I, like many others tend to waffle between loving and hating social media, so this is my take on what I think a better solution looks like. This is something I've been working on for the past couple of months and a concept that I think will be though provoking, if nothing else, to the HN community. If you want to read more on my thoughts and the story behind this, you can check out my blog post here: https://dev.to/duensing/introducing-slow-social-4a90
Besides that, I'm happy to answer questions and take criticism.
If it hasn't been mentioned, you should learn from the social media app Path.
It limited the amount of friends you could have. As a result, people didn't add friends because they didn't want to give up a space for a potential future connection. The scarcity worked against Path.
You might find the same result where people won't post because they'll be afraid of using up their allotment when they may have a better one later.
Thanks, that's a good tip! I'll definitely check them out.
And yup, definitely a concern. Makes me think that perhaps there's a possibility to not cap the posts, but rather have any posts outside of the first one in a week have something like a "secondary" tag. Then again, you might run into the problem that Instagram has where everyone stopped posting as soon as stories caught on.
The app BeReal is getting press lately. The one post a day is a photo and they solve the holding back problem by making it an impulsive post at a preset time. It’s not supposed to communicate everything you did in a day only what you are doing in the scheduled moment.
I think your general vibe is good here, but I don't think you need the posting limit, necessarily. Compared to Facebook, to make it less about re-sharing spam and the like, and more like a conversation, what you need is:
* More emphasis on text (which you already have, great)
* Less emphasis on photos. I hate how when you create a post on FB with a lot of text and photos, photos get much more space within the post layout, it should be reversed if you want a conversation, and if people want to see a bigger version they can always click them to blow them up.
* Links aren't treated as special. You can include them in your posts and people can click them, but they shouldn't result in including a photo+description on the post.
* No sharing other people's posts. You can copy+paste and link to their post (which will only work for other friends of them), but no re-sharing.
Especially those last two mean that you don't get the 'spam' of people sharing content from other people or websites.
Anyway, overall great job, this is definitely something I wanna see. Facebook is full of news spam/hot takes and the like, Instagram is largely just photos and videos, I really want something that's focused on what my immediate friends and families wanna talk about (not just share photos of).
Just a word of caution on soliciting product feedback on here, HN users are a notoriously unrepresentative bunch (with a lot of bad ideas). Better to try ways to get it into the hands of more normal people and see what makes it go 'viral'
The rate limitation sounds good for a general audience of one's connections, but there are a lot of times when life calls for more frequent updates, particularly in times of emergency and medical crisis where the changes to one's life circumstances change by the day, if not by the hour. Posting, "Andy is in the hospital", then needing to wait a week to post, "Andy died 1 hour after being admitted to the hospital". One suggestion might be to allow posts to be threaded, so that updates to an initial post can be added without waiting an entire week.
I don't agree here. This social network is a tool for one method of communication. It doesn't need to be a platform for all types of communication. By trying to excel at everything, it would do nothing particularly well.
You choose the right tool for the job. If a friend is in critical care at the hospital with life threatening injuries, do you really think "slow social" is the appropriate service to use? That's just being silly. As the name suggests, this service is designed for the opposite type of communication. It's like complaining that Sharpie markers should make thinner lines because sometimes you need to write complex notes. Or, that Ferrari should modify their cars because sometimes you need to tow a boat.
I think there's a case to be made that whatever you write after a week of reflection will be of more value or at least higher quality than what you'd be able to send off immediately when someone dies. Certainly there's a need for a space that puts quality over immediacy. There are already a dozen channels by which you can update people with short bursts of information, but by their nature those channels are not well suited to more thoughtful posting.
This is exactly the app idea I pitched my wife with the working title “What’s Happening”. Which she had turned into a joke at my expense. I wish you luck!
I'm really curious what your business model is and how you make money. I looked under those sections on the about page, but they don't actually answer the question.
The app is just launching, and it's a side hustle. Everything right now can run on a free tier, and I'm fairly certain I can support a _very_ sizeable amount of users for < $100 of operating overhead, which is cash I'd totally be willing to spare if I had thousands of users enjoying the app.
But, if I get there, the plan would be to explore charging something reasonable for a plus tier which would offer more formatting options, more pictures per post, and a couple other things, for something nominal like $3 of a month. That could help cover the overhead, and maybe would result in some cash on the side.
I think perhaps an option is not to limit how often people can post, but limit how little they post, i.e. there is a minimum word limit for each post. Add the 'like' options for any general short response (agree, like, love, sad, angry, +1, haha, shock, thanks, etc), but having a minimum demands at least some effort into posting.
The obvious problem is people just posting /10char type responses to hit the character limit, but if it's a word limit with some AI that can recognise 'bad' patterns in structure it could be mitigated to an extent.
You could add a grammar checker and advise corrections or perhaps prompt to improve the message if particularly poor. This would be implemented for public posts only, because for private conversations it is not so relevant to positive discourse.
For years I've thought that dating sites could benefit from such post limits. If one could write 3 posts per day I think one would be more careful about what is posted and success might be shifted a bit from quantity of posts to their quality instead.
I like the idea. I think it would be nice to read in SlowSocial how will posts be treated. Will the company's algorithms read them? parse them? Put users into categories? I assume not, but it might be nice to display this in the front page.
I like the idea because the restrictions on new friends seeing old posts is a similar vibe to one I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
I keep dreaming about an ephemeral social network that functions more like a party — posts expire after a time. I appreciate that there’s not a permanent record of every conversation at a party for people to review later.
Maybe I’m just nostalgic for FidoNet. We expired posts in Echomail groups because we had small hard drives. I appreciate that most of my youthful rants aren’t on archive.org. Unfortunately, some of the dumb nonsense I wrote in 1987 will outlive me.
I would enjoy the freedom to talk with friends and know it vanishes a few weeks later.
I'm using Supabase, Sveltekit, Tailwind, SendGrid, and Netlify.
SvelteKit has been a lot of fun but definitely has a few rough edges. Supabase has been awesome, but as you can probably see, from the comments elsewhere, has some kinks around magic link based authentication.
