8 ms·

Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something, but without the impetus that produced the original.It's the "make s

Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something, but without the impetus that produced the original.It's the "make something people want," but more "make something they use for X." You need the original purpose. It has to be to make something that isn't itself. Myspace was mainly novelty and music, Facebook was for status minting from ivy colleges, other ones are for an exogenous purpose as well. Politics isn't a useful unifying principle. I helped run a progressive political precursor to one of the major ones about 20+ years ago, and it only existed because it was tolerated by part of the establishment, and it could not survive a truly hostile environment. Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games. Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage people. Reddit was for sharing alternative/emerging culture. A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture, and the current generation of censors came up in divergent/alternative culture, so they have a more sophisticated idea of what nascent opposition looks like than the old ones. Short version is, we don't need a decentralized social network, we need new culture that produces networks, and courage to create that culture.

rossdavidh 6y ago
I might also add that a social network like Goodreads or Stack Overflow that is based around some purpose or topic, is so different in tone from general purpose social networks that lots of people don't even notice that it has essentially the same set of features. Also, way less toxic and icky feeling when you use it. Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly as big as Facebook, but in my mind that's a feature, not a bug.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  And might even be the future. Do we need something as big as Facebook? Maybe social networks in the future proliferate on "topic" lines where each network is tailored to whatever topic. I'm working on a social-ish network for TV. Is Facebook good for live discussions about TV? No. Is Reddit? No. Is Twitter, kinda but not really. That's the problem I'm trying to solve just for TV.
  - leppr 6y ago
    We had that before with forums. Customizable rules, mechanisms and moderation could get you quite far. People like general social networks because they value the specific human connections more than the topics of interest.
    - hakfoo 6y ago
      SOME people do. There are some audiences that go gaga for that type of connection. They love unprompted (over)sharing and friend collecting. I suspect you get a base of that on a service like Facebook, and since they're the heaviest users, the platform will eventually warp to appeal to their needs. I always got a lot more value out of vertical communities like forums and newsgroups, just because there was typically specific valuable content and opportunities for deeper discussion. But I suppose I was never the sort who was hugely motivated by "reconnect with your high school buddies/distant relatives" which was the default pitch for general purpose social networks.
  - presentation 6y ago
    I'd like that, but consumers seem to like things being "all in one place" - mostly people who are pretty dedicated to niches these days are willing to go to other social sites, but I can't imagine that the mass market will become OK with having like 10 different portals with inconsistent user experiences, unless under some kind of umbrella - be that a centralized service like Reddit or something else.
    - Jetrel 6y ago
      As an observation, I think a great deal of this is because of the "depth of features" of things a really good service (like Discord) gets insanely right. There's just this mountain of really important quality-of-life things, or needed features available out of the box. For example, I was scared when I started using discord, because it's entirely reasonable to think if I'm logged in in two places and start a voice chat, surely it'll start playing that audio anywhere I'm logged in, right? Everything else follows a "you do it on one machine you're logged in on, and you do it on all the others as well (such as writing a partial message, and not posting it - the same partial message is right there waiting if you grab a different device). Well, not only do they correctly handle that one use case (audio chats) with a totally different 'you're doing it only in one place' model, they even track which machine you're currently live on. If you're actively