration and take measures to prevent bots from signing up for thousands of accounts and upvoting their spam.
How would this be prevented in a decentralized system? Spammers would join the network, create thousands of bots, and upvote all their spam.
Reddit doesn't really avoid anything as far as I can tell. A lot of the content in the big subreddits is more or less well concealed "organic advertising".
The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic.
At least good old blog spam is easy to identify and ignore.
There are a few topics I care about where you have both big subreddits and also dedicated "old school" forums on third-party websites. The forums are always more interesting and in-depth in my experience, when the subreddits are just a litany of karma-whoring picture posts and low effort so-called "memes".
One of the things I prefer about HN is people seem to use the downvote button more often as a "this is a poor quality contribution" vote, rather than a "my opinion differs from yours" vote.
That hasn't been my experience. People show their dissent of opinions with downvotes here on HN too on sufficiently polarizing threads. I think the main difference is the type of content posted on HN vs reddit and the type of people who readily consume that content.
For example, I have noticed shameless downvoting in operating system war threads, both on reddit and on HN. In highly technical threads about physics or mathematics I have noticed people tend to vote based on the quality of the content posted.
The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these
days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of
etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips
while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely
dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic.
This.
I don't know what the rest of the people praising reddit's redesign are talking about. My experience has been that its so heavily sanitized that unless you say something saccharinely in-tune with the consensus view, your comment risks being banished to the nethermost regions of the thread.
Most of the comments are rehashes of the same groupthink, echoing the same banal and glib points over and over till they choke out any real thought provoking, refreshing and original insights.
If the cost of having a system that surfaces original and thought provoking viewpoints means living with _some_ borderline hate speech subreddits, I dont mind paying that cost.
The alternative is just feel-good insanity and a thousand times worse, in import.
"Decentralized" is the key here. One option, already mentioned, is federation like Fediverse. Even more interesting would be friend-of-a-friend system, where rating of each post is subjective, and weight of someone's upvote is inversely proportional to degree of separation between you and them.
Instances can A. block bots on themselves, B. block other instances known to harbor bots the same way they ban bots on their own instances, and if necessary C. whitelist federation if there is a pandemic of hostile actors.
I wonder if crypto could play into this. Blockchain prevents sybil attacks by making interaction not free so that large scale influence is incredibly expensive.
This was tried: steemit.com. It didn't become very prolific, perhaps because the daemon was difficult to run, and there weren't many good frontends. The founding organization subsidized account creation, but was bad at spam detection, so eventually gave up.
Yep, the flag is right. Unfortunately the way snap is designed is that they really don’t want you to distribute binaries outside their special snap store, to the point that if you try, they try to scare your users off by naming ‘install outside snap store’ flag as ‘--dangerous’.
Moderation transparency is the building block to what comes next: mod elections. That’s the one piece still in the works, after that is done, I’m going to consider it stable.
When I was first considering the Linux packaging question, I did evaluate AppImage, Flatpak, Snap and plain old tar.gz, with AppImage being my favourite. Unfortunately they are not equally polished and AppImage flat out did not work in a consistent manner across multiple Linux variants. Between the rest, tar.gz was ok, but there are a lot of people who don’t know what to do with it. Between Flatpak and Snap, Snap was the vastly more polished experience for the end user and for me, so I bit the bullet on their non-ideal ‘we want to be an Apple App Store clone’ way of working and went with Snap.
It will get whatever it can. You also don’t need a mapped port, Aether can punch holes through firewalls via reverse-opens. (Though having a port open will significantly increase your connection speed and frequency.)
You can look at the port it chooses through netstat, it does not have a fixed port. However, once it gets a working one, it won’t change it from then on so you can map that port.
Edit: you can, but it having an Electron shell for UI (the actual app is Go) makes the build process somewhat complicated. It’s on GitHub though, feel free to take a look at the makefile and give it a shot.
I just tried this. It's got some cool concepts (moderation transparency, commitment to privacy) but I'm not sure it will become as popular as HN/reddit because it isn't a website. You won't stumble across it in a google search. It's been around for 5 years and the forums don't have much activity.
Yes, I very often find myself adding "Reddit" to the end of search queries on Google now, because I know that the results will be people discussing the topic I'm interested in, rather than an obscure Wikipedia entry or blog spam.
I just added a search engine to chrome that searches on Google with the site:reddit com term. Add a simple shortcut to the search bar for that engine like "@", and now I just type "@ best baby teether" and get actual people discussing actual pros and cons of baby teethers (or anything else)
Every few years we all say there needs to be a new reddit but the reddit alternatives out there always devolve into places no regular person wants to join. I think there’s a balance between centralized moderation and allowing creativity and free speech that makes reddit work. We don’t give them enough credit for it.
Even HN has just the right balance that makes this place have some of the best threads on the internet.
I think the answer has to do with the user's voice and a sense of ownership:
1. Even if spam accounts sign up, their comments and posts rarely get to the top of the algorithm because user's have a voice in the matter (downvote low quality content, and upvote other higher quality content).
2. There is a sense of ownership on the part of the mods... people who are generally passionate about the area of interest in which they moderate. There have been a number of cases over the years where moderators were acting in bad faith and the users have voiced their concerns to the Admins, who frequently remove mods or even whole subs that are operating against the benefit of the community.
A problem with federated networks is that it eventually leads to centralization of just a few providers. For example, email is federated but most users are on gmail. IRC is federated but most users are on freenode. Diaspora is federated but most users are join the server with already most users.
The only danger is there is the propensity for majority nodes to try to break federation. Normal people will still just use the most popular instance - the value of a decentralized protocol is in how it keeps all actors honest to keep participating, and except for in extreme circumstance of market dominance like when Google and Facebook broke their XMPP support due to their overwhelming control of their silos of communication generally works.
> email is federated but most users are on gmail. IRC is federated but most users are on freenode. Diaspora is federated but most users are join the server with already most users.
I think you underestimate the long tail in all of these cases. I don't think the first two statements are accurate.
True about source of information. When people (me included) find things on google, just also add `site:reddit.com` or just `reddit` next to keyword, most noise results are likely to be gone.
It's toxic because people wanting power insist their position is necessary, others adhere to it (mostly in the name of censoring dissent) and those granted the power, like with politics, are often the last people you want having it.
Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I would say that Reddit would be far better off if it relegated "moderators" to "janitors" to remove illegal content, and auditing who is removing what regularly, and leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.
> leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.
Unfortunately this leads to meme cesspools lacking any major discussion. reddit's ease of discovery backfires here: it's difficult to keep a subreddit's content focused and meaningful if any random person who isn't invested in keeping quality content can wander in. Moderators, and their removal of "too shallow" content, dedicated days for memes or discussions, and creation of dedicated low-quality subreddits, are a necessary evil.
It's a link aggregator based on ActivityPub, the federation protocol used by Mastodon and company.
I am closing to a 1.0 release, at which point I want it to be completely integrated in the global ActivityPub network and would be interactable with from most of the other platforms. (Basically if you have another valid fediverse account, you will be able to post/interact with littr instances)
There are also several other projects in various states of compatibility and featurefullness that are working on the same idea. On the top of my head there's:
There is http://notabug.io that can create mirrors of the main site and synch them up using git. It is a beta test and only deletes cp and doxing. Using nsfw for porn and other stuff.
The code looks clean and is based on the old Reddit code and UI.
What if HackerNews instances were easily deployable? Say on par with launching a new blog through WordPress or similar. Do you think that that would by and large provide the tools and interfaces to satisfy what you are looking for?
Here's a cross between HN & Reddit and some other things, which I think is ok easy to deploy (like signing up for WP.com): there SaaS hosting so one won't need to install oneself ... Otherwise it's Docker images:
https://www.talkyard.io (I'm developing it) — and if you scroll down, you'll notice it adds some improvements on HackerNews and Reddit:
the redesigning of of our internal corporate website is just as dumb. I dont know what it is with this "web 3.0" design aspect but if something is stuttering with simple text input with 8 cores riding on 16 gb of ram, I am afraid to know what the future holds for web apps
I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize.
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I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development.
The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list.
Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer.
Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores).
You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores.
The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list.
Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports.
For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated.
Ex.
Alice follows Bob with weight of 0.5, Dave with 0.1
Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2
Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9
Alice downloads both lists.
Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22
Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095
It's similar, but decentralized and allows trust to be transitively utilized to find friends-of-friends-of-friends content that you'd like.
I think of my spec as basically just a protocol and think most clients would do the work of adjusting trust scores algorithmically based on the actions you take.
You are misguided in thinking that Reddit is a good source of information. Reddit is heavily biased, very left leaning on any political matters. Most subreddits are echo chambers where anyone who voice a different viewpoint could be down-voted to smithereens. The toxicity there is also too high, some are so eager to use insult to drown out any argument.
Surely there are left-leaning subreddits and right-leaning ones? Although, as anecdata, the purportedly neutral politics sub I frequent is definitely left-leaning (but it's swung back and fro over time).
I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD):
* Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that account sharing among a few people is quite common.
* Amazon Prime (with two day shipping plus Prime Video and Prime Music) costs about $14 a year.
* A print newspaper subscription of any major national newspaper would cost about $2.8 or even a lot lesser per month.
* An Audible subscription (one free credit a month) costs $2.8 a month, with lower prices on audiobooks and discounts on them.
* Some premium news publications cost about $30-$45 a year.
I'm not saying that this is similar to Netflix or Amazon or a national newspaper, but it's more about how the more popular as well as niche/premium services have priced themselves and how people perceive value. Comparatively, this $12.99/month or $100/year social network focused on news seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants. It could've probably done better with a currency adjusted or purchasing power parity specific rate. For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).
Having talked about the pricing, the UI doesn't look great either. I saw a list of groups to choose from and the page looked like it was built more than a decade ago. It ought to look like a modern website (with more bells and whistles) if it wants to command more than premium rates. Even Facebook's site, which I think looks outdated, cluttered and ugly, looks better in comparison.
Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another.
The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me from going into the store and impulse buying something on a shelf once a month.
As far as Amazon Prime, I have to believe the price of shipping is built into the products, and the membership is for other psychological and behavior control reasons.
Is part of this social network price the same thing. A cost to make it exclusive, acts as a bit of a spam filter. Then after having sunk money into it, you feel the need to make it worthwhile. I never think "ive been watching too much prime I better get my value out of netflix this month" but a communication tool might be different.
Also get the executive. At the end of the year you get back 2% or $60, whichever is higher. So if you can front the extra $60, there's no reason to not do it.
I agree with you on the Amazon Prime membership triggering impulse purchases, stickiness with the one day or two day deliveries and of course, shipping built into the products' prices. But Amazon Prime video here (in India) has a lot of local content and gets many new movies quickly onto it. My assessment is that Prime Video is probably a bigger attraction for people here (perhaps with Prime Music) than two day shipping alone (which is not very widely available on many products).
The one nice thing about Prime vs Prime video, is they advertise both prices separately, so we can at least get a peak at what percent of the prime cost amazon thinks video is worth. We know they arent selling Video by itself at a loss, it wouldnt make sense to give away video as a loss leader, if you arent snagging people elsewhere.
I agree Amazon Prime is a trap. Without it the free shipping starts at around €29. That alone makes me bundle my purchases, which hinders impulse buying.
Based on observing Prime members I feel most people would be much better off without the subscription.
This exact reason has helped me stop frivolous purchases as soon as I discontinued my prime membership.
I hate paying for shipping and most of the time the items in my cart are < $25 at which point I ask myself if I really need this item. If I really need it, I go to the target/Wal-Mart near my place since they always price match. Not renewing my prime membership has been by very liberating!
Newspaper prices are offset by advertising costs. It costs a bomb to advertise in newspapers and those are the primary revenue drivers for the newspaper publisher.
In the case of Amazon, they are interested in you. You are the primary customer providing them will data points to feed their advertising business. Again, subsidize the cost of Prime membership but get folks to give up data in return. Prime no longer is about hassle free shipping. Prime serves as a vehicle to gobble up all kinds of data to serve their ad business. This is how i look at Amazon and Prime.
Netflix is in the content delivery business, for now. Hence they have to charge full price. If, and when their business model changes to become advertisement driven, you will see changes in the prices charged to end users.
Gotta be smart, I think Amazon technically paid me to have prime one year and this year I've negatived a good chunk of it. Any time they have the 1$ digital credit for delay shipping I select it which then subsidizes a good chunk of my eBook purchases. I think I've had 4$ in credit just this week and have another 1$ I'll get whenever the 5$ shoehorn I ordered yesterday ships.
This post shows how smart Amazon's Prime strategy is. We have someone probably spending thousands of dollars with Amazon (and Amazon taking a good chunk of that in commission) bragging about getting some free ebooks.
Spending money I'd spend at a brick and mortar store, that I'd have to drive to using oil life/tire life/gasoline/brake pad life/brake rotor life while also losing time.
Instead, I can think "oh hey I need to get a shoe horn, the heels on the uppers of the slip-ons I wear to church are getting funky" or "ah crap, I forgot to stop and get a new belt on the way home and this one is getting pretty loose on the last notch and I don't think this synthetic material is going to be happy if I punch a new hole" or "instead of driving to 6 stores hoping to find filters for my air purifier, I can buy 2 on Amazon right here on the toilet and be good for the next 2 years" and "my xlear nasal spray is about empty here at work and this heat is really drying my nose out, I'll just order another now instead of waiting until I go to the grocery Saturday" and "I need another USB C cable, this one is starting to get pretty stressed, I'll order one on Amazon instead of driving miles out of my way to go to Walmart or Best Buy hoping they have one".
Those are this week's purchases. All things I needed, all things I would have had to buy somewhere, all things I got a 1$ credit for which I will use towards eBooks I would have purchased either way.
Or last week when I ordered a tofu press, I have no idea where to buy a tofu press in the real world but wasting gobs of paper towels and using books just wasn't doing it for me.
It's not like I opened Amazon in a moment of boredom and said "let's see what I should waste money on today".
Related, I went to buy a shoe stretcher on Amazon. Had to buy 3 before I got one that wasn't complete garbage.
I'd have gone to someplace local but none of the local places have much inventory for quality goods anymore either...
For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy.
Heck for a little while earlier this year the official Sonicare page was somehow taken over by people selling knock-off replacement heads, all the links from the manufacturers verified page went to obviously fraudulent misspelled products.
>For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy.
Yeah for me it's mostly books (digital and physical), Amazon basics stuff and stuff I can't get anywhere locally (that I know of) like a tofu press or hard to counterfeit stuff like my televisions/an iPad Air 2/my reconditioned vitamix.
The only time Amazon has done that, the buyers were refunded (and that's not just Bezos being polite, that's a meaningful legal obligation if it's a purchase).
This is why the ad model works better. Local advertisers can bid on his data to show 5 cent ads where someone in northamerica may be worth 5 dollars. Trying to price this as a monthly service removes the ability to offer different prices per region without getting into fairness or causing people to get around the rules by signing up in different regions but watching from another.
Netflix has many problems with this model and is currently trying to find a solution. There are services setup to fool netflix into providing content outside of geograpical areas that they are liceased for.
An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook on his phone even if he lives in USA since his attention is not worth anything.
> An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook ...
A system in which a poor person making $30k/year and spends $500/year on products or content advertised via Facebook versus a rich person who makes $1M/year and spends $10k on products/content via facebook is not exactly progressive. The poor person ends up paying 1.6% of their income, while the rich person spends 0.1%.
The poor person spends 16X of their takehome earnings than the rich person, not exactly progressive.
I agree that regional or currency based pricing is not easy and comes with its own problems. But Wikipedia is one of those sites that's freely available and used by people around the world. I wouldn't have thought of the Wikipedia founder starting a venture that charges so much. The 2018-2019 fundraising report by Wikimedia Foundation [1] shows that all the countries in Asia combined contributed less than Australia and New Zealand put together. So he/they must have deep insight into how much money comes from where and the respective ability and willingness of people to donate from different places. They could've as well priced it proportionally with some adjustments on that data.
The price is not $12.99/month, it's free. The $12.99/month are for those that want to support the service financially, it's donationware similar to wikipedia. Jimmy Wales said the idea is that a small minority will pay for the service for everyone.
>showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month
That's the cost to jump the waitlist, not the ongoing price for what will be (he hopes) the majority of users. Back when Facebook was Ivy-league only, there were TONS of students I knew who would have paid to get access. As it gets less exclusive the price will come down or become free
> For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).
That's fairly country-dependant - I actually sent some feedback to Cloudflare expressing my disappointment with their pricing - it's currently 5.30 USD in my country with 20% lower purchasing power than the USA.
I recall Cloudflare mentioning something about the priced being proportionate to whatever a Big Mac costs. [1] Perhaps Cloudflare got it wrong with your country or a Big Mac costs a lot more than in the US (that sounds weird)?
Canada - Big Mac here is about the same absolute cost as the US before accounting for 20% PPP difference, and then Cloudflare rounded the American price down (from $5.51 to $5) and the Canadian price up (from $6.65 to $7) - so it's only a couple dollars, but it doesn't feel like good value. (Particularly compared to other consumer services, e.g. Apple Arcade, Dropbox, Netflix are only +1 CAD over their USD price starting from a higher base price, Spotify and Apple Music are priced with CAD at par, etc.)
I don't see why this should be expected of any company honestly. If I want to price for the country that I'm trying to sell to, why should I be forced to care about or focus on a market segment that doesn't matter much to me?
> showed the price to jump the waitlist ... as $12.99 a month or $100 a year.
Yeah, not a big fan of this. You could buy very nice cloud hosting for $12.99 a month, and run your own instance of a federated social network like Mastodon.
You could stand one up and your parents join it? Yes, not everyone can stand up their own self hosted stuff. In fact few of us can. There's a huge missing gap between your phone/desktop applications and just installing and running hosted applications, but I digress.
I stood up a Mastodon instance and invited a bunch of my friends. Only like 3 of us use it, but it's up and connected to the greater Fediverse.
Why is there even a wait list at all? This feels sketchy from first use. And to not be up front about the cost before getting my personal information is, I feel, dishonest.
How can he expect to create a platform of honest people if he is dishonest from the point of account creation?
Why on earth does it feel sketchy to you. As far as I can tell this service will be devoid of adverts and tracking, which means that it will be entirely funded by subscribers. You can't really expect him to buy all the servers and bandwidth and provide it all to you for nothing out of his own pocket. That's just stupid. It seems to me the idea is that early access subscribers pay for the initial equipment. They then release an initial block of free accounts. As they get more paying subscribers they can invest in more infrastructure and release more free accounts.
If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope.
This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders".
Yeah. I knew (from TFA) that there was a charge to jump the queue. But there's no mention of that on the signup page. And no mention that they don't accept ~anonymous payments.
But Facebook's model, for instance, also prices people out. I am entirely unwilling to use Facebook because I consider it far too expensive. True, I'm paying with data rather than cash, but it's still paying. From my point of view, $12.99/mo is actually cheaper (assuming that paying that means I'm not going to be datamined).
Being “priced out” because you personally value your data more than others is a valid viewpoint, but that’s not the same thing as being priced out because you don’t have money.
That seems like a difference in viewpoint. I can understand your stance, but I don't share it. To me, being "priced out" means that something costs more than you are willing and able to pay.
Fair enough. I was just trying say that being unwilling to pay is very different than being unable to pay.
Charging a high price for a luxury brand is a fine business model but I wouldn’t consider a product accessible to only some socioeconomic groups to a be a Facebook competitor (as indicated in the article).
