Let me know what you think! It is just based on EST for now, sorry.
I thought that was annoying but also amusing.
I do really like this idea.
If anything I want more limited, but also more genuine social media.
Thanks! I'm glad you like it. I do think it could have some cool dynamics but that is what I'm testing right now.
That said, if you've had success with it in a friend group, perhaps that suggests it's a nice mechanism for a group chat app, rather than for a public social media site?
This sounds like a nice sentiment, but I don't think this is strictly true. I would go as far as to say that it is largely untrue. Diverse and worldwide perspectives may damage building a welcoming ecosystem. Whatsapp for example is probably the most popular social media site across the world, and thats because different groups close off themselves into private chat groups.
Take a look at Nairaland, one of the most popular Nigerian social media sites. The content on that site would most certainly not be welcome on any of the silicon valley run sites.
I now use Freedom (freedom.to) on all of my devices to block myself from all of these sites until 8pm every day. I've been getting more work done, and reading more books.
...and that was BEFORE the layoffs =/
I had a quick look at https://www.nairaland.com/ and nothing immediately sprang out.
It depends on whether you consider WhatsApp to be social media (is iMessage social media? is one-to-one SMS social media?). I think it's different enough to what the author is attempting here to be considered differently.
Yes, was not expecting it to hit as much of an audience as it did at the end there. Definitely need some mechanisms to stop the spam it saw at the end.
Local communities all operate in the same time zone. No reason small online communities couldn’t operate in the same time zone, allowing each time zone to have their own separate communities.
I do think of this as an opportunity for you to create your own site that meets your standards, however.
I guess OP is having some hard time with date calculations :D
I find any “deep” topics to be pretty shallow except on specialist boards that wouldn’t appeal to the layman but nonetheless do vet people before letting them on.
You could delay everything by a few hours or a day between submitting a post and publishing it.
I'm talking about the inconvenience of potentially having to get up at 3am to see what your dad posted.
All that said, I think someone should definitely try this idea out, and people can decide for themselves whether they want to us it.
I also thought that Twitter's character limit was stupid, but Twitter really took off.
Personally, I enjoy reading about world news, hearing about TV shows I might want to watch that aren't in my language. I enjoy reading cross-language puns and seeing photos of food I don't usually eat. I enjoy seeing people who don't worry about the things I worry about.
If you don't want those things, if you don't want to know what's going on outside, then that's up to you, but I think that's a sad way to live life.
Imagine something like OnlyFans except instead of being accessible 24/7 for anyone to see at any time, it's only accessible at very late hours, possibly midnight to 4 AM, etc, in your time zone or whatever time zone you wish. In some cases, your content might only be available on certain days of the week.
A neat side effect of this is that if for instance you have a respectable job, but also want to do some debauchery online on the side, no one can simply go see your stuff without respecting the time zone. That means employers aren't going to be looking you up during business hours or your grandma isn't going to accidentally open up links in the middle of the day leading to your spicy content. Stalking someone online becomes a little more complicated because you now have to wait for their content to become accessible. And if someone does see your content, you know it's because they put in the effort to be there when it opens, which can be embarrassing for them to admit.
We take it for granted that information about someone is constantly available online once posted but I think the next big trends is going to be these sort of inaccessibility controls, that are not based on money.
Before you go trying to make this a business though, keep in mind a big player like OnlyFans can just make this a feature in a weekend, if they haven't already.
So my community could be 7:02-10:02pm EST. And if I instead switch to say 6am-9am IST instead, I can check in with the folks who like to meet in the mornings in india, but I am temporarily gone from my own local community.
Not everyone ends up posting within that two minute window and the only "punishment" for not doing so is that it just says they posted late.
BeReal is a great concept regardless, just pointing out the differences and the realities of it.
I love the idea if time boxed experiences so I signed up.
That being said, I like it as a way to just journal a picture a day, even without any contacts in the app.
Expensive long-distance phone calls sucked, but the side-effect was that nearly everybody on a given board was in the same or one-adjacent local calling area. They were strangers behind a screen only to a degree; they were also your neighbors, schoolmates, and coworkers. If someone needed something, someone else could bike or drive over and help. We had parties, we had picnics, we organized camping weekends. They didn't stay strangers for long.
Yes the global internet was big and shiny and it let you talk to anyone anywhere. So far away that they might in fact be a dog, and you'd never know. But for all we gained, we lost that sense of local connection, and I didn't appreciate that aspect until it was gone.
