I built this site as a quick test if a time boxed social media experience feels better than an endless one. So far I've just been using it with friends and it feels nice, but it seems like it is time to bring it to a larger audience.
Let me know what you think! It is just based on EST for now, sorry.
So yeah, the current window wouldn't work for me, but that's fine. Everything doesn't have to be for everyone. We all live in our bubbles anyway; creating artificial rules could actually be ways of creating new, unexpected interactions.
This being said – if you were to adjust the rules to accommodate more people, I don't think it should be "open from 7:39 to 10:39 in whatever your local time zone is", because that feels like it would just destroy the whole idea – that everyone is there at the _same_ time. Also, it would still exclude people who work evenings.
An alternative solution would be to have multiple windows. For example, if you have one starting at 7:39 PM EST and another one at 7:39 AM EST, there would be more chances that there is some time during the day for people around the globe to check in. Depending, of course, on many things: time zones, sleep habits, work schedule, ability to briefly slack off during work, etc. It would remain true to the idea while opening up for some more people. Just a thought.
I also think each window could be smaller, maybe like just one hour?
I like the idea that something like this could be open for 3 hours in the evening local time. Like, you'd get totally different communities coming on at different times, and having completely separate experiences together. But some other people would bridge the gap.
While you're online, every hour some people would be forced to leave and some other people could join.
What I really don't get, it completely blows my mind: why hasn't this concept been completely chewed through, explored to hell and back, back in the days when everybody and their dog tried to invent some new variation of social media website (and get bought up by Yahoo when they ran out of runway or grew tired of it)? Age of the yo app? Feels almost as if the convertible wasn't invented before 100 years after the automobile.
It's especially interesting in local expat communities: in Asia local time, you'll make a comment that is the ground truth and it gets n upvotes from locals and other foreigners in-country. But then the children of immigrants in America who are associated with that country wake up, and suddenly 8 hours later you're a monster.
Or even just choose the start of the time range directly. French joggers might prefer a different time to French Counter-Strike players.
Makes it available for other regions but also the same (silly) idea.
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So basically the same idea, but letting the decision be more dynamic.
CST and BST are a couple of common ones with overloads. Use the ISO standard for your time stamps guys. I have to work with one API that uses these ambiguous abbreviations in a key time stamp field (faceplam).
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Oversharing in natural social networks is penalized heavily, and for good reason - with too much noise and little signal, people get overwhelmed, fear missing out, and cannot agree on anything. Communication becomes a detriment and a chore to the social group. The social group expects everyone to think before they speak, not just blabber endlessly, which is healthy.
Also, replacing the "Like" button/signal with a "Thanks" signal would be good because it'd be better to build a social network based on what people find helpful rather than on what people approve of. I think this was originally Jack Dorsey's idea, not my own.
- You can write and edit one post at a time.
- This post, in whatever form it has then, gets published at 8 in the morning.
- You can only see posts for today. All old content gets deleted.
- No comments or feedback is possible.
- Only symmetric relationships are possible: you can add someone, but they won't see your posts and you won't see their posts until they add you back.
- All "friend" discovery is out of band. There are no recommendations, no boosting/retweeting, nothing.
This is obviously not a mass medium, but its reductionism gives it some interesting properties that have made me consider what a good social network would be. One post a day is a fantastic idea.
(I don't know if they intend for it to be named in public, so I'll refrain.)
I've mentioned it before, but my wife posts about our life there. People can follow you, but there is no feedback aside from you seeing how many people read your post and how many followers you have. There are no recommendations; you have to organically check out the people who read your article to see if you like their writing (if they have any), or add people from an out of band source. Content is as ephemeral as you make it. It's very common for people to only leave a post up for a day or two, but it's up to the author.
If you are interested it's called ameba (www.ameba.co.jp). It's not the only one like this, just the one my wife uses.
I wonder how many micro communities like this exist, mostly under the radar.
I know people that have used it for years
I forgot the name but its an app that sends you a notification at a random time each day, and it gives you 1 minute of use. If you miss it, you miss it.
In that 1 minute you can take a photo where you are right then, and can use the rest of the minute to browse someone else’s series of photos. Just the 1 person you were connected to that day.
It just shows how people are living.
In real life. I know its changed someone’s trajectory. All of their pictures were in an office cubicle and it pushed them to pursue other things sooner. Retirement in their case, to pursue drum circles and new age things because this was always fulfilling for them, they just kept delaying it beyond the rationality to delay it.
After 3 years of doing this, they send you a book of your memories.
No timelines or “algorithm” aside from whatever selects the person you get to see.
onepostwonder.com
It's been running for over a decade, although the community has always been small.
It's currently invite-only, similar to how LiveJournal used to be, but drop tommybgoode@gmail.com a line and mention this post if you'd like to give it a try and I'll send you an invite, which will include invites to give others you'd like to hang out with.
That was Fotolog at the beginning of the century.