My general observation (anecdotal) is that people are more willing to pay a whole lot more for physical goods than for services (including apps, content and Internet connectivity).
Depends on the signaling value of the apps and content. Remember that one of the first iPhone apps was one that cost $500 and did nothing but print "I am rich" to the screen.
Previously someone mentioned the idea of a $1/mo. social network.
I think if someone were to make facebook in it's first ~2 years and keep it very basic it we would be good to go. The only features you need are: a profile picture, a wall, chat, and events.
In other words - a photo of yourself, a way of publicly messaging, a way of privately messaging, and a way to coordinate social events.
What else do you need for a 'social network?'
I would pay $1/mo for that. The simpler the better.
I wish there was a text only social network - I think it would reduce the influence of memes. HN is kind of like that, though I guess you really just need a tightly curated community with a good culture that wants to be good (since reddit comments still are pretty low quality in most cases).
Text only twitter would be interesting since you can curate your own slice of the community pretty easily, as a bonus it'd be fast.
I would pay $1/mo for a chronological feed of my friends' updates and posts.
I found Twitter and Facebook to be frustratingly unusable after they removed their chronological feeds in favor of feeds that prioritize ads and engagement.
Isn't Twitter properly chronological with 'Latest Tweets' turned on? For a while that setting would frequently reset to the non-chronological default, but at the moment it seems to be sticky. (I mostly use Twitter in a web browser, but I think the Android app is working the same way.)
I was wondering why it needed to be such a jarring price.
$13 per month? Really? What’s the bandwidth cost on text and a few images in S3?
Critical mass is obviously the barrier to building something like this but I’m inclined to agree that charging $1/month and $10 a year should be able to turn a healthy profit.
I do kind of wonder if the public is even aware of the problem, though. Anyone I’ve spoken to outside the industry seems to genuinely believe that folks with different opinions to them are stupid (rather than sorted into a different branch of Facebook/Google’s great graph of knowledge for their daily programming).
Sophisticated technology.
I don't really use or like FB, but from what I have seen: stable and fast DB, intuitive, clean UI, lots of features.
No hazzle to join.
>Didn't WhatsApp used to be $1 a year before Facebook bought them and it was a very successful pricing model?
I was hounded and paid £0.69 to renew the 'subscription' ─ which was subsequently offered for free to everyone, shortly thereafter. I felt betrayed, but I would happily pay the same amount today (or slightly more), if only to preserve some shred of privacy.
I don't think anyone expects this other option to be as profitable as facebook. If you actually managed to create something 1/7th the size/profitability of facebook and considered it a failure I guess I'd suggest you might legitimately suffer from visions of grandeur.
I wish Twitter did this. I still think in person meetings are the best, followed by phone calls and emails (when in person socializing isn't possible). I really don't miss a site like Facebook.
But Twitter's use case is different - it is nice to have a place to check for quick updates from federal governments to our local post office and everyone in between, including thought leaders and such.
I've been hacking at a basic version of ad-free, subscription based group messaging, coordination, event planning, etc - check it out! https://get.thread-app.com/
I really liked the idea of Google+ Circles when they first came out. It allowed me to organize people I interacted with into a focused group; work, Linux, TF2, etc. If I wanted to talk about AWS, I could switch my brain into that mode and just post things about a single topic. It was really nice.
All the ideas regarding $1-2/mo social networks seem to forget the enormous cost of moderating content on these social networks. Let's say your social network is $3/mo and people can upload unlimited photos. How long does it take for child porn to start getting shared on your service? Probably not long. That's not even getting into users harassing other users, and stuff like that. Volunteer moderators do the work on reddit for free because they get to feel ownership of their subreddits (until they try to delete them if they're popular, then the admins step in), but on a "normal" social network no one is going to moderate the content for free, especially not the horrible stuff people will post.
The problem I always have is "all my friends". I joined MSN messenger in the 2003(ish) only because that was the only away to join my friends. Facebook came next, and what's app moved them over to that. When it comes to " social media", the clue is in the name.
What is the solution?
A system that using a unique ID I can contact anyone else in the world, the two methods are voice or message. :)
My friends and I are currently building a donation platform for summer camp counselor alumni, church groups, etc. Basically small monthly reoccurring donations ($3-$20). We’ve been playing with the idea of having a social network aspect where to join you pick an organization to donate to and that’s your subscription for using the social network at large
Depending on where you find the data, a lot of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1]. An extra $240 a year will certainly help a lot of people out there, not just in America. That's why free services like Google and Facebook continue to win out. I really like what some companies in the gaming sector have achieved where the richer subsidize the poorer via buying hats and other cosmetics to keep the game free or lower priced.
I would pay $1 to remove each feature that annoyed me. It may cost me $10, but my quality of life would significantly increase, while not being a total pariah.
The challenge is getting a critical mass of users to encourage people beyond just early adopters. Perhaps the new service could seed new users' accounts by offering to import their content/contacts/etc from their other social media accounts.
I’ve been using https://gath.io to organize events. All you need is an email to create an event, and as far as I can tell, you can give it a fake email. It’s only used to send you the edit link (also displayed when you create the event). Same thing to RSVP, although it doesn’t share the link to remove yourself except by email, to my knowledge. They’ve just introduced groups, so setting up events for a group of friends is really easy. Bonus is that it’s open source and the person who maintains it has been really responsive to requests.
Just my guess, but I bet that from this point on, few people (in the developed world) will race to sign up for a new social network. Why? Given the societal and personal costs (and benefits) that we've seen with previous social networks, a lot of lay people are re-evaluating the utility that such services provide them. In many cases, the answer is to keep your current social network, but increasingly disengage from it. Sometimes people find that they actually prefer to be less frequently "connected" to people in their lives, whether family/friends or casual acquaintances, especially given some of the caustic personality traits often displayed on social networks.
Also, many of today's recent non-FB social network successes (Whatsapp, etc) were launched before the general perception of social networking, and internet services in general, became increasingly skeptical. Outside of tech, or people with very narrow interest verticals not served by mainstream social networks, I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.
Curiously, if true, this plays both the the detriment and benefit of established social networks: their primary, most profitable users are not likely to flee, but they are also likely to be less engaged.
I have a fairly large network of friends that existed before FB really had wide adoption. The platform they were on eventually died in favor of facebook.
At this point, I'd like to preserve that network of friends independent of facebook and most of those folks feel similarly. In that sense, there is at least some demand for a social network that isn't evil.
For your use case, what part of your need isn't provided by a phone/address-book? I suspect it's the receipt of broadcast messages from your friend network? If so, then yes, you need a social network with features like FB.
Personally, I'd rather not receive those kind of messages - I only want to receive messages that someone specifically thought to send to me. Doing so dramatically reduces noise. The only exception to this is broadcast messages from important networks with built-in hard trust boundaries (the email list for my kids' classroom, my neighborhood watch list, the Whatsapp group with only me, my wife, my brother, and sister in law - not even parents), and even on those, I will leave if they become more of a cost than a benefit.
Broadcast messages from people you care about are nice. So and so had a baby, or whatever else is going on in their life. It's why FB was useful for before it became a continuous stream of reposted drivel.
I like to keep up with what's going on in people's lives at a scale greater than one to one interactions can support. In my view, there's definitely an upside to technology that supports a number of friends and acquaintances roughly 10x what one could support otherwise.
Hell, even linkedin is somewhat useful to be able to keep up with what old colleagues are up to and reconnect at times.
> Well, HN is a social network with broadcasting features
HN is pull actuated, not push. I have to register interest in topics by commenting before I get responses, and those responses are not part of the main feed. I have to go to my comments page to look for the responses. I don't get notified just because a particular user made a comment or post, because it is topic-centered, not user-centered.
And even with all that, if HN ever rises to a level of routine toxicity that the moderation via community or moderators isn't keeping in check, I'll leave.
I feel the same. I find social networks pretty valuable but don't like or trust Facebook. I'd happily sign up (and pay for) a social network that brought the same benefits but was (1.) ad-free and (2.) didn't employ tons of people trying to maximize my engagement.
Then check out https://joinmastodon.org/ you can either host it yourself or join someone else's server where you can either pay/donate or just use it for free.
So mastondon is an open source twitter clone right? is there anything out there yet or in the works that is more in line with Facebook's product offerings with out the surveillance and tracking?
Kind of, Mastodon is the 'Twitter' part of the fediverse, PeerTube is the 'YouTube' part, Pixelfed is the 'Instagram' part, there are even people who try to use ActivityPub for things you do on GitHub normally. And you can follow and interact between all of them (theoretically and to some degree actually too).
But what you're looking for sounds mostly like Diaspora, which is quite old, it's from back in the Google+ days, and never really took off.
I was on Mastodon for more than a year and loved it: great conversation that reminded me of the hope and promise of the Internet in the late 90's. Then my instance admin went AWOL, the site crashed, and all of my data and social graph were lost. I still can't get the admin to respond to emails. I could host my own server but who really has the technical know-how and time to do that kind of work? Mastodon has got to solve the reliability and/or portability problem. If I could have recovered my social graph on another instance, I would still be on the network.
You can start somewhere and then if you see that it doesn't stick around you can easily move your account to a different server and take all your followers with you, it's build into the software. In that sense it's even nicer than email where you need to tell everyone that you moved on to a different email-address manually.
I donated to the admin's Patreon account in excess of his hosting fees. But, that didn't cover his time, apparently. The admin is still active on GitHub after the server crashed; I guess he just lost interest.
On my instance I can (manually) request a backup every 7 days. It would be nice if this could be automated but it's all media etc. so it's quite big for email. If the admin would have announced that they would switch off the server you could have moved easily which is possible at least since v3.0
I agree that people aren't looking for new social networks, but I do wonder about your view of disengaging from Facebook. I keep reading about it on HN but I'm not seeing it myself. I wonder if it's a US-centric view.
