[EdgeExplorer]

The problem with social media is that it encourages influencers broadcasting to followers over friends mutually interacting and winning over contributing (Great post here about ordinary / competitive conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43080290)

So fix these problems.

1. No followers. Mutual connections only. Put a strict limit of 1000 connections in place to enforce this. No one actually has a mutual connection with more than 1000 people. This only hurts people trying to gain an audience. Heck, make it so if you haven't read someone else's posts in a year, they stop seeing yours. Do whatever it takes to prevent one-to-many connections.

2. No public content. No one wants the whole world to read their conversations with their friends. The only reason you would want that is if you want to build an audience.

3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

4. No newsfeed. Don't reward people for never shutting up. Maybe a chronological list of *friends* by most recent update and click into that to see all their updates.

5. No algorithm. Give people tools to find what they want to see; don't try to decide for them.

6. No re-post, no share, no forward, etc. Content lives in one place only, the account of the person who posted it, and it is only visible to who they said it should be visible to.

[kedean]

>3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

I agree with most of these, but I'm iffy on this one. "No one tracks a score with their friends" is not really true, it makes people feel good to see encouragement and feedback from their friends. There's no reason that encouragement has to be restricted to text comments and messages. Without feedback, you're essentially just screaming into the void knowing someone could be listening.

If the things I'm posting could get feedback but don't, that tells me that the things I'm saying aren't really hitting with any of my friends. That's a valuable thing to know, whether or not you choose to act on it.

Facebook in the early years was for the most part exactly like what you are suggesting, but with likes, and I at least remember it being a pretty enjoyable place for a few years there (I joined at the very end of 2006).

[EdgeExplorer]

"Hitting" with any of your friends is precisely the type of interaction I want to suppress. The way you know if what you say to your friends in real life is interesting to them is if they engage with it. If your feedback mechanism is anything other than the other side of a mutually interesting conversation, you probably aren't having ordinary conversation with friends. What real life feedback mechanisms most closely resembles likes? Applause. Who applauds? An audience.

Friends *can* give non-verbal cues in real life that they are interested (nodding, laughing, etc.), but likes are very much not like those non-verbal cues. Non-verbal cues only work in a very small group. There is no non-verbal cue that works to show interest in the context of "any of your friends" in real life. Emoji reactions in the context of a back-and-forth chat could work as non-verbal cues, but again, those are very different from drive-by likes with no additional engagement.

In this hypothetical social network, if you post something and no one responds to it or engages with it in any way verbally, you would be encouraged to do the same thing you would do in real life if you kept trying to talk about something in a group of friends and no one engaged with it verbally... find something else to talk about (or find a different group for that topic).

The goal is very much to mirror the experience of talking to your friends, but facilitated in a way that makes it more asynchronous and scalable (within the limit of your actual real life connections).

There are a lot of people in my life I would love to stay better connected with, but maintaining a direct chat can be difficult (what to say) and it doesn't always make sense to put people in group chats because the group might only make sense to me (people I used to work with that I actually like, for example). If I could post about what's going on in my life, what I'm working on, what I'm into right now, etc. and have my real-life friends opt-in to an actual conversation about that... well then it's much easier to stay in touch. I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing. If we aren't mutually talking to each other, we aren't engaging as friends no matter how much they may like it. They're just my audience if they have nothing to say back.

Sorry I didn't have time to make this shorter. My goal isn't to convince anyone of anything, just to share a perspective that might be interesting to you, OP or anyone else building something "social". You might sum it all up with the question: What if social media tried to be as much like real life friendship and as little like "influencing" as possible?

[aaronbaugher]

> I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing.

I'm right there with you, but I know a lot of people who very much do want to know how many of their friends "like" their selfies and other posts, and how that compares to how many "likes" their friends are getting. I think they're more common on social media than we are.

I'd be glad to use the system you describe; I just wonder if it would ever draw more than a niche audience without those features that many people seem to find essential to whatever they're getting out of the experience.

[squigz]

> I'm right there with you, but I know a lot of people who very much do want to know how many of their friends "like" their selfies and other posts, and how that compares to how many "likes" their friends are getting. I think they're more common on social media than we are.

Just to be clear about something though: this sort of person existed long before social media, would still exist without social media, and will continue to exist long after the current evolutions of social media

[satvikpendem]

People are already moving towards the group chat model over the town square model, I read some articles on this recently that I can't find right now but it talks about the growth of Discord and the gradual decline of Facebook and Instagram. So I think people are already getting tired of such a like system.

[stickfigure]

I'll be honest, it sounds like you're trying to control my relationships with my friends and it sounds totally toxic.

I like the 1000 mutual connections only limit - that seems enough to get the job done. But "likes" are the online equivalent of the little "uh huh" sounds and head nods we make during real-life conversations to make the speaker feel heard and understood. This is normal healthy human interaction.

[EdgeExplorer]

My proposition is that likes are very different from the non-verbal responses you describe.

Non-verbal responses can only happen in 1) an existing conversation with 2) a small group.

Likes often happen 1) in place of conversation and 2) within a large group.

A like could be given drive-by by any of your 1000 connections at any with no other engagement. That is nothing like "uh huh" and head nods. In fact, if someone outside your small group conversation interjects an "uh huh" randomly while walking past, it's a bit rude.

