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When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring t
by saucoide 8y ago
When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple
- ip26 8y agoThe magic usually missing from RSS is really good recommendation/discovery. I've got a list of feeds I follow, and that's all I'll ever get.
- startupdiscuss 8y agoIs there discovery on Facebook? Most people I add because I meet them in read life. Actually, 100% of the people I add on FB after I've met them in real life. Maybe if there was a good search and easy add mechanism for people I've met, it would fulfill the discovery aspect. I agree with you, it does feel easier to find people on FB.
- ip26 8y agoNo, discovery of news & sources. Your friends who know about <your hobby> are a great news source/filter. Whereas with RSS there's not a good method to find new news you care about.
- max76 8y agoMaybe someone should create an RSS feed that curates other RSS feeds and forwards them to their recipients. I'm not sure how to monetize this, but it would add some discovery to rss.
- Kye 8y agoYou described a link blog. kottke.org and Daring Fireball are good examples.
- criddell 8y ago> I'm not sure how to monetize this Make it good enough to pay for.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoIt's hard to compete with HN and Reddit...
- ryandrake 8y agoRecommendations + Discovery = Filter Bubble. These mis-features are exactly what we should be moving away from!
- ip26 8y agoNo discovery = isolation bubble
- Kye 8y agoI found this out when I switched from Pocket to Instapaper. Instapaper has a curated list of articles updated about once a month, and I don't read half of them. Pocket recommends articles based on what you read, and it's not just more of the same. I'm probably going to switch back.
- wasdfff 8y agoYou can follow hn and other aggregators like reddit via rss. I have it set up for hn where I only get posts that have hit 100 points, otherwise it’s a firehose.
- marcosdumay 8y ago> Recommendations + Discovery = Filter Bubble. Yep. When it decentralized you can control how strong are the bubble walls and can try different bubbles from time to time.
- davidivadavid 8y agoI'll take good recommendations, thank you. I'm surprised so few people here have picked up on the fact that "filter bubble" is a rhetorical trick about as obvious as the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" dichotomy. People like getting good recommendations, and they'll always like them. "Filter bubbles" are here to stay.
- stcredzero 8y agoGood recommendations are like a convenient browser that comes with your OS. The problems come in when it's just one company that has the public locked in to their particular solution.
- ticmasta 8y agoThe nefarious problem with FB is the illusion of recommendation/discovery. They're not trying to find new and interesting things for you the way say, the cultural aspects of HN performs this feat; they're trying to define your profile and then serve up more of the same to increase engagement or capture your entire sphere of awareness so they can manipulate and shape your perception.'
- aaaaaaass 8y agohacker news is always more of the same? let's not pretend like they are any better.
- paulddraper 8y ago> they can manipulate and shape your perception. That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want.
- techbio 8y ago>> capture your entire sphere of awareness Malicious sounding, indeed.
- stcredzero 8y agoThat sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want. Basically, serving you the content and ads you want can turn out to be pretty malicious. By doing so, a big company can manipulate and shape your perception. Year by year, data processing is making big companies ever more potent at doing just this. Is it any wonder that it eventually got to a point where we started seeing problems?
- r3bl 8y agoThey've already intentionally manipulated emotions of a "small number of users" (700k), proved it was possible, and released a paper on it: https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/facebook-unethical-experiment-it-made-news-feeds-happier-or-sadder-to-manipulate-peoples-emotions.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/facebook-unethical-expe...
- mpweiher 8y agoRaaS? Recommendations as a Service? Disaggregated.
