I don’t want to be limited to „meaningful connections!“ I stay in close contact with those who are dear to me outside of social media. I want to stay connected to some random coworker I enjoyed working with in 2011, because I enjoy watching them from a distance, getting married, settling down, that kind of stuff, and occasionally comment on these things.
This used to be a strength of social media before algorithms came in and decided that because I am not liking every post of that person it follows that I am not interested.
By pflenker 2 hours ago
I wonder if that voyeuristic use case is good for people/society. People used to naturally fade from each other's lives, maybe you saw each other in the street if you stayed in the same area, you could ask them about their life in person. If you were closer friends, they'd show you the photos of their wedding or vacation when you visited for dinner or hung out.
Even in the early version, these life updates became a competition of who has the fancier wedding pics, who went to a trendy vacation spot this year etc., leading to an idealized picture of how the life of everyone else is going.
It's a bandaid on the lifestyle of having to move cities all the time and cutting connections. Seeing their life updates doesn't really keep the connection alive, it's an illusion.
By bonoboTP an hour ago
I disagree that being interested in the life updates of someone as being equivalent to a voyeur.
There are people who fade out of one’s lives for various reasons, but it doesn’t mean that the relationship has to end at that. There are many schoolmates, coworkers, etc. who I wish l I had some idea where they were now, which I don’t have right now because of my general avoidance of social media.
This is just a way of keeping on the pulse and generating common context if said pair were to meet again, instead of simply awkwardly smiling and trying to end a conversation as soon as possible.
By supriyo-biswas 12 minutes ago
I think modern social media is a huge problem but don’t see we can fix it without regulation. It’s clear that all the current incentives point companies towards engagement and rage bait and away from anything actually “social”, and I think it’s unlikely that any new social network that tries to fix these issues would achieve widespread usage.
Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would that legislation look like? My main idea is to simply outlaw ML-based recommendation algorithms, but obviously that is not as simple as it sounds and is mostly based on looking fondly on the earlier days of social media, when I felt like it was making my life better instead of worse.
By bkettle 5 hours ago
I think banning algorithm based feeds is a start
Getting rid of any non personal accounts also. So no companies, brands, or meme accounts, and accounts that exist for non personal content only.
By tayo42 2 hours ago
Never thought about it but banning non personal accounts sounds like a good start. I doubt such social media would gain any meaningful popularity though.
By asukachikaru an hour ago
Yes. We should only allow social media in a printed format.
By kovezd 3 hours ago
I'd go further and stipulate spoken word only. Or shouted in town squares by someone wearing a tricorn hat.
By klondike_klive 4 minutes ago
It’s a tricky one, but something that I repeatedly come back to is that publishers are regulated, but social media is a free for all. A newspaper can’t just make up something without consequences (in the UK), for example they may be sued for libel.
Social media companies, by contrast, can publish posts from their anonymised users that contain almost anything, and it is permitted. It can be racism. It can state that £300M a week could be spent on the NHS if only the UK would leave the EU. And those posts can be sent to millions of people without regard to truth or the damage they can do.
The classic response to this is “well, you can’t expect us to police such a large amount of content, it’s impractical” - a fair response - but then there’s a bit of sleight of hand from Meta et al: they conclude that they should therefore be allowed to broadcast anything a user shares. But an alternative conclusion is _well, then perhaps you shouldn’t be broadcasting inflammatory nonsense from any person/bot who posts_ and you have to find a new operating model.
It’s tricky because free speech is important, but I think we’ve seen enough times how dangerous, divisive, and destructive social media is. If there’s no way to prevent people and states from abusing it, then it probably shouldn’t exist. When the retrospective is written on the fall of America and the west, social media will be one of the key explanatory factors, along with hypercapitalism.
By rhubarbtree 2 hours ago
The closest platform that is a somewhat known group of people coming together in a semi-private space seems to be Discord.
You can have as large or as small a community you want, you can have known people, unknown people.