I’ve not used your service because I don’t know anyone who’s on it and I won’t invite anyone to a new social network right away. Too many burnt fingers. So what I am sharing is my social network wish list.
Give a minimum characters/words post and same for photo posts.
Do not show amount of reshares/likes (if at all you allow that; you should not - just let people reply to posts). Definitely add minimum words limits to comments/responses. Let the low effort appreciations or disagreements propagate heart to heart.
Have an idea of a non-searchable ID (I like that from https://slowly.app/ - very similar names as well :)) that one can have - it’s unique and decently readable and completely avoids “reserve the username as a real estate” bullshit of many social networks. You have one to but it isn’t apparent it can be used that way.
And I know it may not sound reasonable or even feasible but I wouldn’t mind some kind of federation. I am slowly tending to hate the walled gardens more and more.
As a general social network it may not take off and if it doesn’t then one wouldn’t want to just post in a circle of 3.5 people (that two and half being people who just opened accounts but are not active).
Once a week seems too less and too limiting. Will the weeks when one didn’t post be accumulated to a max accumulation (and even these can’t be used more than once a day, or once in a two days maybe)?
There’s no way to delete the old posts, or I can’t see one.
Clicking start conversation shares the other person’s email and intimates an email compose. Is that intentional? Or is it pre-alpha build?
Anyway, there was an old submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731419. I don’t really remember a lot from it (definitely nothing from the post) but maybe give it a look.
Coincidentally I've been working on a prototype that is almost the exact same idea. I had very similar motivations and a feeling that "slow social" (I was calling it the same thing even!) is something that can potentially break some people free from cycles of nonstop engagement and the unexpected downsides of always on, public and sharable social networks.
I hope you have success with it! Know that you're not alone in feeling like we need a solution like this. I think I'm far enough along with my prototype that I might as well see it through to completion anyways, but either way it's heartening to see that folks are feeling the same way I am about social networks.
Congrats on the build! I had a similar idea and worked on a similar project a few months back: https://infreq.social/ it obviously doesn't have the same polish that your project has, but the mission as far as what the end goal is for the frequency of the user viewing posts, and the ideal way of monetizing the platform are very much the same.
It's great to see that I'm not the only one with this crazy idea!
I wonder if a "leaky bucket" analogy might be interesting, with a bucket size >1. Say, 5 posts a week, you can make 5 today and then another one once the bucket empties enough.
Or maybe a couple categories: Cat 1, limited to 1 a week, cat 2 limited to 1 a day, cat 3 limited to, I dunno, a few times a day. Or 1/month, 1/week, 1/day? Then when I subscribe to someone I can pick which level I want?
I, personally, tend to prefer more smaller things, as opposed to a big wall of text. But, I'm also willing to admit this just might not be for me.
This is great, and I really appreciate the time you took to explain your thinking. I have similar feelings about the social networks out there, and I’m working on my own take on what I want. It’s very different than what you did, so I’m curious to try yours out and see what everyone has to say. We need more experiments like this - unabashedly anti-engagement and pro-utility.
Looks like this may work for older generations where the pace of life is different and things are less spontaneous. I’m looking forward to see where it will go.
older folk seem to have zero issues with facebook though. All over my feed and groups is 60+ people posting.
Younger people have largely abandoned ship
"4. WHEN AND WITH WHOM DO WE SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?
Affiliates. We may share your information with our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this privacy notice. Affiliates include our parent company and any subsidiaries, joint venture partners, or other companies that we control or that are under common control with us."
I would much prefer that this simply read: We do not share your information with anyone.
I don't plan on sharing personal information with any sort of entity, certainly not for profit. But, the personal information is stored on machines and manipulated by other companies, namely Supabase and SendGrid since its necessary for the site to function.
It's admirable that you're aware of the risk you're placing on your users, and willing to assuage them. If you're audience is HN, you might want to simply list the 3rd party runtime components you're using (and to go one better, review their privacy notices, recursively -- I can imagine a malefactor doing a backroom deal with a component provider to get kickbacks on data being shared down the line.) I would also include any front end components in this notice, like Cloudflare or GA.
Last but not least, it would be nice to know who's behind this, because none of these assurances mean anything if you're really a malefactor. I would recommend putting a real name or two in your "About" page.
Respect the effort, but I think it's not going in quite the right direction. I don't think people need paternalistic restrictions on post frequency. People need to be liberated from engagement-optimizing algorithms and allowed to choose which activity is presented to them and in what order.
I don't think your first and second sentence are necessarily in conflict with each other. In fact, Slow Social has no algorithms for engagement-optimizing, it's part of the design of the application.
That being said, you absolutely _could_ be right on the restrictions on post frequency. Perhaps its not something any sort of large user base might not want. However, as far as I know it hasn't been tried before, and I think that makes it worth a shot.
Lastly, it's possible that restrictions on post frequency serve a segment of the population that might be underserved by current social media, and its something those people would thrive one. At this point we can't say for sure, but I'd love to find out.
Slowing things down has the virtue of being a much easier means of social engineering than figuring out how to empower users to control the flow of content that comes to them. I only have some sketchy ideas of how exactly it would work.
Definitely the starting point is to let users have a simple chronological option.
I have WhatsApp/iMessage groups for immediate friends and family who I don’t mind getting real time updates from. Everyone else, I am okay with periodically contacting as desired via text/audio/video call.
It seems pretty liberated, and I am not sure what more a social network website could offer. Outside of about 5 people, I have no interest in real time updates…I can wait to see photo albums next time I call or visit, like in the times before broadband. In fact I prefer it, so that there is a jumping off point for things to talk about.
I can't imagine having much use for a social network after all these years of social networks being awful, but maybe a truly different and more liberated one would offer some possibilities.
I agree. What I’d like is to be given control so that I can at least work on improving my social life and interactions. I want pro software but for socializing. Something like my calendar app, email app, Photoshop, etc.
