7 ms·

When you say "social network", do you mean Twitter Clone? It seems like developers in particular have come to regard Twitter as archetypal social networks desp

When you say "social network", do you mean Twitter Clone? It seems like developers in particular have come to regard Twitter as archetypal social networks despite it's many problems and the way the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph. IE, N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality, just for example and Twitter isn't something most people enjoy being on but I think it's what people get on to seem/feel important. I think by earlier terminology Facebook/Myspace/Friendster/linkedin are social networks and Twitter/Mastodon/etc are "microblogging services". I think the clone-Twitter impulse is kind of terrible. Not even to say Facebook is inherently better but because I don't think ways of defining one's own social network have been exhausted by all the networks out there (Discord is another format with increasing presences which shows that new ways of organizing connections are still possible).

unityByFreedom 6y ago
> I don't think ways of defining one's own social network have been exhausted by all the networks out there Yeah, it’s fun to build a clone, but what we really need is something innovative.
- andykx 6y ago
  I touched upon this in another comment, but I miss "profile-based" social media sites. No feed. Ex. I have a profile that I can update with photos, etc. If you want to see those things, add me as a friend and navigate to my profile. If I want to share something with my friends, I can use a feature similar to MySpace's bulletin board, a space to share text-only updates about my life. The actual content of the update is hidden behind a link (the title of the update) so I can decide if I am interested in it or not. I think centralized feeds have destroyed social media. This is especially true of feeds optimized to show "relevant" content.
ehsankia 6y ago
The character limit is the last of Twitters issue, in my opinion. I think the #1 issue is the retweet model, it leads to people just brainlessly sharing low effort content with a single click. It's similar to how fake news and misleading content thrive on Facebook. But notice how Instagram where it's impossible to easily re-share content (well, you can now in stories) is far less toxic.
- inopinatus 6y ago
  An honest UI might use the word “echo” rather than “retweet”.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    Retweet used to actually retweet things (i.e. pretend "RT" and the OP's handle), so it's like the floppy disk icon. Parler uses a megaphone.
    - bigiain 6y ago
      It's amusing to me the retweets (and hashtags) were emergent behaviour of early Twitter users, not any sort of well thought out plan for how the platform was intended to work. And then the platform owners mostly misunderstood the problem and emergent solution, and natively implemented something similar but optimised for advertising sales metrics ("engagement!") instead of what the users were actually doing. And then as the user base changed from it's early-userbase to being heavily biased to marketers (sorry, "influencers" and/or advertisers), and social media expert gurus started talking about "message amplification" - and so we end up with new contenders in the field thinking that the lack of ability to shout "brand messages" through a megaphone was the problem those early users "invented" retweeting to solve... <sigh> (And now I'm imagining a world where a St*rbucks-like cafe chain hands megaphones to everybody as they enter the store, with the implicit understanding that you shout out every interesting bit of conversation you overhear, which inevitably quickly develops into people only shouting out other people's megaphone shouts because that's all you can hear, until eventually if crescendos into a Hendrix-esque never ending earsplitting feedback wail - probably Star Spangled Banner for maximum crudeness... Has Black Mirror done this yet?)
      - stormbrew 6y ago
        God so much this. Manual retweets didn't really work like the feature Twitter implemented do and they had drastically different effects on content spread. Quote tweets (which were also emergent before rts even became a feature) are actually closer in those terms. But because the button is right there the more useful emergent version died completely off.
greendude29 6y ago
> N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality Is this an assumption or is there evidence? I can see why at first glance that would seem true, but I also see conspiracy theories spread with or without character limits. What seems to do better for discourse is not char limits, but rather enforcing limits on misinformation and hate speech.
microcolonel 6y ago
> the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph Far as I'm concerned, this is the main feature of Twitter. The only thing that really sets it apart is that every exchange is a public exchange. This also (until recently) set a standard for statements, where if there are enough replies, and even the critical ones don't cast doubt on the statement, you could have more trust in it. Now of course it's uncertain, since Twitter automatically censors and pseudo-censors replies, including quality ones. Sometimes Twitter does this thing where it won't even show you a reply that you sent unless you have a direct link.
grawprog 6y ago