using your home machine, they don't ring your phone - your phone which you might have left home. Or the session you accidentally left running on your office machine. They know you're actually live on a particular machine, and don't annoy or embarrass people by making the others ring. There are just a lot of really, really important things like this they get right. Forums did have a little bit of shared standardization, since a lot of people tend to use only a handful of highly popular forum apps, but kinda like the old 90s-style thing where there was always a roster of "must have" OS tweaks and apps you'd install on a new machine (and get to thinking 'geez, why don't they just make this part of the OS) - there's a similar thing with forums where there are a lot of sidecar things that ought to part of every forum, but simply aren't standardized. (Some of these are critical to doing certain jobs; some of them are, like accessibility features, critical to certain users, and difficult to make forum admins care about if they don't personally have the problem). That, and what you're saying about "having it all in one place". It has a lot of benefits, like being able to cross-communicate and deeplink between communities.
- conradev 6y ago
  My favorite social network in this category is Strava. Browsing the feed is super motivating and great for generating route ideas.
rohan1024 6y ago
I feel like a piece is missing in the current Internet infrastructure although I have no idea what it is. Consider this, WhatsApp stories are not much different than personal blog but putting up stories takes few clicks while self hosting is whole new endeavor. Ideally everyone should own a blog/self host. This would solve the issues with centralization. The problem is hosting a blog and discovering it is still not as easy as creating WhatsApp/Insta stories. Nor the users are ready to pay the price for running that blog. Centralized services solve all these problems. If some platform ever solves issues with self hosting and makes it easy to self host for minimal cost, I think we will have changed the face of Internet forever. tl;dr We haven't achieved the required level of software/hardware abstraction for everyone to self host
- koalaman 6y ago
  I think 'Social Networking' is really just a bad name for an internet identity and sharing model no different from the same problem in Operating Systems. The internet is the computer but it's missing identity and acls. With those things anybody could write an indexer that could build a feed for you.
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    That's the salient point. When you re-frame social media as collaboration tools, the answer to the question, "collaboration on what?" comes to the fore. What is the underlying project that requires collaboration? I have a few ideas, but I hope framing that way yields ideas for others.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      >What is the underlying project that requires collaboration? Gossip. I'm not being (entirely) snide: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1069397114554383?journalCode=ccrc https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/106939711455438...
    - gritzko 6y ago
      Eventually, all what media does is information routing from producer to consumer. The existing Big Tech paradigm is just one of [many][1], if you think that way. [1]: http://doc.replicated.cc:8080/%5EWiki/owner.sm http://doc.replicated.cc:8080/%5EWiki/owner.sm
swalsh 6y ago
I partially agree with you. Right now the people most likely to switch are going to be the people who have no home. The crackdown has started, but it's pretty early. The people kicked, or leaving at this point are not the ones you want to be the early founders of your social network. Remember, the first users set the tone for the community.
- gfodor 6y ago
  Your last point isn’t a truism as networks approach global scale. Early users of Facebook and Twitter have not set the tone - they may have influenced it, but particularly in Facebooks cause, any such influence has been largely diluted away.
  - swalsh 6y ago
    You're not going to get to Facebook/Twitter scale without good content in the beginning.
    - gfodor 6y ago
      Agree if that was your point it’s well made.
chartpath 6y ago
True about Facebook. But didn't they completely re-invent themselves once the white suburban soccer moms took over, and then again when all the drunk racist uncles came on? I feel like you are right about the need for an original purpose. And would add that at such a momentous time when everyone can see the consequences of private, centralized media selling attention so efficiently, is it really impossible that the situation rises to that level of original purpose? The seed of a new community might just need a great spark.