It's certainly becoming a more and more popular perspective with my demographic (20-something's in the UK). Most people haven't quite checked out just yet, but mainly use facebook for messenger and events, and are generally becoming:
1. Disengaged with the platform
2. Concerned about how much it knows about our lives
In the last few months, I've seen this go from something that only techies cared about to an increasingly mainstream point of view.
> 1. Disengaged with the platform 2. Concerned about how much it knows about our lives
Disengagement is an effect, not a cause, but I'd argue that the primary cause of disengagement is that the balance of dopamine increasing "happy" social networking experiences vs neutral or anger inducing negative experiences on social networks has shifted to the neutral/negative.
Even on the "happy" side, there's only so many recycled life-affirming aphorisms, or happy photos from other peoples' lives you can see in your newsfeed before you start to tune them out. On the negative side, produced content on social networks has turned toward the increasingly attention-grabbing, and occasionally even psychologically injurious. So if the happy stuff isn't making you so happy anymore, and you tire of the negative stuff, what do you do? Disengage.
According to Pew research, Facebook usage in the US has been flat since 2016, neither gaining nor losing overall.
However, the age breakdown of those users has changed a lot. Facebook has absolutely hemorrhaged users younger than about 45. The majority of American FB users are in the 46-76 year old range now, with 68% of US FB users aged 50 or older.
In the US, anyway, Facebook is for old farts and businesses.
Not US-specific, but it's absolutely a developed-country specific view. People are treating it more like they treat alcohol - fun to participate in every so often, but not healthy to do daily.
Might be a US-centric view, I live in Europe and I’ve started seeing less and less engagement on FB for some time now. Granted, me and my friends are in our late-30s, early-40s so we’re pretty busy with life generally speaking, but even so public sharing of stuff is at least an order of magnitude lower compared to 2012-2013. Most of the conversation has moved into private groups that are hosted by FB or WhatsApp.
At least on my FB feed (which is indeed becoming less full over time), at least once a week someone will raise the question of 'is there anywhere to go after Facebook?' So at least some people are looking.
The way other social media platforms have solved this problem is by targeting younger demographics first, those that are making social media accounts for the first time.
For these "greenfield" users, there is no need to convince their friends to leave their existing social media platform, because there is none.
Every day, middle schoolers get smartphones for the first time, and the majority of them probably aren't going to make Facebook accounts, but rather Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok, etc.
> I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.
Right — people don't go actively seeking a generic alternative to something they already have. They do although, hear about new services that do something different. Similar to TikTok, or Instagram, it will hit on a niche interest and expand from there. The current market leaders will ignore it long enough (opportunity not big enough) that by the time they see it as a threat, it's too late.
You may be right but I went ahead and signed up for wt.social and paid for a year's subscription. Who knows - maybe something interesting will come from this.
I think faking growth until you achieve actual growth is the time-honored tradition of social media websites, and can flip a failure into a success by getting people to feel that, "Am I missing out?" feeling again.
I don't think WT:Social is doing that right now though, so not sure what their plan is to combat what you're talking about.
TikTok is a great example of people being willing to join new social media but it's a niche social media app compared to fb/twitter... and in a lot of ways fills a void that Vine left, so i agree but think it's kind of an exception right now
A lot of people have been throwing up Mastodon/Pleroma/Fediverse on this thread and I think, like TikTok, you're going after a different segment: randos you don't know.
Mastodon/Fediverse instances feel like a nice big random AOL chat room, or Reddit threads in the Twitter format. It won't connect you to your current social groups (except the very few who are like 'Yea I'm on that. Here, follow me), but rather help you exchange ideas with a bunch of randos. Which is something that was pretty damn cool about the early Internet really.
There is an exception to this. A lot of people race to sign up on new networks to secure valuable and limited usernames or urls early in case the network does become a big deal someday.
I think this is a tiny number of people, but even then, how would an early username or URL on a hypothetically successful new social network benefit you anyway? Unless you are already a "big deal" yourself for other reasons, a particular username on a social network isn't going to turn you in to one.
Whatever one might think about social network "influencers", their influence is ultimately rooted in something about them (looks, charisma, knowledge, marketing dept strategy), not their username.
Yeah I gotta be honest the two sites I both like and hate most on the internet are Wikipedia and StackOverflow. Great resources in most cases but my god the moderation is.. overbearing.
I have my doubts that'll work for a social network. Good luck to them, but I'll have probably forgotten I signed up by the time they next send me an email.
Side note you seem to be able to bypass the signup queue by visiting your own friend share link.
"Good behavior" is double speak for "following the groupthink". Just look at wikipedia for an example of how bad this can become, where 1/3 of all content is edited and moderated by one dude with all his biases.
Social network posts aren't a collection of verifiable facts. The idea of someone being able to edit my post about my family vacation strikes me as more than a little bizarre.
I usually donate to Wikimedia every year, and I was a donator for WikiTribune and followed it closely as it rolled out. I personally think that Wikipedia is one of the most valuable resources on the internet.
Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off.
Glancing at WikiTribune now, it seems like wt.social is a pivot for the service (https://www.wikitribune.com/wt/news/article/101868/). I hope it turns out well, because I strongly believe that the service Jimmy Wales initially described as WikiTribune is a good idea and something the internet needs. But, I think I'll wait on the sidelines this time around before getting too invested in the idea.
> I personally think that Wikipedia is one of the most valuable resources on the internet.
I would say it's the most important resource on the internet, beyond actual infrastructure like DNS.
> Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off.
Me too - I donated in total about £200 since WikiTribune launched, and hoped with Jimmy Wales behind it that it could really take off. I like this pivot though, and believe the whole community-sourced content idea is better suited to a social media type site rather than a heavily hacked WordPress blog.
I really miss the news app Circa. vs it's later reincarnations.
Major stories broken down to factual info and direct quotes with each item a tile with the source indicated a link to their version of the story.
I could catch up on a dozen major stories in minutes and track them as updates were pulled in as top level tiles with the new information and again link out to the source.
Clean, accessible, felt very unbiased without any spin just data and events as reported, but no commercial value so floundered.
well, it was bought out by Sinclair in 2015 and that's about as biased as shadow owners can be. The original incarnation was incredible.
It's a nice idea but my social life doesn't revolve around news, it revolves around things I like to do and my friends and family, so this doesn't interest me.
I also think social + news will just lead to you getting stuck in a bubble of news content your social group agrees with.
Surprised I had to scroll so far down this thread to find someone else with this sentiment.
When did social networks become epicenters for sharing and arguing news and politics? Someone make a paid social network that forbids news and politics and you'll have my attention.
I love the idea of an alternate social network, and I'm fine with the idea of charging users. But in an era where free alternatives are bountiful (even if most of them are "free as in puppy"), where a full paid blog hosting service like Micro.blog -- which includes a social network timeline built on IndieWeb principles -- is only $5 a month, where "subscription fatigue" is entering the lexicon... this is just a bonkers amount of money to ask.
If I were serious about building some kind of social network at this point and thought it would need a revenue stream to be sustainable, I'd try to:
- find not just a niche but functionality that differentiates it from existing services in some way (if your service can be described as "Facebook for X," you've already lost, because the Facebook for all values of X already exists and is called "Facebook")
- build on open protocols, IndieWeb style (including ActivityPub, although the first point suggests the service better not be "Mastodon for X," either)
- if it makes sense, have a free tier that gives people some clue what they're signing up for, although not so much that it discourages them from actually, you know, signing up
- charge a low enough rate that signing up doesn't feel like a huge commitment: say, $2 a month or $16 a year
I'm surprised nobody has tried the low-cost route yet. Yes, I get it, those rates aren't going to be bringing you VC money and bazillion-dollar unicorn growth, but a relatively small number of paying users could create a sustainable, even profitable, small business for a few employees.
Which one is actually free? You're paying by sharing your life with them to sell for other purposes. Your purchases, search history, private conversations, even bedroom talk are all ongoing amortized payments for that puppy.
That's what "free as in puppy" stems from: the puppy is technically free, but there are a lot of other costs involved. It was originally coined, AFAIK, to suggest than even "free as in speech" free software can have a lot of other costs associated with it, but I think it applies to free services that get their revenue by showing you ads, aggregating and monetizing your data, or both.
I'm not necessarily if translates into online social media, but at least in meatspace there's no shortage of social clubs where the high price tag is a feature not a bug. They're called country clubs.
Absolutely, and it'd be possible to create the social network equivalent of a country club. The questions I'd ask are (a) is that the kind of network that Jimmy Wales wants to create here, and (b) what's the value proposition? Obviously part of the value is saying "I am a member of this exclusive club," but that relies on the exclusive club actually impressing whoever you consider "the right people." :)
"this is just a bonkers amount of money to ask." I couldn't agree more. I am not sure what Jimmy Wales is thinking here... there is no way this site gains any serious traction. I wouldn't pay $5/month for facebook... hell I wouldn't pay $3/month... you know what, if Facebook wasn't free, I wouldn't use it.
There is this idea that everything should be free for everyone, but building and maintaining a platform like Facebook takes immense amounts of resources. If someone builds a social media platform and wants to work on it full time, they need some source of revenue.
It's going to be either coming from the users or it's going to be coming from advertisers. You take your pick.
I would agree. $3/month would be more reasonable, and with Wales behind it, probably even somewhat sustainable for the first year. Afterwards they could lock everyone in at that price and up it to say $9 or $10 .. whatever they need to in order to cover costs.
I would prefer a decentralized social network based on boxes you plug into your router with content shared in a way that fellow users bear the weight of shared content like torrents.
You could rent the box or buy outright with money to develop paid for by a premium on the box or by the rent wherein even a modest rent would outstrip the cost of buying like a cable box.
