This is actually really interesting.

Marrying digital with physical is an interesting approach. The problem of proximity is a unique point of friction which might also temper digital communication.

If the application "lived" on cellphones and communicated with a P2P protocol, users could truly own their data (excluding the data they share with their network).

I imagine that some subset of users (1/10th?) would need to aggregate and serve their own and first-tier friends' content from a cheap VPS, and the Kardashians and Elons of the world might need a CDN of some kind, but if it's limited to short text posts I imagine it would be a tractable problem.

I dont use telephones. Nice knowing you guys, I guess. We can still think of the good times.

I would hate this because I’m physically nowhere near any HNers I’d trust, and vanishingly few HNers at all.

You wouldn't be first-tier friends with people you only know from the internet. You'd be first-tier friends with neighbors and cousins and the other parents at your kids' school. Then when I prove (keybase style) that I, HN user ineptech, am also "ineptech" on this social network, you would know that I really am a 48-year-old guy in Portland and not some other person because I have also friended all my irl friends, and our friends-of-friends-of-friends eventually overlap.

Maybe "friend" is the wrong term. Maybe "vouch". You could still message me, but you wouldn't vouch for me, because you don't know from HN whether I am who I say I am.

But why ? Why would you expose your entire real life social circle to the internet?

If you don't want people to know that you're friends with Dave, don't friend Dave, or don't use it at all. This isn't supposed to replace pseudo-anonymous networks like Twitter, this is more like Facebook without all the bullshit. The use case is "I know Dave, and I don't care who knows that I'm friends with Dave, and I'd like to let him know I won't make it to the PTA meeting without involving an enormous advertising corporation".

The fact of the "vouch" could provide the validation without identifying the people from whose circle overlap it was derived.

I think the point is that you wouldn't be. The network, from your perspective, will be quite small.

I don't speak to my neighbors.

My blood family consists of violent homophobes that would shoot my house up if they ever learned I'm gay (or where I live).

I have a dedicated online persona (fursona, really) that I keep compartmentalized from people I distruat.

Some of my friends are trans.

Some of my friends have abusive ex-partners and stalkers.

Some of my friends are sex workers who need social media to find customers but don't want their real names leaked.

How would your proposal serve any of these use cases? From where I stand, it'd be more of a hindrance.

This idea may not fulfill every use case.

It's fine if it doesn't fulfill all use cases, but demonstrating any thought to some of them would help flesh out the details of what's being proposed.

Are you building a social network, or a chain of trust?

Are identities fungible, or irrevocably linked to a person's legal name and physicality?

Etc.

Your example just shows the perils of monopoly social networks.

Today you have Facebook and Twitter (and whatever the kids use these days) with not much in between. If you’re not on those you don’t exist as a person.

If there were more options to choose from you could have a place with all your furry friends that is completely separate from the other aspects of your life like coworkers and family. No need to link between the two, nobody needs to know what you get up to on the other places unless you wanted them to.

The whole point of vouching for someone is so they can prove they are who they say they are. If you don't want to do that, then don't do that. Or, if you have two identities, I suppose you'd have two accounts.

Anyway, things don't have to be for everyone. In the unlikely scenario in which this gets built, there would still be other websites too.

> Anyway, things don't have to be for everyone. In the unlikely scenario in which this gets built, there would still be other websites too.

Just so we're clear: Do you realize this is how systemic prejudice gets built?

"Our policies disproportionately exclude [insert minority group] in particular? Well it isn't because we're [insert -ist word here]! We love [group]. We're baffled why they would believe otherwise."

You've misunderstood me, no one is being excluded and there's no real name policy. Use a pseudonym, make two accounts, make ten or a hundred if you like. What you can't do is use the app to prove that you really are John Smith, if you didn't sign up as John Smith. And to the extent that one of the main features of the app is to prove your identity, the app would not be useful to someone who doesn't want to do that.

Around here, I'm pretty unwelcome at things like tech meetups. I stopped going, after experiencing the "circle of avoidance" thing, a few times.