I've never really thought of twitter as a social network more of a collection of grandstands or soapboxes or something all with people holding megaphones with a 10 second limit all yelling at the same time and sometimes the people around your megaphone will yell your message out to the people near their soap boxes. The more important you are, the taller your soapbox and and the farther the sound goes, but your megaphone still only works for 10 seconds at a time.
irrational 6y ago
In my mind, it is only a social network if I know whom I am networking with and they know who I am in real life. Reddit isn’t a social network since no one on there knows who I am and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never interacted with the same person on there twice. Anonymous is not social.
- ponker 6y ago
  This site is a bit of an in between. There are definitely recognizable names here like JacquesM, DoreenMichelle, etc. that I don’t know IRL but recognize here. Then there are the users like WalterBright where I can correlate to an IRL identity, without knowing him personally.
  - jimhi 6y ago
    I had to look up all the people you named and am still not clear who they are or why you know them exactly.
    - ponker 6y ago
      I don’t, I just recognize them as commenters and can tie their comments into their previous comments.
      - irrational 6y ago
        That might be one difference. I read comments, but not who wrote them. I don't even know who I am replying to right now ;-) It is like shouting into the dark.
        dmurray 6y ago
        HN de-emphasises the handle of the commenter (smaller font, lighter text). No doubt that was an intentional decision, but I wonder just to what extent the original designer (pg?) expected it would influence the discussions. Reddit emphasises them a bit more than HN, but still the natural reading flow is such that you miss the username. It's common for someone to comment, a second poster to reply asking a question, and a third poster to reply without people noticing he's different from the first poster. Facebook emphasises the commenter more, showing their name in bolder text and a profile picture. Some older forums (on phpBB, vBulletin, etc) emphasised it even more, devoting a large section to the left of each post to the commenter's name, statistics and often an avatar. These forums were much more prone to cults of personality than the likes of Reddit. On the other end of the spectrum is 4chan, where posts are anonymous and content, or at least memes, is king. It doesn't seem like that necessarily leads to more nuanced discussion.
greggman3 6y ago
I very much want a Facebook for coding friends clone. Lots of solutions out there but I for whatever reason I don't like any of them Slack/Discord and similar interfaces are effectively chat. I want topics and replies. I know you can start a topic on both of those but it just feels less conducive to friends talking to me than talking on Facebook. I could make groups on facebook. I can't put my finger on why this doesn't work. Maybe because it requires diligence. I have to remember to select the group of "programmer friends" that I want to topic to go to. Forget and my either my programmer friends get family posts or my family gets programmer posts. Also FB will spam non-programmer friends with "g posted about x over here". A forum like discourse or phpbb doesn't have to social graph. Anyone that joins can participate in all discussion. I want to talk to friends only Google+ and some features that seemed to kind of go in this directly but I feel like most people used it to spread news instead of discuss what they're working on or thoughts they are having. I don't need tech news. I can get that here. I'm not even saying Facebook is the best UX for what I want. I used to enjoy a smf forum that was mostly friends and I liked that I could see the list of topics. But, I also just like glancing at my Facebook feed once a day or so and see what my friends are up to. I'd like a similar experience except for programming / tech only topics with tech only friends. And of course it goes without saying that a coding FB should format code well and some how allow embedding live snippets in iframes Note: I know lots of people say their FB news feed is a dumpster fire. For whatever reason I've unfollowed enough people or something that mine is fine. Unfollowed every political friend for example. Just don't want that on my newsfeed. Can get it elsewhere
- wryun 6y ago
  If all you want on top of Discord/Slack is proper topics, https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/ is worth a try. See, for instance: https://rust-lang.github.io/compiler-team/about/chat-platform/ https://rust-lang.github.io/compiler-team/about/chat-platfor... https://www.ponylang.io/community/ https://www.ponylang.io/community/ (both use zulip for their main chat platform, AFAIK)
  - greggman3 6y ago
    I want the social graph. I post, only the people I added as "friends" get to see my post, not everyone who signed up for the discord/slack. I also only want to see posts from my friends. But of course, we all have different lists of friends. Discord/Slack don't seem to be about that. But thank you for the recommendation. I'll still take a look
FailMore 6y ago
I've been working on Taaalk (https://taaalk.co https://taaalk.co), a social network for conversations.
CathedralBorrow 6y ago
> and Twitter isn't something most people enjoy being on but I think it's what people get on to seem/feel important This feels like a "everyone is mostly like me" fallacy. A whole ton of people use Twitter because they actually enjoy it.
- Can_Not 6y ago
  Maybe they're mostly enjoying the fact that everyone else is already there.

