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The social network I'd like to try is this: * Funded by subscriptions. * Free from ads. * Since it is not ad dependent, yes, it can also provide a chronologi

• todd3834 9y ago
  Disabling links to websites in posts for the sake of preventing fake news is kind of sad. I get why but it feels like punishing the majority for the minority of bad actors. It’s also still possible to spread fake news without a link. Anyways, this is your ideal network and so please disregard my opinion on how it should work :)
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• NetOpWibby 9y ago
  Shameless plug: - https://socii.network https://socii.network - https://hub.socii.network https://hub.socii.network I’m working on a social network that does most of what you mentioned. I never thought about reposts being a quick and easy way of stopping the spread of viral misinformation, I like that idea.
  • jug 9y ago
    Looks interesting, I'm taking a look!
• rock_hard 9y ago
  I think you are conflicting what people want with what people would use! Also: feeds are not ranked because of monetization...they are ranked because they work better that way
  • dkarl 9y ago
    I don't know if feeds really work better that way. There are people I wish I was still following on Facebook because I'd like to get the highlights of what happens to them (moves, deaths, other important life events) but I had to drop them because they post trivial shit that gets dozens or hundreds of likes. Reactions were designed to help with that problem (sad news can get sad reactions so it can get elevated the same way a "liked" post can) but people still get more sad reactions when they post a link to a news article about pollution or kids dying in a car crash in another country than when they announce that they themselves have a serious illness. I wish there was a social network that could somehow avoid people competing to post the highest volume of popular content, so they could relax and focus on posting information about themselves that other people want to know. But even if you were somehow able to force people to just post about themselves, no third-party content, there are plenty of people who would make a meal of it by posting endless videos about their grooming regimen, their cooking, or cute stuff their cat does. It all just devolves into competing for attention. Hmmm. How about a social network in which everybody is guaranteed equal exposure, and posting more content only dilutes your own content, not everybody else's?
    • rock_hard 9y ago
      You raise some good points...a ranked feed is certainly also not perfect...but at least you got the flexibility to do all the things you proposed.
    • beenBoutIT 9y ago
      Whatever system Facebook was using to determine the contents of your feed back when Facebook was more enjoyable for you would probably still be the best system to use now. Someone clever should just recreate the Facebook from 2000's that everyone liked, call it something else and give the UI/UX a long-overdue upgrade.
• BeetleB 9y ago
  When most people think of social networks, they think of a way to connect with friends and family - not a way of discussing interesting issues (i.e. forums). "Funded by subscriptions" more or less guarantees the former will not happen. People want stuff for free. >Shares or "retweets" not supported. Also to disrupt viral spreading of stuff that is almost never about socializing, and nowadays instead disturbingly often about wanting to be virally spread as a goal in itself. Sadly, reshares are part and parcel of a community - even before the days of the Internet. For many, gossip is part of socializing. A friend posted that he's just getting married. People will want to spread the word. How can they without reshares? Rewrite it themselves? Resharing is simply part of usual human interaction.
• pmoriarty 9y ago
  I'd add to that: - Decentralized - Designed with strong privacy and anonymity of its users in mind
  • magic_beans 9y ago
    Anonymity? Why be on a social network at all in that case? You might as well just maintain a blog.
    • pmoriarty 9y ago
      People could still use nicks. That's basically what the old internet and old BBS systems were like, before anyone cared to track and spy on their users.
      • rock_hard 9y ago
        Sure, you go ahead and make the internet great again. Maybe also kick these kids off you lawn while you're at it old man ;)
        • dang 9y ago
          Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • greglindahl 9y ago
      Most of my friends appear to strongly want to have multiple personas on social networks: one per major hobby, one for family, one professional, etc.
• wenc 9y ago
  > Funded by subscriptions This sounds like it might be a good idea because it seems like it would remove the incentive to monetize personal information, but in practice it creates a barrier to adoption and makes the social network kinda useless. I joined a subscription-based social network that was designed for expats [1]. It was by all-accounts well-designed, well-managed and had everything going for it. But no one in my circles are part of it, and the event lists were really thin because the network was really thin (and I live in one of the largest cities in the U.S.). It does "work" for some definitions of work, but it isn't very successful (though there seems to be enough people on it to make it sustainable--I wonder about retention rates past year 1). I suspect the things on your list were conceived based on your circumscribed experiences and are not what the general market really wants. It could work in a more niche setting, but you'd have a hard time scaling the business model. [1] https://www.internations.org/ https://www.internations.org/
  • carussell 9y ago
    > in practice it creates a barrier to adoption and makes the social network kinda useless The main thing is that you're trying to bootstrap new cultural norms. If there weren't so much inertia around free services, people would probably be fine paying a few bucks per month for certain classes of services. I've always thought it would be a great idea to fund message boards, communities, etc., by keeping track of users' individual resource usage and making that info visible to them. GitHub is free for most, for example, and others pay for some extra perks. But even then, the price structure comes off as pretty arbitrary. Since Patreon became a thing, I've seen some people set up funding goals that take the form of explaining that it takes, say, ~$85 per month to cover the costs of running servers, but that doesn't really accomplish what I'm talking about, since it's still too easy to treat it as a shared commons. A running sum is able to make the point unambiguously; it says something along the lines of, "because of the requests we had to handle to serve your use of the site, we are now on the hook for paying $2.74 so far this month". If you're a magnanimous admin, you can continue operating free services, but just "soft bill" people with a pay-what-you-want scheme (by which I mean guilt them). If you're actually trying to cover costs you do hard billing, but offer the first year free or something, which also removes one of the barriers of getting started—so long as we're operating on the assumption that we've already managed to establish it as a new cultural norm. Resource-proportionate billing also has the nice side benefit of getting people to be more conscious of wasting time on the site—breaking the cycle of idly refreshing the home page to procrastinate.
