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> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People ta
by godot 1y ago
> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better.
>
> Some things work precisely because they’re small.
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
- rco8786 1y agoYea the first few years of Facebook were magical. It felt like suddenly you could connect with your peers in a new way, discover old friends, etc. Went downhill pretty quickly though.
- pier25 1y agoFacebook around 2008 was pretty cool. Just me hanging out with my irl friends. And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.
- xgkickt 1y agoI thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.
- mojuba 1y agoGoogle's Circles is a classical example of something that seems like a great idea on paper but doesn't work in practice. It had too much friction: categorizing people by circles and then also deciding which circle should receive what. Apparently nobody liked it and it's one of the reasons Plus failed so spectacularly.
- buzzerbetrayed 1y agoAnother reason was asymmetric friendships. Meaning Alice could add Bob to a circle without Bob adding Alice back. Made it so much harder for the network effect to kick in.
- citizenkeen 1y agoAnd yet for certain communities - like TTRPGs - it not only worked incredibly well but were still unlocking the effects of its loss.
- danlugo92 1y agoFWIW IG now has a similar feature. I don't use it but alas...
- ncruces 1y agoNo, it didn't fail. Circles is group chats (WhatsApp, or whatever's popular in your neck of the woods), which I'd argue is how (most?) people in 2025 actually do “social networking.” Instagram/TikTok/Xitter is… something else entirely.
- ipaddr 1y agoChat programs are not social networking.
- Ar-Curunir 1y agoThey absolutely are. Maybe less so in the USA, but they have replaced Facebook for many (most?) people in the subcontinent, Africa, and south america
- ncruces 1y agoExactly. Europe too. It's how people talk to groups of dozens of people at a time: friends, neighbors, acquaintances, the parents of your kid's school mates to discuss school stuff or to setup a birthday party… coworkers if you include more work oriented chat apps. I have dozens of such groups, some with photos of kids around a birthday cake that I'd never have put up of Facebook (if I still used it). If that's not social networking, I'm not sure what is.
- thewebguyd 1y agoYeah, Facebook's best days were when it still required a .edu email to sign up. Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.
- fullstackchris 1y agohttps://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/new/index.php https://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/new/index.php comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters
- ipaddr 1y agoThis is the reason for facebooks success the rollout. Regardless of when you joined it was always better for you then the next group. Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard. There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y agoI remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.
- amelius 1y agoYou could run something like Facebook but in tiny shards. It would be better. And require 1/1000th of the engineering workforce.
- xnx 1y agoI can see many way where you can only follow (and be followed) by 1000 people would be better in many way. An audience of 1000 isn't monetizable so the network wouldn't be poisoned by ads ("sponsored content" AKA "sponcon").
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stanmancan 1y ago1,000 is way too many. Low hundreds max.
- jakelazaroff 1y ago15 years later, we've reinvented Path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network) > Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allowed users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family.
- NikolaNovak 1y agoI liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome. I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.
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- wat10000 1y agoThe problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that. I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell. There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.
- xp84 1y agoThis is pretty true, but funny because it’s maybe the simplest problem to solve at least on Facebook, with the group visibility. People just either don’t care or are too incompetent to select the correct audience when posting.
- wincy 1y agoI remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.
- saghm 1y ago> I don’t think she even noticed honestly. From her perspective, the post disappeared, and then you never posted anything like that again! Everyone wins
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI had a relative threaten his daughter, because her daughter-in-law posted some political stuff he disagreed with. Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.
- coldtea 1y agoThis goes both ways (old to young and reverse), but family goes before politics. You don't cut out, or disown, or stop visiting, or badmouth family because you disagree with their politics... If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.
- generj 1y agoIt depends, if the political take is sufficiently shitty it’s a betrayal of your morals, friends etc to continue to associate with your family spouting it. Typically that has to be some extreme form of bigotry people won’t let go of after repeated coaching. Extreme bigotry or conspiracy thinking is arguably a form of abuse directed at other family members and it’s 100% ok to cut people off for being abusive.
- Ar-Curunir 1y agoWhere does it stop? What if your relatives support, eg, racist policies? What if they support genocide? How personal does it have to be? What if you’re dating a person of another race, and your relatives support keeps making racist comments to you, even after you try to explain why that’s not okay?
- derefr 1y agoI think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks. The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators. Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto. The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.) Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest. In real-world terms: • Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks. • Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks. • Group therapy sessions are good social networks. • A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there. Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.) • I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.) • BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was. Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.) It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.
- para_parolu 1y agoThe best social network I ever used was private one with a few thousand users. Over time you just know most active users.
- Jbird2k 1y agoTelegram is a platform where you can connect with people on a small scale
- brentjanderson 1y agoThere's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
- saubeidl 1y agoGoogle Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..
- kevml 1y agoExcellent point. Plus and Wave were ahead of their time.
- positron26 1y agoCircles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. In hindsight, any SNS begins as a megaphone and if it can't make statements in culture, it doesn't exist. It's not actually about the individuals. Sure, people want to post things, but they want to be feeding into something that does stuff. I don't think Google ever made that case. It was pure chicken and egg with no ice breakers.
- throwawayq3423 1y ago> Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. Then it wasn't a good feature.
- positron26 1y agoThe point is that we weren't looking for social media, so killer SNS features didn't matter. It was a better mousetrap for a market that's deep down motivated by mashed potatoes.
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- doctorpangloss 1y agoHa ha, the authors says do things that don’t scale, but he used Gemini to write that cliche prose.
- jszymborski 1y agoThis is sorta something people are discovering with Mastodon. Lots of instances are realizing it's better to cap registrations before they get too large and just have someone spin up another instance. You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).
- 30minAdayHN 1y agoOnce a sister of my friend messaged me asking to take down a picture of him with a beer mug. It was because they were looking for matches for him (Indian wedding). I said no and told her that it is better to lose such a match :p At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoGoogle + solved this issue with 'circles' or whatever it was called. For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know. The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)
- tombert 1y agoSomethingAwful is still fun precisely because they don't have too many people. At any given time, there's about ~2500 active users, which is enough to keep the chats funny and interesting and avoiding "dead mall" vibes, but not so much that it's horrible like LinkedIn or Facebook.
- Seanambers 1y agoAt some point, everyone on Facebook realized almost at the same time, that it was no longer a place to share, but a place to compete. Then everyone basically stopped sharing and started curating.
- andai 1y ago"What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too." —xkcd 1320
- xgkickt 1y agoDigital Heaven. We may not get it, but our AI death masks will.