[areoform]

As a team member, one request that I do have is that don't make Clubhouse's mistake. Someone once told me that Clubhouse was like a house party, where your behavior reflected on who invited you. So it kept the initial community quality high.

The minute Clubhouse removed that invite-only policy, the community died very quickly and everything was replaced by the worst sludge imaginable.

I think you should keep the invite structure, and increase the number of invites to positive users/communities (as you already do!). And use the graph that naturally forms to inform content moderation.

Social shame is a strong motivator that hasn't been properly deployed by a platform yet (mobs on twitter don't count). What I'm thinking about is that if someone you invited directly does something horrible like, posts slurs to a user, then the inviter should also get a notice that their invitee was a horrible human being. And if this inviter's invites end up being toxic people, then it may be a good idea to prune that branch of the tree.

This structure will limit growth, necessarily, but it will also give you time to solidify a new kind of structure and a new kind of experiment in social media.

I think it is possible to have a high-quality social network that scales.

Also, please for the love of god, I want to get my mom to use the platform, can you make sure that stuff doesn't break containment?

[specialist]

> where your behavior reflected on who invited you

Ages ago, I suggested that slashdot (or successor) adopt a mafia-style system of vouching. So that members police their own.

I invite you to slashdot, so your reputation (karma, whatever) impacts my own. In a way, you become my responsibility. To protect my own rep, I may have to kick you off the system.

If you in turn invite others, they also factor into my rep. Kicking you off would also kick off all your invites. And so on.

[thealchemistdev]

Social solutions to social problems. Perfect!

[marvin]

Not perfect. Brings the problems of social solutions too.

Popularity contests, smooching, people & groups ostracized for status game reasons, other forms of social bullying and so on.

It’s maybe great for a frat, but it will struggle for exploring the fallow lands close to controversial topics.

This happens to be where a lot of the really important stuff happens, the explorations that lead to growth.

You can’t solve this by simple weighting. Most novel true and important things are only realized by a tiny minoroty. And if they happen to be unpopular, forget about it.

If the purpose of your social network is to be actually useful for the world, this is an extremely important feature

[thealchemistdev]

Perfect wasn't the right word to use, but in the age of LLMs, deep fake images, video, and voice; No one should take to heart anything they see on these screens.

Don't take this the wrong way, I have no reason to believe that you're a real person and not a fun contrarian bot. And you to myself as well. :)

In either case, our wetware isn't suited for social interactions at this scale. I think small, invite only, social rings are much better than what we have now. Yeah, people are going to play silly games, but we won't see a solution to that for a very long time.

As for the people who are eager to explore the edges of controversial ideas; they should be aware of how to discern a group that values progression through challenge over one that demands consensus, and steer clear of the latter.

And to your final point about being useful to the world, it would be better to strive to build a system useful to just your loved ones and local community. Plenty of people exhaust themselves over words on a screen from fake people on the other side of the planet. We have enough ancient and contemporary text from philosophers and religious leaders to remind us that people, specifically the people physically around us, matter more than anything. But of course, there's no money to be made with IT cookbooks, so we don't talk about them.