Imagine if our email app changed their goal from empowering users to engaging users. We’d have email apps that surfaced only engaging emails you received and buried the rest. It would maximize our short term app usage engagement to the detriment of long term goals (getting work done). Gmail shows it’s possible to meld good algorithms (spam detection) with good user empowering features, while also being an ad-supported model!
You say that, but what if they choose paternalistic restrictions on post frequency?
"You must make all your choices yourself, and you must prefer that!" <- doesn't actually seem all that free, to me.
People act like any one website must support all use cases, all the time, when in reality, opting in to the site is also a choice; literally nothing on the Internet is required, you can choose not to participate (and all of the consequences, good or bad, that come with that choice).
I agree to some extent. The “medium is the message”; let the outcomes of post frequency be determined by the structure of the platform. Whether that structure should be more prescriptive than descriptive though is certainly up for debate.
One way to look at it is a restriction on post frequency, but the reason why modern social is so harmful is because unlimited post frequency means unlimited read frequency.
It isn't restricted post frequency, it is restricted read frequency.
Yeah, I definitely thought of this. It's kindof a chicken or the egg thing. Some of my friends had the suggestion of a weekly digest or something like that.
In the end, I opted for this since, from my perspective, there's a sort of solace knowing that I'm only "expected" to write at most once a week.
Personally I believe that the era of Facebook style social media networks have come and gone. It’s on the road to becoming a niche product, like family newsletters, not completely dead, but also not completely alive.
I can respect the work and the idea, but not many are going to sign up, the first mover types have been burned so badly by Facebook that they’re going to pass.
I like it. Think of it in inverse: no contact can send you more than one a week. You can safely add people you dint know well and not worry about them filling up your feed with shit. Also once a week is like blogging - you will get more thoughtful content.
I think the idea of paternalism comes from seeing people harm themselves by undertaking actions they were manipulated into taking, and confusing that with actions they'd have done on their own, independently.
I think 'the algorithm' truly is the bogeyman of our time. Have you considered that it is precisely people themselves who crave engagement and that it is the often reviled paternalism which liberates people from following their worst instincts?
People crave engagement as much as they crave unhealthy food. Having a person stand behind you at all times with an infinite amount of the exact kind of burger you like isn't gonna help make you get thinner lol. And that's like the whole point of personalization algorithms.
Paternalism isn't categorically bad but I see it as a last resort. People have never had the option to filter out garbage from their feeds. If they did, there might be little need for paternalism.
Isn’t one of the points about “slow” social that you don’t need to read 50 posts a day? I would be happy checking in once a week, the same day I am going to post my update.
Yes but it will be an empty desert with anything below 10m users, because only then would an average user would have 100 friends and 10 posts per week.
I would be happy with one, or two posts a day...I only need 5 friends to post a week, at 10 I always have something to read, at 50 friends I am positively awash...
Introverts are a big crowd - a fact the socialites like Zuckerberg tend to forget. This will easily grow...
> You also need to let users upload their contact list otherwise you won’t be able to build your social graph.
In the context of legislation like GDPR and CCPA is this even legal in some jurisdictions any more? Genuinely not sure so any insight gratefully received.
As other people have mentioned but I think not quite nailed perfectly, restrictions on behavior aren't quite the right solution to the problems that plague social media. Some people think that the right move is to eliminate engagement optimization algorithms, and I think that's not quite exactly right either.
IMO the right solution is personal executive autonomy over content presentation and algorithmic optimization. By which I mean, I want to be able to make an "executive" choice over what kind of experience I want to have on a social platform. By "executive" I mean, I want to be able to make that choice explicitly, not implicitly by my behavior. For instance, an implicit choice is walking by a beautiful chocolate cake and being unable to resist eating it. An explicit choice is being able to architect my environment in advance, such that there are no beautiful chocolate cakes to tempt me.
The biggest problem with social media right now is that the incentives of the existing platforms do not allow people to make these choices explicitly. They do not allow us to craft our information environment using our higher order executive functions, they force us to do it using our reptillian brains, one moment at a time. Essentially, they force us to choose: either you get none of what social media has to offer, or you take every aspect of it, whether you like it or not.
Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature. People have a right to that kind of content if they want it. But they equally have a right to engage their higher cognitive functions and choose not to be expose to it if they don't want it, or choose to be able to architect the manner in which they are exposed to it.
> Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature.
Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed.
Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers, here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a different core belief than the previous group of RPG people, here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But Brilliant people.
Then when they added collections so I could present the different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes, and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and never see it.
Also, the original ability to "circle share" was exceptional (and it's truly sad it was apparently abused into the ground by spammers). It allowed "real people" to curate groups of other real people around a certain topic, and then a new user (assuming they could find the curator) could then mass follow/watch those people.
"Here is a group of people who are creating things and having great conversations with each other. Check it out."
It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice party.
Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.
Wow, Google+ sounds like it was actually pretty good. These are all features I've wished Twitter had.
When Google+ came out, I do remember avoiding it mostly out of spite, because Google were so overwhelmingly aggressive in trying to make me use it. And these days I'd probably never type my personal info into any Google property. Still, sounds like a shame it failed.
I agree, it's not perfect. Maybe, just maybe though, it's better than other alternatives out there.
Your suggestions for being able to apply our "higher order executive function" to our social networks is honestly a great take, and a great suggestion. Unfortunately though, that's not something I can really build, even if I had the time, resources, and personnel. That sort of social network requires critical mass of content and would by definition almost, have to be a competitor or aggregator of other social networks. However, that's not the sort of social network I personally am interested in building either.
I think what you're describing definitely falls into our modern definition of a social network, but I also think that definition falls very short of the potential for technology to facilitate relationships. In my opinion, the "thirst traps and rage baits" totally have there place (they're a lot of fun!), but I don't think their place is in the same app as your best friend sharing about their mixed feelings of loss and euphoria as they move from one job to another.
That all being said, I think you bring up a really good talking point, one that I hope the people at Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc. all pay attention to. As for me though, there's nothing I can really do about it other than start discussion.