New York ageism is even worse than Silicon Valley.

No one wants to know me, and I'm OK with that, as I get a lot done, anyway, and the people that matter to me (all over the world) are part of my circle.

I can relate to this. Most people don't like me. The problem is they don't like me for the things I love about myself.

Minimizing social friction produces lubricant, not "quality" humans.

What is a quality that turns people off to you but you don't think is worth changing?

I am extremely direct, often play devil's advocate, and rarely react with emotional equivalence.

Excuse me for being direct, but do you mean to say you don’t care about other people, only whether what they say is accurate and whether they can communicate it without emotional reaction?

I view all interactions as transactional. Some interactions are net-positives, but most are net-negatives. I value those who reciprocate and avoid those who do not.

From my perspective, your question is quite nuanced. I do not value people (in general) because I place no value on life. We are born, we live, and then we die. In time, we will all be forgotten. The outcome is absolute.

Out of curiosity, do you work closely with hardware/embedded systems or similar concepts?

I have not. Why do you ask? You have certainly piqued my interest.

This level of optimization away from other humans in my experience tends to come from specific forms of introverted high intelligence (interaction with others is a net loss) but also specialization functionally/professionally away from interaction with humans (typically toward machines, or at least into more constrained work environments).

I haven't yet found something I feel passionately about. I recently finished refactoring a pid-free analytics application but now find myself without motivation. I love solving problems but dislike the rest.

I'll look into the niches you mentioned. Thanks for the reply and your time.

Sorry to hear your experience has been that. As someone approaching that point, I wonder whether I will have to find other outlets besides the traditional tech meetups that I was attending more regularly in the times before covid.

Since you do bring experience, I would recommend (if you haven't tried yet), to give talks instead of just attending. I have found that the speakers tend to be well received regardless as they bring value. I did a lightning talk once and had the most positive interactions after my talk than any of the other meetups I attended.

Yeah...the thing about the talks (I'm quite good at that stuff), is that they also skew young, and generally, at least around here, they are considered as currency, so there's a lot of competition for them. I could really give a rat's ass about ego, and I'm not looking for work, so I'm not interested in mud-wrestling some hungry young turk, with a syllabus full of Buzzword Stew, for a speaking engagement.

I'm good at Swift and native Apple stuff. I've given courses on it, in the past. I was actually shocked to find out that no one is really interested in that, out here. I could go into the city, but, quite frankly, I'd rather eat ghost peppers.

Chris, I read your blog and many of your posts here. You are a good writer. Please don't stop.

First, it sucks that you are facing that age discrim IRL. In the tech world, "doing talks" is a bit like publishing in scientific research. It builds a brand name for yourself and increases your value. This is why the young and aggressive (and mostly men) want to do it. Plus, it is a form of fame and adoration. The same group wants that too.

Second, I had a idea reading this post: Did you ever consider "doing a talk" with an audience of zero? Record it exactly like you are giving a talk, then post to your blog or YouTube. People would watch it; I know it. The difference: You couldn't mix with an excited, buzzing crowd after your talk, but maybe the comments section would be interesting. If you get lucky (great talk), it will pop-up on HN. For example, you said you are "good at Swift and native Apple stuff". Watch a few YouTube videos on the topic. Find areas of weakness. That is an easy way to generate ideas.

Thanks. I’ve considered doing stuff like Vimeo/YouTube stuff, and may do so, but it’s a lot of work. I’ve had a full dance card, the last couple of years, and that has even affected my text postings (which is why I came up with my “Shorties”[0] series).

I enjoy writing, but don’t enjoy video production as much (but I haven’t really done enough to say that, definitively).

When I give talks and classes, I spend a lot of time, preparing. I spent close to a month, preparing this 90-minute Bluetooth class[1].