• jwmoz 9y ago
  It will never work. Nobody will pay - no users. Remember app.net?
  • swlkr 9y ago
    Maybe the price was too high, I wonder if people would pay something like a dollar a month billed annually, or really cover costs and charge $19/year
    • ganzuul 9y ago
      Discord Nitro seems to be doing well, but no info on if it covers their costs.
• ninkendo 9y ago
  I accomplish most of this (other than no-links-allowed) with iMessage threads with friends. What you're saying sounds basically like chat.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• jiveturkey 9y ago
  sounds substantially similar to IRC. if text is supported, i don’t see how retweets and links could be blocked. so if you accept that you can’t prevent those things (except by user agreement), it sounds like slack fits the bill.
• chaostheory 9y ago
  I could be wrong but it already exists and it's getting traction: https://www.vero.co/ https://www.vero.co/ It's not perfect, nor does it hit all your points but it's a start (of a trend at the very least) http://www.adweek.com/digital/this-ad-free-social-media-app-thinks-it-can-capitalize-on-facebooks-privacy-woes/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/this-ad-free-social-media-app-...
  • TACIXAT 9y ago
    From the outside, Vero just seems like it's going to be a portal to a bunch of corporate services. >Your friend just shared this cool Spotify song, please sign up for Spotify at Vero's special rate of $3.99 / month to listen. Even on the landing page there is an advertisement for me to order a photo book of Prince. This does not seem very social, it's just more hyped up media.
  • jug 9y ago
    Yes, I'm actually on Vero! I'm a bit concerned about the backing (the people behind it) and their ideas about funding but hey... It's at least something, it's a try to fix maybe especially Instagram. I'll never be all too hard on people trying to fix things.
• dominotw 9y ago
  This seems like a reaction to Facebook. Almost no one cares about this enough to create " good Facebook. Here in India millions of barely educated people enjoy Facebook to keep up with family and friends. They don't know how to pay for things online and are not comfortable putting their cards on the internet.
• sidcool 9y ago
  That seems like a very peculiar choice, and meant people won't like such a social network. This may reduce the most important factor of social networks, People.
• jaccarmac 9y ago
  You could set up a Mastodon instance to do exactly this. Why not try and see if there are others who like the model?
• SCdF 9y ago
  > Links to websites not supported in posts. That seems, with all due respect, bananas. There are loads of reasons to have a link in your post, not least because you may use a third party photo host and you want to link to your holiday snaps without having to copy everything everywhere. Even ignoring that though, you can't share recipes, tracks on youtube, programming blog posts, a cool pair of shoes, a link to a book your friend has been looking for for years...? Links are the web, it would feel hollow without them.
  • petee 9y ago
    More importantly,links can be used to prove a post is not fake news, i.e. cite your sources
    • jug 9y ago
      Well, I'd have nothing against links in comments either. My issue is really the spreading of viral links, fun and memes, or inflammatory posts, all that have become so common with time at least in my feed.
  • jug 9y ago
    I know. You lose these things, and I'd prefer that one wouldn't have to go there. But my experience of Facebook and Twitter has shown that a very large part of the links posted are to memes and politics and trying to prove people wrong, win Internet battles, or to show how great you are because you are linking to the latest new diets. It is so rare to actually see people post "Here's the recipe for a great cake that I, myself, made today!" or "Here's the latest program that I have made!" or "Here's an excerpt of a new book I'm writing!" It's what I'd expect to see on a social network, but don't. Social networks to me have become strangely disconnected from the real personal lives. It's a filtered view and I think links exemplify it in the worst way. They're impersonal and often just point to random articles online. I've also found that I get more comments on text posts than links. People don't seem to even open them very often. I can see a compromise though. Allow communities, like Facebook Groups, where links are allowed to be posted. So people can join food groups, programming groups, and so on. That way, you still avoid all the junk links and flooding your feed with e.g the latest makeup tips, while still opening channels for people who are interested in these things. There could be two kinds of communities, too. Location-based communities (based on geolocation, a la Jodel) and interest based communities. I've found that location based communities can fill quite an interesting niche! People don't know each other, but what they discuss is all relatable, and if you travel, you can quickly get tips about the area, too. It touches on another problem I have with Facebook and many other social networks. They assume that just because we have some sort of relationship with each other, maybe work, maybe old friends, maybe family, we may still not share interests. It's not always shared interests that make me follow people, but to just stay in touch.
• diasp 9y ago
  Try https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org
  • BeetleB 9y ago
    It doesn't satisfy a number of the person's requirements.
• nradov 9y ago
  I support subscription funding but most of the rest sounds terrible. When I go scuba diving and post underwater photos on Facebook the likes are useful feedback on whether or not I'm taking good pictures and help me improve as an amateur photographer. Plus I enjoy it when people share my photos. It makes the world a brighter place and hopefully encourages viewers not to trash the ocean.
  • rainbowmverse 9y ago
    You might like this Mastodon instance: https://photog.social https://photog.social
• kristianc 9y ago
  It exists and is called WhatsApp.
• juliansamarjiev 9y ago
  Check Vero
• ace_of_spades 9y ago
  Mhh, why not go with a kickstarter style payment scheme? Have a campaign to fund the operating budget, another one to fund feature a and another one to fund feature b. You get user aligned prioritization for free while users are happy to be able to choose their level of support. Can’t believe I haven’t seen this model in action, yet!