Pretty common experience for a Western Australian though. "Hey wow that looks like an amazing webinar!" Instant disappointment when I see the hours.
Isolated in time and distance.
It was called Let's Get Weird.
App would open only from 11p to 4a
You were be able to chat and share pics only with nearby people
Selfies were upside down, because why not
At the end of the day period, pics, chats every thing got deleted and it was a blank slate the next day
A shifting window would be even more "slow internet". Of course it would be a different vibe; you'd have stuff to catch up on the days it's in prime time for you. As-is it seems like it'd have more of a real-time vibe.
What is your hypothesis(es)?
That social media would be better if chats were synchronous rather than asynchronous? That the system can help people better balance between time spend in the virtual world and the physical world? Or something else?
Quite the contrary. Welcoming ecosystems are discriminatory because necessarily exclude those who generally aren’t interested, or act in bad faith.
Community is local.
So yeah, the current window wouldn't work for me, but that's fine. Everything doesn't have to be for everyone. We all live in our bubbles anyway; creating artificial rules could actually be ways of creating new, unexpected interactions.
This being said – if you were to adjust the rules to accommodate more people, I don't think it should be "open from 7:39 to 10:39 in whatever your local time zone is", because that feels like it would just destroy the whole idea – that everyone is there at the _same_ time. Also, it would still exclude people who work evenings.
An alternative solution would be to have multiple windows. For example, if you have one starting at 7:39 PM EST and another one at 7:39 AM EST, there would be more chances that there is some time during the day for people around the globe to check in. Depending, of course, on many things: time zones, sleep habits, work schedule, ability to briefly slack off during work, etc. It would remain true to the idea while opening up for some more people. Just a thought.
I also think each window could be smaller, maybe like just one hour?
Then go to any of the sites that already exist for that, and stop acting like any new site needs to function exactly according to your personal preferences in order to be acceptable.
> if you don't want to know what's going on outside, then that's up to you, but I think that's a sad way to live life.
You can "want to know what's going on outside" without needing every single website to be globalized. We don't need to completely eradicate local communities in order to be exposed to other cultures. I think an awful lot of people would find your position here to be the "sad" one. I know I do.
Worth thinking about what metrics you think reflects “better” (content, experience). Something that measures quality of engagement. Retention should work.
One thing you’ll be up against is that thoughts don’t keep office hours, but someone might still want to share with their circle. You could consider creating a holding pen for things a user comes up with - they can record it, but it doesn’t flow yet. That also gives cooling off period which I bet could simultaneously give the satisfaction of immediate gratification (writing it down) and quality content (reflect before post).
Only downside is you have to share 2FA secrets on my server. I wonder if I should consider making one that's completely encrypted. (I trust me, but you shouldn't trust a stranger.)
(It's web based because I only use my work phone and they won't allow me to put my own apps on it.)
I'd _highly_ recommend it to anyone with an Android phone.
I like the idea that something like this could be open for 3 hours in the evening local time. Like, you'd get totally different communities coming on at different times, and having completely separate experiences together. But some other people would bridge the gap.
While you're online, every hour some people would be forced to leave and some other people could join.
Maybe if your dad posts something on a website that is only opened at 3am in your own time zone, it’s that their post is not intended for you.
I can’t access op’s website because of my location and I have no fomo at all : I’m just not the target. It’s ok. I still find the idea to be funny.
Where is the controversy in the examples?
Back when I lived in the ‘states, I’d wake up in the morning and participate in all sorts of interesting discussions on a bunch of fresh posts.
Now, living in Europe, I wake up to a homepage full of “7 hours ago” top comments with 200 points on them. Any contribution we make from here will last maybe a minute or two before getting sorted down out of view.
I spend most of my time now reading what y’all had to say about stuff.
It was a really nice app, but they just couldn't make it work.
I have an idea kicking round the back of my head... when I was a teenager I ran a php forum on a shared server. I shared it with my school friends, and we had about 30 regular members on it. It turned into a full blown social network, we'd have our own memes, we'd talk about who's going to the school disco, make jokes etc...
It was really nice, there was no monetization, no ads, the "feed" was chronological, no bots, or spammers.
I also used it to learn programming, reading and modifying the code to add our own features.
My idea is an open source social network. Completely customisable. It wouldn't be designed to scale up past a couple of hundred users. You'd host it yourself (on aws, heroku or similar), and would be completely in control of the instance.
I like how this is considered weird. Like, yeah, let’s talk and share our pictures globally in an instant to people we don’t know.