Totally get that, and to be clear I think what you're doing is super cool. I should have given a more relevant example to you. I think the general category of "user autonomy" over how/what kinds of content they see or don't see is a better abstraction than restrictions on behavior.
So, for something like your network, that might mean rather than limiting how frequently people can post, give users the option to aggregate content from frequent posters in their feed. So, maybe I have a switch I can toggle that says, "show a unit of content from one person no more than once per day", where that single block of content is expandable, and gives some aggregated summary of how many things they posted / what its content was, that I can drill into if I want to, or quickly skim over if I don't care.
I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the same system to ingest exactly what you want.
We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting since.
Are there some readers that do some content curation for you on top of your subscriptions? The biggest issue I had with RSS (besides content discovery) is that some people blog multiple times a week while others only once in a while. I would like something that limits the amount of content I get based on how much they post: posts from people who blog only once in a while should be more prominently visible than others. Some way to mark posts as "I want more of that" or "I don't want more of that" would also be helpful to improve the curation without having to manually tweak parameters.
That works for the consumption side, but at least from what I've seen (it's been a while), the feed readers don't have so much share/comment/like side to them. Frankly, they seem to miss the social side. Again, maybe I'm just not using the right feed readers, but when I use some these days, they feel somewhat isolated, just receiving info, not also sending it.
Yes, I've been yearning for platforms really to just let me control the database query, basically. I want to be able to create custom filters/sorts/queries, or even choose some from an algorithm store, that lets me control how I view things.
For example, on Twitter, I love having the "latest tweets" option. But maybe I want to also have "only tweets from verified people with over 100 retweets from other verified people." This is somewhat possible on Tweetdeck, but not possible directly within Twitter itself.
It reminds me of the Facebook Graph Search, which I loved—"my friends of friends who speak Spanish who live in San Francisco." But FB shut that down a few years ago.
Makes me wonder what are the main reasons they don't implement such options to help us better choose how we see the data—is it technically difficult to implement? Does it run counter to the business model of placed advertisements? Does it really just unleash too much power in the hands of the users and make these companies afraid what might happen?
I'd love if they did implement the changes you suggest and I wonder why they haven't.
> Does it really just unleash too much power in the hands of the users and make these companies afraid what might happen?
Social media companies spend incredible resources trying to continuously improve the stickiness of the app so users keep coming back to it. Giving users total control over curation creates two big problems for this.
1) if I can cut out all of the BS in the feed, I can utilize the app more passively which likely reduces overall usage. I would try to get my social media into a weekly feed, which is not compatible with the business social media companies are trying to run. It's all about DAU's.
2) total curation makes researching and optimizing the UX for eyeballs more difficult because you introduce an entirely new set of variables into the equation. This increases the likelihood that behavioral research draws erroneous conclusions based on the patterns being observed. By controlling the drip of the content to the users, the company can control for this much more easily.
> Makes me wonder what are the main reasons they don't implement such options to help us better choose how we see the data...
Rather than anything nefarious, I think it might simply be down to the fact that it doesn't justify the engineering effort it would take to create a feed algo store or repo like you suggest considering how few people might actually use that feature.
The vast majority of people out there likely don't have the wherewithal, time nor inclination to carefully pick and tune the algo for their friend feed.
When Facebook was first created, there was no feed. We flocked to it because it was useful for a few important reasons: 1) communicating with friends, 2) finding events to go to, 3) organizing groups, 4) storing and sharing photos, and 5) meeting new people (sometimes). It was great as a tool to supplement your social life.
When they introduced the feed, Facebook gradually became worse at all of those things. Facebook became less about being a useful tool and instead became a media sharing instrument for serving advertisements. Your entire post is about that aspect of it though, and really it's the problem with all social media. The feed design is fundamentally incompatable with providing the utility that was initially offered by Facebook. The feed is purely a tool for distribution and consumption, not forging connections or otherwise improving the lives of users.
This is exactly what I was trying to say in my other post.
Currently I suspect the logic behind social media engagement algorithms is something like "feed the user more of what they have clicked on in the past". But in real life, I don't just do more of what I did in the past. Sometimes I choose to do different things. But in legacy social media like FB I can't choose to be offered anything different than what I clicked on in the past. I can't ask for the culture wars and political hot takes to fuck off so I can see normal friends and family posts (or vice versa).
This lack of choice in what we're offered is what's essentially inhuman about legacy social media.
Ahhh the original web vision and promise of the Semantic Web.
Snippets of machine readable datum everywhere fetched and assembled
for you by your own "intelligent agent".
The competition would be innovating better personal agents and data tagging.
I think TBL found the mother of all misunderestimations when they made http servers and browsers as step zero.
the first social media platform I used was Reddit where you really can choose to be fed thirst traps or rage bait for the next hour by exclusively browsing one or two specific subreddits and I'm not sure I'd say that's much more healthy than fully algorithmic social media, it just has different problems.
Particularly the rage bait: I basically had to quit reddit because I realized the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.
It can have that problem if you make that choice. I use reddit extensively, mainly subscribed to a bunch of mostly small subs for my own set of narrow interests, and it works great.
I mean, for what it's worth there's an aspect of this on Reddit, in the sense that you can choose which subreddits to join (and can maintain multiple accounts to keep your experiences separate).
Although I'm sure it's not perfect, it's not terrible either. Especially if you follow the perennial Reddit advice and unsubscribe from the massive default subs.
I kind of disagree about this: maybe it's different if you're more mature but reddit was my first social media platform, I used it a lot in middle school, and in my experience rage bait was a huge problem. Rage bait subreddits become more and more extreme over time, losing the ability to distinguish the people they hate from parodies of the people they hate and effectively building up an effigy/totem of "the other side" to concentrate that hate onto. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I eventually realized I had to quit reddit because the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.
Your ideas and the OPs sound like solving drug addiction by offering a new less addictive drug. Obviously the addicts will continue using the addictive ones! I think the social problems can only be solved by legislation because the existence of even one Facebook is already the problem.
