This seems to just kind of stop halfway through. "I took inspiration from things of the past: forums, shoutboxes, IRC and so on." Yes? How did you apply this inspiration? Where's the link to the results of this inspiration? What are the features you decided are crucial?
That's a big part of the appeal of places like Hacker News and Tumblr- the focus on being a social network without adding in additional ad-delivery "features."
I don't know if going full ascetic by removing images, reactions, etc. will achieve the same effect or not. Something like that would be very nice for smaller communities: IRC is still kicking, despite everything. Curious to see how the project goes, I'm unsure if the article cut off unexpectedly or if it's just very early.
> That's a big part of the appeal of places like Hacker News and Tumblr- the focus on being a social network without adding in additional ad-delivery "features."
I myself wouldn't count Hacker News as a social network. There isn't anything that caters towards individuals making connections with one another. It's all about short-lasting exchanges between strangers on a given topic. The social aspect is fleeting and the network part is nonexistent (at least among users themselves. Networking has to happen through a third party). Not saying that this is a bad thing at all because HN is certainly a fun and appealing place to hang out online.
To the article itself, I think the author's graph is a little too simplistic. It only trends downwards. Some baseline features can cater to a more engaging discourse. The reason I say this is because I've been using an experimental social network called Minus (https://minus.social/#) which is very basic: you can't "friend" or "follow" anyone, there are no clubs or groups or private messages (though you can @mention), the main timeline combines everyone's activity, and you only have 100 posts available until you can't post anymore (but you have unlimited replies to other peoples' posts). While fun, it's hard to keep track of people unless you get into a conversation with them or unless they post frequently (though they can get buried by speedrunners who try to exhaust their post counts as fast as possible if you don't block them). So with Minus, I think there is still potential to add features that would positively contribute to the level of discourse before it would experience a downward trend
I consider community control and privacy to be features. I think the author is talking about more technical features that are often in conflict with these. I like KISS in my social media and news media which of course is why I am here and in the fediverse.
Will comment I think the hardest thing is getting users. I tried to make a dating site almost a decade ago, I learned a lot from it but I had to seed it with fake profiles and yeah, ultimately it went nowhere.
I think dating sites are particularly tricky because you rely much more on active users than simply user generated content.
Think of twitter, although active users are very much important, once a tweet is there it's there and it's available for everyone so the website gets a little more valuable with every tweet that is posted. But a dating site? Someone that makes a profile adds nothing if they abandon it after a couple days!
So although I agree with you that getting users is indeed one of the biggest challenges; I think your experience was particularly bad :)
semi tangent, YT I was against it for a bit, but it's hard to beat their user engagement
against because of the ads being applied to videos even if you didn't want them there, but I also realized I don't pay for their service and their bandwidth/processing happily gulps down my GBs of files.
