17 ms·

Minus

• a9h74j 5y ago
  Read a bit, good idea. Will be followed by some copycat's Minus++, which will be montetized.
• vezycash 5y ago
  Monetization strategy: $10 for 100 more posts.
  • guerrilla 5y ago
    That'll shut the poors up.
• lord_and_xavier 5y ago
  Yeah wordpress doesnt scale. hug of death
  • wizzwizz4 5y ago
    I don't like Wordpress either, but correctly configured it's not that much worse than a static site.
    • Tomte 5y ago
      Correctly configured it is a static site with a minimal stub in PHP. And if you want to go further you can bypass that stub and serve the static pages directly from your web server. Best of both worlds, really.
      • vmoore 5y ago
        > Correctly configured it is a static site with a minimal stub in PHP Maybe there's a 1001 plugins being used which means the Wordpress site has to make boatloads of requests to the backend. Many Wordpress sites make that mistake. I keep my plugin count to at least five plugins. And they're obviously plugins which I really need, and they're not chatty in any way.
    • bastawhiz 5y ago
      But the sites that are slow or performance sensitive often aren't just static sites. If it's more than just a simple CMS to you, you need to be enough of a WordPress expert that you probably don't need WordPress in the first place (or you're just using it for the themes or plugins). Weird WP performance cliffs are hard to avoid for dynamic content and "correctly configuring" either means rolling a custom solution or getting neck deep in your infra—both of which smell a lot more like engineering than not.
    • toast0 5y ago
      I've only run one wordpress site (and reluctantly), but I found it very hard to configure correctly. I was very happy when I was able to convince my boss to replace it with a much simpler blog system that only supported exactly what we needed.
  • zuppy 5y ago
    you couldn’t be more wrong. wordpress is one of the easiest apps to scale, put a varnish in front of it as you mostly have static content. you can go even further, move the comments to an external tool and you can have a very long cache.
    • jsuqo 5y ago
      "Jira scales. You just need to put a varnish in front and move the comments to disqus"
      • zuppy 5y ago
        no, it doesn’t. the content from jira is very dynamic and adding a reverse proxy will not help as much as it will help with a cms.
    • lucideer 5y ago
      All your comment has communicated is that Varnish can scale. Wordpress is not Varnish. The gp isn't "wrong": putting Varnish in front of WP is a possible solution to the fact WP doesn't scale, not a disproof of the fact. Furthermore it's a highly limited solution: WP is only static if you limit it's use to its static features, and configuring Varnish for the unholy mess of 3rd-party dynamic/interactive/form-handling WP plugins is nightmare territory. Wordpress doesn't scale.
      • kortilla 5y ago
        Producing cache friendly output is how you scale easily. A content management system that doesn’t produce cacheable html isn’t scalable and one that does is. It’s not the job of the content management system to serve the cached pages. That’s what CDNs, browsers, and caching layers in general are for.
        • lucideer 5y ago
          Caching is one facet of scaling (albeit a large one). It's not necessarily the job of a CMS to serve cached pages but there's a bunch of other considerations in scaling, particular where database writes are concerned; something that will be relevant in a system where users post content. Also, see the final paragraph of the comment above for discussion of the extent to which WP "produces cachable html"
  • noahtallen 5y ago
    A raw HTML file won’t scale if it’s served from a potato. ;) This probably has more to do with the host & servers than WordPress.
    • phil294 5y ago
      The energy derived from a potato should probably be enough to serve a static webpage with 100 req/s. Even the highest-ranking HN posts should not result in more than five requests per second. It's beyond me how the "HN hug of death" has ever come to be an issue in any scenario.
• rpastuszak 5y ago
  That's such a lovely idea. Reminds me of a game made by one of my friends: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1-chance/id1529736678 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1-chance/id1529736678 The game itself seems pretty trivial. What makes it really interesting is that you get only one chance to play it.
