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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 ta

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.
UShouldBWorking 6y ago
Lol, I'm doing the same for audiobooks. Several hundred users a day after three+ years building.

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.

UShouldBWorking 6y ago

Lol, I'm doing the same for audiobooks. Several hundred users a day after three+ years building.