I have just been a bit strapped for time, lately.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/shorties/

[1] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master

Interesting, but how do we know if friend of a friend is real or not? I think it's also vulnerable to bots or malicious infiltration

You only "friend" people in real life who you trust not to act maliciously. If you unwisely trust someone who is malicious, you encounter various problems, just like in real life. But it would be very difficult for a malicious person to construct a realistic-looking subnet of sockpuppets because that would require getting lots of real people to make that unwise decision.

Not saying this is perfect, but I predict that the vast majority of users who "friend" 20+ people irl who also have friends will be fine, and borderline cases will be borderline.

An invitation model would inherently link bad actors. With that being said, I dislike the approach.

One thing that might be valuable on this is to do sms contact syncing where people can provide soft proof that they share the same social circles. In essence, if both parties have John Doe in their phone as 123-456-7890 , we can extrapolate that they both know him. Extend this across many contacts and it might be possible to see how much their direct networks overlap. One way of proving a person is indeed who they claim to be is by using a service like authillo.com

Reminds me a bit of PGP and a key signing party. In that case the goal is to verify government docs to help someone verify they are who they say they are, but you can also give greater trust levels to the people you actually know.

scuttlebutt[0] is like this.

0:https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/

You can add someone on SSB just by adding their public key though. That's not what the comment above is talking about

The first problem I see is separating my online identity with my real identity. I really don't want anyone at my job finding out which dog I am on the internet.

My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting. :)

The second is friends of friends can get really awkward. There are some people who are friends with me that are also friends with people who never want to see me again.

I mean, nothing would stop you from making a fake identity, and friending other anonymous people, and posting spicy memes. But you can do that on mastodon today, right? This is for the cases where you want to prove your identity. If most people use it that way, then the anonymous people would be little subnets that are either separate from the main graph or connected by only a few nodes. Typical users would* have dozens of people vouching for them, who each have dozens of people vouching for them, etc, which is strong evidence that they're who they say they are.

* in some hypothetical future where this gets made and is wildly successful

That's exactly the point of small social circles. You can segment your audience as a broadcaster based on shared interests, language, and understanding.

The vast majority of the Internet doesn't need to read your shit posting. However, a small group of friends might find that appealing. If no one finds that content useful, amusing, or interesting... you'd be screaming at a wall. Isn't that exactly how it should be?

That's... not relevant? OP was talking about a system that requires tapping phones to connect and using friends of friends to form secondary connections.

This is why I have a burner sim for online accounts requiring a phone number. (Looking at you Telegram...)

Whoops, my bad.

I also maintain two phone numbers but for different reasons. I hate spam.

> My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting.

Shit posting is one of the biggest forms of toxicity online. It would be nice if it went away by tying posts to real people. Some people don't care and would shitpost anyway, but most people only shitpost because nobody knows who they really are.

This comment rhymes with the justifications for Real Name policies. They don't work.

All real name policies do is make many LGBTQ+ people feel unwelcome.

Facebook does tie posts to real people. It doesn’t work. People are just as toxic.

It would appear there is some irony in this SoftTalker.

What do you define as shit posting?

Not the person you're replying to, but I agree with them. For me shitposting is discussing in bad faith.

But what is it?

Being contrarian for no other reason than to annoy, or trying to get under someone’s skin, ignoring their arguments and riding roughshod over what they’re trying to say. Things people avoid doing in real life because very soon after doing them you find yourself disliked.

Oh my god, yes. It's like most online content has to be communicated in crappy memes, sarcastic quotes, and weird existential dread responses. It drives me insane.

The bar for "shitposting you don't want your coworkers to know about" is so low nowadays that it's almost a free speech issue to allow anonymous accounts.

If you post about not like drag shows in front of children, that itself is harmless enough in a vacuum but polarizes people to a serious extent

I think maybe it depends how you define shit posting. If you mean trolling or posting extremely negative and low-effort content, then I suppose I agree with you about it being toxic.