• silisili 5y ago
  It's neat but seems ephemeral. Maybe that's the point. I had a not similar but related idea, basically borne from my hatred of Twitter. Basically, you'd only be able to make a comment if you have a credit. Credits would be time based, probably 1 or 2 a day. The only other way to get credits is if the person you replied to likes your comment. Basically, the idea being to quit getting people being so controversial and argumentative. Edit: I kept replying below describing some vision that doesn't exist, which I feel is rude to the OP and Minus, so I'll not reply further. As I have little intention in building anything at the moment, feel free to take anything you like from it, Minus et al.
  • rzzzt 5y ago
    Token bucket! But perhaps a microtransaction system would also fit neatly in your scenario. >:)
    • silisili 5y ago
      I thought about that, but still unsure. Want to be an asshat? Pay a dollar and get another credit.
      • axelroze 5y ago
        That won't stop organizations with lots of money unless the cost for more credits raises exponentially. Everyone will have to stop when millions and billions get into play.
  • maximp 5y ago
    I like that time-based mechanism much better. The karma/engagement-based stuff would just let popular people post more :)
    • abeppu 5y ago
      I think this is still bad, because it heavily encourages people to post stuff that others will respond to, which isn't necessarily what's honest, authentic, valuable, etc.
• neilv 5y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20210905040333/https://minus.social/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210905040333/https://minus.soc...
• maximp 5y ago
  This product seems to combine a few unrelated ideas. No monetization, reverse-chronological feed, no notifications: sweet. Easier to have cleaner, more meaningful conversations with people, hopefully. In short, a nicer, ad-free, less-harmful Facebook. How will you pay for it if it ever gets popular? I'm not sure how limited posts play into this. I think the intention is to make users really think about what they're posting. But the arbitrary, "nice, round number" limit just feels existentially dreadful at best, and like a headline-generating schtick at worst. Surely there's some other mechanism that can nudge people towards more thoughtful, less self-promoting posts (or whatever the goal is); maybe limiting posts to one a day?
  • georgeoliver 5y ago
    This particular implementation isn't a product (it's an art piece).
  • lcnmrn 5y ago
    I scaled Subreply with the same amount of money I would pay for Netflix/Spotify.
  • sundarurfriend 5y ago
    > But the arbitrary, "nice, round number" limit just feels existentially dreadful at best, and like a headline-generating schtick at worst. From TFA: > Minus was created by Ben Grosser and commissioned by arebyte Gallery (London, UK) as part of the solo exhibition Software for Less [https://www.arebyte.com/software-for-less https://www.arebyte.com/software-for-less]. It's an art project. Headline-generating schticks and existential dread are to be expected.
  • Stupulous 5y ago
    Re: one a day By coincidence, earlier today I had the same idea. I was thinking about how so much of what you encounter in social media is biased towards people who post a lot. In politics, for example, most people are relatively moderate. People who spend more time talking about politics are more likely to hold extreme positions. And people who spend the most time talking about politics are the ones who spend the least time evaluating their and others' positions. So the political social media is dominated by uneducated extremists with hot takes. (I admit this often includes myself, though I do try to put effort into my comments). A possible solution to this would be reducing the amount of allowed posts per time, which would quiet the noise and give high-effort interactions a more level playing field. Of course, that sucks for engagement and interferes with topics like humor that benefit from low-effort contributions. I wonder if there's a client-side way to bias your feed towards people who post less frequently.
• johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
  Interesting idea, but what's stopping someone from creating a second account?
  • axelroze 5y ago
    Inconvenience. With the second account one has to re-friend all the users from the first account. Also it would lead to bad social standing as by re-friending it will be obvious they are breaking the 100 posts per person per life rule. This could even lead to automatic bans by studying the connection structure.
  • pgroves 5y ago
    That's what I want... this would force me to make a different account for every topic I might comment/post on, and they can have their own local networks. If it's a topic that I know a lot about (eg what I do at my day job), it would force a fresh start every few years. This is in contrast to my twitter account, which is such a mess that I don't like posting b/c "most" people who will see it followed me for some other topic.
  • nacs 5y ago
    Nothing and that's exactly what would happen if it became popular. You'd get @kanyewest7, @kanyewest289, @kanyewest3058, etc. Also, the younger you are when you join the network, the fewer posts you get per year. If you join as an 18 year old, you have a little over 1 post per year remaining. If you join at 90, you have 10 posts per year, etc.
