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What I'm curious to see is if anyone is going to take the opposite end of that bet: Facebook's "openness"/"World is flat"/"End of history" vs. decentralized, tr

What I'm curious to see is if anyone is going to take the opposite end of that bet: Facebook's "openness"/"World is flat"/"End of history" vs. decentralized, tribal, anonymized, balkanized social networks. As Facebook keeps accumulating users, and as users accumulate "friends", the SNR decreases and makes the product experience less valuable, notwithstanding the efforts they make to "optimize" the feed. Mine is mostly filled with things I'd rather never see. Facebook is a social network that mostly reproduces geographic social networks, but that doesn't connect people based on affinities. The people discovery mechanism is close to non-existent. People in your Facebook neighbourhood are people who most likely live in your current, past, or "work" neighbourhood. Are there any social networks that try to dynamically create communities/"neighbourhoods" based on behavior? (e.g. upvote a post and you get "closer" to the poster, with symmetric behavior for downvoting, and second order effects propagating to other users based on their own upvote/downvote of said post). Apologies if that's too vague, I'm thinking out loud here.

sheac 10y ago
The only systems that readily comes to mind is Reddit. It's amazing how you can wind up on a subreddit and realise that you're nowhere near the bottom of the rabbit hole that you've been calling a hobby for the past n years. I don't know if this qualifies for what you're after, though, because these communities are: * based on users actively seeking out forums based on what they consider themselves to be interested in, and * each community is centred around a single topic. There might be a subreddit for people who love Fraggles and a subreddit for people who love pop-tarts, but no subreddit for people who love both Fraggles and pop-tarts.
- davidivadavid 10y ago
  Reddit does have the affinity thing, but as you point out, it's not nearly as granular as it could be.

sheac 10y ago

The only systems that readily comes to mind is Reddit. It's amazing how you can wind up on a subreddit and realise that you're nowhere near the bottom of the rabbit hole that you've been calling a hobby for the past n years. I don't know if this qualifies for what you're after, though, because these communities are: * based on users actively seeking out forums based on what they consider themselves to be interested in, and * each community is centred around a single topic. There might be a subreddit for people who love Fraggles and a subreddit for people who love pop-tarts, but no subreddit for people who love both Fraggles and pop-tarts.

davidivadavid 10y ago
Reddit does have the affinity thing, but as you point out, it's not nearly as granular as it could be.