[aaronbaugher]

Yeah, if you don't give people some way to "like" things, you'll just get lots of comments that are nothing but heart emojis and such. It'd be like when AOL users discovered Usenet and there were lots of "Me too!" posts because they wanted to agree but didn't have anything to add.

[BeFlatXIII]

As much as I love shilling IRC, Discord & Zulip have the right ideas with emoji reactions. It allows one to signal acknowledgement without spamming the chat. Frankly, Discord's recent decision to make reactions trigger push notifications was terrible.

[joshka]

> I agree with most of these, but I'm iffy on this one. "No one tracks a score with their friends" is not really true, it makes people feel good to see encouragement and feedback from their friends. There's no reason that encouragement has to be restricted to text comments and messages. Without feedback, you're essentially just screaming into the void knowing someone could be listening.

Good :D Let's revalue meaningful nuanced interactions over meaningless single bit signals. Even an emoji response rather than a like makes for better connection.

[apimade]

It’ll end up being number of comments. Which is great, because that’s the purpose of a social network; socializing.

[RandomBacon]

> Which is great

Idk, that sounds horrible to me.

I'd rather not waste time reading through a deluge of low-quality comments, instead of quickly reading a few high-quality comments.

[netsharc]

The comments will be full of GIFs of hearts...

Without comments, likes, feeds, OP should buy geocities.com instead of friendster.com .. Part of me feels that would be a better site to resurrect.

[BeFlatXIII]

#4 & 5 finally address the slow poster problem. While chronological by friend does put those who never shut up first, it also means they get exactly one (1) entry in the feed.

[mckirk]

I concur mostly, with one exception: I truly enjoyed the 'events' feed in Facebook, to be able to see what was happening and which concerts etc friends of mine were interested in that I could potentially join in on, so I would exclude that from the 'no public content' rule.

[tonyneufeldblog]

I like the sound of this. However, it seems dangerously close to living life without social media at all. What would make this a better experience than just having someone's phone number or adding them to a group chat?

[EdgeExplorer]

What do I say to my cousin that I see a few times a year but would like to maintain a connection with? Do I just randomly send them pictures of my food and posts about what I've been up to? Do I send an occasional random banality like "how's the weather"? Neither of these seem like good strategies.

But if I could see the occasional (low frequency) update on things in their life or interesting to them... I could maybe see an opportunity to reach out for a real conversation about something of mutual interest.

Imagine you're suddenly teleported to a party with a hundred people you know and like but aren't super close to. How do you join a conversation? I mean, if it was people you were really close to, you'd just go up and talk to someone. That's group chat / SMS. But if it's more aquaintence level... one of two things probably happens: You overhear something that you're interested in and connect on that, or you randomly drop in various conversations at a surface level until something clicks.

That's what I'm after. Conversation that naturally flows from a spark. You don't need that with your closest friends, but you don't need a social network to keep up with your closest friends either. I imagine social networking as the tool to provide ongoing sparks for real direct interactive conversations on an occasional but ongoing basis with people you aren't close enough to to just call/text.

[GuinansEyebrows]

> What do I say to my cousin that I see a few times a year but would like to maintain a connection with? Do I just randomly send them pictures of my food and posts about what I've been up to? Do I send an occasional random banality like "how's the weather"? Neither of these seem like good strategies.

"hey cousin, it's been a while! i was just thinking of you the other day, how've you been? what's new? miss you, hope to talk to you soon!"

[grvdrm]

People interacted with their cousins a few times per year prior to the internet and social media. So, it’s not good/bad strategy but instead can I do this if I’d like to?

Yes. You can. I still do many of these low frequency hellos/whatever they are via texts and sometimes calls. No from seeing something in social but instead from elsewhere. Example: look through old photos!

But I like the spark idea too.

[chairmansteve]

You are correct. But maybe ypu have described Whatsapp?

[hodder]

I'm honestly confused at what's left after stripping all of this out that isn't basically just texting your buddies?

[EdgeExplorer]

Yes, but with better UX.

[netsharc]

What's left is to resurrect the correct site: geocities.com

[brailsafe]

> No one actually has a mutual connection with more than 1000 people

Maybe it's a bit pedantic, but surely this is less likely to be true with no other qualifications like what counts as a mutual connection.

All it would take is 50 people that I'm acquainted with who also know 20 people I've never met, which seem like very plausible numbers.

Now, whether I would want to establish any kind of connection with those people on the basis we both know someone in common is a different question

[satvikpendem]

That's what they mean, those 50 acquaintances are your mutual connection, not those 20 each you've never met.

[brailsafe]

True, my bad. I guess I was thinking of it though in the context of a recommendation to connect based on a mutual connection, whereby you could easily come up with a list of 1000 people who I don't know but that one of my friends does, since the context was a social media platform and that's a common feature

[gasull]

I would add:

7. No links.

Otherwise it will become an activist platform where the blues and the reds fight for clicks.

[android521]

You would have a ghost town nobody uses then

[RandomBacon]

Re. #1-3: meh

Re. #4/5: I want a chronological feed of my friends' posts, no algorithm. If I feel my friend is posting too much garbage, then I want to be able to "unfollow" them but still be "friends". I want to see what's going on in my friends' lives, not read or see politics/animals/etc.

Re. #6: STRONG AGREEMENT.