#2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it.
25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activity of 25 of your friends and the others are relegated to essentially being contacts.
I remember about two years ago Facebook was getting into a lot of trouble due to the amount of negative mental impact it had/has on its users and they did a study which found social media can have a negative impact on its users unless the user only follows a small circle of real-life friends and interacts with those people online. I don't have a source to this; I'm willing to accept there isn't real _evidence_ behind this claim.
Anyway, I'm surprised social media has been around this long, has been the subject of such controversy and there haven't been any or many real, impactful changes to the nature of it. Facebook and Instagram are, in my opinion, trying to be too much. They want to combine personal and public spaces. This, of course, works from a business perspective. But what are the long-term consequences of these products on our mental health and society?
We need a new social media focused on personal, tight-knit groups of people and interests. One that makes this the focus and doesn't stray for the purposes of profits. And, if that's not feasible in an economy that demands growth, we need better legislation demanding certain consumer protections are created for this sphere of products.
I can already see it, imagine people who have their list full, removing people and replacing them would be a public passive aggressive "thing" people would do and the such drama that would follow. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I think this would actually be a selling point of the platform, however could possibly turn into a negative part of the social culture.
What if it automatically populated the list of your "close friends" by some algorithm that ranks your overall interaction with them. So you can't arbitrarily add or remove the friends. You could "game" it but only by actually interacting with the person. If they include sentiment analysis on the interactions, then you couldn't "game" it by spamming or being a cyber bully either. You'd actually have to be friendly towards that person.
If I want to person A as a close friend, and they're not active on the platform, that should be allowed. Maximizing interactions isn't the goal, or else we wouldn't limit the feed in the first place
I think it can built so the "Feed" is restricted to "Close Friends". You can still go checkout the other friend's profiles individually. I'd also like it to be set to filter out news articles and other crap like what photos they liked ...etc.
To be fair, almost every non-Facebook social network has failed. I wouldn’t consider that to be proof that a limited social network can’t succeed but rather that social networking sites are difficult to produce.
No disagreement here. I just recall that guy being comically pompous (see also his penchant for carrying both a "day iphone" and a "night iphone") at the time Path launched.
Wow, what is it with anti-social people starting social networks? I long ago lost track of my collection of ridiculous quotes from the Friendster guy. But I still remember him being outraged that people were using it wrong by creating profiles for abstract things they loved (cities, parks, stores, brands) and then friending them. Like, buddy, when your users find new ways to use your product, run with it. Instead, he just got big mad and banned a lot of people.
Looking back, Friendster strikes me as the single biggest missed opportunity of that decade. He had a two-year lead on Facebook. In a network-effect business! But through careful focus and diligent effort, he managed to blow it.
That's why this has remained an idea for me rather than anything I would consider attempting. Social networks have an enormous bar to entry. This is why I think this would most feasibly be applied as a restriction to Facebook/Instagram and it's probably something they will never implement unless forced.
Have we ever seen social networks succeed that were not primarily driven by highschool kids? (except work oriented ones, e.g. LinkedIn/tech communities and pre-www communities)
I've kind of achieved this for my Instagram feed. I simply "mute" anyone I don't care to see again. My account still follows them, so they are none the wiser. I think most social networks provide a similar "publicly follow but mute" feature.
It takes some time to mute everyone I want muted, but it only took a couple days to mute the more post-happy folks. I discovered that most of my network hardly post.
Instagram is so much more enjoyable now. 2 minutes a day, rarely more.
>there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on
I don't consider myself an extreme socialite, but as someone who has lived in 3 states in the US and whose friends are scattered around the world after getting a degree here, this sounds really, really, really perverse.
That said, most of my use of Facebook is not to keep tabs on the people I care about (a lot of them don't use Facebook much, if at all).
The product that the OP described already exists: it's called a chat room (IRC channel, Skype group chat, Telegram channel, Whatsapp group chat, etc).
I really liked the idea of Google+ circles. Creating "containerized" groups of people (things?) that I could act on in a complete unique way was really cool. I could say something in my "friends" circle that I couldn't (or would be misunderstood) in my "family" circle. I could also keep track of technology (Linux, Tesla, etc.) in another, completely separate, area.
I wish that a "social" network would bring back the idea of Circles.
This is exactly what I'm aiming to do with Thread - an alternative social network that focuses on tight-knit groups and building more intimate relationships, for the purpose of improving our mental health.
One important thing to note is that it will be monetized through a subscription, not by selling consumer data or driving sales of targeted ads.
Can’t that be achieved by simply Facebook offering an option for feeds of manually created group by you? Like you create a group called closefriends where you add your close friends and family upto 25 members. Then a feed for those people only shows up?
Almost similar to where each user is a subreddit and you create a multireddit.
Facebook is a video game where you honor the groupthink for max followers and upvotes; something like the 25 followers can be emulated but if you're the only person playing the new game, its not going to be a fun game because everyone else will have higher scores due to no made up limitations.
I do this right now on Facebook; you can unfollow anyone. I'm not following anyone and I have no feed. But the problem is people aren't going to voluntarily do this, and it's a big pain to unfollow hundreds of people.
This needs to be baked-in to have any real impact.
That reminds me of Google Buzz. I used it with a group of maybe 5-6 other people, and it felt like Google had built this product just for us- deep integration into Google Chat and Gmail, everything was solid, and no one else was using it, so it felt like our own private ghost-town.
You can easily do this today, just start a mastodon instance and restrict the signups. I run a > 100 user instance on just a $10 digital ocean VPS. I'm seeing small tight-knit community instances popping up all over the place. You can tweak the settings or or even add customizations from forks that cater more to a siloed instance.
We need to separate the data layer from the app layer to allow free competition again.
I don't think that Facebook will be replaced with something so similar. I think what we need is an open data-platform that can contain (in a controlled way) social media data along with other kinds of data and then allow building social media apps on top of it. Otherwise we'll always be stuck using whatever the biggest supplier builds for us.
25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activity of 25 of your friends and the others are relegated to essentially being contacts.
I remember about two years ago Facebook was getting into a lot of trouble due to the amount of negative mental impact it had/has on its users and they did a study which found social media can have a negative impact on its users unless the user only follows a small circle of real-life friends and interacts with those people online. I don't have a source to this; I'm willing to accept there isn't real _evidence_ behind this claim.
Anyway, I'm surprised social media has been around this long, has been the subject of such controversy and there haven't been any or many real, impactful changes to the nature of it. Facebook and Instagram are, in my opinion, trying to be too much. They want to combine personal and public spaces. This, of course, works from a business perspective. But what are the long-term consequences of these products on our mental health and society?
We need a new social media focused on personal, tight-knit groups of people and interests. One that makes this the focus and doesn't stray for the purposes of profits. And, if that's not feasible in an economy that demands growth, we need better legislation demanding certain consumer protections are created for this sphere of products.