That’s essentially what a Mastadon instance is. If it’s hosted at home or on someone’s cloud account - the difference is only in connectivity speed. I’m extremely hopefully, perhaps naively, that a new internet isn’t going to be based on blockchain or owning data or any foundational change - it will be based on the ability for people to host their own server-side software again. The App Stores democratized client side apps, but they forced a huge centralization into platforms.
What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center... one that encourages and assists with cloud native design and aims to reduce load rather than hope you architect incorrectly and happily charge for the waste.
Perhaps I’m being naive, but it feels like a tooling problem, not a social or political or economic one. Anyways, I’ve quit my job at Stripe and just finished YCS19 with the goal of closing the gap between Facebook/Mastadon, Medium/yourBlog, Minecraft.com and a docker image...
And you’re totally correct about renting home server “boxes” too - except most house holds already have plenty of compute and connectivity - it’s just that installing / managing server software is completely out of reach to most people (and some developers!). It doesn’t need to be grandmas running router software - just the family nerd able to create on the internet again - and reliable enough software you’d actually invite grandma to signup!
> What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center... one that encourages and assists with cloud native design and aims to reduce load rather than hope you architect incorrectly and happily charge for the waste.
Sandstorm tried this, and they got very very far.
I think it was ingenious, but the sysadmin in me was very skeptical about the HA/scaling story (there was none). I guess it's fine for self-hosting for yourself&friends, but there should be an easy way forward - after all, Kubernetes commoditised clustering (I mean - once you're past setup).
Where can I follow your efforts? You mention KubeSail in your profile, but that seems developer-oriented?
We (Sandstorm) had an HA/scaling story, which we called "Blackrock"[0], and it was (and still is) the basis for the Sandstorm Oasis hosting service. I actually think we spent far too much time on that part too early. It turns out we could have operated Oasis by running regular single-machine Sandstorm on a beefy (though not that beefy) VM and been fine -- honestly, we would have had fewer outages and better performance. We probably should have spent our time making the platform work better for developers and end users instead, and built out the scalability later when customers really demanded it...
> We probably should have spent our time making the platform work better for developers and end users instead [...].
I keep a number of folders / bookmarks / stickies, where I save all the quotes like this one, so that I can then stumble upon them randomly. This is the single most important thing to keep in mind when building any kind of a platform. Developers particularly, are often the most important users of your product, since they will over time help drive the momentum and keep on bringing value.
KubeSail is the company, yes - and developer oriented only in the sense that it’s not “Enterprise” - the idea is to make cloud native accessible to everyone - to make hosting your own apps fun and easy and cheap again! We have a long way to go and haven’t launched anywhere yet, but you can join the mailing list or just signup now for a free cluster namespace :)
"What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center"
Ease of deployment is one thing, but managing and troubleshooting these deployments is another. Ordinary people generally don't want to do any of these things.
There are some people who have both the technical aptitude and desire to do these things, but they'll likely always be a small minority. An even smaller minority will be willing to do these things long-term without getting paid.
Sounds good in theory, but that is so far removed from what 99% of social media users do.
Nobody wants to rent/buy boxes, handle routers, etc. ; most users are on mobile, on the go.
Well the idea is they plug the box in at home, and the box is the server that contains all their shared data (photos, etc.) and lets them control how it's shared with others. Sure, they can access it from their phone, but the phone wouldn't be the server. The whole idea is that each user has control over their own data, instead of just handing it over to some big tech company.
Ideally no more complicated than setting up their phone and adding personal info/pictures. With an app store that defaults to installing only from official channels but with the ability to add channels more so like linux repos than the google play store.
How many users don't have home internet? You could also pay money for someone else to run it for you and later decide that paying $100 once was better than paying $10 a month forever. Note $10 a month x 5 years = $600.
Yes, this is something that the user would have to check out. My ISP is Comcast (a regular consumer account, not business). My contract specifically says that I am allowed to run servers from my home, as long as they aren't intended to be used by the general public.
I've been running my own servers from home for a very, very long time and it has never been an issue.
Running a social media node would probably count as "intended for the general public", but I'd bet that Comcast wouldn't really notice or care unless the amount of traffic exceeds a certain level or they start getting abuse complaints.
For this to succeed, I think you'd need a company that provided boxes as a service. Instead of having to order anything and plug it in, you just sign up online, the same as today's social networks.
Here's the twist: the company (presumably a non-profit or social purpose corp) would also offer the ability to buy your box, at which point they mail it to you; when you plug it in, your existing data is copied to it and you begin to self-host instead.
This makes it easy to sign up for and try out, while also offering a path toward self-hosting, once you decide you like it and don't want to keep paying the monthly fee.
> I would prefer a decentralized social network based on boxes you plug into your router with content shared in a way that fellow users bear the weight of shared content like torrents.
This is something that the SoLiD (Social Linked Data) initiative, based on web and linked-data standards, is expressly built to support; your "box" would implement what the initiative calls a Personal Online Datastore, or POD. Though "federated" third-party hosting of such datastores is also allowed for, of course.
There was some hype around something called "Freedom Box" [1] a while ago, but it seemed to have gone quiet. Things like this pop up every now and then, and then tend to disappear.
What? The Freedom Box project seems to still be going strong. The associated, pluggable hardware has "disappeared" mostly because it doesn't seem to do much over what a plain old single-board computer (SBC) or mini-PC can do already.
I love what Jimmy contributed to the world with Wikipedia. This, however, is DOA. The site barely communicates a value-proposition, doesn't give me a sense of what's behind the curtain unless I pay $13/month. C'mon the best practices for building product are WIDELY available now.
What the US government really wants is all your public online accounts.
They used the broad and not fully defined definition of the word to their advantage.
What a social media site is, is something I think we are all collectively defining. It's too new to be really set in stone.
Also, even though words have broad meanings, it doesn't make it right to use it that way, since social customs would make the person using such definitions unintelligible. For example, if I said in my introduction at a party to a woman "I'm gay", she will likely take it to mean 'I'm homosexual', not 'I'm happy'. Both are completely valid dictionary uses. Only one has a valid use in any modern context.
Social media is generally defined as media where the primary intent is socializing. For me, that means it is more about communicating with friends and family in a manner that is directed to furthering my understanding of them, and their understanding of me. These sites would be like facebook, twitter, instagram, etc
Sites like HN, webmasterworld, blackhatworld, etc... are more about advancing knowlledge in a specific area. Socializing is a secondary consequence. These could be considered 'quasi' social media accounts.
Based on the current definition of social media, even comments on a news site or blog, 'could' qualify. But then again we run into the issue that if you use words in non-standard ways you can become unintelligible to your fellow humans, undermining the whole purpose and concept of language. If I said 'I read a comment on social media' and really meant 'I read a comment on cnn.com' people would not understand what I'm saying. It would be odd and awkward.
So would you say that Reddit isn't a social network? I would have agreed at inception, but not anymore. I'd say the lines have blurred enough to look at any site where commenting is one of the primary functions as "social".
HN isn't a social network. It's centered around topics (articles, Show/Ask HN, ...) rather than individuals. There's no way for me to follow or contact a particular user.
It's not the same as following in the traditional "use the follow to populate a timeline or feed" sense. I don't come to HN wondering "what did my peeps comment today?", rather I come to glance at particular stories, and perhaps read the comments.
The "engagement" aspect of HN is in the quality of items that make it to the front page, and in the comments. It's not in the slow drip-drip-drip of near-real-time notification regarding the activities of specific users.
Who are my friends then? You've got access to my profile, if this is a social network you should be able to find out who my friends are, right?
This website contains no meaningful information about my relationships with other people. And more to the point, the way I use this site is not abnormal; people who leave lots of information about their social relationships on HN seem to be in a minority. You might claim that comments such as these, between you and I, are social interactions. I would counter by saying these are not meaningful social interactions. Don't take this personally but I don't know you and I don't plan on ever knowing you.
The main difference between a 'social media' forum and a topical forum is that in a topical forum there's some expectation of staying more or less, you know, on topic. There is some functional overlap, but more limited domain.
is it? i mean there were online boards and forums that had this comments/replies structure, joel on software anyone?. well minus the points. but those were never called social networks...
I wouldn't have called it a social network - there's really no graph of user connections, unless you want to consider a graph of directional has-replied-to or has-upvoted links, but that's pushing it.
But if another technology added an embedded HN clone, they would call it "social networking features", probably...
Although I would definitely consider HN to be a social network, the number of comments here disagreeing made me look into it a bit more. According to Wikipedia both Hacker News and Reddit are "social news websites".
I spend more time on HN than all other social media (reddit, facebook, instagram, whatever) combined. Isn't user engagement what matters from a consumer perspective?
$13/month does feel like an odd price point to me. I imagine people would compare to what they pay for Netflix, HULU, etc, and wonder why this is so high.
This will simply never takeoff. The Goldilocks conditions that allowed Facebook to spread like wildfire will never exist again. You would have to find a large group desiring to use the platform (college kids) who help grow the user base, with few/any functional alternatives (Facebook already exists, so it cannot supplant itself), along with a newly booming internet thanks to university/household broadband access, etc... At this point, all the initial users of Facebook have children and grandparents that use Facebook... and it is multi-national. The idea that a spunky-yet-well-funded startup is going to even contend with them is silly. Not that I do not wish it would happen, and we can all think of reasons why it should happen, but once the reality of contending with 2+ billion active users kicks in, you realize the petite crowd of HN users that would go for this “Facebook rival” are utterly irrelevant. MySpace was a known brand that spent millions on rebranding after cleaning up its landing pages in 2012 and they went... nowhere. Justin Timberlake could not even save them.
"Prestige" and quality of a social network that you have no connections within, don't matter one iota. The product is the website and infrastructure of the network, married with the users and their connections within. See: Google Plus. They (stupidly or naively) thought that using the cachet of exclusivity and invite emails would work in its benefit just as it did with Gmail, fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the product and the entire marketplace they were trying to succeed in.