gfodor 6y ago
The product feature of intellectual freedom is suddenly a real value proposition.
- mynameishere 6y ago
  You don't seem to understand that these good people would never run afoul of the current or future regimes and so would never see their data or companies or livelihoods erased on a whim.
r00fus 6y ago
> Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something, TikTok would beg to differ. You are correct about having a base, but once you grow out of that base, you can compete as a general purpose social network (ultimately an advertising/lead channel - even if only for the market of ideas). It's all about execution and as you said, purpose. So what's FB's purpose anymore?
- noizejoy 6y ago
  Parent post also said the following > A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture And arguably TikTok found that.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  Old people need to yell at each other? FB has peaked I think. Their endgame looks like Equifaxbook. Smart view on TikTok though. I thought the purpose of TikTok was for teenagers to be on a platform without their parents checking up on them, and the CCP was right there to collect kompromat on the next generation of potential western leaders. I am suddenly very optimistic about the purposes for how new platforms will emerge. Younger people will figure it out.
- tomaszs 6y ago
  TikTok was not a copy. It was unique in a way it was a short video platform for dancing when it started.
CuriouslyC 6y ago
What we need is a distributed content distribution network, which just happens to be social. Something like a social bittorrent network with distributed search and inline website display.
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  Isn't this what Diaspora is?
  - CuriouslyC 6y ago
    Does Diaspora have torrent sharing built in now? I don't see any mention.
- Sargos 6y ago
  This is what IPFS does and most decentralized platforms under development are built on top of it.
EGreg 6y ago
This platform doesn't exactly match everything on the wishlist, but it matches what you've written here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735243
rayvd 6y ago
Tell that to MySpace, Friendster, etc. There is room for prove product disruption if the iteration adds significant value, or if the quality of service of the current leader drops off.
madrox 6y ago
I think you’re right. This is the thesis behind my current startup. Before you build anything, you have to know what community is being underserved. I’ve believed one of those areas is esports but over time generalized that to current events. Decentralization will only work out if it benefits that community somehow. Shameless plug: my social network is in alpha if anyone wants to offer feedback. https://trophy.gg https://trophy.gg
xiaolingxiao 6y ago
Bingo: this is the heart of why a better tech solution won’t appeal to the majority. People need to feel like they’re partaking in some particular culture or counter culture. On clubhouse for example, people feel like they’re casually mingling with the elite. So that, in particular, those without country club memberships assign a premium value to it.
lmm 6y ago
> Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games. Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage people. Reddit was for sharing alternative/emerging culture. Disagree. There were plenty of gaming chat tools. The first group I got into Discord with wasn't playing games, the first group I got into Hipchat with wasn't particularly code-oriented, the first group I got into Slack with wasn't the kind of group that had management, and the first subreddits I got involved with were nothing to do with that kind of culture. Those tools succeeded not because they were doing something new but because they made something that didn't suck. Sometimes that's all it takes. I remember talking with friends 2-3 years before Slack et al about how all the existing chat tools sucked and maybe we should build a better one. We concluded that there must be some fundamental reason why Skype etc. were so bad, something that we were missing. But we were wrong, and Slack proved that. (This isn't an argument that Facebook can be replaced the same way, because Facebook has a great UX. My point is just that you don't always have to do something different. Sometimes "x, but better" is enough).

