
 Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival - cpeterso
https://www.zdnet.com/article/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-has-quietly-launched-a-facebook-rival-social-network/
======
ratfaced-guy
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).

~~~
AndrewStephens
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.

~~~
ZainRiz
I disagree. What Reddit brings to the table is:

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.

~~~
andrei_says_
Kickass moderation by committed individuals who are also experts in the field.

See AskHistorians, Science, ModeratePolitics etc.

This combined with huge communities results in incredible conversations.

~~~
chrisdhoover
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.

~~~
DaveWalk
Interesting phenomenon. It's eerily similar to r/Boston.

------
wtmt
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.

~~~
basch
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.

~~~
ansible
I feel that Costco is worth it just based on bulk-buying toilet paper, dish
detergent, and such.

~~~
paulddraper
I have Costco premium or whatever the highest one is.

Consistently great quality + deals.

Right now they're selling a Costco-sized box of 1,500 Legos for $40.

~~~
godelski
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.

~~~
basch
To get the up to $60 refund you have to quit the executive program. You dont
get the difference every year, AND get to keep making 2%.

------
danielecook
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.

~~~
fossuser
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.

~~~
chillacy
Low effort ascii art was a mainstay on digg back in the day, I think
moderation is more key.

------
danans
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.

~~~
GetOutOfBed
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.

~~~
nicoburns
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.

~~~
danans
> 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.

------
TulliusCicero
"Since all content on the platform can be edited or deleted by other users, he
believes there's a good incentive for good behavior by users."

There is zero chance this policy survives having a million+ users intact.

~~~
Loughla
It will become power users controlling the narrative. Sort of like how edits
and that approval process on wikipedia operate right now.

~~~
corobo
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.

------
cdata
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/](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.

~~~
sleavey
> 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.

------
rosybox
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.

~~~
ArlenBales
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.

------
chipotle_coyote
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.

~~~
Vysero
"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.

~~~
dinkleberg
Your personal data isn't worth $3/month to you?

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.

------
michaelmrose
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.

~~~
erulabs
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!

~~~
rollcat
> 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?

~~~
kentonv
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...

[0] [https://github.com/sandstorm-io/blackrock](https://github.com/sandstorm-
io/blackrock)

~~~
rollcat
Oh, I've somehow totally missed this - sorry!

> 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.

Thank you for this reminder.

------
brianbreslin
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.

------
maxaf
I could shell out $13/mo, or, you know... not use a social network. I don't
use one now, and I'm doing just fine.

~~~
mholt
HN is a social network

~~~
pwinnski
To call HN a social network is to redefine the term to apply to any website
that allows comments.

It's really not.

~~~
Someone1234
That's how the US Government defines it.

If you want a US Visa you need to tell them your HK account.

~~~
4ntonius8lock
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.

~~~
screenbeard
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".

------
Fezzik
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.

------
will_pseudonym
"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.

------
Zenst
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...](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."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318590)

------
LeoPanthera
Since the article apparently lacks a link to the actual social network site:
[https://wt.social](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.

~~~
leoh
I signed up and it seems usable without payment. I wonder if it's region
dependent.

------
bransonf
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.

~~~
mkskm
According to the announcement on Twitter it is free, just donation-based:

\-
[https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192160194693718017](https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192160194693718017)

\-
[https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192635476726947840](https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192635476726947840)

~~~
bransonf
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.

~~~
Nuzzerino
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.

------
ratsmack
>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?

~~~
thundergolfer
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.

------
JDiculous
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).

~~~
jki275
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.

------
bransonf
From WT:Social's website

> We will foster an environment where bad actors are removed because it is
> right, not because it suddenly affects our bottom-line.

But what constitutes a bad actor?

~~~
mirimir
Bottom line, it's arguably anyone who Jimmy Wales doesn't like.

I wonder if they'll refund fees paid.

I might try it, if they accept Bitcoin. Which I doubt they do. But I don't
even see a payment link at [https://wt.social/](https://wt.social/)

Maybe you must try creating an account first.

------
pmoriarty
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.

~~~
soapboxrocket
This isn't really any different than most cases. Think Elon Musk started Tesla
or SpaceX? Nope, he bought in just like Jimmy.

~~~
the_duke
Musk didn't found Tesla and is (somewhat inappropriately) labeled as a
cofounder, but joined in Series A as an investor.

But he very much did build SpaceX from nothing (well, his Paypal money), and
his unconventional approach is responsible for their success.