He also less quietly launched a Social Media strike only 4 months ago, which now has a whole new perspective given this.
My thoughts at the time, which I said "EDIT ADD Had a quick look for `related` interests and see that he is CIO of Everipedia, which is decentralizing encyclopedia writing from an article in March: https://www.wired.com/story/larry-sanger-declaration-of-digi.... But I'd not cry foul even if they did produce their own decentralised social media platform; Kinda hope they do actually. Competition does have its upsides."
Since the article apparently lacks a link to the actual social network site: https://wt.social
The article says that it's not free and there's membership fee. I'm not against that, but it doesn't say that anywhere on the front page. Presumably they tell you that after you've submitted the form containing your personal information. Kind of shady.
I've had a hunch lately that someone would try to create a paid social network, but I never thought the idea would work for the reasons that social media became so popular to begin with.
Facebook is popular because it is free, it is easy, it is convenient. Old people, kids, a large proportion of the population has no understanding of how they get all this for free. And most of them don't care. They interact with ads just like it's any other content in their feed. They are happy they get something with so many features without having to pay for it.
Social networks that advertise privacy or no ads have limited appeal because the only group that really cares about this is (maybe) teenagers, and younger adults who are in touch with privacy politics.
Sorry, my understanding is that there is a waiting list unless you're willing to pay. Even still, I don't ever think a donation-based social network will be able to outcompete a free (but totally selling your data) social network.
Competing by what measure? If quantity is your measure, of course you can never beat free, and I'm sure Jimmy Wales knows this too, having founded the free Encyclopedia.
People won't pay for a platform unless they're using it, so you can be sure that of the users that are paying, they're likely to be engaged.
I don't know about you, but social networks tend to suck when the users aren't even logging in. I don't need a billion users or even a million on a given platform to necessarily find reasonably good interactions on it.
>We will foster an environment where bad actors are removed because it is right, not because it suddenly affects our bottom-line.
Who will determine what a bad actor is and what criteria will be used. We have already seen the effect of people banned from sites for political and religious views, so do we really need another site that will just do the same?
What exactly has been the effect? Which political and religious views are you talking about? I can think of instances of neo-Naxis being kicked off Facebook and Cloudflare, but no instances of it happening according to religious views?
If you are OK with banning Nazis from a platform, then you’ve accepted the premise that certain bad actors should be removed, and now you’re in a debate about where the line should be drawn.
I created an account, log in, and just see a page with a bunch of "subwikis" on completely random topics ("Woodworking", "Mountain Biking", and "Icelandic Horses" are the top 3) with no subwiki having more than 9 members, most only having 1 or 2.
Now I will log out and probably never think to log back in again.
(I know this might sound like I'm shallowly dismissing it, but this is just my honest experience as a random casual internet person. I hope they can make this more appealing and succeed, especially since I support any attempt at toppling proprietary monopolies).
Yeah, the onboarding shows that, but there are a bunch of subwikis that are actually active. I have no idea why they show ones that are not active when you onboard, that decision makes no sense at all.
I always shake my head when Jimmy Wales is given so much credit for founding Wikipedia, while what he did was supply the money for it from the profit he made off his soft-core porn business, while Larry Sanger (who deserves most of the credit, including coming up with the name Wikipedia, with Wikipedia's most distinctive feature -- the so-called Neutral Point of View, and with managing the site itself) is virtually forgotten.
History is written by the victors, and unfortunately Sanger decided to instead focus on Nupedia, which was more focused on "experts" writing the articles. Ultimately it seems that Sanger didn't truly believe in the core underlying idea of Wikipedia, which is that allowing anyone to write/edit without any reputation or credentials (or even an account!) eventually leads to a good outcome. It's counter-intuitive to some degree that the noise of allowing the "unwashed masses" to contribute is outweighed by the ease of attracting new contributors combined with the decentralized, crowd-sourced corrections of the community.
There's a reason why Wikipedia is one of the largest and most useful websites on the internet meanwhile Citizendium barely lasted, and that reason had little to do with ideas being stolen or porn profits being redirected. Jimmy is just a good businessman and made something people want / need with the proper marketing and leadership. It's as simple as that.
These arguments about who's more important than who are usually pretty pointless. You should begin with a measure of importance and then use it in an unbiased way to evaluate people. It should give results you agree with no matter who you apply it to. Is funding something more important than founding it? Is doing unpaid work more important than paying for work? Who knows without any criteria, but coming up with a name surely ranks pretty low by anyone's standard.
Tesla, sure, but SpaceX was all Elon Musk, unless I am living in an alternative universe. His friends all tried to convince him he was crazy to start a rocket company. One even put together a montage of rocket explosions to try to keep him from doing it.
Musk absolutely should take credit for Tesla as it exists today.
The Tesla he bought into was just a research project. It was nowhere near the global brand it is today nor were they on a trajectory that would have put them anywhere close to where they are today. It was his vision that made it possible at all.
Similar to the founding story of McDonald's. Ray Croc bought the idea and made McDonald's what it is today. He didn't actually start the original 6 burger restaurants named McDonald's.
It's also questionable whether Tesla Motors would have had the same impact (or even survived) without Musk's efforts and leadership. They were making a very niche sports car at the time that was basically hand built. Musk is the one that got them to a mainstream commercial product.
Fine, but when do we stop assigning money and drivers as co-founders? You can look at situation like Lee Iacocca did the same thing for Chrysler, but he wasn't labeled as a co-founder.
In the article, it mentions that signing up is free, but there's a waiting list. 25,000 members (sorry 78,000) but only 200 have paid to bypass the waiting list. Beyond that, the signup page doesn't have enough information for me to share my information, which includes email and birth date.
This seems to me to have the exact same problem that projects like Mastodon have, which is that people use social media because other people they know use social media. You can point out all the benefits the alternative sites have, but at the end of the day, 99% of people aren't going to want to completely start over on a new site that isn't going to offer anything that they can't already find on an established platform.
Ouch. Think he's missing the mark quite severely there.
Merit or not, the whole "if it's free you're the product" thinking hasn't really sunk in with people outside of heavy tech.
So while this might make sense to you and me, I can see 13USD being a tough sell for the average user. Which is a deathblow to something that inherently requires critical momentum.
I don't understand why authors frequently use the term "quietly" in article titles. ZDNet is a fairly significant site, there is nothing 'quiet' about this at all. And if you wanted to actually compete with Facebook, you'd want to get this message everywhere possible. Network effects are real for a platform like Facebook.
> We will empower you to make your own choices about what content you are served
I decide myself what sites I visit. Although in recent years I mostly use HN for discovery.
There is only one problem though: Web authorization/id. When I publish family photos I don't want the whole world to see, only our relatives.
I've setup basic HTTP auth and sent out username+password to all relatives.
That however doesn't scale! And it's impractical.
What we need is a public/private key that is generated by the browser, and which can be shared between many devices. You can have many keys, one for work, one for personal business, another one for gaming or what not, as many identities/keys as you want.
When you visit a web page that wants to know your identity, like any websites that right now asks for a username/password. You get a dialog asking if you want to identify on that website, and what meta-data the website request and what you info you want to give it. Kinda like installing an app on Android or iPhone where you need to confirm the app permissions.
Upon accepting the identify request, you pick an appropriate ID, then your browser sends the public key to the web server, and answers a challenge to make sure you are the owner of that ID. No more username/passwords to remember.
As for me who is a content hoster, I simply chose from a GUI, depending on what server/app i'm using, which group or individual id/public key I want to give access.
If an unknown id/key authenticates, depending on what server/app I'm using, I get a notification, asking me to add that ID/key to contacts or what not. Kinda like with social messenger apps.
At this day and age, we need something better then usernames and passwords!
Just signed up. I could search for topics but not join as it says I'm number 60K+ in the waiting list and need to pay. First impression it looks like Reddit. I'm very skeptical people will pay $100/year for this. Reporting the number of members is pretty useless since I'm pretty sure they are not talking about paying ones.
Definitely not Bitcoin. I've given Bitcoin to Wikipedia in the past (using the same email address). When I try to pay for a WT Social subscription with a credit card, I get a bit scary error message:
Card Input Error(s):
You cannot combine currencies on a single customer. This customer has had a subscription, coupon, or invoice item with a different currency.
Just a FYI, but you don't need to pay the $12.99 or whatever it is to "jump the waitlist". Simply invite someone else, and when that someone else joins, you're automatically off the wait queue and able to view a feed or create subwikis.
Join the subwiki called "Riffing" if you're into MST3K or Rifftrax. :)
What I want is a decentralized Reddit with the same type of interaction that we have with our beloved Google search engine.
So you are right, if Reddit is so central to our lives, why do we have such a hard time taking it down? Is it because we are so used to having it there that it's just not something we can imagine not having?
No. I know a lot of us want to take it down. But the good thing about reddit is that it can be taken down. That's why it is one of the most interesting internet communities. It doesn't really have a "community" in the true sense of the word. But in reality, it has communities. And it doesn't matter how big or small those communities are; that's how the site functions. Reddit can be taken down and Reddit will be back with a new identity and a new identity will be created. We don't have to worry about it.
To be contrarian, I feel ads are good and useful thing if done right. I look at ads as website working hard to figure out my needs. Ads connect products and companies which want to add value and the customer who otherwise might not discover them. It's win-win and normalizes platforms against paid services which vast majority of the world cannot afford. It's a slap in the face of 95% population when you say it just cost same as few coffee cups. I know the crowd here gets spooked when they see ads for product they were searching for. To me, its great that someone out there is trying to figure out proposing me competitive products I'm interested in right now. Again, its win win scenario but it has to done right (for example, no personal information transmitted to advertisers).