As a former opiate addict myself, I don't think that's true at all. Moving the choices of addiction from the simple parts of the brain to the higher parts is the whole game. If at any time while I was an addict, you had told me "I'll give you a week's supply, but after that, you can never use again", i'd have made that deal every time, even if I knew it would be enforced.
The problem of addiction is the problem of inter-temporal choice, and a broken discount function. Most addicts don't want to keep using in the executive part of their brain. They know it's self destructive, but they keep doing it anyway, because the next hit is always, in a very local sense, rational. The ability to bind your own hands is the way out.
I think such a network, while great in theory, would mostly be filled with techies like us, because by design, it favors intentional interaction over mindless swiping, giving advertisers less incentive to fund you and thus eventually struggling to remain solvent.
Now, if we put some regulation on dopamine loop limitations, such a network might absolutely THRIVE!
Just my personal take! Do I wish people engaged more actively with the idea that these products can be living breathing things that we also can exhibit influence over? Absolutely. Do I think the critical mass of such users exists today? Sadly not, but I hope one day to be proven wrong!
While I think this helps, Twitter has their 'lists' feature that effectively allows you to choose what timeline you want to view at any point; the only difference with your post is that it's not forced upon you, and perhaps you envision platform uses some ML model to classify posts from people you never follow. As it stands, people don't like the friction that comes with needing to hand-pick people to put into different twitter lists, so the feature is largely unused.
> The goal of the company is to equally value the customer, environment, and profits. In other words, the model isn't to maximize profit like an investor backed startup, but rather to create a lean, useful piece of software that grows with its users and can sustain itself from every angle from day one.
If the owners are separate from the users, it's not set up for sustainability. If someone other than the users bear the risk of loss and upside of profits, it creates weird incentives whether you want it to or not.
Have you considered running it as a co-op? Every user has an equal stake in costs and profits and an equal voice in decisions. This model literally grows with its users, and it's the only one that does so.
I like this but it sounds like you've chosen the wrong model for running it. If I was going to use something like this (which I would like to, I think, if nothing else to share updates with families/close friends) I would want to own it equally with the other users.
Couchsurfing converted to a B-corp, but that didn't work out well (for the members). I think co-op would put the emphasis back on the member experience and would have prevented Couchsurfing from killing its community and ruining its brand. CS also claimed that the B-corp meant it couldn't accept donations or do open source development, though I have no idea if that was true.
That is exactly why I think one post per week and lack of global space is a great solution for a startup; it massively simplifies spam and other hostile content early detection and removal.
I think it's a valid concern to ask about incentive alignment - if you're wanting to do a tech-for-good project, you probably want to make sure that profiteering doesn't become the primary driver at a later date by making a Ulysses pact [1].
It’s not a weird criticism. May not be unrealistic to be a co-op, fine that’s difficult. But don’t lie and say there’s no profit incentive to be had when there clearly is if owners of the platform are separate from individual users
IMHO this is doing completely the opposite of the intended effect, because the concept is focused only on pleasing the content consumers, but it completely misses the point of what the content creators need and want out of it. And without content creators you have nothing.
The influencers are the ones who post in regular periods because it's a job for them, while ordinary people post whenever they find something interesting to say/share because their motivation is purely emotional - they're looking to channel their MOMENTARY excitement or frustrations about something. It has to happen immediately or it will not happen. Limiting them to a single post per week kinda kills all the fun, because you can't share what you feel when you feel it. System forces you to postpone the reaction until the next weekend, which means it breaks this emotional cycle and the reward of venting online. This would certainly make for a higher quality of reactions, but frankly what would be the motivation for me to sit on some thoughts for a whole week and then login to this service to post a single post, and then again be forced to wait a whole week for the next chance to say something? I can see myself doing something like that only if there's some personal gain in it, so IMHO in a long-term only influencers and self-promoters would be motivated to participate.
Opposite of the idea that it's built "for friends, and not for influencers". One post per week is how influencers operate in order to create a sustainable flow of repetitive visits, not ordinary people posting just for fun.
Seeing a bit of debate concerning the most defining feature: one post a week.
This is my favorite aspect of the site!
What this really brings up is the distinction made ages ago about policy vs mechanism. Every social media platform out there has or basically uses the same mechanisms: interactive, submit text/photos/video, add "friends", and so on. You'll notice that Slow Social implements the mechanism of a social network.
So... what makes every social networking site different? It's the Policy! Most platforms had a few defining policies.
- Twitter: "tweets" must be quite short, originally emulating SMS, all tweets show up in your feed (not sure if this is true anymore).
- Facebook: add friends, must use your real name
- Quora: must use your real name, posts must take the form of either a question or an answer to a question (but comments may also be made)
- Reddit: Upvotes and Downvotes are first class citizens, users submit an idea, and the interface encourages lively discussion in the comments (this isn't technically policy, but more like culture).
And so we add Slow Social to the mix: must add a friend to your list for them to see your post or add their email, may only post once per week.
It's also just cool to experiment with new policies and see if they work.
So, Slow Social adds a new, perhaps daring policy so as to make things more enjoyable overall. As an aside, if I'm only allowed to post one thing per week for my friends, I can't help but think that that would encourage my writing to be more impactful, thoughtful, and polite. It would encourage good habits in written communication.
So needless to say, I'm signed up and looking forward to where this goes!
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I, like many others tend to waffle between loving and hating social media, so this is my take on what I think a better solution looks like. This is something I've been working on for the past couple of months and a concept that I think will be though provoking, if nothing else, to the HN community. If you want to read more on my thoughts and the story behind this, you can check out my blog post here: https://dev.to/duensing/introducing-slow-social-4a90
Besides that, I'm happy to answer questions and take criticism.
It limited the amount of friends you could have. As a result, people didn't add friends because they didn't want to give up a space for a potential future connection. The scarcity worked against Path.
You might find the same result where people won't post because they'll be afraid of using up their allotment when they may have a better one later.