~~~
eigenvalue
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.

~~~
stjohnswarts
There's almost 100% chance it would have failed, I doubt they could have found
a more dedicated and driven person to take it through its darker times.

------
neogodless
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.

------
ryacko
It might be worth mentioning that Wikipedia spent several million on creating
a more trustworthy search engine without anything to show for it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_\(Wikimedia_Foundation\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2016-02-03#In_focus)

I have serious doubts of this particular endeavor's success with statements
like these:

"The business model of social-media companies, of pure advertising, is
problematic," Wales told the publication.

"It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content," he added.

------
aquova
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.

------
z3t4
> We will never sell your data.

I can/want to host my own data.

> 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!

------
JMTQp8lwXL
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.

------
Havoc
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.

------
tinyhouse
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.

~~~
mirimir
What are the payment options?

Bitcoin maybe?

~~~
spartas
Looks like Credit card and PayPal only.

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.

~~~
mirimir
WTF?

Don't some people have credit cards from different countries? Legally, I mean.

------
passwordreset
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. :)

------
fortran77
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.

So we have a choice.

------
sytelus
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).

------
tomaszs
I find the concept awesome so i joined it as 201 person i suppose. Here is an
invitation link for you: [https://wt.social/gi/tomasz-
smykowski/work/buwn](https://wt.social/gi/tomasz-smykowski/work/buwn)

------
coolspot
He have done that before with non-profit social network ([20]) and non-profit
virtual mobile operator ([10]).

[20] - tpo.com

[10] -
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Operator](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Operator)

------
KoftaBob
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?

------
hanoz
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.

~~~
sleavey
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.

~~~
hanoz
That settles that then, thank you. So what's it like on the inside, worth
queuing for?

I am intrigued. It's a terribly clunky name mind.

~~~
sleavey
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.

------
system2
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.

------
ttraub
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.

------
INTPenis
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.

------
burtonator
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.

------
ggggtez
>Since all content on the platform can be edited or deleted by other users, he
believes there's a good incentive for good behavior by users.

This... from the Wikipedia guy? Oh boy, I'm not convinced.

------
josefresco
[https://wt.social](https://wt.social)

First I've heard of this, and there's no pricing (or really any) information
on the website. Anyone have experience?

~~~
37
FTA:

>It costs $12.99 a month or $100 a year in the US, or €12 a month or €90 a
year in Europe. It's £10 and £80 in the UK.

~~~
josefresco
Yes I read that, however the site has no pricing information (which is
terrible UX)

------
yggda
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

[1][https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-
fac...](https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-
make-money.asp)

~~~
rconti
probably an issue of scale

------
JohnFen
I really hope this effort is successful! I'd sign up myself, except that I
don't really find much value in those sorts of services.

But maybe I should sign up anyway, just to help it along...

------
jcomis
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.

~~~
jandrese
100% agree. $12/month and you have to convince all of your friends to also
shell out $12/month? Dead on arrival.

------
samirillian
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.

------
smt88
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.

------
ishanjain28
This just makes me think why do I need a social network. I never did anything
remotely useful on Facebook/Instagram(Although, Twitter is useful).

Why would I want to use this?

~~~
halbritt
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.

So, there's one use case.

~~~
JohnFen
That's too bad.

I'm lucky -- in my area, the burners, hippies, and makers don't use Facebook
for coordination. They have mailing lists for that.

~~~
halbritt
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.

------
acd
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.

------
komali2
Lol, if you try to create a "subwiki" that already exists, you get a 404 and
the error is in the URL:

>
> [https://createsub/?url=/wt/emacs/&failed=This%20SubWiki%20al...](https://createsub/?url=/wt/emacs/&failed=This%20SubWiki%20already%20exists!%20Please%20join%20that%20SubWiki%20or%20try%20a%20different%20name).

------
ddingus
Why so much money?

At scale, nowhere near $12.99 / month is needed.

~~~
cJ0th
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.

~~~
ddingus
Maybe it is not.

I am saying that amount of money is not necessary.

Different things.

------
rocky1138
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... ?

~~~
woofcat
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.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" People use Facebook because _everyone_ is on facebook."_

There was a time when everyone was not on Facebook.

Every social network with a critical mass now started without one.

Back around when Facebook started, MySpace was massive. Now it's extinct.

~~~
MadWombat
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.

------
cryptozeus
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.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
"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).

~~~
indigodaddy
Is WP the only blog that can hook into the micro.blog platform? Any list of
supported blog engines/platforms?

~~~
detaro
As far as I know, you "hook a blog into it" by telling it which RSS feed(s) to
copy from your site, so pretty much any blog engine will work.

It also supports a few more advanced things like Webmentions, there support is
thinner, but possibly can be added.

------
softwaredoug
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

------
thewojo
They quietly should've hired a designer ;)

------
degenerate
It appears the "changelog" of all posts, comments, articles, and edits is
public right now...