    • awb 5y ago
      Presumably they could ban duplicate accounts. But yeah 100 posts per year or 1 per day would be interesting too and wouldn’t render your account as useless when you max out temporarily instead of permanently.
    • gharman 5y ago
      That’s a feature! That 90yo probably has rather more worth sharing than the 18yo.
• abeppu 5y ago
  I love this as an idea, but I suspect as a user, I would use either zero or one posts. I do like the idea that the platform can actively disrupt the "addictive" patterns that develop elsewhere. Other things I've wanted: - Instagram with an ML layer that auto-rejects pics with faces or text. Landscapes, vistas, animals, architecture etc all would be welcome. - high latency Twitter, where no post is viewable until at least 2 weeks after it's published. Bickering threads become impractical. People learn to post stuff that will be worth caring about later. - Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction of posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone quickly learns you can't trust it, but it can still be cute/fun/humorous.
  • Y_Y 5y ago
    What about a low-bandwidth Twitter, where posts load immediately, but at 2e-3 bits per second, so that it takes two weeks to load the whole thing.
    • itisit 5y ago
      Call it "Loris"
    • rzzzt 5y ago
      The combination of your ideas would be Mars rover Twitter: 5-20 minutes propagation delay, 160-800 bps bandwidth using the X-Band High-Gain Antenna - https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/communications/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/communicatio...
  • Beaver117 5y ago
    For the last one: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/
  • 0-_-0 5y ago
    The latency idea actually makes a lot of sense
• Jaxkr 5y ago
  Hugged to death :(
• yellow_lead 5y ago
  The artist has many more gimmick projects like this if anyone else is interested https://bengrosser.com/projects/ https://bengrosser.com/projects/
• deleted 5y ago
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• 01100011 5y ago
  I wonder what sorts of social media we'd see if it wasn't dependent on selling ads. The need to drive engagement and sell things to people tends to limit the types of social media. It's nice to see an experiment like this but I don't know if it will go anywhere. I was thinking the other day of an idea where you take turns with people in your circle to become a 'star' for a period of time(day, days, week, hour, whatever) every so often. During that time you get the limelight, and become the focus of the group. Imagine that, during that tie period, you're encouraged to share more of the boring details of life. Like 5 minutes of every hour or two maybe. Something like this appeals to me because I feel like I don't really connect with my friends on social media the way I would in real life. If I hung out with a friend, I'd experience more of the banalities and have a more complete picture of what their day to day life was actually like. Obviously that's not something you want to get blasted with every day in your feed, and it's not something you want the responsibility to produce every day, but let's say it happens once a year for each person. I just feel like the Facebook/Instagram model promotes a focus on curated highlights of a persons life, which is fine, but doesn't really feel like friendship. I want something that replaces the experience of spending a day with someone. With all the distance between us these days, either from economic migration, the pandemic, or whatever, I really feel like I'm losing touch with my friends. Seeing their highlights on my feed or even communicating with them via text/im/voice just doesn't cut it. How can we provide that sense of connection remotely?
  • crazygringo 5y ago
    > if it wasn't dependent on selling ads. The need to drive engagement Driving engagement isn't a consequence of ads. Netflix tries to aggressively drive engagement too and it doesn't have ads. The reason is simple: the less people use a service, the more likely they are to unsubscribe. The more likely they are to spend their time on a competing service that's doing a better job at driving engagement. Driving engagement is necessary for a business period, no matter how they're funded.
    • leobg 5y ago
      Well, there always has been a substantial difference in the quality of journalism between newspapers (subscription based) and tabloids (sold individually), wasn’t there? What the internet adds, of course, is the constant competitive pressure of other content which will always be flashier, clickbaity, and emotion-triggering than yours. So people will switch faster if you don’t compete on these terms. By contrast, a NYT reader 30 years back never got exposed to much of the competition’s content. So there was no reason for switching. You just stuck with the partner you had chosen, simply because there was no “Tinder”, so to speak.