At least we will benefit from what forums are left in the form of model training data. People give LLMs a lot of shit, but it's possible one day that a language model ends up becoming a go-to oracle of future archeologists studying the present day.
Sometimes it's easy to take for granted how historic the current times are, and how interested people will be in the minuet and institutional knowledge which few bother to expend considerable resources preserving.
Hilariously, this reminds me of a governmental department that was hosting its server in-house as a simple PC and available only during working hours (9am-5pm), so when the staff left, they turned it off.
But this social media actually reminded me of old phone line BBS. I believe life was better when we had to wait for our enjoyment, and even stand in line for it.
I really like the idea, it sounds like a very healthy way to engage. If you took a photo on holiday you wouldn't be able to share it until the evening, so you'd just put the phone away. It becomes a camera. At the moment I see people take a photo and then for the next hour they're distracted by reactions, comments, feeling obligated to respond to comments... they miss the whole experience. Sharing when your friends are actually online would also be more interactive.
Of course, if you're on holiday then your three hour home time window may be unusable. But then, worst case scenario, you bulk upload everything when you get home. It would be like the old days of returning from a trip and getting friends round to see a slide show - quite charming, really.
Having said that, apps which have tried to slow people down haven't been too successful. People on HN might like it more than the general population.
But I will make the obvious point that does not seem very fashionable these days. What if we chose instead to cultivate self-discipline? This project is a technical fix to a human problem, but human problems can also be addressed with human solutions. Is there no value in doing things the time-honored way?
Personally, I'm not addicted to social media but I do have a sweet tooth. The classic hack here is not to have sugary things in the home, or only in such small quantities as to neutralize the problem. But these technical fixes are expensive. Restaurant desserts are poor value compared to an industrial-sized pot of Nutella, consumed slowly.
Well, I've discovered that, with practice and determination, and of course some rules about quantities and time windows, it is in fact possible to resist temptation, even when it's sitting right in front of me all day. Personally, I find this human solution to be liberating and empowering.
I think that it can not be understated just how much self disciplin moderne people living in moderne societies are possessing.
Try to compare how moderne adult people react to sweets, social media, etc. compared to kids and children.
Continuing pushing this on the individual does not work. This is like saying that you can become multi billionaire by not getting star bucks.
The reality is things do not work like that, even to maintain a small community forum you need a small but constant influx of new users as people regularly just disappear/leave as in any social group.
The real challenge is to let decent human people join without the trolls, bots and scammers.
If you understand you don't want them given a broader context, then it requires no self-dispcipline - you just don't want them.
But if you can't untangle your contradiction, i.e. if self-discipline is required, why would you want to spare any thought on that?
I understand your point about this resisting temptation being a skill, a muscle that you train, that you want to master and that feels empowering. I'm just pointing out that when truly mastered it is 100% effortless - and when it is 100% effortless it means you either can't have it or understand that you don't want to (which is the same as simply not wanting to).
Otherwise it's a cognitive dissonance, a distraction.
The product is the network. The restricted window is a feature. I can already achieve this with screen time and leechblock.
But no quibbles if it’s just hobby project.
I don’t share this thread’s ideas about making it accessible for everyone. I think people are too fixated on scale and inclusion.
It’s absolutely fine to work for three evening hours in a fixed timezone. Every timezone has enough people to not meet every one of them in a lifetime.
If someone wants this in their timezone, they can just llm-php it into existence. Or ask OP about sharing source codes.
Oversharing in natural social networks is penalized heavily, and for good reason - with too much noise and little signal, people get overwhelmed, fear missing out, and cannot agree on anything. Communication becomes a detriment and a chore to the social group. The social group expects everyone to think before they speak, not just blabber endlessly, which is healthy.
Also, replacing the "Like" button/signal with a "Thanks" signal would be good because it'd be better to build a social network based on what people find helpful rather than on what people approve of. I think this was originally Jack Dorsey's idea, not my own.
- You can write and edit one post at a time.
- This post, in whatever form it has then, gets published at 8 in the morning.
- You can only see posts for today. All old content gets deleted.
- No comments or feedback is possible.
- Only symmetric relationships are possible: you can add someone, but they won't see your posts and you won't see their posts until they add you back.
- All "friend" discovery is out of band. There are no recommendations, no boosting/retweeting, nothing.
This is obviously not a mass medium, but its reductionism gives it some interesting properties that have made me consider what a good social network would be. One post a day is a fantastic idea.