And yup, definitely a concern. Makes me think that perhaps there's a possibility to not cap the posts, but rather have any posts outside of the first one in a week have something like a "secondary" tag. Then again, you might run into the problem that Instagram has where everyone stopped posting as soon as stories caught on.
Alas, it's a tricky problem.
It might very well be that the best social media is simple private messaging.
https://text.npr.org/1092814566
* More emphasis on text (which you already have, great)
* Less emphasis on photos. I hate how when you create a post on FB with a lot of text and photos, photos get much more space within the post layout, it should be reversed if you want a conversation, and if people want to see a bigger version they can always click them to blow them up.
* Links aren't treated as special. You can include them in your posts and people can click them, but they shouldn't result in including a photo+description on the post.
* No sharing other people's posts. You can copy+paste and link to their post (which will only work for other friends of them), but no re-sharing.
Especially those last two mean that you don't get the 'spam' of people sharing content from other people or websites.
Anyway, overall great job, this is definitely something I wanna see. Facebook is full of news spam/hot takes and the like, Instagram is largely just photos and videos, I really want something that's focused on what my immediate friends and families wanna talk about (not just share photos of).
You choose the right tool for the job. If a friend is in critical care at the hospital with life threatening injuries, do you really think "slow social" is the appropriate service to use? That's just being silly. As the name suggests, this service is designed for the opposite type of communication. It's like complaining that Sharpie markers should make thinner lines because sometimes you need to write complex notes. Or, that Ferrari should modify their cars because sometimes you need to tow a boat.
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You're going to need to do more to keep it on the 'not spam' list, I think.
But, if I get there, the plan would be to explore charging something reasonable for a plus tier which would offer more formatting options, more pictures per post, and a couple other things, for something nominal like $3 of a month. That could help cover the overhead, and maybe would result in some cash on the side.
The obvious problem is people just posting /10char type responses to hit the character limit, but if it's a word limit with some AI that can recognise 'bad' patterns in structure it could be mitigated to an extent.
You could add a grammar checker and advise corrections or perhaps prompt to improve the message if particularly poor. This would be implemented for public posts only, because for private conversations it is not so relevant to positive discourse.
I like the idea. I think it would be nice to read in SlowSocial how will posts be treated. Will the company's algorithms read them? parse them? Put users into categories? I assume not, but it might be nice to display this in the front page.
And maybe there are useful ideas in https://www.humanetech.com/technologists ?
I keep dreaming about an ephemeral social network that functions more like a party — posts expire after a time. I appreciate that there’s not a permanent record of every conversation at a party for people to review later.
Maybe I’m just nostalgic for FidoNet. We expired posts in Echomail groups because we had small hard drives. I appreciate that most of my youthful rants aren’t on archive.org. Unfortunately, some of the dumb nonsense I wrote in 1987 will outlive me.
I would enjoy the freedom to talk with friends and know it vanishes a few weeks later.
SvelteKit has been a lot of fun but definitely has a few rough edges. Supabase has been awesome, but as you can probably see, from the comments elsewhere, has some kinks around magic link based authentication.
Give a minimum characters/words post and same for photo posts.
Do not show amount of reshares/likes (if at all you allow that; you should not - just let people reply to posts). Definitely add minimum words limits to comments/responses. Let the low effort appreciations or disagreements propagate heart to heart.
Have an idea of a non-searchable ID (I like that from https://slowly.app/ - very similar names as well :)) that one can have - it’s unique and decently readable and completely avoids “reserve the username as a real estate” bullshit of many social networks. You have one to but it isn’t apparent it can be used that way.
And I know it may not sound reasonable or even feasible but I wouldn’t mind some kind of federation. I am slowly tending to hate the walled gardens more and more.
As a general social network it may not take off and if it doesn’t then one wouldn’t want to just post in a circle of 3.5 people (that two and half being people who just opened accounts but are not active).
Once a week seems too less and too limiting. Will the weeks when one didn’t post be accumulated to a max accumulation (and even these can’t be used more than once a day, or once in a two days maybe)?
There’s no way to delete the old posts, or I can’t see one.
Clicking start conversation shares the other person’s email and intimates an email compose. Is that intentional? Or is it pre-alpha build?
Anyway, there was an old submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731419. I don’t really remember a lot from it (definitely nothing from the post) but maybe give it a look.
I have no idea why we think we need to complicate our relationships with any third party...
The only reason why social media works is because it is horrible and addictive, Your product is neither of those, so it will never work.
Pull works better for stories/updates because then the reader has control over how often they want to check in an see what their friends are doing.
“Oh but if you wanted that you could just something something with e-mail rules something something Dropbox curl ftpfs.”
Coincidentally I've been working on a prototype that is almost the exact same idea. I had very similar motivations and a feeling that "slow social" (I was calling it the same thing even!) is something that can potentially break some people free from cycles of nonstop engagement and the unexpected downsides of always on, public and sharable social networks.
I hope you have success with it! Know that you're not alone in feeling like we need a solution like this. I think I'm far enough along with my prototype that I might as well see it through to completion anyways, but either way it's heartening to see that folks are feeling the same way I am about social networks.
It's great to see that I'm not the only one with this crazy idea!
Or maybe a couple categories: Cat 1, limited to 1 a week, cat 2 limited to 1 a day, cat 3 limited to, I dunno, a few times a day. Or 1/month, 1/week, 1/day? Then when I subscribe to someone I can pick which level I want?
I, personally, tend to prefer more smaller things, as opposed to a big wall of text. But, I'm also willing to admit this just might not be for me.
Good luck with this!
Affiliates. We may share your information with our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this privacy notice. Affiliates include our parent company and any subsidiaries, joint venture partners, or other companies that we control or that are under common control with us."
I would much prefer that this simply read: We do not share your information with anyone.
Last but not least, it would be nice to know who's behind this, because none of these assurances mean anything if you're really a malefactor. I would recommend putting a real name or two in your "About" page.