Curious what more experienced engineers/founders think of this:
I feel that one way to solve both the ownership over data problems and minimize server costs is to use some sort of P2P system where all posts, images, videos, etc are hosted locally. This could be through a browser extension when on a computer, within local storage on mobile apps, etc.
When a user pulls up their feed, it would be directly pulling posts from the locally hosted accounts of those they follow, similar to torrenting. With the bulk of data center costs offloaded to P2P, the remaining server costs could run on donations, similar to how Wikipedia does now.
I'm not sure if a social network like this currently exists, or if I'm missing some potential problems with the concept. Thoughts?
This article is all over the place. It can't possibly be that everyone is expected to pay around $10 a month because:
1. Obviously almost nobody is going to be prepared to pay that, and
2. He wouldn't be talking about it not making a profit and having bare-bones staff if every one of a predicted 50-500 million users was going to paying that amount, just to run a social network, because he'd need an army of staff just shoveling money of the window to avoid making a profit on those figures.
So it must be that it's donation based, but then again how does a monthly donation to jump a waiting list work? Do you go outside and rejoin the queue if you stop donating?
The article is all very confused, and obviously the site itself doesn't help matters.
I got an early invite because I donated to WikiTribune; I'm not sure if that meant I skipped some payment sign-up page, but I wasn't required to pay anything to obtain access wt.social.
It looks a bit like Facebook: a central column with your "feed" (which is populated with articles from a bunch of interests - "subwikis" - that you choose when you get in for the first time), a left column with other groups you might be interested in joining, and a right column with invite links for your friends, a list of your current groups, and recent changes. There's a bar at the top with notifications and search.
There is absolutely no way people would pay $12 per month for social media. They already get it from others for free. It is not about news to anyone. It is about snooping and boosting ego. Jimmy Wales didn't understand the facebook audience I guess.
The secret to a good social network is reputation. Upvoted content floats to the top, while downvoted content is pushed out of sight.
It's not always fair, and certainly does not always bring the best content to light, but it's a lot better than a purely level playing field of equals, where a fool's opinion is weighted exactly against that of a great philosopher.
Charging for access is problematic, however. People have been trained to expect free stuff, and unfortunately it's not clear the value proposition of Wales' offering. To avoid seeing ads? To have vastly better content? To be a superior UX? He has a pretty tough row to hoe.
Now that people have seen how fun Facebook is (after all it does have its benefits) I would love to wipe the slate clean and start over with a payed model.
Maybe not as high as Netflix, because there would be no need for such heavy bandwidth use, but definitely yearly/monthly subscriptions.
I don't use social media myself but I hear from family members and friends how fun it is to connect with far away relatives and of course organize and attend various social groups.
But I'm skeptical as to whether wt.social will work with the big players still out there serving a majority of users.
I'm paraphrasing Machiavelli here but he nailed it in regards to wicked men.
"As long as there will be men there will be those that are wicked. As long as the good man restrains his behavior he will always lose to the wicked man. "... this is not an exact quote. Just paraphrasing.
This is why all these strategies will fail in regards to Facebook.
They just flat out play dirty... VERY dirty.
The reason why bought Whatsapp is that they were paying users directly to spy on their phones and found that Whatsapp had a massive user adoption.
Unless you're prepared to go evil there's no way to win against this.
Like others I don't understand the pricing here. For comparison in 2017, FB made $84 per US user, and $27 per EU user. So you're already paying more than you 'pay' facebook.
> He doesn't expect the social network to be profitable
I'd expect it to be more profitable than facebook at this price
I like the idea, but that price is going to keep out many, many people. I'd guess around $1/month would work, but even then, in the eyes of most you are competing with free.
Would be cool if a social network was priced like taxes. If you make more money, you pay more. Don't know what kind of arrangement could conceivably create that system though.
Among my friends (and many other people), social networking with people I know in real life has been replaced by chat apps and SMS.
If I want to share news, I do it via group chat. I think this is common.
For those who want social news in their particular ideological bubble, there's reddit. For those who want a news reader, there are many news apps. And for those who want to interact with strangers, there's Twitter.
I'd love to support this, but I just can't think of a use-case for my life.
In the bay area, I have hundreds of acquaintances that are burners, hippies, makers, etc. I've been keeping up with these folks for nearly two decades now and would like to continue to do so as they have enriched my life immeasurably. Many of us get together on at least a yearly basis and often do special events together. All the other tools that we would've used to communicate and coordinate with each other have died in favor of facebook.
I suspect the community here is just too large for something like a mailing list. I mean, there are mailing list, but they're less generalized than I like.
I've never done anything useful with an IDE as a Ruby developer. Why do IDEs like IntelliJ even exist? I personally don't have a need for them, and I refuse to understand that other people have different needs and wants.
I enjoy some of the content I find on Instagram from interesting individuals and companies. But for me the value of Facebook is its ubiquity - nothing comes close to it for being able to contact old friends from other countries, from schools, from various social circles, etc.
And for that reason the "quietly launched" thing here kinds of defeats the point of any Facebook rival for me.
Although, The "celebrities"(I am more interested in following Engineers, Computer Scientists. These guys are my "celebrities") I would want to follow are not on facebook/instagram(Or they don't share anything I'd be interested in on those platforms).
This is pretty much the only thing I use FB for, and even here it's not that much. It lets me keep tabs on people I rarely communicate with, and gives me a way to easily communicate with them if I want to say "hi" after a year of no communication. For people I'm not that close with (not enough to exchange phone numbers), it lets me keep a list of these mere acquaintances.
It is better to pay cash for online services than to pay through your private information. If the service is free you are the currency, all your interest are sold for profit.
I would much rather pay for online services like email, news and content than to sell info about myself through ads to private companies.
Useful services:
Email
Protonmail,fastmail
Online video
Peertube
Paying for social media.
Paying for newspapers online, this is so they do not have to sell their platform and independence to ads.
i think it could actually work. a couple of messengers (slightly different product but still...) have tried offering good alternatives to whatsapp at a sensible price. It turns out, people aren't motivated to switch even if the price is low.
When you make it expensive, otoh, it feels exclusive. After some reputation is built you can somewhat lower the price and perhaps many people are thrilled that they can join a very exclusive club.
whether this works out remains to be seen. success in this area is hardly likely but I doubt pricing is the determining factor.
With things like GNU Social you can have your own social network effectively free and you 100% control it. How can this compete with that? The only real way is the network effect (all your friends are on it so you feel like you have no choice but to join because it's going to be very hard to get everyone to switch to your network). WT Social doesn't have that, so... ?
The problem with all solutions to facebook (and this one) is getting a critical mass to join them. People use Facebook because _everyone_ is on facebook.
I don't need to think "Is my cousins boyfriend on Facebook?" you just know they are.
Without that assurance, you'll end up with two invites for a function, and that is more work for little gain.
Exactly. But all this tells you is that there was some added value that Facebook brought that made people sign up even when it didn't have critical mass. Currently, the only network I know of that might be in the right place to compete with Facebook is Instagram. Which is basically the same, but with more pictures of food.
WT:Social is never going to have a Facebook level network effect, but it's certainly going to be higher than GNU Social. I just created an account 5 mins ago and I was number 100k+ so they're off to a good start.
This is not for the people who are complaining about the high price. Did anyone question what price we paid for free product like fb/insta ? Clearly this product is in infancy and trying to attract early adopters. In future price may come down and ui/ux will get better but it’s clearly not for everyone looking to escape into social media as entertainment.
I'm totally the target market for this. FB is just f$$ing depressing, and I only check in every couple of days now. I would happily pay for a regular dopamine fix that didn't include a shower of muppets saying things I find mildly irritating at best. I'm also totally over the BBC, ABC (Australia, not USA), and other MSM. Again, shower of muppets etc etc.
What I really want is the early internet back again. I want some blogs to read, that are witty, intelligent and erudite. I want a feed reader that will let me know when they update. I want a news source that is likewise witty, erudite, intelligent and sceptical (the foremost asset of any journalist should be scepticism).
I think I'll just go and find a bunch of blogs to follow. And start my own again. F$ck Facebook.
"If you're complaining about the price, this isn't for you" is kind of a truism, but I'm not sure it's a helpful truism in this case. At a moment where the phrase "subscription fatigue" is sweeping into popular discourse, $100 a year is a hell of a big ask for a nascent social network. App.Net couldn't convince people to pay $50 a year earlier this decade; today Micro.blog is building a cult following as a paid Twitter alternative, but it's very consciously not trying to take on Twitter scale-wise -- and it's actually a full blog hosting service for $60 a year (with a free tier if you're already hosting your own blog you want to integrate with it).
A lot of the good “social networks” these days are organized a single topic or community. Like a community slack/discord or moderated subreddit. I wonder whether there will be much of a market for open ended social networks into the 2020s as both twitter and Facebook have become cesspools... and frankly don’t feel like good places to interact with folks
I don't think a social network based on subscription will work. Although I could afford it, only a tiny proportion of my Facebook friends could afford an expense like that.
The endless unresearched opinion on Facebook drives me mad. But unless you only want to have friends who are rich enough to agree with you, this is dead in the water.
Silly question but on facebook/twitter, most of the fake news I'm getting isn't from ads but from random people I've added over the years that are sharing a bunch of crap. The fact that they'd be paying to access that social network wouldn't change what they're sharing on it.. or would it?
The problem isn't the network. The problem is the social -- your social, i.e. your friends. You can get the same effect on existing social media simply by not having them as friends, or blocking them.
The people who enjoy fake news won't sign up for this. They'll stick with a network where they have "freedom of speech". They won't vanish, and they won't get any better educated. It's not as if you can make the urge to spread fake news vanish. Your racist cousin still exists, and he's still eagerly seeking out and re-posting obviously fake stories from outside what he dubs the "mainstream media" -- he won't suddenly come to his senses, and he certainly won't pay for the privilege.