rossdavidh 6y ago

I might also add that a social network like Goodreads or Stack Overflow that is based around some purpose or topic, is so different in tone from general purpose social networks that lots of people don't even notice that it has essentially the same set of features. Also, way less toxic and icky feeling when you use it. Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly as big as Facebook, but in my mind that's a feature, not a bug.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
And might even be the future. Do we need something as big as Facebook? Maybe social networks in the future proliferate on "topic" lines where each network is tailored to whatever topic. I'm working on a social-ish network for TV. Is Facebook good for live discussions about TV? No. Is Reddit? No. Is Twitter, kinda but not really. That's the problem I'm trying to solve just for TV.
- leppr 6y ago
  We had that before with forums. Customizable rules, mechanisms and moderation could get you quite far. People like general social networks because they value the specific human connections more than the topics of interest.
  - hakfoo 6y ago
    SOME people do. There are some audiences that go gaga for that type of connection. They love unprompted (over)sharing and friend collecting. I suspect you get a base of that on a service like Facebook, and since they're the heaviest users, the platform will eventually warp to appeal to their needs. I always got a lot more value out of vertical communities like forums and newsgroups, just because there was typically specific valuable content and opportunities for deeper discussion. But I suppose I was never the sort who was hugely motivated by "reconnect with your high school buddies/distant relatives" which was the default pitch for general purpose social networks.
- presentation 6y ago
  I'd like that, but consumers seem to like things being "all in one place" - mostly people who are pretty dedicated to niches these days are willing to go to other social sites, but I can't imagine that the mass market will become OK with having like 10 different portals with inconsistent user experiences, unless under some kind of umbrella - be that a centralized service like Reddit or something else.
  - Jetrel 6y ago
    As an observation, I think a great deal of this is because of the "depth of features" of things a really good service (like Discord) gets insanely right. There's just this mountain of really important quality-of-life things, or needed features available out of the box. For example, I was scared when I started using discord, because it's entirely reasonable to think if I'm logged in in two places and start a voice chat, surely it'll start playing that audio anywhere I'm logged in, right? Everything else follows a "you do it on one machine you're logged in on, and you do it on all the others as well (such as writing a partial message, and not posting it - the same partial message is right there waiting if you grab a different device). Well, not only do they correctly handle that one use case (audio chats) with a totally different 'you're doing it only in one place' model, they even track which machine you're currently live on. If you're actively using your home machine, they don't ring your phone - your phone which you might have left home. Or the session you accidentally left running on your office machine. They know you're actually live on a particular machine, and don't annoy or embarrass people by making the others ring. There are just a lot of really, really important things like this they get right. Forums did have a little bit of shared standardization, since a lot of people tend to use only a handful of highly popular forum apps, but kinda like the old 90s-style thing where there was always a roster of "must have" OS tweaks and apps you'd install on a new machine (and get to thinking 'geez, why don't they just make this part of the OS) - there's a similar thing with forums where there are a lot of sidecar things that ought to part of every forum, but simply aren't standardized. (Some of these are critical to doing certain jobs; some of them are, like accessibility features, critical to certain users, and difficult to make forum admins care about if they don't personally have the problem). That, and what you're saying about "having it all in one place". It has a lot of benefits, like being able to cross-communicate and deeplink between communities.
conradev 6y ago
My favorite social network in this category is Strava. Browsing the feed is super motivating and great for generating route ideas.

rohan1024 6y ago

I feel like a piece is missing in the current Internet infrastructure although I have no idea what it is. Consider this, WhatsApp stories are not much different than personal blog but putting up stories takes few clicks while self hosting is whole new endeavor. Ideally everyone should own a blog/self host. This would solve the issues with centralization. The problem is hosting a blog and discovering it is still not as easy as creating WhatsApp/Insta stories. Nor the users are ready to pay the price for running that blog. Centralized services solve all these problems. If some platform ever solves issues with self hosting and makes it easy to self host for minimal cost, I think we will have changed the face of Internet forever. tl;dr We haven't achieved the required level of software/hardware abstraction for everyone to self host

koalaman 6y ago
I think 'Social Networking' is really just a bad name for an internet identity and sharing model no different from the same problem in Operating Systems. The internet is the computer but it's missing identity and acls. With those things anybody could write an indexer that could build a feed for you.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  That's the salient point. When you re-frame social media as collaboration tools, the answer to the question, "collaboration on what?" comes to the fore. What is the underlying project that requires collaboration? I have a few ideas, but I hope framing that way yields ideas for others.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    >What is the underlying project that requires collaboration? Gossip. I'm not being (entirely) snide: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1069397114554383?journalCode=ccrc https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/106939711455438...
  - gritzko 6y ago
    Eventually, all what media does is information routing from producer to consumer. The existing Big Tech paradigm is just one of [many][1], if you think that way. [1]: http://doc.replicated.cc:8080/%5EWiki/owner.sm http://doc.replicated.cc:8080/%5EWiki/owner.sm

swalsh 6y ago

I partially agree with you. Right now the people most likely to switch are going to be the people who have no home. The crackdown has started, but it's pretty early. The people kicked, or leaving at this point are not the ones you want to be the early founders of your social network. Remember, the first users set the tone for the community.

gfodor 6y ago
Your last point isn’t a truism as networks approach global scale. Early users of Facebook and Twitter have not set the tone - they may have influenced it, but particularly in Facebooks cause, any such influence has been largely diluted away.
- swalsh 6y ago
  You're not going to get to Facebook/Twitter scale without good content in the beginning.
  - gfodor 6y ago
    Agree if that was your point it’s well made.

