That seems to be depressingly true of any social website. There seems to be a sort, sweet spot that exists briefly between the implementation of a good idea and when the parasites catch on and move in to ruin it.
Wow that happened 27 years ago. Time does fly.
I am blaming Facebook. The parasites I was thinking of are the people and impulses that pervert the successful formula to push some agenda (e.g. push for some "engagement" metric, push people to use this or that app, unscrupulous monetization, etc).
But year after year they've stepped back on privacy, while still being a completely closed platform compared to the open web.
Facebook does the opposite now, which leads people to use it as a content consumption platform rather than a social network. Obviously that's what Facebook wants, since content consumption is infinitely more profitable than people posting on each other's walls all day.
Yes, you'd have to manually curate some things, but otherwise I think it's mostly just a matter of not hiring any marketing people, and creating the features first and looking how to make them easily usable second. Especially if the goal isn't to "kill FB", but simply offer an alternative to those who want the good bits and actually like, uhh, reading manuals and being proficient with the tools they use.
They can't come if there is nowhere for them to come to, and then it's easy to pretend they don't exist. But they do, even among the old and young and not so technical.
AI can help with that. Facebook already has automatic alt text for images, for example:
* Image may contain: 1 person, standing, selfie and phone
* Image may contain: cat
* Image may contain: food
And for an end-user, simple filtering can help with that. I sometimes use the FBPurity browser extension to hide everything that's a link or shared post, leaving almost exclusively original content. It can filter on that automatic alt text too if you hate cats, but I don't mind frivolous posts that are original content from my actual friends.
Make your own.
Here's what I did for my local network of friends (who also all hate Facebook). Install Wordpress, add the free Buddypress plugin, purchase $50 BuddyPress theme. Throw on a server.
There you go, your own private social network in under a week.
Or you can make your own social network with Diaspora* (https://diasporafoundation.org) or GNU Social (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757)
> If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.
Get into the world of finstas, that's basically the concept behind them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstag...
Lots of people have. There was for example Ello a couple of years ago. Me and many of my Facebook friends created accounts, used it for a couple of weeks and slowly kind of ended up back on facebook. Apparently no one else stuck around either since Ello seems to have turned itself into something else.
Manipulative algorithms can be taken out though, I suppose.
In a short period of time, that would solve 90% of your problems.
Just looked through settings and wasn't able to find anything for order of posts in news feed.
> And mute your obnoxious friends from appearing in your newsfeed.
Yep this is pretty easy to do.
> You can also hide posts from particular websites from appearing on your newsfeed.
This isn't helpful since you cannot block the entire class of "transitive" posts. Eg a Honda ad because a friend of mine liked a Honda page. Sure I can block Honda. But Toyota or Volkswagen can still show up until I block them individually...
And I think after a couple weeks hiding posts you'll significantly reduce the variety of content hitting your newsfeed.
Posting pictures of your food should be a criminal offence. Nothing too serious, just a couple of years in prison or something.
"Look, honey, we got something in the mail from Katie and John! It's... oh... just a bunch of pictures of food. That's odd."
Meanwhile Katie and John are still at home, furiously stuffing envelopes with the same food pictures so they can send one to everybody in their address book.
http://www.jaruzel.com/files/look-honey.png
:)
I also miss the "going to the beach", "this was a nice day" etc.
I don't miss "join me on farmville", "1000 reasons why Trump and/or Hillary are dumb" etc.
I deleted the app last year. Kept the account because as far as I can tell it's the same difference and I haven't summoned the strength to go retrieve my photos yet. Haven't missed it at all. Meanwhile my wife is increasingly addicted...
I don't understand your comment at all. What else would you be saying when you show a picture of nice food other than "this food is great"? I'm not in the habit of posting food photos but I've never understood the hysteria around it on places like HN.
I cannot remember thinking that about others but maybe I don't follow the same people as you.
"Look what I'm doing right now!"
Isn't this just like a smaller version of Show HN?
I mean: you make something, you post it and someone else chimes in with ideas or (hopefully) constructive criticism?
Is there any reason that I cannot see why making food isn't a form of making that we can be proud of?
No, but we were talking about why people post pictures of food that they buy, not that they make.
Because, yeah. Caning is totally commensurate with that.
No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out.
If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.