Mastodon comes close as well, but the effort to start a discord community is so much smaller compared to running a Mastodon instance.
By mfru 2 hours ago
Wouldn't this also extend to Matrix/Mumble/XMPP/TeamSpeak then?
By dhalucario an hour ago
See the aforementioned ease of adoption.
By jahsome an hour ago
The author invented and then dashed against the rocks a few existing fediverse platforms in the course of a couple paragraphs.
These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from venturing outside the walls.
Friendica is one of several fediverse platforms the author basically describes. You can even self-host an instance for yourself and friends/family.
And you may say:
> I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.
Perfect. IMO, the minuscule friction to enter is the benefit. The walled gardens exist and hold people in such high numbers exactly because they've reduced the friction to enter and increased it to leave. The definition of a trap, yes?
By 3RTB297 2 hours ago
Replacing the current social media giants is incredibly hard because of network effects and lock-in. Could we instead implement most of the OP's ideas with a client for an existing social media site that filters out all the crap?
By foreigner 30 minutes ago
People are basically looking for a standalone Facebook groups that's not owned by a corporation. Or Twitter for small groups but not what mastodon has become. I think honourably some people have tried and many continue to build niche products like micro.blog. Personally I just want a service that is not commercially owned, for profit or by a US corporation. My own attempts/ambitions get in the way of being able to achieve it, so I started working on something that slowly solved my own problems e.g news feed aggregation, videos without shorts or the algorithm, chat with AI based on a model from Qatar. Soon I'll add posting but only because I feel like I need some sort of personalised way to bookmark and share my thoughts within it being about gaining attention or validation from a world of likes and retweets.
There are no good answers, because the reality is the next medium is probably quite different from the last. But yea personalised small group chat, feed, news makes sense.
By asim 4 hours ago
Well intentioned, but never going to work. Social networks will always create financial incentives that have to be contended with. No network that can connect to “close” people, will always result in some nodes on the graph that connect to a “large portion of people”.
Always. This broadcast ability is then a path to financial renumeration, which will see the rise of copy cats and another arms race to gather attention from people on the network.
Fundamentally, information / clout / something is resistant to being distributed equitably on information networks, especially online networks.
By intended 3 hours ago
A lot of his ideas remind me of the BeReal app, it limits posts per day and is geared toward 'friends in real life' and with just a few friends on it I've stayed engaged. But it's sparse for me and can be a ghost town much of the time, but that may be just because my friend group isn't using it much. There needs to be sufficient network effect to maintain and grow it's reach as a network, which may be antithetical to its founding principles.
By danboarder 3 hours ago
That's been my experience with BeReal as well. I seldom see posts from people I'm close with, and so I post less as well, and presumably that contributes to a similar feeling for other friends of mine.
In fact, these days, I only post in it so that I can record the moment, to add it to the record of fotos which are convenient and fun to look back through.
By WastedCucumber 2 hours ago
I liked BeReal while it was still just post 1 picture a day. Now you have 'your brands' there, they try to increase 'engagement' by trying to get people use the app more... I was there when it happened on Facebook, I was there when it started on Instagram – not again, thx.
What are people using now instead of Facebook (for broastcast and interaction with friends/family)?
Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.
By hboon 5 hours ago
WhatsApp and Signal are considered "social media" technically, though plenty of people are still on FB telling the world about their trips and what they ate for breakfast.
I'm always surprised at how HN folks are either unable or unwilling to admit that the fediverse exists beyond Bluesky or Mastodon. I far prefer lemmy to reddit, and Friendica is essentially that the author is describing. This stuff exists already, and it's the perverse incentives of social media such as walled gardens and a critical mass of people that are what keep them alive.
By 3RTB297 2 hours ago
Nothing. I see them when I see them. If there’s something urgent we call each other or send an SMS. There’s no need for daily, weekly or even monthly updates. This makes meeting and talking in person always interesting because there’s so much to sync that we’ve all had time to digest beforehand.