chartpath 6y ago

True about Facebook. But didn't they completely re-invent themselves once the white suburban soccer moms took over, and then again when all the drunk racist uncles came on? I feel like you are right about the need for an original purpose. And would add that at such a momentous time when everyone can see the consequences of private, centralized media selling attention so efficiently, is it really impossible that the situation rises to that level of original purpose? The seed of a new community might just need a great spark.

gfodor 6y ago

The product feature of intellectual freedom is suddenly a real value proposition.

mynameishere 6y ago
You don't seem to understand that these good people would never run afoul of the current or future regimes and so would never see their data or companies or livelihoods erased on a whim.

r00fus 6y ago

> Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something, TikTok would beg to differ. You are correct about having a base, but once you grow out of that base, you can compete as a general purpose social network (ultimately an advertising/lead channel - even if only for the market of ideas). It's all about execution and as you said, purpose. So what's FB's purpose anymore?

noizejoy 6y ago
Parent post also said the following > A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture And arguably TikTok found that.
motohagiography 6y ago
Old people need to yell at each other? FB has peaked I think. Their endgame looks like Equifaxbook. Smart view on TikTok though. I thought the purpose of TikTok was for teenagers to be on a platform without their parents checking up on them, and the CCP was right there to collect kompromat on the next generation of potential western leaders. I am suddenly very optimistic about the purposes for how new platforms will emerge. Younger people will figure it out.
tomaszs 6y ago
TikTok was not a copy. It was unique in a way it was a short video platform for dancing when it started.

CuriouslyC 6y ago

What we need is a distributed content distribution network, which just happens to be social. Something like a social bittorrent network with distributed search and inline website display.

at-fates-hands 6y ago
Isn't this what Diaspora is?
- CuriouslyC 6y ago
  Does Diaspora have torrent sharing built in now? I don't see any mention.
Sargos 6y ago
This is what IPFS does and most decentralized platforms under development are built on top of it.

EGreg 6y ago

This platform doesn't exactly match everything on the wishlist, but it matches what you've written here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735243

rayvd 6y ago

Tell that to MySpace, Friendster, etc. There is room for prove product disruption if the iteration adds significant value, or if the quality of service of the current leader drops off.

madrox 6y ago

I think you’re right. This is the thesis behind my current startup. Before you build anything, you have to know what community is being underserved. I’ve believed one of those areas is esports but over time generalized that to current events. Decentralization will only work out if it benefits that community somehow. Shameless plug: my social network is in alpha if anyone wants to offer feedback. https://trophy.gg https://trophy.gg

xiaolingxiao 6y ago

Bingo: this is the heart of why a better tech solution won’t appeal to the majority. People need to feel like they’re partaking in some particular culture or counter culture. On clubhouse for example, people feel like they’re casually mingling with the elite. So that, in particular, those without country club memberships assign a premium value to it.

lmm 6y ago

> Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games. Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage people. Reddit was for sharing alternative/emerging culture. Disagree. There were plenty of gaming chat tools. The first group I got into Discord with wasn't playing games, the first group I got into Hipchat with wasn't particularly code-oriented, the first group I got into Slack with wasn't the kind of group that had management, and the first subreddits I got involved with were nothing to do with that kind of culture. Those tools succeeded not because they were doing something new but because they made something that didn't suck. Sometimes that's all it takes. I remember talking with friends 2-3 years before Slack et al about how all the existing chat tools sucked and maybe we should build a better one. We concluded that there must be some fundamental reason why Skype etc. were so bad, something that we were missing. But we were wrong, and Slack proved that. (This isn't an argument that Facebook can be replaced the same way, because Facebook has a great UX. My point is just that you don't always have to do something different. Sometimes "x, but better" is enough).