(I don't know if they intend for it to be named in public, so I'll refrain.)
For example, in your typical gaming clan Discord server, a tenement building's WhatsApp/email group, or a small town's quarterly town hall meeting. It only takes a handful of people in such social groups for the group to serve its purpose.
Indeed, TheFacebook easily reached its critical mass when it was limited to Harvard College. Hacker News would work just as well with 500 monthly readers as it does with 5,000,000+ currently.
Whales, celebrity influencers (whether from out-of-network or homegrown celebrities), and other such things are only needed to compete with the social media giants today. But if you don't wish to compete and want to serve a small community, then this is not a problem.
What are your thoughts on what the benefits would be to having all users active only during certain hours?
It is probably easier to just close it down to avoid handling all the angry phone calls if it would happen to have an issue during the break.
That was Fotolog at the beginning of the century.
Things are allowed to exist for fun, most things don’t have to (or should) be concentrated on profit.
onepostwonder.com
It's been running for over a decade, although the community has always been small.
It's currently invite-only, similar to how LiveJournal used to be, but drop tommybgoode@gmail.com a line and mention this post if you'd like to give it a try and I'll send you an invite, which will include invites to give others you'd like to hang out with.
Funny enough, the time zone restriction acts as a crude proxy for locality and slightly scratches the itch; more than the time window does.
It's especially interesting in local expat communities: in Asia local time, you'll make a comment that is the ground truth and it gets n upvotes from locals and other foreigners in-country. But then the children of immigrants in America who are associated with that country wake up, and suddenly 8 hours later you're a monster.
Some other restrictions I think can work:
* No more than 1 post per day
* No more than 500 friends
* No followers
* No public posts
* No posting links
* No commercial pages
It doesn't matter if it's being checked on the client or the server. If the user controls what your code sees, they can fake it.
I know people that have used it for years
I forgot the name but its an app that sends you a notification at a random time each day, and it gives you 1 minute of use. If you miss it, you miss it.
In that 1 minute you can take a photo where you are right then, and can use the rest of the minute to browse someone else’s series of photos. Just the 1 person you were connected to that day.
It just shows how people are living.
In real life. I know its changed someone’s trajectory. All of their pictures were in an office cubicle and it pushed them to pursue other things sooner. Retirement in their case, to pursue drum circles and new age things because this was always fulfilling for them, they just kept delaying it beyond the rationality to delay it.
After 3 years of doing this, they send you a book of your memories.
No timelines or “algorithm” aside from whatever selects the person you get to see.
What I really don't get, it completely blows my mind: why hasn't this concept been completely chewed through, explored to hell and back, back in the days when everybody and their dog tried to invent some new variation of social media website (and get bought up by Yahoo when they ran out of runway or grew tired of it)? Age of the yo app? Feels almost as if the convertible wasn't invented before 100 years after the automobile.
So basically the same idea, but letting the decision be more dynamic.
YAGNI. A niche tool whose selling feature is time-restricted usage shouldn't have to account for weirdos that miss the point of it and cheat with their clock.
The software engineer within me shudders at the thought of running batch jobs in production while there are ongoing transactions, and where conflicts can and are fully expected to happen.
I've mentioned it before, but my wife posts about our life there. People can follow you, but there is no feedback aside from you seeing how many people read your post and how many followers you have. There are no recommendations; you have to organically check out the people who read your article to see if you like their writing (if they have any), or add people from an out of band source. Content is as ephemeral as you make it. It's very common for people to only leave a post up for a day or two, but it's up to the author.
If you are interested it's called ameba (www.ameba.co.jp). It's not the only one like this, just the one my wife uses.
Maybe have a user register to a timezone which can be changed twice a month or so (for travel) and that will be the time window when that person can enter? Then again, there are so may ways to get around this.
I always thought something like this would be a great idea for MMOs. Your account would be limited to a game with a timeslot that's only up 1-2 hours a day. So you could play consistently, but not have to play too long to keep up with other players.
Perhaps because it would be self-defeating from a profit perspective
Maybe if you measure it solely by monetary value, but if you consider will power to be a finite resource as well then the calculation changes.
In fact, on the topic of posting less, I know first-hand that the introduction of the ephemeral “story” format in conventional social media was done precisely in order to reduce friction in getting people to post more.
Or even just choose the start of the time range directly. French joggers might prefer a different time to French Counter-Strike players.