But if shitposting is just off-color jokes or talking about topics you might want to keep private, I don't see that as a problem. I think a lot of great internet content wouldn't exist without some form of anonymity. I certainly wouldn't share genuine insights into my job without anonymity. People wouldn't share sexual content or secrets. Many people wouldn't share anything at all no matter how tame or appropriate. My wife over thinks when she writes and is always afraid she isn't wording things well. She posts absolutely nothing outside of Reddit.

My definition of shit posting is the stuff I say on Reddit. The highest rated comment on my previous account there would likely get me banned here. :)

I'd say that then this hypothetical new social network just wouldn't be suitable for Reddit-like shitposting.

Keep Reddit and Twitter for that, this-new-thing for real-identity real talk.

I don't see a problem and I'd love it.

Grow a thick skin. Instead of shielding people from real world things expose them to it. In a few generations they get used to it/learn to use it.

Like Google deliberately fucking up their image search and not releasing a proper face search... because rainbow ponies would fall from the sky.

I am not even sure how this is an actual position to be defended.

Writing anonymously or with pseudonyms is as old as feather pens. It allowed people to denounce tyrants and allowed women to publish their writings.

To force everyone to show an id to publish is either very naive or ill-intented to push us into a full Orwellian framework.

'Shitposting' or scorn writing is the price to pay so that anonymity is there for when you _truly_ need it.

As people who don’t do this, I prefer to stay anonymous. Anonymous writing has a long and good history with some bad apples. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwafrr

> It would be nice if it went away by tying posts to real people. Some people don't care and would shitpost anyway, but most people only shitpost because nobody knows who they really are.

If this was true and the only explanation, HN should be much worse than it is and Facebook should be much better than it is.

Even as a person who hardly ever get in trouble with mods I have come to deeply appreciate the possibility to have accounts or profiles totally disconnected from reality.

Many stories we see couldn't have been shared if a hard link to a real identity was necessary, and many questions could not ve asked.

For example random22username12 asking about some technical aspect about some software is not a problem.

But if he is Firstname Lastname from Some Company it might get him in trouble, as it might tell others what they are working on.

I had a conversation recently about the problems of social media and the growing extremes of political viewpoints. We agreed the a good part of the problem is partially caused by the online echo chamber but mostly by the increasing physical isolation of people in the real world. In the past the majority of men would have worked in manual labor with lots of other people, women would have worked at home and spent a lot more time getting to know their neighbours, now we work in isolation on a screen and stay at home without integrating with a community on a daily basis like times past. This allows people's views to go unchallenged and reduces the middle ground we all depended upon. Previously our vees would be challenged and our standing in our community would depend on our views. To go back to your point about anonymity should we be posting stuff online that we know our physical peers would have a problem with. Anonymity has its place I'm just not sure where the line is drawn.

To some degree, I agree. But I also grew up before social media. Very little has changed about the fundamental ugliness of human behavior we try to tuck into a corner.

As someone who was seriously hurt by forced conformity, I’m not exactly pining for the way things used to be.

It wasn’t that long ago when people were expected to drink themselves to death rather than seek help.

> My coworkers and family really wouldn't appreciate my shit posting. :)

Hey, here’s a thought. Maybe if there were any locally observable consequences to that behavior you’d stop and the Internet would be a better place…

The “shit posting” referring to my dark, sarcastic humor. It gets upvotes on Reddit but I try to keep it off Hacker News. :)

I worry more about my parents reading about how I see my childhood or a future employer knowing I’m bipolar.

And there are consequences to my behavior online.

Kayodé Lycaon is my identity in the furry fandom. People know me in real life under this name. I’m published under this name.

In a lot of ways, my legal identity is the pseudonym. I think of myself as Kayodé more than [legal name].

To shreds you say? And his wife?

Hearing a lot on this thread about folding real life back into social networks, making the system designed to keep people on the happy, healthy, human-scaled social path. Today's SMBC lines up pretty neatly - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/addicted

You seem to be under the impression that real life access is the indicator of closeness of relationship. It is usually not.

