

You Deserve Better! - oemerax
https://medium.com/@oemerax/you-deserve-better-f5fb66347ef1

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ndnichols
"Bynd Zero". Yeesh. This just feels like another thing I'm obligated to burn
down and manage. A better solution, for me at least, is to continue to not
care about Twitter and Instagram, and stop caring about Facebook. You're not
missing out on anything. Nothing bad happens if you miss little controversies
or links to blogs.

~~~
oemerax
Hi ndnichols, thanks for your feedback! "Every time someone visits News Feed
there are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow
and Pages for them to see." The FB EdgeRank shows only an average of 300
stories out of these 1,500 each day. Some people do not care about Social
Media but some do..and we believe that customers need a better solution to
this :).

~~~
ndnichols
Hey oemerax, thanks for taking the time to respond. Like you said, I'm
probably not the audience for your app :-) For me, the important aspect of
social networks is their pleasure-to-time ratio. E.g., "I'm going to look at
Facebook for five minutes while waiting for the bus, I haven't looked at
Facebook in two days, please show me the most interesting stories of the last
two days so my five minutes pass quickly." (I don't think Facebook does a
particularly good job here, but I think that they are at least trying to build
the thing I want.) Where it sounds like the people you're targeting are
thinking "I want to see every post from my approved friends". So you're going
for completeness, which I don't care about. (Again, different audience, haha.)

Good luck!

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pluma
Note: iOS only (for now, anyway).

Also, as German "UG (haftungsbeschränkt)" (aka "1 Euro GmbH", a German LLC
that doesn't require the 25k capital normally required for a GmbH) sounds
incredibly fishy (deservingly so or not). My instant reaction when seeing that
in the footer of the Bynd app website was extremely negative; I think it's
worth scraping together the cash capital for a full GmbH to avoid that
potential first impression.

~~~
oemerax
Hi pluma, thanks for your feedback! The Android version will be released soon
after. Would you mind testing it?

p.s.: the company was created by three students and is currently bootstrapped.
The UG is great for a start but you´re right: nothing beats a GmbH :). We will
transform into this asap.

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ryanthejuggler
I think centralization is the problem here. "One central hub" just becomes
susceptible to all the same problems that we face with Facebook et al. To
truly create a solution to this, we need an open-source service so that people
can go to spacebook.com or whatever for normal use, but properly motivated
folks could run their own server too. Sort of like Diaspora, only with a
centralized hosting option.

~~~
mtbcoder
Wouldn't RSS fit this role?

~~~
ryanthejuggler
Theoretically, yeah. Someone just needs to make it "cool" enough that people
actually start using it as their primary method of social networking. RSS has
a niche now, but it would be really cool if it were adapted to fix this
problem.

~~~
jerf
It doesn't even really need "adaptation". It's already fairly suitable. It
just needs someone to write code to use open standards instead of trying to
force us in a walled garden.

I've been using RSS for 15 years now. I've watched people mock the idea in
favor of $SERVICE, for a wide variety of values of $SERVICE and now most of
those services are dead, Facebook already deciding what you see, and Twitter
now going down this route. Meanwhile, my open-world RSS subscriptions just
keep chugging along, through at least 5 different major readers I've used at
various times, with subscriptions to things that update every hour and things
that update every couple of months. It just keeps clocking along, delivering
value, over and over and over, while walled gardens rise up, choke themselves,
and die, destroying people's networks in the process. Meanwhile, I just keep
on keepin' on, because I am not beholden to anybody.

(Edit: It also occurs to me to point out that my blog in its capacity as an
RSS provider has survived 3 platforms now, and that the only one that required
the readers to take any action was the one time I switched from the hosted
service to a DNS name I control. That was less trivial though.)

There's a bajillion options that already exist... all you have to do is _stop
jumping into the walled garden_. No matter how nice it looks. No matter how
advertised it is.

Ask yourself... "Am I confident this will be here in 10 years?" RSS will be.
The only way it can die is for nobody at all to use it. Will Twitter? Will
Facebook? Well, I won't guarantee they won't but I'd give less than even odds
for both, frankly. (At least, without some sort of major event that really
changes them, like an acquisition or absorption into something else. Yes,
talking about Facebook being acquired sounds strange today... a lot happens in
ten years. Right, MySpace?)

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fabiofzero
OF COURSE this would be an app announcement. I don't know why I expected
anything else.

~~~
tiagocesar
Count us two on it.

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copsarebastards
> I have many Facebook friends, but my feed feels less relevant than ever.

"I have this cause, yet I am experiencing the effects of that cause!"

WTF, how do you not see that having too many "friends" is going to create a
Facebook feed that's irrelevant to you?

> There was a time that I used to check my Facebook about a 100 times a day,
> but lately I only check it a few times a week.

That must be really hard for you.

The problem is not that Twitter et. al. are filtering out all the good
content, it's that 99.9% of social media is completely fucking worthless to
anyone except advertisers. The solution to this problem is not an app, it's to
delete your accounts on these "services" and go outside.

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thomasloh
Isn't it just a prettier RSS reader? basically Flipboard? Also, I'm skeptical
of the concept of "bynd-zero" because it is impossible. In fact it'll be even
more stressful because the stream of contents is endless and the only way
around it is to shut off this feed addiction.

~~~
oemerax
Flipboard is awesome but once you bundle different social media accounts ->
the information overload doubles, triples etc. It´s possible to reach "Bynd
Zero", if you only follow your close friends, family members etc (Priority
level 1).

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jarcane
This kind of use-case is actually part of why I started using Flipboard in the
first place, back when I had an iPad. I could consolidate my social media
feeds into a "magazine" and just skim the highlights.

