
Ask HN: Are social networks inherently shitty? - l33tbro
Given the way Sean Parker nowadays describes them as &quot;social validation feedback loops&quot;, do you think a worthwhile social network can exist?
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himom
Disclaimer: I was the lead sysadmin at an ivy school’s residential housing
dept and cofounder of a VIP email startup.

Yes (star star)

For contact information, scheduling/coordinating, interest/news and friend-of-
friend romance/friend/activity partner discovery, a social network of
sufficient connectedness has obvious value.

If pictures (except a standardized headshot), bragging, cyberdisinbitionism,
sharing, ads, bots, fake users, state hacks, commercial spammers,
influence/sentiment peddling/consent manufacturing, extremely risky selfies,
undesirable radical inclusion and gossip can be eliminated/minimized, then it
seems feasible to have a solid, useful social network that isn’t working
against you or your friends.

I think a social network like a light version of ASW for cool mortals but
limited in terms of messaging, videos/pics and public/group sharing would be
good... everyone whom wants to join has to be invited/vouched, pay a $499 USD
one-time fee, pass a real background check and create a sufficiently complete
and interesting profile in order to be reviewed for final acceptance.

This way, the quality and signal of the network remains high and the worry is
less... such high barriers are so that safety, comfort, value and preselection
remain high and undiluted by commercial or popular pressures. Furthermore,
customer funding eliminates the need for ad-support, privacy invasions and
other questionable monetization schemes.

Such an app would need to grow in private alpha much as FB did by first
launching at large, prestigious universities where social networks are clearly
valuable and worth guarding.

Be somewhat open.. but not too open and not too closed.

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sbinthree
I think at a certain point they became a failed social experiment and that we
may not have something like it long term. Humans need outgroups, hierarchies
and privacy. If you try to change or remove that you really just end up with a
different form of it.

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bunderbunder
There's an essay in the book _The Best Software Writing I_ (edited by Joel
Spolsky) that talks about how social networking represents an inherently poor
model of real human social networks. Here's an online link:
[http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html](http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html)

It's from 2004, so it lacks the perspective of having seen how virtually all
of the history of social networking unfolded. And it flogs on negative
stereotypes around both programmers and people with autism in a way that
really grates. So I can't recommend the essay generally. But it does have some
interesting observations.

One is the jarring crudeness of simplifying the infinitely complex and nuanced
texture of real webs of social connections down to a simple 1-bit flag: "Are
you my friend? Yes or no." Facebook has subsequently made the graph bitartite,
so now you can "friend" people and "follow" companies, but that's barely an
improvement.

I'm no longer a Facebook user, but their recent "X is not your friends" ad
campaign got me thinking about that fact again. The campaign seems to be
trying to imply that they really do understand my social life, and they are
going to get in line with it. But the jarring simplicity of the message just
reminded me how much they don't. My social network is not just a list of
people I happen to associate with. It's the guy I talk philosophy with, it's
the people I went to college with, with whom I still get together to catch up
while our kids (all about the same age) run feral in the backyard. It's grad
school classmates with whom I can share the gory details of my successes,
failures and frustrations with data engineering and fitting machine learning
models, and whom I can call on for help when I'm having trouble, and who call
on me for help for the same. And it's people who really don't want me to ever
mention words like "conjugate transpose" in their presence, but do want to
hear about the everyday joys and challenges of simultaneously going to
graduate school and raising their grandchildren.

Facebook doesn't - can't - understand any of that subtlety. Consequently, it
doesn't - can't - provide a satisfying experience for facilitating my real
social life.

As a medium for creating and then feeding a minor addiction to clicks of the
"like" button in response to photos of my kids, in exchange for "a non-
exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to
use" them, on the other hand, it seems to be amazingly well-optimized.

~~~
pwg
> As a medium for creating and then feeding a minor addiction to clicks of the
> "like" button in response to photos of my kids, in exchange for "a non-
> exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to
> use" them, on the other hand, it seems to be amazingly well-optimized.

Their model appears to be largely based around perpetuating the high-school
clic mentality for the purpose of shoving advertising at the clic members in
order to profit.

The addiction (just as in the high-school clic) is to be a member of the "in"
crowd (for whatever definition of "in" applies). Which is probably why there
is only "friend" (which clearly fails, as you detail, to capture the nuances
of real social interaction). With only a single linking level, each new clic
member feels just as important as another, feeding the addiction just a little
bit (the "I'm important, because X is friends with me" mindset).

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DiabloD3
No, I don't think they were ever justifiable in the first place.