Out of my set of close friends the vast majority I have never met in person. Most family I might add are in entirely separate states. Most of my IRL friends no longer live near me.

> You seem to be under the impression that real life access is the indicator of closeness of relationship.

No, just the hardest part to fake. You can copy my photo, hack my email, mimic my prose style, and steal my credit card, but you can't get the people in my school's PTA to say, "Yeah that's him" in real life.

This resonated with me. Well said.

This marks you as a tremendous outlier.

Imagine moving to a different country/state just before this app becomes popular. All your friends & family are now far away.

Most of the people I've become friends with since my 30s have moved long distances to be where I happened to meet them. Melting pot cities like Los Angeles consist largely of people who moved there from other states!

This seems like a silly design, adding a huge barrier to getting started.

Threema has a concept of "levels" for contacts:

> Level 1 (red): The ID and public key have been obtained from the server because you received a message from this contact for the first time or added the ID manually. No matching contact was found in your address book (by phone number or email), and therefore you cannot be sure that the person is who they claim to be in their messages.

> Level 2 (orange): The ID has been matched with a contact in your address book (by phone number or email). Since the server verifies phone numbers and email addresses (via an SMS or email with the activation link), you can be reasonably sure that the person is who they claim to be.

> Level 3 (green): You have personally verified the ID and public key of the person by scanning their QR code. Assuming their device has not been hijacked, you can be very sure that messages from this contact were really written by the person that they indicate.

I've always liked this idea! I think it should be device-level too, and not have a separate ephemeral identity. In other words if you get a new phone you have to start over.

This is an interesting concept. The biggest disadvantage would be losing a digital archive every two years (or as necessary).

Its sister idea is holding on to phones for longer. The big drawback would be losing the phone, I think.

So does the person who finds the phone inherits the identity? Can we have influencers selling off their circles? When I get robbed is my mugger now friends with my grandma?

Isn't he already, right now?

Well, right now they would need to unlock it and I can sign out of the app somewhere else.

The phone would have the same physical security features. But 'signing out' would be more of an ostracism thing.

Ah, ok, so it's just a pain to get back into the social network. Isn't this just adding friction for friction's sake?

No, it's adding friction for honesty's sake. You don't have six thousand friends. You have five friends, tops, and like two hundred acquaintances tops[0].

There's nothing to "get back into"-- it was all just a lie to flatter you. The network effect stops working for you in the low three digits. You're just part of a people directory owned by some corporation.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

For Facebook I keep my friends list light - less than 50 people, but there are people who I live a far ways away from - my parents for instance are 5 hours away. I don't want to have to drive to them just to prove they should be part of my social network.

I mean, if you want, you could choose to not use this nonexistent product. You don't have to hypothetically use it.

True, and I probably wouldn't. Just throwing out what I see is a potential issue.

Currently working on implementing a similar feature, where instead of direct interaction it's location based relative to that users recent posts. That way if you don't want to be "found" you don't post and vice-versa.

On the subject of "tapping phones". I had the idea that you could generate a nice pairing key by using the aligned inertial measurements to validate identity over a public channel (like some wireless protocol). Think of it like Bump 2.0. You could then share contact information, messages, whatever...

In practice it might be a little bit more than a instantaneous bump, and more of a quick shake. Like a handshake, but with phones. Weird, but kinda cool... maybe.

> I think it could be implemented in a distributed way, with no central server,

Fixed by Bison Relay released yesterday.

One of the primary utilities of a social network is being able to connect with people who aren't around you. If everyone on my Twitter was within shouting distance why would I need to Tweet at all?

I'm not sure that would work for me. One of the things I like is actually making new friends. Google Plus was absolutely perfect for that: I got to know a lot of people with similar interests (hobbies, politics) to mine.

In fact, I'm not even connected to my real life friends on any social media, as far as I'm aware. Maybe they're not even on it. They may be wiser than I.

I still think there is an issue of trust.

What happens when you meet a bad actor vs someone you have known your entire life?