• deleted 5y ago
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• juliend2 5y ago
  (Site is down) Here's the intro video: https://vimeo.com/587261149 https://vimeo.com/587261149
• soneca 5y ago
  Tangential plug, I launched my own social network without feed, notifications, or even a way to find people there. It flopped everywhere I promoted it, but it is still online since I am on free tier of the host service. If anyone wants to check it: https://www.quidsentio.com https://www.quidsentio.com
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    > ...It flopped everywhere I promoted it... Have you considered lowering the barrier-of-entry from $19? For what is effectively a journaling app, you're driving an incredible amount of margin out of a scenario where your audience has no incentive to pay.
    • soneca 5y ago
      It is a _shared_ journaling app, not many of those around. I believe $19 annually is pretty low already ($1.58/month). And people have to pay only after they have a lot of posts, so anyone can try for free. If people aren’t willing to pay that, it does not make sense to lower the price, but rather give up the idea. Even my comment above mentioning has been downvoted twice. It is pretty clear it’s not something people want.
  • LegitShady 5y ago
    I think you built something that was by design a niche product. Big social networks experience network effects - when a bunch of your friends/family/etc are already on a free social network it makes the barrier/effort low. If you have a social network like you made it requires that groups of people join it together, and that they know the other has it in advance, and that costs money to post beyond a certain number of posts - it's not clear what that they can get from you that they can't get from facebook or instagram already for free. It's not clear what you're offering that's better than those two. The features of 'no feed, no notifications, no way to find people' isn't necessarily a plus to the overwhelming majority of users, and from your page I don't understand what you offer in your service that even someone who journals wants.
    • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• droptablemain 5y ago
  I don't use social media, so I'm probably not the target audience anyway -- but I don't understand this at all. It just seems like an arbitrary and stupid limitation.
  • juliend2 5y ago
    Limitation breeds creativity.
• streamofdigits 5y ago
  Love this. People are craving a different social media experience or at least quite a few articulate and imaginative ones do. But while the failure of the current crop is evident (well not in terms of shareholder value), what should be a "good" replacement is not all that obvious. Even beyond sustainable business model issues, there are so many configurations, platform features, constraints, user incentives etc. There are two general principles I can think of: * Let a thousand flowers bloom (in a fediverse context) and let evolutionary trial-and-error determine what works * Source some insights from the surveillance capitalists as they are the ones who have accumulated the largest empirical factbase about what we should definitely avoid 8-)
• Vaslo 5y ago
  Reddit needs this but for upvotes. Tons of low quality posts starting with a barely funny joke that goes 15 replies deep with almost the same joke but less and less funny. If you only have say 5 upvotes a day, you won’t contribute garbage to a barely useful thread.
  • ok123456 5y ago
    This is how slashdot does moderation.
• JasonFruit 5y ago
  I know, I know, this is more art than a serious social medium (if social media can be serious): but I don't think the concept is as clever as it tries to seem. A project like this, even as an objet d'art, ought to inspire someone to interact with it, to poke at it and see what happens — but would anyone really bother? The limitations would make you think carefully about what you share with the community, but that caution works against building any sort of community, even an ephemeral one. It's just not attractive or engaging, like a painting you'd see in a gallery and walk past after a glance.
• Amorymeltzer 5y ago
  There was a social network "this" some years back, the idea being that you could make just one post a day. I enjoyed it a bit, and IIRC it didn't do too terribly. Predictably, it's now gone.
  • sayhar 5y ago
    I have one of their stickers. It was nice! IIRC it was doing fine, but they ran of out funding and their next round of financing fell through unexpectedly.
• deleted 5y ago
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• deleted 5y ago
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• andreygrehov 5y ago
  In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you. When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe. Jeffrey McDaniel, “The Quiet World”
  • spoonjim 5y ago
    Wonderful
  • ComputerGuru 5y ago
    This was the first comment I favorited on HN, many years ago.
    • zarzavat 5y ago
      It really is the unofficial poem of HN.
  • saagarjha 5y ago
    I always wondered why the poem wasn't one hundred and sixty-seven words long. Perhaps this was all he could save for us.
    • dredmorbius 5y ago
      Or the other 42 were for us to give the ones we love.
