It would be quite a challenge to re-create what FB circa 2006-2010 or so was like. Before influencers and engagement farming. Before it became "social media" and was just a "social utility"
The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.
Group chat apps somewhat fill this product void, but not completely. There was something magical about a social network being somewhat open & organic that group chats can't capture
> The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.
We need the Craigslist of friends and family social networks. A company that is just aggressively disinterested in bloat or hyper engagement.
Something where "re-sharing" doesn't exist and links are deemphasized in the UX, so it's more focused on your content (hopefully you talking about your own life, thoughts, etc.). Especially text content, with photos/videos present, but a bit deemphasized.
Absolutely no business or "influencer" pages, of course.
There is an app like that. It’s called mewe, when Facebook was being especially egregious in some privacy overreach a bunch of people I know checked it out, but we were so burned from all the other social networks that we weren’t willing to use it like we had used to use Facebook. I think that time has just passed.
It was already starting to go downhill in mid-2006 (when it became available to anyone). The golden age was 2004-2006. I remember after it opened to the public most college students already decided it wasn't that cool anymore.
> The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.
This doesn't make sense to me: the Facebook from back then didn't support "engagement optimizers" as it didn't have a pervasive programmatic newsfeed trying to show you posts from random people you might like: it showed you posts from your friends, and if none of your friends were "influencers" you simply couldn't see any influencer content even if every other user on the site who wasn't your friend was an influencer.
The group chat is the new social network. Chronological, you know who’s in there, photo sharing, reactions, reply’s. It has everything me and my close friends need.
How does that handle overlapping friend groups? Each person in my friend group has their own friend group, and their friend groups often include people who I am not friends with.
It would seem that we'd need multiple group chats to make it work reasonably. Is that what you do?
If we wanted it done with only one group chat it would seem it would have to include the union of all the friend groups of people who are in the chat, which would result in there being for most people in the chat a bunch of people they don't know also in the chat.
We'd probably then want some kind of filtering. I'd probably only want to see posts that are from my friends, and maybe posts that my friends have reacted or replied to.
...and then we are essentially back to a Facebook-like or Twitter-like thing except maybe with better filtering.
I question the value of trying to combine multiple friend groups into one group chat. They may have overlapping friends in them, but the groups are distinct and have their own character and collective identity, and I present myself slightly differently to each group. What do I stand to gain by combining my interactions with these different groups into one "social network"?
If you are in multiple group chats and have something to say (e.g. a life update), do you post in each individually? Or do you pick and choose which groups get the update? If your groups overlap, now some people get the same update twice - are they supposed to react in both?
Group chats are intimate by design and don’t seem like a good fit for “broadcast” style updates like “I bought a house”, “moved to CA”, etc. That’s the value in the Facebook feed of old. Something like that also helps you stay connected with more distant friends/acquaintances, people you might not talk to daily but you would still be happy to see how they are doing in life.
Again, it's instructive to think how things worked before Facebook.
People would announce things like that to each group individually, and often chose to not mention it in some groups because they're not intimate enough. We used to just be okay hearing and discussing the same announcement multiple times ("some of you already know this, but..."), most likely with different parts of the story told in different settings and triggering different conversation because the groups are different.
For the more distant acquaintances, people wrote Christmas cards (or equivalent) for the occasional updates. These can still be handled very nicely with an email list, and really don't call for the kind of instant-update sharing that Facebook et al encourage.
Is it less efficient to write and read the same updates multiple times? Sure. But is efficiency really what we should be striving for in human relations?
I mean, sure it worked before Facebook, but having grown up using Facebook, it feels much more natural to use social media than a Christmas card, email list, or whatever! Besides, those alternatives still feel intimate - you made an effort to reach out - and now you have to consider whether the other person wants that level of intimacy, will feel obligated to respond, etc.
