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For your use case, what part of your need isn't provided by a phone/address-book? I suspect it's the receipt of broadcast messages from your friend network?
by danans 7y ago
For your use case, what part of your need isn't provided by a phone/address-book? I suspect it's the receipt of broadcast messages from your friend network? If so, then yes, you need a social network with features like FB.
Personally, I'd rather not receive those kind of messages - I only want to receive messages that someone specifically thought to send to me. Doing so dramatically reduces noise. The only exception to this is broadcast messages from important networks with built-in hard trust boundaries (the email list for my kids' classroom, my neighborhood watch list, the Whatsapp group with only me, my wife, my brother, and sister in law - not even parents), and even on those, I will leave if they become more of a cost than a benefit.
- icebraining 7y agoWell, HN is a social network with broadcasting features, and it's what allowed halbritt to reply to you. (This isn't intended to be a "gotcha", just to stimulate reflection on why it's different)
- danans 7y ago> Well, HN is a social network with broadcasting features HN is pull actuated, not push. I have to register interest in topics by commenting before I get responses, and those responses are not part of the main feed. I have to go to my comments page to look for the responses. I don't get notified just because a particular user made a comment or post, because it is topic-centered, not user-centered. And even with all that, if HN ever rises to a level of routine toxicity that the moderation via community or moderators isn't keeping in check, I'll leave.
- halbritt 7y agoI see your point and it's valid. Broadcast messages from people you care about are nice. So and so had a baby, or whatever else is going on in their life. It's why FB was useful for before it became a continuous stream of reposted drivel. I like to keep up with what's going on in people's lives at a scale greater than one to one interactions can support. In my view, there's definitely an upside to technology that supports a number of friends and acquaintances roughly 10x what one could support otherwise. Hell, even linkedin is somewhat useful to be able to keep up with what old colleagues are up to and reconnect at times.