I think what would really be great is a social media site that doesn't offer direct image or video hosting. A bit like how reddit used to be. You just have link aggregation, voting, and comments. That's it. Maybe in a nice, clean, minimal UI as well. This would lend itself to tech folk I think. If only it existed.
Great idea. To add: I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean. Also maybe it would be great to have a voting system where one could downvote as well! But only after a certain number of upvotes I think.
Maybe a really unintuitive system for ranking too? Like make it unclear why some posts are ranked higher than others, and why some are somehow greyed out even though there isn't an obvious way to downvote or report content. Also make it so you have to manually minimize the top reply in order to see the second most popular topline reply because there should be absolutely no limit to seeing the amount of subreplies.
The thing that gets me about the unintuitive system for ranking is that you have zero idea how long something will be on the front page. It could be 3 hours old, #4 on the page, with a few hundred upvotes and more points than almost all of the votes on the front page, and then just disappear an hour later.
And once something drops off the front page, it gets seen by almost no one. I keep trying to stop myself from spending too much time on comments (editing them for clarity and grammar, finding sources that people can follow instead of just relying on my claims, rereading the person I'm responding to in order to make sure I actually got what they were saying), because it's easy to spend 30 minutes trying to make a solid comment only to find out that the whole discussion has now disappeared and no one is likely going to read it.
I have no interest in what quantity of people end up reading my comments. What difference does it make to me if it’s a popular thread or an unpopular one?
Zero notifications, if such a thing existed, would help an online community stay constructive since the default behavior would be to forget conversations. This would help folks get some distance and perspective rather than being constantly reminded that they have an argument to win.
Another nice thing about zero notifications in our new social media app is that the development effort for that feature is very low.
> I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean.
My idea was to give people IP-like addresses like the early internet. And start off (until we find something better) with the ol’ Class A, B, and C networks of sizes roughly 16M, 64k, and 256 respectively.
The value I think is in having groups as small as 256 and each group has an admin/moderator. Why are we ‘automating’ people out of a job in the tech space when we could be ‘automating’ them into one.
Keep in mind, the existing IP networks stay. This is just a logical layer.
There are better ways to do it but I think this is an interesting start. There’s even a planned obsolescence built in as the world has more people than the 4 billion or so that a 32 bit address space gives.
Which to me is perfect. A chance to try some new things but a built in expiration date so nothing becomes too entrenched.
Actually it could lend itself to a great business model as well — hackers both start startups, and often are looking for jobs at startups. You could use it for lead generation for startup founders to join your accelerator (once that concept exists), and an added benefit to founders would be access to hiring from the pool of hackers on the site. Win/win.
Sounds like bit of a schlep though. Would need to draw an audience e.g. by producing a ton of your own content early on. Lots of legal processes involved with operating an accelerator. Probably not worth it.
We have to be careful to not simply crowd-source the moderation either. Keeping a crowd-moderated social media site from devolving is a dang hard task.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that most social media companies have slowly started to discourage outbound links.
On reddit a surprising number of subs no longer allow you to just submit links, and a growing number require review before posting external content.
Even Twitter (before Musk) was clearly deprioritizing external links.
This is a bit troubling because it further leads to the "dead internet" where it gets harder and harder for people making interesting content independent of major sites to get visibility.
I think of the main reasons HN remains relatively high quality is its primary function is still aggregating pointers to elsewhere.
I'd thought Reddit subs prohibited links because it attracts spam and marketing disguised as organic recommendations. For Twitter, they promote organic content "for free" but want to make the inorganic stuff pay money for promotion.
Discord is close the original poster's idea for a social network, replace "social circle" with "Discord server" and lower the member limit for a server. Back to your topic, a semi-private Discord server/social circle moderator can ban anyone posting spam links so its not a huge problem there.
This always leads to a hivemind. Because even if you're supposed to use it for rewarding good posts, what the horde ends up doing is using downvotes as a disagree button. Especially if the admins/moderators have authoritarian powers to hide content on top of the users' individual powers or rate limit posting by those with differing views. Because everyone's bias sneaks in - no one is exempt from this - and it's very hard to see your own biases if you don't deliberately venture out of your filter bubble regularly. The best tool I've found for this so far (and I maintain a search) is https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news It gets trickier when one side completely ignores a story, which both do.