The value that Facebook brought is now people can _choose_ to respond to you, and you can also silently see what others are up to without needing to explicitly catch up. It’s kind of like bumping into someone you know in public, and the resulting interaction (e.g. comment or DM from seeing the update post) feels much more organic as well.
> If you are in multiple group chats and have something to say (e.g. a life update), do you post in each individually? Or do you pick and choose which groups get the update?
Where's the problem here? Too many options and too much control? Nothing's stopping you from blasting every group chat you're in other than that you'll annoy the people in chats that don't want to hear about your problems. Maybe just send to your family and close friends.
> now some people get the same update twice - are they supposed to react in both?
This is a non-problem. Do people have to react to everything you say every place where you've said it? Is it difficult to decide how to deal with getting news over the phone and having that person announce the same news at the book club meeting? How will you know where to answer?
Broadcast-type announcements can be a little weird to announce in a group chat though. A very basic example, but let’s say you’re in a group chat mainly for gaming together. Are you going to be the first to make a big personal announcement, like “I just bought a house”? You could, but it almost feels weird in that you’re specifically putting the spotlight on yourself and also soliciting direct responses (some of which might just be a token “congrats!”). Whereas if you post a similar announcement on Facebook, Instagram Stories, etc, nobody feels compelled to respond unless they really want to.
You could say “if you don’t think people care, only tell your close family and friends”. But broadcast announcements can cause more spontaneous reactions from people, and I often find myself reconnecting, even if only in a short conversation, with people I don’t generally talk to otherwise. It’s a better way for staying connected with old friends, who you might not have reason to talk to frequently (e.g. via group chat), but would happily spend a day catching up with if you were in the same city.
In my friend groups, you post it twice. Generally you react in the most intimate group chat you encounter the post in. It is a bit complicated, but much simpler than using a dedicated broadcast social network.
My intimate friends are almost all in group chats. Many of them are not technical at all.
You are thinking about chats like a soapbox perhaps, by calling them posts, and trying to make them cater to a network. They are conversations, when you add people, it is so they can join the conversation, naturally that's not your soapbox.
So you just don't do any of those things you mentioned, people rarely broadcast using group chats. You are trading quantity and breadth for quality and depth by choosing just a small group of people to keep in contact with meaningfully.
Social media does really help people stay connected no doubt, but it breeds shallow connection habits, and I wager it makes less meaningful connections out of people who could have been very close had they not been given that feeling of connection through shallow means. Like eating a fast food burger instead of a nutritious meal, you are satisfied so you don't seek more, but you robbed yourself of a better opportunity.
> How does that handle overlapping friend groups? Each person in my friend group has their own friend group, and their friend groups often include people who I am not friends with.
> It would seem that we'd need multiple group chats to make it work reasonably. Is that what you do?
It's not that complicated. If you really need to you create multiple groups. Generall it's not necessary. Groups are usually topic-related, not just based on friendship. Most of my friends come from various interests, so I just participate in the right topic groups and I see them there.
The volume is also not a problem. I quickscroll through it once a day or so and if I miss something important I'll get reminded by someone.
The thing is that social media have really screwed themselves up by screwing with our feeds, adding suggested crap and removing stuff we want to see.
now we just have baby boomers pretending to be told something by someone that doesn't care about them, making conversation with you as if they were part of a social circle they’re telling you about
I'm building a fediverse project that aims to fill this exact niche. It's basically a recreation of an early-ish version of VKontakte (Russian Facebook) but federated and in green instead of blue. It's not really ready yet, and there are lots of important features missing, but I do use it daily for my primary fediverse account.
I, too, am sick of all the existing social media companies trying their damnest to cater to the entertainment use case no one ever asked for.
As long as you stay in the left part of the app, where your chats and your people live.
But then there’s the right section of Snapchat — “Discover” and “Spotlight”. We DON’T GO to the right half of Snapchat, because it’s just complete and utter garbage.
It's more about connections to acquaintances and mutual friends... maybe you just had to be there in ~2009 but there's really nothing like it today. For better or worse.
