I wish there was a text only social network - I think it would reduce the influence of memes. HN is kind of like that, though I guess you really just need a tightly curated community with a good culture that wants to be good (since reddit comments still are pretty low quality in most cases).

Text only twitter would be interesting since you can curate your own slice of the community pretty easily, as a bonus it'd be fast.

Low effort ascii art was a mainstay on digg back in the day, I think moderation is more key.

someone is attempting to build a curated internet for each other, check this out:

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/get-kelvin

You can curate your reddit feed to include only text posts and links

Surely making text only instance (or network) of Mastodon wouldn't huge endeavor. Attracting people could be bigger challenge

How will that be different from a messages or WhatsApp group?

SMS?

I would pay $1/mo for a chronological feed of my friends' updates and posts.

I found Twitter and Facebook to be frustratingly unusable after they removed their chronological feeds in favor of feeds that prioritize ads and engagement.

Isn't Twitter properly chronological with 'Latest Tweets' turned on? For a while that setting would frequently reset to the non-chronological default, but at the moment it seems to be sticky. (I mostly use Twitter in a web browser, but I think the Android app is working the same way.)

We had it and it was beautiful: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed

Yes!

I was wondering why it needed to be such a jarring price. $13 per month? Really? What’s the bandwidth cost on text and a few images in S3?

Critical mass is obviously the barrier to building something like this but I’m inclined to agree that charging $1/month and $10 a year should be able to turn a healthy profit.

I do kind of wonder if the public is even aware of the problem, though. Anyone I’ve spoken to outside the industry seems to genuinely believe that folks with different opinions to them are stupid (rather than sorted into a different branch of Facebook/Google’s great graph of knowledge for their daily programming).

What costs more is not hardware but the salaries of employees.

> What else do you need for a 'social network?'

Mass adoption. The user base is the valuable aspect, everything else can be easily recreated.

Besides the advantage of an already established network - what are facebooks other advantages?

I suppose money is the biggest. are there others?

>Besides the advantage of an already established network - what are facebooks other advantages?

Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Sophisticated technology. I don't really use or like FB, but from what I have seen: stable and fast DB, intuitive, clean UI, lots of features. No hazzle to join.

But biggest is network effect.

You get adoption by datamining and autoenrollment so that when people do finally sign in/up.. they already have a network.

Not creepy at all..?

>Previously someone mentioned the idea of a $1/mo. social network.

Didn't WhatsApp used to be $1 a year before Facebook bought them and it was a very successful pricing model?

$1 a year for a website is very feasible for both parties assuming it's some Western society.

>Didn't WhatsApp used to be $1 a year before Facebook bought them and it was a very successful pricing model?

I was hounded and paid £0.69 to renew the 'subscription' ─ which was subsequently offered for free to everyone, shortly thereafter. I felt betrayed, but I would happily pay the same amount today (or slightly more), if only to preserve some shred of privacy.

Facebook pulls an average revenue of $70/year on each American user, so $1/mo is leaving a lot of money on the table by their standard

I don't think anyone expects this other option to be as profitable as facebook. If you actually managed to create something 1/7th the size/profitability of facebook and considered it a failure I guess I'd suggest you might legitimately suffer from visions of grandeur.

They used to say that at Signup, first year free, then again waive $1 every year in India.

I wish Twitter did this. I still think in person meetings are the best, followed by phone calls and emails (when in person socializing isn't possible). I really don't miss a site like Facebook.

But Twitter's use case is different - it is nice to have a place to check for quick updates from federal governments to our local post office and everyone in between, including thought leaders and such.

I would say you also need Groups. But I love the idea.

I've been hacking at a basic version of ad-free, subscription based group messaging, coordination, event planning, etc - check it out! https://get.thread-app.com/

I really liked the idea of Google+ Circles when they first came out. It allowed me to organize people I interacted with into a focused group; work, Linux, TF2, etc. If I wanted to talk about AWS, I could switch my brain into that mode and just post things about a single topic. It was really nice.

Anyone remember app.net?

I sure do. I miss it. I think it was doomed the moment it went freemium instead of strictly pay.

Yeah I feel like it's a very similar idea, however WhatsApp did get it's start for $1 a year after the first year iirc?

Did that make WhatsApp any money?

Yes, it had hundreds of millions of users.

All the ideas regarding $1-2/mo social networks seem to forget the enormous cost of moderating content on these social networks. Let's say your social network is $3/mo and people can upload unlimited photos. How long does it take for child porn to start getting shared on your service? Probably not long. That's not even getting into users harassing other users, and stuff like that. Volunteer moderators do the work on reddit for free because they get to feel ownership of their subreddits (until they try to delete them if they're popular, then the admins step in), but on a "normal" social network no one is going to moderate the content for free, especially not the horrible stuff people will post.

The problem I always have is "all my friends". I joined MSN messenger in the 2003(ish) only because that was the only away to join my friends. Facebook came next, and what's app moved them over to that. When it comes to " social media", the clue is in the name.

What is the solution?

A system that using a unique ID I can contact anyone else in the world, the two methods are voice or message. :)

My friends and I are currently building a donation platform for summer camp counselor alumni, church groups, etc. Basically small monthly reoccurring donations ($3-$20). We’ve been playing with the idea of having a social network aspect where to join you pick an organization to donate to and that’s your subscription for using the social network at large

$20/month?!? Forever?!?

It’s for a charity of your choice, so if you have the money, it’s an option. That’s why the base is $3

To charity. That's $240 to charity a year. Is that so much to sacrifice?

Depending on where you find the data, a lot of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1]. An extra $240 a year will certainly help a lot of people out there, not just in America. That's why free services like Google and Facebook continue to win out. I really like what some companies in the gaming sector have achieved where the richer subsidize the poorer via buying hats and other cosmetics to keep the game free or lower priced.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

Where did I say $240/ year is the baseline

> Previously someone mentioned the idea of a $1/mo. social network.

Dalton Caldwell currently chief of admissions at YC, tried exactly this at App.net a couple of years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Caldwell

I've been working on exactly this! https://get.thread-app.com/

It's a side project of mine at the moment, so it's quite basic, but I'd love it if you checked it out.

Seems to require a phone number? Won't be for me...

Well, https://dubfi.com/ is there already and it's free. And yes, it's coded by me.

I would pay $1 to remove each feature that annoyed me. It may cost me $10, but my quality of life would significantly increase, while not being a total pariah.

Groups, images / albums, tagging, friends.

This, though there is a very real problem of a mass-adopted online payment method where that $1 transaction is a net profit.

The challenge is getting a critical mass of users to encourage people beyond just early adopters. Perhaps the new service could seed new users' accounts by offering to import their content/contacts/etc from their other social media accounts.

Or, just accept that it takes a long time to build a successful business.

Why would you use that instead of FB though? FB is free and most people are on it already.

Yeah, considering it's basically just a glorified CRUD app!

Events are the thing that keep me and my peers using it.

I’ve been using https://gath.io to organize events. All you need is an email to create an event, and as far as I can tell, you can give it a fake email. It’s only used to send you the edit link (also displayed when you create the event). Same thing to RSVP, although it doesn’t share the link to remove yourself except by email, to my knowledge. They’ve just introduced groups, so setting up events for a group of friends is really easy. Bonus is that it’s open source and the person who maintains it has been really responsive to requests.

Oh man, this looks like exactly what I want. Will be trying this for next event I plan.

keybase?

fff