unityByFreedom 6y ago

> I don't think ways of defining one's own social network have been exhausted by all the networks out there Yeah, it’s fun to build a clone, but what we really need is something innovative.

andykx 6y ago
I touched upon this in another comment, but I miss "profile-based" social media sites. No feed. Ex. I have a profile that I can update with photos, etc. If you want to see those things, add me as a friend and navigate to my profile. If I want to share something with my friends, I can use a feature similar to MySpace's bulletin board, a space to share text-only updates about my life. The actual content of the update is hidden behind a link (the title of the update) so I can decide if I am interested in it or not. I think centralized feeds have destroyed social media. This is especially true of feeds optimized to show "relevant" content.

ehsankia 6y ago

The character limit is the last of Twitters issue, in my opinion. I think the #1 issue is the retweet model, it leads to people just brainlessly sharing low effort content with a single click. It's similar to how fake news and misleading content thrive on Facebook. But notice how Instagram where it's impossible to easily re-share content (well, you can now in stories) is far less toxic.

inopinatus 6y ago
An honest UI might use the word “echo” rather than “retweet”.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  Retweet used to actually retweet things (i.e. pretend "RT" and the OP's handle), so it's like the floppy disk icon. Parler uses a megaphone.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    It's amusing to me the retweets (and hashtags) were emergent behaviour of early Twitter users, not any sort of well thought out plan for how the platform was intended to work. And then the platform owners mostly misunderstood the problem and emergent solution, and natively implemented something similar but optimised for advertising sales metrics ("engagement!") instead of what the users were actually doing. And then as the user base changed from it's early-userbase to being heavily biased to marketers (sorry, "influencers" and/or advertisers), and social media expert gurus started talking about "message amplification" - and so we end up with new contenders in the field thinking that the lack of ability to shout "brand messages" through a megaphone was the problem those early users "invented" retweeting to solve... <sigh> (And now I'm imagining a world where a St*rbucks-like cafe chain hands megaphones to everybody as they enter the store, with the implicit understanding that you shout out every interesting bit of conversation you overhear, which inevitably quickly develops into people only shouting out other people's megaphone shouts because that's all you can hear, until eventually if crescendos into a Hendrix-esque never ending earsplitting feedback wail - probably Star Spangled Banner for maximum crudeness... Has Black Mirror done this yet?)
    - stormbrew 6y ago
      God so much this. Manual retweets didn't really work like the feature Twitter implemented do and they had drastically different effects on content spread. Quote tweets (which were also emergent before rts even became a feature) are actually closer in those terms. But because the button is right there the more useful emergent version died completely off.

greendude29 6y ago

> N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality Is this an assumption or is there evidence? I can see why at first glance that would seem true, but I also see conspiracy theories spread with or without character limits. What seems to do better for discourse is not char limits, but rather enforcing limits on misinformation and hate speech.

microcolonel 6y ago

> the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph Far as I'm concerned, this is the main feature of Twitter. The only thing that really sets it apart is that every exchange is a public exchange. This also (until recently) set a standard for statements, where if there are enough replies, and even the critical ones don't cast doubt on the statement, you could have more trust in it. Now of course it's uncertain, since Twitter automatically censors and pseudo-censors replies, including quality ones. Sometimes Twitter does this thing where it won't even show you a reply that you sent unless you have a direct link.

grawprog 6y ago

I've never really thought of twitter as a social network more of a collection of grandstands or soapboxes or something all with people holding megaphones with a 10 second limit all yelling at the same time and sometimes the people around your megaphone will yell your message out to the people near their soap boxes. The more important you are, the taller your soapbox and and the farther the sound goes, but your megaphone still only works for 10 seconds at a time.