And it appears that it gets the time wrong:
> Current time: 11:56:29 AM EST
It's currently 11:56a EDT, or 10:56a EST.
(¹at least in America. If you're international, well, I guess that's the answer.)
As an aside, I'd be very curious to hear your answer to the question. I'm generall very pro-diversity, but I think it's naive to think it's all lollipops and rainbows.
Since everyone is pushing their idea of a social media app with some form of constrain. I think only pen would be pretty sweet. It's slow, it's difficult, it's annoying to edit, yet it's also more personal, and you can draw as well.
The "health food" of social media will be a product category where there will be market share to capture and whoever gets it right will be rewarded. Those users, like the health nuts of today, will know what there are looking for.
If, a thousand years from now future historians need to study our time, they can just ask the LLM.
There's a SF story in there somewhere.
I used to think it was only politics, but I visited a social media like Reddit that filtered politics by default--I forgot what it was called--and it still looked terrible because of all the drama.
It's a colossal waste of time. If you spend 20 hours learning Regex, that will help you for your lifetime. If you spend 20 hours talking about the latest disaster, in 20 hours that is all obsolete because there is a new disaster. And those 20 hours will make you angry and fill you with indignation while even gaming for 20 hours would have a more positive impact on you.
I'm not saying these things aren't important, but they are really not that important compared to how much of the Internet has become soaked with them.
You're making a great point, and one I think most people agree with, but I'm not sure it's relevant. At least, based on what I see of the website in its "offline" status.
Makes you also wonder if the future of long-range communication between planets or galaxies would involve LLM-based compression, embeddings, etc.
We definitely need to fix the hallucination problem though, or a receiving civilization might be extremely confused about our nature.
This is a huge problem. If you want to cultivate a large audience, every social network I'm aware of encourages you to post intensively. I've moved to new social networks and ended up unfollowing people I liked because they Would Not Shut Up, deeming it more important to build a following than maintain normal communication.
CST and BST are a couple of common ones with overloads. Use the ISO standard for your time stamps guys. I have to work with one API that uses these ambiguous abbreviations in a key time stamp field (faceplam).
I miss the MSN days.
Mostly what this immigrant effect has produced in America is a bunch of movies about how the writer of the movie hates their mother. (EEATO, Turning Red, etc.)
But a funny one I've repeatedly noticed in West Coast Japanese-Americans is they have West Coast progressive political beliefs (basically, noone should ever be punished for crimes because it's mean) at the same time as Japanese ones (copyright violation or disrespecting important big companies should get the death penalty), and I don't think they've noticed.
I wonder how many micro communities like this exist, mostly under the radar.
* timezones, most of the world is not on EST. If you make it per timezone, then not everyone will be on at the same time.
* 7.39 to 10.39 is not practical for everyone even on EST timezone. I go to sleep at 8pm, this means that I avoid screentime 7-8pm because of blue light. We all have different schedules, I tend to only use my computer during the business hours. In the evening I want to spend time with my kids, not be on social. Even if your social network would have a reward, for example 100$ a month to use it from 7.39 to 10.39, I would decline.
Some food for thought:
* Make the time open only based on a user selection. For example I would chose 9am to noon. Only allow switching time once a month. Clearly display a schedule of when most of your friends have selected a time, so that if I see that actually a lot of my friends have chosen 1 to 4pm instead, I can switch to that.
* Most likely after this comment, I will never see your site again. I would suggest adding a demo or a video, for people logging in outside of the hours, to entice them to come back when the site is open.
But then on the other hand, there have been a few years between that time and the present...
You can also add Arizona to the list, but for only part of the year, as Arizona and the Hopi nation do not follow daylight savings time, but the Navajo nation, which fully surrounds the Hopi, does
Also, writing to the email address markl<at>... ends in
Message not delivered
Your message couldn't be delivered to mark<at> because the remote server is
misconfigured. See technical details below for more information.What do you mean you can't sign in though? I will add password resetting soon but I'm curious if you're running into an issue with the login system.
I want to delete my account—not unsubscribe. It's a cool idea, but only accessible to me between 00:39:00–03:39:00 (UTC-01:00). I'm too old for that! :P
I assume there is a way to delete my account behind the login wall… but I can't log in outside of the "open" hours.
Therefore, I'm stuck: I can't be online during the "open" hours and the login button is disabled and reads "Log in (unavailable)" during the "closed" hours.
I also tried to reply to your email with a data deletion request, but the delivery failed. There is no support email on the homepage, nor a way to message you directly via HN.