- darkarmani 8y agoRSS is really just the content/transport method. For a decentralized FB, you would move the intelligence into your local client and it would like more like a web-of-trust network. 1. You connect to friends and you either manually assign or "grow" a bunch of weights to your amount of trust in them and your interest in various topics they might post. 2. You and your friends make posts and assign "topic" metadata to the posts. The value of the system depends on your friends properly assigning metadata to posts. But it makes it easier to filter out extended families' political shitposting (based on trust and negging untagged posts). 3. Your feed is selected based on the weight of your friendship times the weight you base on the interest of the topic. If your best friend posts something about computers and you have positively weighed that topic it would bubble up. 4. Friends-of-friends can transitively receive a proportion of the trust score you have in your friend. Highly trusted friends will make you trust their friends more. 5. Down-votes and upvotes would train your local agent. They could also be fed back to the originator IF votes were signed by trusted encryption keys to prevent your friend from faking his vote count on the "post". This decentralizes the network out of FB and democratizes the algorithms / system for what and how you want to receive your information.
- NotAnEconomist 8y agoI think there's middle ground that likely is more commercially viable: 1. Everyone makes a website. 2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes. 3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client: 3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes. 3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds. 3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" and have all of your family feeds in a second "feed". 4. Most of this is actually done via cloud hosting of managed packages, rented. There's still many strong factors in favor of centralization, but if it's built around interop, then having a few large providers than mesh together is still an improvement and begins a competition to provide better services. It's what happened with blogs and RSS anyway.
- CodeCube 8y ago> submit articles to content indexes ... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)
- wasdfff 8y agoFollow feeds that post from a variety of sources. I follow a HN rss, a couple multireddit RSS feeds, and even newsletters from nyt and la times will include stories from a variety of places. “Discover” hardly ever means, “check out what’s interesting,” usually it’s “check out this targeted ad”
- ip26 8y agoAh, but if I'm too broad, then I get a firehose of news. RSS gives you everything that comes down the pipe- unless you set up filters, I suppose
- asdff 8y agoFor reddit you can get a feed for the top posts only, and for HN you can set a score threshold. I even follow newsletters over rss (killthenewsletter), which if you subscribe to some daily digests you get exposed to stories from a variety of sources on many topics. I can still run through like 250 headlines in about 30 minutes, reading or saving what I like to pocket and skimming over the rest. There is definitely set up and optimization with RSS, getting the right mix of feeds that you want, but I don't see any targeted posts or advertising when I browse the internet now. Its also really good for following journal articles in my field. Pubmed has active search RSS, for instance, and every journal pushes their new articles to RSS.
- hotmud 8y ago> [F]or HN you can set a score threshold… How does one do that? I'm interested.
- JetSpiegel 8y agohttps://github.com/edavis/go-hnrss https://github.com/edavis/go-hnrss Shameless plug: Binaries here: https://gitlab.com/somini/go-hnrss/ https://gitlab.com/somini/go-hnrss/
- hinkley 8y agoThe way I grew my feed was to look around any time an article in my feed linked to another site. The thing is though we want to talk about the stories and ask questions. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? Comment forums on a million sites don’t work. In the early days of the web someone had the idea that you should be able to run your own group commentary without the site aurhor’s permission. You’d register for the service and your browser would tell you or show you that there’s a conversation going about this page. I still feel like we need this.
- cakeface 8y agoThere are some w3c tools around open annotations that might be a good fit for this.
- tmaly 8y agoI think something like personal AI, like something out of a William Gibson novel could fix this issue.
- unicornporn 8y agoBlogrolls worked quite well for me.
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoI use Feedly for my rss-feeds and they do recommend other sites to follow if you search for a feed.
- QML 8y agoCan't you just have a website like Medium that acts as an aggregator (of RSS feeds) instead of a platform? The issue I have to whether stick with RSS feeds, which seem like it's dying, or to use ActivityPub, which doesn't seem to be developed that heavily.
- pmlnr 8y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
- QML 8y agoI think in addition to this an aggregator, you also need a website that helps create an RSS feed for each user while simultaneously abstracting that notion away. Thanks for the pointer though :)
- njn 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
- krausejj 8y agowe're working on this problem with mendoapp.com but instead of following "feeds" you follow people, and it queues up links they've shared on twitter
- snackematician 8y agoMaybe more of an email list than an RSS feed then? You can control who is a member of the list to receive content. It would be cool if social media could be done through email, sort of like Usenet.