This is a huge problem. If you want to cultivate a large audience, every social network I'm aware of encourages you to post intensively. I've moved to new social networks and ended up unfollowing people I liked because they Would Not Shut Up, deeming it more important to build a following than maintain normal communication.
A shifting window would be even more "slow internet". Of course it would be a different vibe; you'd have stuff to catch up on the days it's in prime time for you. As-is it seems like it'd have more of a real-time vibe.
But this social media actually reminded me of old phone line BBS. I believe life was better when we had to wait for our enjoyment, and even stand in line for it.
I don’t share this thread’s ideas about making it accessible for everyone. I think people are too fixated on scale and inclusion.
It’s absolutely fine to work for three evening hours in a fixed timezone. Every timezone has enough people to not meet every one of them in a lifetime.
If someone wants this in their timezone, they can just llm-php it into existence. Or ask OP about sharing source codes.
Local communities all operate in the same time zone. No reason small online communities couldn’t operate in the same time zone, allowing each time zone to have their own separate communities.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/HelpCenter/StoreInfo.jsp
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...and that was BEFORE the layoffs =/
That said, if you've had success with it in a friend group, perhaps that suggests it's a nice mechanism for a group chat app, rather than for a public social media site?
Back when I lived in the ‘states, I’d wake up in the morning and participate in all sorts of interesting discussions on a bunch of fresh posts.
Now, living in Europe, I wake up to a homepage full of “7 hours ago” top comments with 200 points on them. Any contribution we make from here will last maybe a minute or two before getting sorted down out of view.
I spend most of my time now reading what y’all had to say about stuff.
I do think of this as an opportunity for you to create your own site that meets your standards, however.
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Personally, I enjoy reading about world news, hearing about TV shows I might want to watch that aren't in my language. I enjoy reading cross-language puns and seeing photos of food I don't usually eat. I enjoy seeing people who don't worry about the things I worry about.
If you don't want those things, if you don't want to know what's going on outside, then that's up to you, but I think that's a sad way to live life.
I really like the idea, it sounds like a very healthy way to engage. If you took a photo on holiday you wouldn't be able to share it until the evening, so you'd just put the phone away. It becomes a camera. At the moment I see people take a photo and then for the next hour they're distracted by reactions, comments, feeling obligated to respond to comments... they miss the whole experience. Sharing when your friends are actually online would also be more interactive.
Of course, if you're on holiday then your three hour home time window may be unusable. But then, worst case scenario, you bulk upload everything when you get home. It would be like the old days of returning from a trip and getting friends round to see a slide show - quite charming, really.
I find any “deep” topics to be pretty shallow except on specialist boards that wouldn’t appeal to the layman but nonetheless do vet people before letting them on.
So my community could be 7:02-10:02pm EST. And if I instead switch to say 6am-9am IST instead, I can check in with the folks who like to meet in the mornings in india, but I am temporarily gone from my own local community.
Quite the contrary. Welcoming ecosystems are discriminatory because necessarily exclude those who generally aren’t interested, or act in bad faith.
Community is local.
This sounds like a nice sentiment, but I don't think this is strictly true. I would go as far as to say that it is largely untrue. Diverse and worldwide perspectives may damage building a welcoming ecosystem. Whatsapp for example is probably the most popular social media site across the world, and thats because different groups close off themselves into private chat groups.
Take a look at Nairaland, one of the most popular Nigerian social media sites. The content on that site would most certainly not be welcome on any of the silicon valley run sites.
It depends on whether you consider WhatsApp to be social media (is iMessage social media? is one-to-one SMS social media?). I think it's different enough to what the author is attempting here to be considered differently.
I had a quick look at https://www.nairaland.com/ and nothing immediately sprang out.
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The "health food" of social media will be a product category where there will be market share to capture and whoever gets it right will be rewarded. Those users, like the health nuts of today, will know what there are looking for.
I used to think it was only politics, but I visited a social media like Reddit that filtered politics by default--I forgot what it was called--and it still looked terrible because of all the drama.
It's a colossal waste of time. If you spend 20 hours learning Regex, that will help you for your lifetime. If you spend 20 hours talking about the latest disaster, in 20 hours that is all obsolete because there is a new disaster. And those 20 hours will make you angry and fill you with indignation while even gaming for 20 hours would have a more positive impact on you.
I'm not saying these things aren't important, but they are really not that important compared to how much of the Internet has become soaked with them.
[edit] I realised as soon as I pressed send that immediately there will be a service that let's you open 8 accounts and seamlessly operate them as a single one.
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It was called Let's Get Weird.
App would open only from 11p to 4a
You were be able to chat and share pics only with nearby people
Selfies were upside down, because why not
At the end of the day period, pics, chats every thing got deleted and it was a blank slate the next day
I like how this is considered weird. Like, yeah, let’s talk and share our pictures globally in an instant to people we don’t know.
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