I think a better approach, if you want to use social media at all, is to tell people "I won't be friends with people who believe hateful BS." That's the only thing that might help: force them to choose between their friends and their desire to reinforce their group identity. Going to a different site might achieve that, but you don't need to spend money and you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just use the existing tools.
Why is it every answer to this solved problem involves someone new playing go between in social networks?
"Come to my alternative to X, where instead of X-corp handling all your data, Y-corp will!"
The internet was not suppose to be like this...
What matters is not if you would pay $1, but if your friends/family are willing to pay $1. Without them the network is useless. I don't think one can build network effect fast enough with a paid (truly) social network.
If you don't like facebook try mewe. There's no ads & you get the basics for free, but you can pay for things like a dark theme or extra emojis in different themes. Mastodon is a good twitter replacement.
I love Wikipedia. I know almost nothing about Jimmy Wales bar hearing one radio interview with him the content of which I do not recall. And yet somehow his name is a negative for me. How does that happen?
i joined. First "friend request" i got was from some Bitcoin marketer who had subbed to "every" interest group....
I couldn't see any way to flag this person, report them for spam or otherwise mark them as someone I'm not interested in.
I was also spammed by the "new posts in..." for subs i had not joined and have zero interest in getting email from.
In short, this feels like something from the good old days when we all thought the internet was a small and friendly town... What the hell were they thinking!
Interesting idea, but $13/month is about 2X - 3X more than I'd be willing to pay. I pay Protonmail around $6/month, and I want to pay less than that for social media.
"It costs $12.99 a month or $100 a year in the US, or €12 a month or €90 a year in Europe"
I would subscribe just for the outlandish concept of not ripping off Europeans.
I joined immediately. We need this. And where else will we find an option with such a high profile and from people with such a good track record? It may actually have a chance.
Minimum salary where I live is about 400usd/mo, and it's asking me for 12usd/mo. I predict not that many people from my country will join any time soon.
Facebook is "free," this is $100/year. Even if Facebook weren't already the giant it is, that fact alone would determine the outcome in the social space.
I deleted my social media accounts (save Hacker News) a few years ago. I’m so happy without them, I’d probably have to be paid to join a new one. Been there. Done that.
I’m all for finding alternatives to the ad-based models that plague social media (and the web, in general), but how will people without bank accounts use such a system?
Free social networks (as in free beer) only accept users who don't have a bank accounts because the networks expect them to have one in the near future. Otherwise, there would be no reason for advertisers pay the social networks for the cost of these "free riders". Everybody ends up being monetized, that's the plan.
I haven’t had a bank account for the last 8 years. How long do you expect they will wait for me to get a bank account? What about people who banks won’t work with?
I disagree with this notion that users are “free riders”. Users bring content to these platforms. Without users, the platforms themselves are absolutely useless.
I paid instantly for a yearly subscription (90 euros) because I really want the opportunity to support a project that keeps me in contact with my friends and interest groups and that doesn’t harvest me for my data. I’ve seen techies clamour for a subscription-based Facebook service for years... it’s clearly not in Facebook’s interest to pander to the opt-out-of-information-collection crowd, so I’m delighted somebody is providing an alternative and I’m willing to take the plunge and vote with my wallet.
Considering that when you sign up you're put in a waiting list that can be bypassed by a monthly or yearly subscription (or by bringing on a bunch of users via referral links), I'd say "subscription model" is perfectly correct.
Jimmy is a brilliant man. He created one of the most valuable sites on the net. But I think he is suffering from being in a bit of a feedback bubble. Problems of success I guess.
I don't know anyone who says: I want a social media company to help combat the fake news I see.
Having more flexibility on who sees what, more privacy in group conversations, ways to 'downvote' things not just 'like/love' (lop sided incentives), etc... those are things I've wanted from FB/Twitter/Instagram and I've heard other people want.
It seems he is solving a problem no one wants a solution for. For all the media hype, I'm personally not convinced social media companies should be the arbitrators of what is fake news or not. I'll give Jimmy the benefit of doubt that his version of censorship will be the best, he has proven it with wikipedia. But I'm not sure censorship, even good ones, are what we need.
For those who aren't anti-censorship, then you get the disagreement on what type of censorship we should focus on. In the US, it seems one side favors censoring the far left (as has happened historically with things like communism) and others choose censoring the far right as the priority (a more modern approach). I dislike both sides (extremes tend to be unhealthy) but as a free speech advocate, I want them to have their platform, as twisted and unhealthy as it is. The strength of good ideas should be such that they don't fear bad ones.
If two PHP developer and a community person launches a social network, can we actually call it a Facebook rival? It's lightyears away from feature parity.
What I really want is a 'Spotify for prominent newspapers', so I'm not confronted by paywalls for sites like NYT, Washington Post, Bloomberg, etc. That is something that I would pay for.
What I won't pay for is multiple subscriptions to several prominent newspapers I'm interested in, that are linked everywhere, especially here. If WT:Social can provide content from all the biggest mastheads with one convenient subscription, I'm in.
I'm not sure if it's just the headline, but this seems like solving the wrong problem. Universal platforms fail at moderation. Moderation doesn't work unless the moderators are part of the community. Reddit and Mastodon are the ones to follow here (as well as Hacker News, or lobste.rs, or tildes.net, or a zillion specialized forums).
I’ve been living in China for some years, and you know what’s surprisingly not a terrible model for a social network? Wechat, if it were rebuilt by people who value freedom and privacy. Think of it like WhatsApp but with a feed — just enough social to help you stay connected with your IRL friends, without turning everything into political discussion.
(And yes, I realize that it’s partly the censorship here that steers people away from politics and keeps it social, but I don’t think that’s all of it)
I don’t see why a social network should also build in first class features for sharing and commenting on news. What’s the old adage about discussing politics and religion? Why should it even be POSSIBLE for me to argue with some nazi I don’t know in the comments section of an article my grandma shared with my uncle? Seriously, wtf?
If you want a site purpose-built for discussing news as it goes viral, Reddit is fine for that.
Interesting things about Wechat’s feed:
- It’s not what you see when you open the app. Instead, the app opens to your messages. This is huge.
- It’s strictly chronological. Yep.
- Each time I open it, the 5th post is always an ad, and it’s labeled as such.
- It’s trivially easy to restrict most people from seeing only the last week, or month, or six months of your posts. People you’re not friends with can’t see your posts BY DEFAULT.
- When your friends post, you can only see comments and likes from your own friends. (it's easier to notice unexpected connections, which could be an upside or a downside depending on your situation)
- If you want to re-share something, there’s no button for that: you have to open the page, copy the link, and post it again. This is obviously intended to make the censors’ jobs easier, but adding friction also cuts down on low effort sharing.
How it’s otherwise different from Facebook:
- There’s no such thing as viral posts. Sure, the same link might get shared in thousands of private groups, but the discussion isn’t shared. I think this is a feature, not a bug. Again, there are plenty of websites specifically for discussing news with strangers as it goes viral.
- It’s mobile-first (basically, mobile only). You can’t see the feed on PC, so if you want to write an angry tirade about f-ing Yankees fans on your friend’s post, you’re gonna get sore thumbs. Again, adding friction means less trash makes it on the network.
- Everyone has it hooked up to payment, so splitting the bill at the end of dinner is trivial. There’s even a feature for sending a bill to a group with N people that splits it N ways and shows who has and hasn’t paid.
- (Probably some other stuff, but I basically stopped using Facebook 7 years ago when I moved to China, partly because my parents and old friends are on there sharing news stories I'd rather not know their stance on)
Even aside from the censorship, Wechat isn’t perfect — its interface hasn’t changed in the 7 years I’ve been using it, so stupid stuff like pinning contacts or putting groups in a separate tab or even goddamn EVENTS aren’t things you can do in the app.
But as a social network, it’s got most of the value while being way less problematic than Facebook.
Governments around the world should demand Facebook either place a permanent ad banner promoting WT:Social front and center on their website for everyone from that country, or they can pay $x00 million in fines per month. If Facebook chooses to pay the fine, half the fine should then be donated to WT:Social to keep their site running and the rest can be distributed back to the taxpayers. :-)
2. More importantly: imagine it happens. Who would actually make a switch?
I mean, really, who chooses to use FB, because he likes FB? I don't think I know a single example. For the last year or so it even (finally!) became trendy among non-techy people to hate FB, but so what? People stay because their social circles stay. In fact, it's been quite a while since I don't actually feel pressured to use FB by induviduals, but rather the stuff like climbing club using FB as a platform to announce events and gather groups to go camping and stuff.
WT:Social might become of use as a very niche social network for news, but no way it can be seriously viewed as FB's rival. And even if they could, they are fighting for the yesterday's market, meanwhile Facebook builds the future, where their helpless users will willingly spend their lives in Oculus helmets socializing with their FB "friends" on VR beaches. Or whatever.
This is the worst attempt I've ever seen at building a social network.
3 out of 4 of the major social networks were started by 20-22yos,
4 out of 4 were initially for teens only,
3 out of 3 in the last 10 years were mobile-only, ios-only
I could go on forever but the point is it doesn't even get the basics right. If you're interested in how one builds a successful social network check Nikita's tweets (sold TBH to Facebook 2 years ago for $100M) https://twitter.com/nikitabier
I think it is way more than the "ninth most popular website." I'm quite sure the Web would be a very different place if it hadn't existed. In fact, I would rank Wikipedia alongside the Web and perhaps the Internet. Not only did it establish that information about nearly everything would be available free and without commercial motivations (obviously, with tremendous caveats, but still far closer to those ideals than any of its contemporaries), it also provides an incredible corpus that is the basis of many machine learning approaches. With the excuses people make on a daily basis, there's no assurance something like Wikipedia would have happened the same way. And it continues to develop important projects. Separately, Wales doesn't deserve all the credit, but I just can't leave that the summary of "Wikipedia" is it's "almost as popular as Facebook."