      • Frost1x 5y ago
        Sounds like the point would be to keep the intrigued reader wondering what the significance or meaning was by leaving 42 or 'n' words--what is it that was of similar importance the author didn't share with us but used elsewhere, etc. To keep things interesting, you have to leave openings for the imagination to wonder.
• aerosmile 5y ago
  10 years ago, I launched a small modification to a social network I was running at the time - you could only post once per day. The quality of the content went through the roof, but it turned the product into more something like Medium. It had some upsides, but also some downsides. It was amazing to see how such a simple change can dramatically alter the nature of the product.
  • dylan604 5y ago
    This to me is the equivalent to the war on drugs. If you limit someone's ability on your platform, they will find a different platform. Until you squash the need/desire, those with the need/desire will find a solution. Addiction is more complicated.
• deleted 5y ago
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• whitepaint 5y ago
  Why?
  • awb 5y ago
    Constraints can boost creativity
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  The old "X" but with new cool restriction "Y" startup idea. Like Twitter or Snapchat.
• Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  How about the last post being a redirect to new account?
• beckman466 5y ago
  Sounds a bit like the dev got stuck in the childhood fear/fantasy of "what if the more words I speak, the sooner I die"...
• andrewclunn 5y ago
  With no text limit and infinite edits, this could be useful.
• thomasjudge 5y ago
  Gimmick.com
• JosephK 5y ago
  Notable that you can edit comments after posting, which makes the number of posts you can make virtually limitless.
• mikesabat 5y ago
  It strikes me as strange that "Social Networks" assume or differentiate based on "social media". Social networks moved from connecting people to posting to create an inventory where ads could fit. It seems like removing the posts from a social network could be an interesting unlock.
• nicktorba 5y ago
  my biggest problem with this idea is that many people are already hesitant to write/post online. limiting the number of posts they are allowed to make might make their post anxiety even worse. i do like the sentiment behind it though
• superasn 5y ago
  I would prefer if it was like 3 or 5 post a month. Since that way you're never at the end of your line and it would still avoid a lot of the noise which I think this site hopes to achieve.
• b7bfcdeaab33 5y ago
  Why does it require my email, first name, last name, and username to start?
• rekoros 5y ago
  This comes from the same galaxy as https://www.yourworldoftext.com/ https://www.yourworldoftext.com/
• batch12 5y ago
  It would be interesting to have a network with a time bank like BBSs were. You get x time every Y hours to read or comment. It would be like noprocrast but not configurable. I think I may make it...
• anderspitman 5y ago
  This but limited to 100 friends.
• gnull 5y ago
  What's always difficult when trying out projects like this one is that none of my friends are willing to join it with me, so I have to either talk to myself or to strangers. And this weakens the feeling of engagement for me.
• jonnycomputer 5y ago
  I'd rather it be: you post it, and others will see it in 100 days.
• broabprobe 5y ago
  In my mind the best social network would limit people to 1 post per week (or month?). Then no one is creating more noise than anyone else, you get to what's really important, and you can actually catch up with everyone.
• SkyMarshal 5y ago
  Is there no way to view the timeline without creating an account?
  • aero-glide2 5y ago
    Use temp-mail.org
    • SkyMarshal 5y ago
      It's not a privacy issue for me, more a labor issue. I don't want to make the effort to create an account (and verify my email address) without at least checking out the activity on the site.
      • gvv 5y ago
        writing this post probably took more time than doing that to be fair :)
        • SkyMarshal 5y ago
          Haha, probably. I guess I’m selectively lazy then. :)
• aero-glide2 5y ago
  This could work if it had groups based on topics.
• makach 5y ago
  How about I throw in a shitload of money only request is that you allow me to post regardless of that limit? Concept seems flawed.
• zkid18 5y ago
  Hey, nice idea! Not sure if that an expected behavior or not, but after login I get straight into WP panel.
• zorr 5y ago
  An interesting concept. Are there limits to just creating a new account when the 100 posts are used? It could be interesting to have an account with a maximum number of posts, use the last post to announce your next account and thus periodically it forces each of your followers to make a conscious decision on whether or not to remain following you.