That being said, you absolutely _could_ be right on the restrictions on post frequency. Perhaps its not something any sort of large user base might not want. However, as far as I know it hasn't been tried before, and I think that makes it worth a shot.
Lastly, it's possible that restrictions on post frequency serve a segment of the population that might be underserved by current social media, and its something those people would thrive one. At this point we can't say for sure, but I'd love to find out.
Definitely the starting point is to let users have a simple chronological option.
It seems pretty liberated, and I am not sure what more a social network website could offer. Outside of about 5 people, I have no interest in real time updates…I can wait to see photo albums next time I call or visit, like in the times before broadband. In fact I prefer it, so that there is a jumping off point for things to talk about.
I can't imagine having much use for a social network after all these years of social networks being awful, but maybe a truly different and more liberated one would offer some possibilities.
Imagine if our email app changed their goal from empowering users to engaging users. We’d have email apps that surfaced only engaging emails you received and buried the rest. It would maximize our short term app usage engagement to the detriment of long term goals (getting work done). Gmail shows it’s possible to meld good algorithms (spam detection) with good user empowering features, while also being an ad-supported model!
"You must make all your choices yourself, and you must prefer that!" <- doesn't actually seem all that free, to me.
People act like any one website must support all use cases, all the time, when in reality, opting in to the site is also a choice; literally nothing on the Internet is required, you can choose not to participate (and all of the consequences, good or bad, that come with that choice).
It isn't restricted post frequency, it is restricted read frequency.
In the end, I opted for this since, from my perspective, there's a sort of solace knowing that I'm only "expected" to write at most once a week.
I can respect the work and the idea, but not many are going to sign up, the first mover types have been burned so badly by Facebook that they’re going to pass.
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In order for a user to check the site, there would need to be 50 posts from their friends that they can read through.
For that to happen, they would need 500 friends for them to make 50 posts a week.
In order to reach 500 friends, you would need 100 million users, before that the network would be empty with nothing happening.
It’s better to limit the number of posts to 1 per day.
This way, you would be able to have some stuff going with 50 friends in some areas and 3 million users.
However, you need to get to 3 million users somehow with no value in your network, maybe you can get this through posts like this, but very difficult.
You also need to let users upload their contact list otherwise you won’t be able to build your social graph.
I would be happy with one, or two posts a day...I only need 5 friends to post a week, at 10 I always have something to read, at 50 friends I am positively awash...
Introverts are a big crowd - a fact the socialites like Zuckerberg tend to forget. This will easily grow...
You can only play one game a day! How are you going to get revenue if someone can only spend a few minutes a day on it?
In the context of legislation like GDPR and CCPA is this even legal in some jurisdictions any more? Genuinely not sure so any insight gratefully received.
IMO the right solution is personal executive autonomy over content presentation and algorithmic optimization. By which I mean, I want to be able to make an "executive" choice over what kind of experience I want to have on a social platform. By "executive" I mean, I want to be able to make that choice explicitly, not implicitly by my behavior. For instance, an implicit choice is walking by a beautiful chocolate cake and being unable to resist eating it. An explicit choice is being able to architect my environment in advance, such that there are no beautiful chocolate cakes to tempt me.
The biggest problem with social media right now is that the incentives of the existing platforms do not allow people to make these choices explicitly. They do not allow us to craft our information environment using our higher order executive functions, they force us to do it using our reptillian brains, one moment at a time. Essentially, they force us to choose: either you get none of what social media has to offer, or you take every aspect of it, whether you like it or not.
Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature. People have a right to that kind of content if they want it. But they equally have a right to engage their higher cognitive functions and choose not to be expose to it if they don't want it, or choose to be able to architect the manner in which they are exposed to it.
Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed.
Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers, here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a different core belief than the previous group of RPG people, here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But Brilliant people.
Then when they added collections so I could present the different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes, and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and never see it.
I miss it so much.
"Here is a group of people who are creating things and having great conversations with each other. Check it out."
It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice party.
Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.
When Google+ came out, I do remember avoiding it mostly out of spite, because Google were so overwhelmingly aggressive in trying to make me use it. And these days I'd probably never type my personal info into any Google property. Still, sounds like a shame it failed.
Your suggestions for being able to apply our "higher order executive function" to our social networks is honestly a great take, and a great suggestion. Unfortunately though, that's not something I can really build, even if I had the time, resources, and personnel. That sort of social network requires critical mass of content and would by definition almost, have to be a competitor or aggregator of other social networks. However, that's not the sort of social network I personally am interested in building either.
I think what you're describing definitely falls into our modern definition of a social network, but I also think that definition falls very short of the potential for technology to facilitate relationships. In my opinion, the "thirst traps and rage baits" totally have there place (they're a lot of fun!), but I don't think their place is in the same app as your best friend sharing about their mixed feelings of loss and euphoria as they move from one job to another.
That all being said, I think you bring up a really good talking point, one that I hope the people at Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc. all pay attention to. As for me though, there's nothing I can really do about it other than start discussion.
So, for something like your network, that might mean rather than limiting how frequently people can post, give users the option to aggregate content from frequent posters in their feed. So, maybe I have a switch I can toggle that says, "show a unit of content from one person no more than once per day", where that single block of content is expandable, and gives some aggregated summary of how many things they posted / what its content was, that I can drill into if I want to, or quickly skim over if I don't care.
I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the same system to ingest exactly what you want.
We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting since.
For example, on Twitter, I love having the "latest tweets" option. But maybe I want to also have "only tweets from verified people with over 100 retweets from other verified people." This is somewhat possible on Tweetdeck, but not possible directly within Twitter itself.
It reminds me of the Facebook Graph Search, which I loved—"my friends of friends who speak Spanish who live in San Francisco." But FB shut that down a few years ago.
Makes me wonder what are the main reasons they don't implement such options to help us better choose how we see the data—is it technically difficult to implement? Does it run counter to the business model of placed advertisements? Does it really just unleash too much power in the hands of the users and make these companies afraid what might happen?