In the beginning when I left Facebook over ten years ago it felt alienating. Then it felt too quiet. Then whenever I met people, months apart or even years for distant family, I realised it didn’t matter. We connected like it had been days since our last meeting. Eventually more and more of them have also quit social networks entirely, though most use group chats for their immediate family — parents and kids to orchestrate activities etc.
By simianparrot 3 hours ago
I think culture is more private again. In the early social media phase, people very nonchalantly posted all their random thoughts and drinking pics, vagueposting publicly about a breakup etc. People now feel more surveilled, and feel that the public internet is icky. HR sees all etc. It's similar to how people changed their behaviors in response to ubiquitous phone cameras.
It feels paradoxical to say that, but I think it's true both that social media is bigger than ever in terms of flurry and activity, and that normal people participate less (outside scrolling the feed passively). A few people are semi-professionalizing in it now, influencers with sponsorships, local celebrities and trendsetters etc., while normal people's normal life updates are dwindling. The Pareto split is sharper.
By bonoboTP an hour ago
I think that's definitely a part of it. I also think the signal to noise ratio has simply gotten so low that it's started taking up too much energy for most people, so the value is lost. There will always be "feed junkies", I suspect, but they're a dwindling minority.
By simianparrot 12 minutes ago
That's all I use now for REAL social media. My family is in one Signal chat, and my in-laws in a other one. All the social media I need. School groups are unfortunately on Facebook Messenger groups.
By aleken 4 hours ago
Whatsapp updates, you can see the updates of your contacts, then you can react or send them a message
By kelvinjps 4 hours ago
Ah. Kind of "decentralized" in a sense. Thanks.
By hboon 4 hours ago
I also dream for this. Personally I would remove likes/reactions though. As we've seen with Instagram it's too easy to chase that dopamine rush/compare number of likes. Comments are enough in my opinion.
By qweiopqweiop 2 hours ago
Likes/reactions should be hidden to everyone else except the poster, and not used for any kind of ranking.
And comments should be disabled by default. Users should have to take the extra step to enable comments ("I would like feedback") and if they're off by default, it won't feel strange or negative to the viewer.
By prisenco 2 hours ago
> I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right. Any more than that and you're a collector, and not using the platform to foster connection.
Path[1] did that, but with a cap of 50, and then 150 (based on the Dunbar number of meaningful human connections one can retain). They had a crazy growth period but eventually went kaput.
I'm not sure vc funding and ads are compatible with a slow, quiet and healthy social network.
By prisenco 2 hours ago
The problem is whenever wise people sit out of the popular platforms like today’s social media, society continues most of its speech and politics on those big popular fast social media platforms. So we are all still exposed to its risks.
By SilverElfin 6 hours ago
“blog as a social network” was/is pretty much Tumblr. Most of the content was structured as posts and updates on your personal page. You didn’t even need to engage with the social part.
It’s hard to explain the difference between it and Twitter if you never used it, but the platform itself creates very different posting ideologies.
By pram 5 hours ago
Now I have been using Whatsapp as my only "social media app" basically as stated in another comment: Whatsapp updates, you can see the updates of your contacts, then you can react or send them a message.
And these updates only contain the people who you have as a contact and they have you as a contact, so you only receive the updates of the people you care about and if there is someone you don't want to see their updates you can turn off updates for them.
I hope meta doesn't ruin this feature.
It's Also available in signal I think
By kelvinjps 4 hours ago
back in 2009 in Spain we had what the author describes in Tuenti (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuenti).
at first it was invite only and by default people's profiles were private, you'd need to be friends to see their activity and pictures.
your feed was just your friends statuses and new pictures in chronological order.
later on it got some games and a realtime chat but it ended up dying because of newer social networks.
it was great to keep your actual friends and family connected.
By dahrkael 2 hours ago
In Hungary, we had iWiW, one of the earliest "social media" sites. (=international who is who - though it never went really international, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWiW, started as WiW in 2002).