[https://wt.social/recentchanges](https://wt.social/recentchanges)

Mostly nothing interesting, people testing the system out. The whole site
feels like a post-dotcom-boom experience... a slightly styled Craigslist.

------
wbhart
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.

------
grumpy8
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?

~~~
whatshisface
Is being exposed to fake news hurting you, or is being tracked?

~~~
Forbo
Yes.

------
jfengel
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.

------
eitland
As someone who miss the original Whatsapp a lot I was about to reach for my
wallet, but this seems to be more of a wiki than a social network to me:

> Since all content on the platform can be edited or deleted by other users,
> he believes there's a good incentive for good behavior by users.

------
linusnext
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...

------
retpirato
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.

------
dkural
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.

------
psychometry
Really not impressed with their UI design. Looks like it was designed by
programmers.

------
greypowerOz
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!

------
scandox
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?

~~~
kylek
<queue donation-time-of-the-year-puppy-dog-eyes photo>

------
Johnny555
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.

------
fajr_rd
"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.

------
standardUser
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.

------
cfv
OK, so I signed up for it.

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.

------
ARandomerDude
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.

------
abootstrapper
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.

------
chabes
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?

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
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.

~~~
chabes
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.

------
xhruso00
Once there was a great presentation about App Store sales sorted by
Categories. Outcome - social apps don't make money, do business category of
apps.

------
throwaway35784
People pay lots of money to join real world social networks, like country
clubs, so I think something like paid online social networks will evolve.

------
diveanon
It seem click-baity to call this a facebook rival until it has over a billion
users and is having an impact on geopolitics and election rigging.

------
qubex
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.

------
Iv
"It costs $12.99 a month"

Yeah, not for me. Maybe journalists or news professionals can be interested,
but it better has to bring value.

------
sweeneyrod
That article seems to incorrectly say it's a (mandatory) subscription model:
Wales' tweets say donation-based.

~~~
yellowapple
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.

------
4ntonius8lock
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.

------
jonplackett
Am I being stingy by thinking them asking fo £10 a month is a a lot?

How much does facebook make per user per month?

------
btmiller
WT:Social for the name of a Facebook rival makes it a total non-starter.

------
zadkey
Not so quiet now that it's on the front page of hacker news.

------
michaelmrose
Being asked to pay for something before using it is a hard sell.

------
stri8ed
Not a fan of that name.

------
Porthos9K
I can pull the Associated Press' RSS feed for free. Likewise with the BBC and
ProPublica and The Intercept.

Why would I pay $13/month for news I can get for free without useless "social"
features and data collection?

------
rak00n
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.

------
qwerty456127
Cool. Where do I sign-up to give it a try?

------
h0l0cube
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.

------
jammygit
Do they really not provide a link?

------
olivermarks
not impressed with what wikipedia became
[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-
editors-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-
elite-diversity-foundation) I don't feel Wales is trustworthy

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bladerunner85
these are all social networks right? why does everyone call them social media?

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greenhatman
Instead of ads, it will just have a huge banner on top with Jimmy Wales' face
asking for donations.

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skybrian
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).

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notadoc
The best social network is already on your phone. Call and text people you
care to engage with.

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pixiemaster
Will these get rid of the annoying begging-banner on wikipedia in Q4? then
sign me up!

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edisonjoao
most of these people are one hit wonders.

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xivzgrev
The value of a social network is exponentially related to the number of nodes
and connections. By putting a paywall up it’s sharply limiting that.

What he’s trying to do is admirable but doesn’t make a lot of sense.

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physicles
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.

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sk84life
And build with.. oh donated money. Now we can donate more again :)

Is anybody worrying how much Wikipedia pages are hiding researchers results ?

Oh, please. I would rather use good ol' VK before these CIA books

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Forbo
> Is anybody worrying how much Wikipedia pages are hiding researchers results
> ?

Got an example you'd like to cite? Tried searching on my own, couldn't find
anything off hand.

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randomb_1979
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. :-)

~~~
krick
That's quite a manifesto you just wrote here, but

1\. It won't happen.

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.

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francescopnpn
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](https://twitter.com/nikitabier)

~~~
the_duke
> 4 out of 4 were initially for teens

Facebook was for college students, not teens.

But otherwise, yeah, if the plan is to capture a significant audience, this is
a horrible attempt wrt to UI and messaging.

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OatMilkLatte
"Rival" is a strong word. Nothing Jimmy Wales touches ever amounts to
anything.

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WhyKill
yeah that wiki thing never amounted to anything more than being the ninth most
popular website.

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davidy123
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."

