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That seems like it presumes that your IRL friends have good taste/similar interests though. The reason people follow big accounts is because the big accounts of

That seems like it presumes that your IRL friends have good taste/similar interests though. The reason people follow big accounts is because the big accounts often have some specific niche of thing they post in that's curated in a way that resonates with people. Most of my IRL friends maybe only share 1-2 major interests with me. My friend who may repost interesting board game news would also share things about kayaking or crypto investing that I don't care about. If my IRL friends run into something they think I'd be interested in, they'll just send it to me directly. What's the value in getting the combined firehose of all their reading?

prox 3y ago
I think there should be two tiers in any account, the private space (private spaces where you talk to friendgroups) and a public space where you have a rather anonymous nickname and which isn’t directly connected to your private space. Usually it’s one or the other and you need multiple accounts (say on Instagram for example) It feels like businesses figured out accounts and then moved on, while I think there is still room for so much growth and customization.
- noirbot 3y ago
  Aren't those tiers just functionally accomplished by other technologies better suited? For instance, a Slack/Discord/Matrix with themed channels for people to talk and share relevant stuff about some hobby or topic for sharing among a group of friends, and then a public Twitter/Instagram/Tumblr that your friends may or may not follow and may be anonymous?
- hot_gril 3y ago
  It works kinda like Discord, you have some fake name handle, but IRL friends know what your handle is.
hot_gril 3y ago
It does mostly presume that you have things in common with your friends. At least it's not everything they read, only what they repost. Also, if something was reposted from 8 hops away by someone you don't know, you still see the OP's handle and can follow it. The only value this brings is that it's much easier to hit "repost" on things you like than it is to go send links to everyone. People do this already, it's just awkward, and friends get annoyed from chat notification spam.
- noirbot 3y ago
  The question is what percentage of my friends have more than 50% of my interests? I read plenty of interesting stuff on HN that isn't interesting to a lot of my non-programmer friends. So I post it in the "software-dev" channel of my dev friends' Discord. I don't post it in the server I share with the folks I play video games with, or my friends I cook food with. Channels of info are only as valuable as the signal/noise ratio is. That's the whole point of RSS in some ways. You follow a lot of specific curated news sources that may be low-volume but high relevancy. "All the stuff my friends enjoy enough to repost" is likely below 50% relevant to me, just because I have a lot of friends who do a lot of stuff that I don't also care about, or don't care about that much.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    I was imagining enough volume that 50% would actually be pretty good. Like, I only click on 5% of top HN articles on a good day.
    - noirbot 3y ago
      I kinda doubt my friends read enough good stuff to have 50% of their stuff be more than 1-2 things per day, which is pretty bad volume. What percentage of what you read would you re-share in an average day? You also have to remember that some of that overlap of stuff is stuff you also probably got from the same place they did. If my friend and I both read HN, me resharing something from the homepage of HN has a low chance of being something they haven't already seen too. My opinion is mostly based on the number of slack and discord channels in servers with my friends that I have to have muted because they have plenty of chatter about articles I don't care about. Filtering by topic is much more valuable than filtering by which human shared it most of the time.

prox 3y ago

I think there should be two tiers in any account, the private space (private spaces where you talk to friendgroups) and a public space where you have a rather anonymous nickname and which isn’t directly connected to your private space. Usually it’s one or the other and you need multiple accounts (say on Instagram for example) It feels like businesses figured out accounts and then moved on, while I think there is still room for so much growth and customization.

noirbot 3y ago
Aren't those tiers just functionally accomplished by other technologies better suited? For instance, a Slack/Discord/Matrix with themed channels for people to talk and share relevant stuff about some hobby or topic for sharing among a group of friends, and then a public Twitter/Instagram/Tumblr that your friends may or may not follow and may be anonymous?
hot_gril 3y ago
It works kinda like Discord, you have some fake name handle, but IRL friends know what your handle is.

hot_gril 3y ago

It does mostly presume that you have things in common with your friends. At least it's not everything they read, only what they repost. Also, if something was reposted from 8 hops away by someone you don't know, you still see the OP's handle and can follow it. The only value this brings is that it's much easier to hit "repost" on things you like than it is to go send links to everyone. People do this already, it's just awkward, and friends get annoyed from chat notification spam.

noirbot 3y ago
The question is what percentage of my friends have more than 50% of my interests? I read plenty of interesting stuff on HN that isn't interesting to a lot of my non-programmer friends. So I post it in the "software-dev" channel of my dev friends' Discord. I don't post it in the server I share with the folks I play video games with, or my friends I cook food with. Channels of info are only as valuable as the signal/noise ratio is. That's the whole point of RSS in some ways. You follow a lot of specific curated news sources that may be low-volume but high relevancy. "All the stuff my friends enjoy enough to repost" is likely below 50% relevant to me, just because I have a lot of friends who do a lot of stuff that I don't also care about, or don't care about that much.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  I was imagining enough volume that 50% would actually be pretty good. Like, I only click on 5% of top HN articles on a good day.
  - noirbot 3y ago
    I kinda doubt my friends read enough good stuff to have 50% of their stuff be more than 1-2 things per day, which is pretty bad volume. What percentage of what you read would you re-share in an average day? You also have to remember that some of that overlap of stuff is stuff you also probably got from the same place they did. If my friend and I both read HN, me resharing something from the homepage of HN has a low chance of being something they haven't already seen too. My opinion is mostly based on the number of slack and discord channels in servers with my friends that I have to have muted because they have plenty of chatter about articles I don't care about. Filtering by topic is much more valuable than filtering by which human shared it most of the time.