It was also invite based and it was exciting to get an invite back then. It was more like a phone book, it had detailed profiles where you could specify your favorite things, introduce yourself, upload a few pictures etc. It didn't have a newsfeed. Later they would introduce some kind of notification when someone uploaded new pics. But it was mainly "poll-based", i.e. you'd go to specific profiles to see if they uploaded anything new.
This was a significant break from the pseudonymous forum and chat culture (A/S/L?), and blended your real life with the previously totally separate online world for the first time. Now you could look up classmates, see who viewed your profile, of course it drove a lot of teen drama as you'd expect. It was a more public companion to the nascent MSN Messenger culture (which replaced the SMS-based more private teen comms culture, which replaced the family-landline-phone-based gossip culture and of course IRL-based one, feels weird to have lived through all those transitions - we didn't even have a family landline phone in the early 90s and would use phone booths to call family members in other cities).
The mainstream dominance of iWiW in Hungary was actually quite short-lived (~2004-2009), though it feels longer in my memory, there was so much happening, so much new stuff popping up. Note also that iWiW got bought by the local subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom already in 2006. So it was quite obvious that there's commercial value in such sites.
Initially Facebook was also more profile-focused, where the main activity was looking up profiles, checking their friends, reading bios, looking at galleries etc. (where you actually clicked links to explore, instead of being fed a feed and just scrolling), and the newsfeed-focus only got introduced later.
Nowadays, Facebook is mostly a public agora in Hungary, the platform for politicians and pundits and social critique etc (instead of Twitter like in other countries). I think the eager culture to post updates for real friends has dwindled, people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates. Real personal "social media" is mostly in private Whatsapp groups I think.
By bonoboTP 2 hours ago
Bluesky and Mastodon are exactly this IMO. No algorithm, just following people.
By articsputnik an hour ago
I’ve been dreaming of building this.
I miss chronological feeds the most.
By prisenco 5 hours ago
I think something like a Whatsapp that recommends contacts that can be close is good enough. Something like friends of friends recommendations. But no more.
By i-chuks 2 hours ago
Should internet based chat platforms develop a common protocol (like SMS for mobile networks) so that people don't all need to use the same app (Whatsapp and the like) to be able to have 1:1 or group chats?
(Before someone says I have rediscoered email -- I know email exists for a similar reason but not for instant messaging for a smartphone weilding generation)
By albert_e 5 hours ago
What you've re-invented is XMPP.
The original Facebook Messenger and Google Talk both used XMPP, it has support for encryption and push notifications.... For a brief period, you could actually chat across ecosystems.
And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
We do have matrix now, but it's still largely irrelevant, and doesn't really feel fully baked yet.
At this point, all the major companies have a huge vested interest in keeping things closed.
Without blue bubble lock-in, I, and quite a few people I know, would ditch increasingly mediocre iPhones for Android, so apple has to keep building iMessage exclusive features and has to avoid ever releasing an iMessage android app (most recently, Apple Invites, which integrates with iMessage cleanly and is impossible for third-party apps to integrate so neatly).
I expect Apple to continue to leverage "Apple Intelligence" as a feature that only integrates well with iMessage so that they can continue to lock users in, and keep the conversation as far away from open chat protocols as they can.
In the AI age, unencrypted textual conversations are a new source of training data, so Instagram, Twitter, and Google want to keep their own messaging systems to themselves.
By TheDong 4 hours ago
> And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
I think this is more accurately
> And it was killed, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
Not to say there were not problems with XMPP or Matrix, "innovation" always feels slow because its federated, committee, opensource, etc.
... Really though, if you've got a whitepaper from 2020 about "building a protocol", and 6 years later you've got exactly 0 users actually using the protocol, it's maybe not even worth linking.
Writing a vague hand-wavy paper that says "We need a distributed graph, we'll use blockchain, there are IDs" is very easy.
Getting enough users that people can talk to each other, that's hard, and real usable applications help with that, while whitepapers do not.