- saucoide 8y agoYes, but ideally it would be 2-ways, and there is still the problem with discovery, more in general i just think there shouldn't be social media sites, "social media" should be a protocol
- wasdfff 8y agoYou mean like newsletters? No need to reinvent the wheel.
- schnevets 8y agoEmail/newsletters are a promising protocol, but you would have to rethink the UX to be more like a newsfeed, where a concise version of the message is shown once, and then automatically marked as read. I have noticed friends reverting back to RSVP e-mails via Paperless Post Flyer. I'm still not sure if one person in this social group is not on Facebook, causing the change, but it has been a welcome adjustment. If Facebook Events can be replaced by an e-mail approach, I don't see why other products can't follow suit.
- asdff 8y ago>where a concise version of the message is shown once, and then automatically marked as read. So like a rule to push it into your newsletter folder?
- walterstucco 8y agoYou are describing Xanadu
- dtougas 8y agoDidn't you just describe Twitter?
- yakshaving_jgt 8y agoTwitter could be great if you could truly tune-out the stuff you don't want to see. For a long time I held onto my account, trying to mute anything part of SJW or communist discourse, but to no avail. Twitter shows you stuff you didn't sign up for anyway, I suppose to maximise engagement.
- stcredzero 8y agoWhen i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content That last phrase could add a lot of friction. you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose That would indeed replace Facebook. However, then you have a chicken and egg problem. Those clients won't be much good unless people provide data by using them, and people won't use them because they don't already have the data to provide good recommendations.
- viraptor 8y agoThere's already a lot of aggregators which are partially-social. For example theoldreader tells me that someone likes a specific post from RSS feed. Not sure if they have recommendations, but they could certainly generate them if they wanted.
- stcredzero 8y agoOne thing that could be really cool, would be the UI of RSS readers applied to social media. Like, you could have the ads and recommendations in their own branch of the tree.
- naravara 8y ago>When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple Up until you get to "different clients" you're basically describing classic Google Reader.
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoI still miss google reader. If was such a fine product that just worked so of course it had to go.
- grahamburger 8y agoThat sounds a lot like ActivityPub / Mastodon.
- brlewis 8y agoMy ideal social media was FriendFeed, and yes it was in many ways similar to an RSS feed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
- akirk 8y agoI've been actually building something like this on the side with the Friends plugin for WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends/ (source at https://github.com/akirk/friends https://github.com/akirk/friends) It's based on the idea that you'd publish to your personal website either publicly or privately. The private posts can only be read by your friends (who own personal websites themselves and have established a friendship connection using a friend request). The implementation is just a (not yet standardized) friend ship request REST protocol plus authenticated RSS feeds (using a secret key exchanged by the above process). Since the whole decentralized social network idea is a chicken-and-egg game, I've constructed the plugin in a way so that it is useful to use by yourself: You can subscribe to RSS feeds, filter feeds with your own rules, and get full-content e-mail notifications for all or selected posts. The plugin also implements Emoji-Likes on posts and allows recommending posts to your friends. It doesn't have an automatic recommendation engine (yet?). Actually, there is no need to have this restricted to WordPress since it uses very much established technology, so it could interoperate with any other compatible platform. I just implemented it with WordPress for its ecosystem and that you can use existing mobile apps to read on it and share to it. Overall the whole endeavor allows you to have your personal social network decentralized, ad- and spam-free since you select who you listen to. The plugin is already well usable but it only progresses at side-project speed, so help is welcome (not only development work but also trying it out, posting about its features with screenshots/-casts, etc.)! You can read more about some technical details at https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/03/decentralized-social-networking-with-wordpress/ https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/03/decentralized-social-ne... and take a look at the presentation: https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/08/wordpress-meetup-presentation-decentralized-social-networking-with-wordpress/ https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/08/wordpress-meetup-presen...