irrational 6y ago

In my mind, it is only a social network if I know whom I am networking with and they know who I am in real life. Reddit isn’t a social network since no one on there knows who I am and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never interacted with the same person on there twice. Anonymous is not social.

ponker 6y ago
This site is a bit of an in between. There are definitely recognizable names here like JacquesM, DoreenMichelle, etc. that I don’t know IRL but recognize here. Then there are the users like WalterBright where I can correlate to an IRL identity, without knowing him personally.
- jimhi 6y ago
  I had to look up all the people you named and am still not clear who they are or why you know them exactly.
  - ponker 6y ago
    I don’t, I just recognize them as commenters and can tie their comments into their previous comments.
    - irrational 6y ago
      That might be one difference. I read comments, but not who wrote them. I don't even know who I am replying to right now ;-) It is like shouting into the dark.
      - dmurray 6y ago
        HN de-emphasises the handle of the commenter (smaller font, lighter text). No doubt that was an intentional decision, but I wonder just to what extent the original designer (pg?) expected it would influence the discussions. Reddit emphasises them a bit more than HN, but still the natural reading flow is such that you miss the username. It's common for someone to comment, a second poster to reply asking a question, and a third poster to reply without people noticing he's different from the first poster. Facebook emphasises the commenter more, showing their name in bolder text and a profile picture. Some older forums (on phpBB, vBulletin, etc) emphasised it even more, devoting a large section to the left of each post to the commenter's name, statistics and often an avatar. These forums were much more prone to cults of personality than the likes of Reddit. On the other end of the spectrum is 4chan, where posts are anonymous and content, or at least memes, is king. It doesn't seem like that necessarily leads to more nuanced discussion.

greggman3 6y ago

I very much want a Facebook for coding friends clone. Lots of solutions out there but I for whatever reason I don't like any of them Slack/Discord and similar interfaces are effectively chat. I want topics and replies. I know you can start a topic on both of those but it just feels less conducive to friends talking to me than talking on Facebook. I could make groups on facebook. I can't put my finger on why this doesn't work. Maybe because it requires diligence. I have to remember to select the group of "programmer friends" that I want to topic to go to. Forget and my either my programmer friends get family posts or my family gets programmer posts. Also FB will spam non-programmer friends with "g posted about x over here". A forum like discourse or phpbb doesn't have to social graph. Anyone that joins can participate in all discussion. I want to talk to friends only Google+ and some features that seemed to kind of go in this directly but I feel like most people used it to spread news instead of discuss what they're working on or thoughts they are having. I don't need tech news. I can get that here. I'm not even saying Facebook is the best UX for what I want. I used to enjoy a smf forum that was mostly friends and I liked that I could see the list of topics. But, I also just like glancing at my Facebook feed once a day or so and see what my friends are up to. I'd like a similar experience except for programming / tech only topics with tech only friends. And of course it goes without saying that a coding FB should format code well and some how allow embedding live snippets in iframes Note: I know lots of people say their FB news feed is a dumpster fire. For whatever reason I've unfollowed enough people or something that mine is fine. Unfollowed every political friend for example. Just don't want that on my newsfeed. Can get it elsewhere

wryun 6y ago
If all you want on top of Discord/Slack is proper topics, https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/ is worth a try. See, for instance: https://rust-lang.github.io/compiler-team/about/chat-platform/ https://rust-lang.github.io/compiler-team/about/chat-platfor... https://www.ponylang.io/community/ https://www.ponylang.io/community/ (both use zulip for their main chat platform, AFAIK)
- greggman3 6y ago
  I want the social graph. I post, only the people I added as "friends" get to see my post, not everyone who signed up for the discord/slack. I also only want to see posts from my friends. But of course, we all have different lists of friends. Discord/Slack don't seem to be about that. But thank you for the recommendation. I'll still take a look

FailMore 6y ago

I've been working on Taaalk (https://taaalk.co https://taaalk.co), a social network for conversations.

CathedralBorrow 6y ago

> and Twitter isn't something most people enjoy being on but I think it's what people get on to seem/feel important This feels like a "everyone is mostly like me" fallacy. A whole ton of people use Twitter because they actually enjoy it.

Can_Not 6y ago
Maybe they're mostly enjoying the fact that everyone else is already there.