I'd love if they did implement the changes you suggest and I wonder why they haven't.
Social media companies spend incredible resources trying to continuously improve the stickiness of the app so users keep coming back to it. Giving users total control over curation creates two big problems for this.
1) if I can cut out all of the BS in the feed, I can utilize the app more passively which likely reduces overall usage. I would try to get my social media into a weekly feed, which is not compatible with the business social media companies are trying to run. It's all about DAU's.
2) total curation makes researching and optimizing the UX for eyeballs more difficult because you introduce an entirely new set of variables into the equation. This increases the likelihood that behavioral research draws erroneous conclusions based on the patterns being observed. By controlling the drip of the content to the users, the company can control for this much more easily.
Rather than anything nefarious, I think it might simply be down to the fact that it doesn't justify the engineering effort it would take to create a feed algo store or repo like you suggest considering how few people might actually use that feature.
The vast majority of people out there likely don't have the wherewithal, time nor inclination to carefully pick and tune the algo for their friend feed.
When they introduced the feed, Facebook gradually became worse at all of those things. Facebook became less about being a useful tool and instead became a media sharing instrument for serving advertisements. Your entire post is about that aspect of it though, and really it's the problem with all social media. The feed design is fundamentally incompatable with providing the utility that was initially offered by Facebook. The feed is purely a tool for distribution and consumption, not forging connections or otherwise improving the lives of users.
Currently I suspect the logic behind social media engagement algorithms is something like "feed the user more of what they have clicked on in the past". But in real life, I don't just do more of what I did in the past. Sometimes I choose to do different things. But in legacy social media like FB I can't choose to be offered anything different than what I clicked on in the past. I can't ask for the culture wars and political hot takes to fuck off so I can see normal friends and family posts (or vice versa).
This lack of choice in what we're offered is what's essentially inhuman about legacy social media.
The competition would be innovating better personal agents and data tagging.
I think TBL found the mother of all misunderestimations when they made http servers and browsers as step zero.
Get real.
You could, but most people download neversinks or someone else's custom filter.
Particularly the rage bait: I basically had to quit reddit because I realized the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.
Although I'm sure it's not perfect, it's not terrible either. Especially if you follow the perennial Reddit advice and unsubscribe from the massive default subs.
The problem of addiction is the problem of inter-temporal choice, and a broken discount function. Most addicts don't want to keep using in the executive part of their brain. They know it's self destructive, but they keep doing it anyway, because the next hit is always, in a very local sense, rational. The ability to bind your own hands is the way out.
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Now, if we put some regulation on dopamine loop limitations, such a network might absolutely THRIVE!
Just my personal take! Do I wish people engaged more actively with the idea that these products can be living breathing things that we also can exhibit influence over? Absolutely. Do I think the critical mass of such users exists today? Sadly not, but I hope one day to be proven wrong!
sounds good to me.
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If the owners are separate from the users, it's not set up for sustainability. If someone other than the users bear the risk of loss and upside of profits, it creates weird incentives whether you want it to or not.
Have you considered running it as a co-op? Every user has an equal stake in costs and profits and an equal voice in decisions. This model literally grows with its users, and it's the only one that does so.
I like this but it sounds like you've chosen the wrong model for running it. If I was going to use something like this (which I would like to, I think, if nothing else to share updates with families/close friends) I would want to own it equally with the other users.
If you go for co-op, you could go one further and try for a non-profit co-op: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/nonprofit-coop-66008.html
https://ioo.coop (Internet of Ownership Coop) (Edit: currently down, a snapshot is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20211207224925/http://ioo.coop/ )
https://platform.coop (Platform Cooperativism site)
A good short read on the topic could be Nick Srnicek's Platform Capitalism; it covers concisely a lot of the economics involved.
How does that work?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative
I think it's a valid concern to ask about incentive alignment - if you're wanting to do a tech-for-good project, you probably want to make sure that profiteering doesn't become the primary driver at a later date by making a Ulysses pact [1].
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact
https://drivers.coop/
The influencers are the ones who post in regular periods because it's a job for them, while ordinary people post whenever they find something interesting to say/share because their motivation is purely emotional - they're looking to channel their MOMENTARY excitement or frustrations about something. It has to happen immediately or it will not happen. Limiting them to a single post per week kinda kills all the fun, because you can't share what you feel when you feel it. System forces you to postpone the reaction until the next weekend, which means it breaks this emotional cycle and the reward of venting online. This would certainly make for a higher quality of reactions, but frankly what would be the motivation for me to sit on some thoughts for a whole week and then login to this service to post a single post, and then again be forced to wait a whole week for the next chance to say something? I can see myself doing something like that only if there's some personal gain in it, so IMHO in a long-term only influencers and self-promoters would be motivated to participate.
This is my favorite aspect of the site!
What this really brings up is the distinction made ages ago about policy vs mechanism. Every social media platform out there has or basically uses the same mechanisms: interactive, submit text/photos/video, add "friends", and so on. You'll notice that Slow Social implements the mechanism of a social network.
So... what makes every social networking site different? It's the Policy! Most platforms had a few defining policies.
- Twitter: "tweets" must be quite short, originally emulating SMS, all tweets show up in your feed (not sure if this is true anymore).
- Facebook: add friends, must use your real name
- Quora: must use your real name, posts must take the form of either a question or an answer to a question (but comments may also be made)
- Reddit: Upvotes and Downvotes are first class citizens, users submit an idea, and the interface encourages lively discussion in the comments (this isn't technically policy, but more like culture).
And so we add Slow Social to the mix: must add a friend to your list for them to see your post or add their email, may only post once per week.
It's also just cool to experiment with new policies and see if they work.
So, Slow Social adds a new, perhaps daring policy so as to make things more enjoyable overall. As an aside, if I'm only allowed to post one thing per week for my friends, I can't help but think that that would encourage my writing to be more impactful, thoughtful, and polite. It would encourage good habits in written communication.
So needless to say, I'm signed up and looking forward to where this goes!