
Show HN: A Socialist Social Network - eveFromKarmaFm
https://www.karma.fm/
======
eveFromKarmaFm
Hi all - Thank you for killing my baby!

In short, the thinking here is that instead of building a community with the
intent to monetize the users and their data, we can become sustainable through
patron contributions - half of which get redistributed to the users. My
thinking is that this incentivizes us all to keep costs very low and also
incentivizes members to impress one another, instead of exploiting one another
with clickbait or "lead-generation" (advertising for-profit stuff is strictly
disallowed).

RE "socialism": this isn't intended to be socialism as a religion ~ more like,
"the model we're working with right now is having some painful side-effects
and maybe it's worth trying a hypermodern coop / WSDE model that addresses
some of the root causes of these symptoms (data abuses, CCP exerting control
over our information flow / free speech, cambridge analytics stuff,
LGBTQ+/small creators struggling on YouTube, etc)" which happens to align with
some socialist principles, from what I gather.

Here's the Patreon:
[https://www.patreon.com/karmafm](https://www.patreon.com/karmafm)

This is very young and experimental, and so far there's only been a single
distribution (a whopping $4 (post-fees) sent to a member from a $10 patron
contribution) but the Patron contributions have since quadrupled to $40!

Forgive my brevity as I attempt to keep this thing breathing and thank you for
taking a look.

~~~
losteric
Just some feedback:

* Anything with a sign-up feature needs an elevator pitch somewhere on the homepage: "What" and "Why" for the layman, two _short_ paragraphs but ideally a single-sentence elevator pitch.

* Eliminate the ideology, focus messaging on the value and support. "Socialist" is a very broad and burdened term.

* Explain how tf this is socially owned. All I see a dictator, however benevolent, and a very inefficient donation system.

* Player Guide is... bad. Super hand-wavy on the stuff that should be specific (community guidelines), lots of ideology, and straight up fluff. Write assuming every reader is blind and ADD - some of them are, and everyone else will benefit.

~~~
anoncake
> * Eliminate the ideology, focus messaging on the value and support.
> "Socialist" is a very broad and burdened term.

No. Eliminating the ideology is never possible. If you try, you implicitly
support the dominant one. Avoiding the term is a good idea though.

~~~
eveFromKarmaFm
What do you think about embracing the controversy embedded within the term as
a means of educating people around its underlying principles, getting people
talking/thinking about it, etc?

~~~
anoncake
I'm afraid the term makes many people _stop_ thinking. They hear Karma is
socialist and conclude that it's bad. Ideally, you would tell people Karma is
socialist only after they have evaluated it.

On the other hand, even the most faithful anti-socialist should recognize that
you aren't building a totalitarian dictatorship here. So it may make them
think after all.

~~~
eveFromKarmaFm
Hey anoncake ~ just wanted to thank you for planting this seed. You and a few
other members had the same ideas, and they're manifesting into a lower-
friction articulation of what this thing is all about:
[https://www.karma.fm/p/S09A4/dialing-down-the-socialism-
and-...](https://www.karma.fm/p/S09A4/dialing-down-the-socialism-and-dialing-
up-the-collaborative)

Many thanks for the impact.

------
anigbrowl
OP, if you're bootstrapping this thing at a tiny scale it looks like you've
just been hit with the 'HN hug of death' as the wide readership of the website
often yields a huge surge of incoming traffic to anything which lands on the
front page.

While someone else sorts this problem out (or you just wait for it to subside)
perhaps you could explain the concept and goals here in the meantime. Don't
feel bad, this happens to lots of people.

~~~
eveFromKarmaFm
Thanks for this! This is a super small nights/weekends experiment with a dozen
or so active users; I probably should have prepared for a spike, huh? I'll
leave a top-level comment to summarize the thinking before I jump back over to
keeping it alive . Thank you again.

------
RugnirViking
Hi there. I left a comment on the site, but I'm not sure if it got through
because it went down again before I could check to see. The main problem I
have found so far trying to use the site is that you've made a huge variety of
communities and posts using a reddit scraper. I understand the urge to have
content, but starting small will allow users to actually find places where
other living users are rather than an endless wasteland of bot posts with no
comments.

In addition, having user-driven content from the start will (hopefully) lead
to a community and a unique style forming - with people sticking around
because they enjoy the content and discussion already there, and posting more
of the same themselves. If you want to shape the community, the best way would
be to make one or two posts yourself, and try hard to comment and engage with
other user's posts in the way you hope future users will.

Also, the personality of the first few active users will have a large effect
on how the site's culture will evolve. If you're interested in left-wing
politics, perhaps try to publicise the site in the kinds of places people
already talk about left-wing politics - specific subreddits or discord
servers. Of course a lot of places won't like straight-up advertisement, but
if you pitch it as an ongoing project and ask for ideas, people will likely be
happier to accept it.

~~~
eveFromKarmaFm
It went through and I responded! I apologize for the performance headache. I'm
in uncharted territory over here.

[https://www.karma.fm/p/SGXFV/once-upon-a-time-i-
accidentally...](https://www.karma.fm/p/SGXFV/once-upon-a-time-i-accidentally-
launched-karma)

My response:

Thanks so much @Rugnir. This is absolutely a problem; I'll quote you over on
the most recent retrospective.

I have a question: when you visit the homepage, all posts are human (filtered
for "non robot posts"). You can then include bot posts by manually disabling
this filter. On Tribe pages, the filter is "off" by default. Would you like to
see the filter controls on the Tribe pages, with it "off" by default?

~~~

In addition, having user-driven content from the start will (hopefully) lead
to a community and a unique style forming - with people sticking around
because they enjoy the content and discussion already there, and posting more
of the same themselves. If you want to shape the community, the best way would
be to make one or two posts yourself, and try hard to comment and engage with
other user's posts in the way you hope future users will.

Also, the personality of the first few active users will have a large effect
on how the site's culture will evolve. If you're interested in left-wing
politics, perhaps try to publicise the site in the kinds of places people
already talk about left-wing politics - specific subreddits or discord
servers. Of course a lot of places won't like straight-up advertisement, but
if you pitch it as an ongoing project and ask for ideas, people will likely be
happier to accept it.

^ YES! This is all gold. Thank you.

------
nyolfen
this is perhaps a more useful link, assuming it will load for you:

[https://www.karma.fm/p/SZ1CD/karma-capital-
architecture](https://www.karma.fm/p/SZ1CD/karma-capital-architecture)

~~~
eveFromKarmaFm
Thank you for this

------
johnday
The site seems to not currently functioning, which... doesn't bode well?

I am interested in how a social network can be socialist, per se.

~~~
natechols
The jokes practically write themselves...

~~~
giancarlostoro
I was going go comment "it doesnt work" but I didnt want people to think I was
making fun of the political ideology instead of reiterating the website not
working.

~~~
bifrost
Keyboard Stalin once said -> "The loss of one click is tragic, but the loss of
thousands is statistic."

~~~
eveFromKarmaFm
hahahahaha stop distracting me with your wit

------
bifrost
It appears to be down?

------
cyborgx7
A "socialist social network" sounds appealing, but the words "meritocracy" and
"gamification" are red flags to me. I think I'll stick with mastodon for now.

------
easytiger
Can you explain some of the design?

I.e. backend stuff

~~~
eveFromKarmaFm
Sure thing!

The application architecture is simple - it's an n-tier app (front end >
business layer > SQL server).

The business layer is .NET/C#. I use Entity Framework as an ORM and then
migrate the slower bits to Dapper + raw SQL whenever I need to trade
maintainability for performance.

I'd be happy to expand on anything specific you're curious about :)