By TheDong 4 hours ago
I also wish there will be a lot of diverse social media for specific interest groups. I am fine that not many people would use them. I would actually prefer that because I can at least expect people with genuine interest on the topic. Discord in this regard is pretty close to this direction I think.
tl;dr: people have a huge diversity of preferences for social media, we need to rearchitect social networks to allow them to express those preferences while still connecting with each other, I think atproto enables this and is where I'm betting on.
By jpereira an hour ago
What he describes existed and didn’t scale comparing to modern social media. It was called LiveJournal.
By alamzin 4 hours ago
And MySpace and GeoCities.
By bonoboTP an hour ago
At the exact same time that Instagram launched, another platform that is also almost exactly what this post describes also launched: Path - and it's long dead, too. The author's views represent such a tiny minority that is not worth the required effort to build and maintain a platform for. Let's not forget network effects. You might love this utopian platform, if it were to exist, but good luck convincing everyone you care about to move over with you. You may as well then just use a journaling app if you're talking to yourself.
The largest social platforms right now are hardly showing any signs of slowdowns. The market signal is clear: this is what most people want and are fine with.
Perhaps a journaling-focused platform where social is a second-class aspect might succeed. You're documenting things for yourself anyway and if friends happen to see them and engage with them, that's an added bonus. Network effects would not matter here. In fact, this is how I used Path back in the day. I intentionally kept no friends on it and started using it like a journal, recording my thoughts, adding photos and checkins.
By m4houk 3 hours ago
It exists: Whatsapp
Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.
By giveita 5 hours ago
It's still possible to host a phpbb as well. Easier than it was in 2005, but harder than using a big platform.
By bonoboTP an hour ago
use nostr. it can be anything you want it to be.
By t1E9mE7JTRjf 3 hours ago
Slowcial Media
By xnx 5 hours ago
This is what we need
By Emerald_dreamer 2 hours ago
Minor formatting quip: At the top, the "dd mm yyyy" format should not use a comma.
By carabiner 2 hours ago
> I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized.
The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you receive both got monetized. They monetized Attention by adding View, Like, Share and Follower counts to everything.
And those counts started acting like Currency does in the real economy.
For example a key feature of Currency is that it acts as Store of Value. That value can then be exchanged at whatever time for something else in the real economy.
But in the real economy the Money Supply is regulated and controlled by the Central Bank. Why did that happen?
Before Central Banks (a very recent invention) showed up individual Banks printed their own currency. If they printed "too much" all kinds of strange phenomenon started emerging in the real world. For centuries no one connected that back to how much money was being printed. Because people had no idea what the level of the money supply was. Just like on social media there is no tracking or visible signal of the global Money supply and interest rate setting to control it.
So any time there was a price rising in the market, bank runs, bubbles in the market people would blame everything under the sun other than those responsible for money printing. After centuries of chaos Central Banks started emerging to control what individual Banks could do. Same story will repeat with Attention(which is acting just like a Currency).
This is why Elon and Trump rush to start their own Attention Banks cause they understand better than anyone being able to print a store of value that everyone else uses gives you power.
This is also why having China influencing the money supply (Attention) of US is via TikTok is non-optional.
So people eventually land on 2 paths forward -
1. Demonetize Attention - which is what the post is talking about
2. Remonetize Attention - where there is tracking of how much Attention anyone can receive, and how much Attention anyone can pay. Similar to what controls exist on Banks in what they lend and how much cash they need to hold. And Banks can then run for-profit without doing as much damage as they did when they controlled the money supply.
By joules77 6 hours ago
Agreed in general. Only appropriate regulation will convert for-profit social media into its healthy version. We're already seeing the seeds of it with bi-partisan bans on smartphone use at school.
By abnercoimbre 3 hours ago
I guess if you could convince your friends & family to use something like https://friendi.ca/ it could work for you.
By gman83 2 hours ago
Exactly the same thing I thought of.
I expect that by suggesting something that is quite literally what the author described, we'll both be downvoted to hell because HN has a staunch "fediverse, ew!" mentality.
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