Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening

It's an interesting idea, but if it's only open at a convenient time for a particular group, it's going to lack diverse and worldwide perspectives, and those are important for building a welcoming ecosystem. I doubt giving each timezone its own 3 hours would work, but perhaps rotating the 3 hours each day so that it's anchored on a different timezone would encourage that diversity of content and perhaps even encourage creating connections across timezones.

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?

I kind of like the idea of a regional social media app which literally doesn’t work in other parts of the world. It makes the space a little more special than something trying to reach everyone IMO

Isn't that just YikYak?

People have completely lost sight of the importance of small forums.

YikYak had nothing to do with time, it was geofenced to certain locations. I loved it in college, it was so much fun.

> It's an interesting idea, but if it's only open at a convenient time for a particular group, it's going to lack diverse and worldwide perspectives, and those are important for building a welcoming ecosystem.

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.

What's so objectionable about Nairaland to silicon valley?

I had a quick look at https://www.nairaland.com/ and nothing immediately sprang out.

> 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?

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.

Not enough crypto scams for one

Why should it have “diverse and worldwide perspectives”? Must a Muslim site be open to all Christians? Must a Japanese site admit me even though I don’t know Japanese? Should a site for Ukrainians be forced to allow Russians?

I do think of this as an opportunity for you to create your own site that meets your standards, however.

If I’m discussing a local event with people I know, what would diverse and worldwide perspectives add?

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.

At the extreme level of “regional”, that’s Nextdoor.

Sure but Nextdoor is still a huge business trying to reach the widest possible audience of local areas. Something limited by if you’re awake when it’s up is different IMO

You've immediately assumed that by "diverse perspectives" I mean controversial perspectives.

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.

Location-based subreddits get close to this also.

I like the idea of users being able to pick their 3-hour window and timezone, and maybe only can change your window setting once per day (or maybe only pick a new window that starts at least 24 hours in the future). But crucially, each such 3-hour window and time zone combination has entirely isolated and independent content, as if it is a different site.

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.

there is reddit for that, I want to go back to an internet thats just primarily NA, if world of warcraft classics success is anythign to stand by or old school runescape, I think its time we did this with our social networks too.

Forums, perhaps. But small group chats (which I suppose are technically "dark") are the bedrock of the current internet writ large and where most of the content that filters up to places like Twitter comes from.

Not everything has to be political. Can we go even 5 minutes without someone turning a discussion to focus on Elon?

Name a social media site that has diverse and worldwide perspectives that also feels welcoming.

Quite the contrary. Welcoming ecosystems are discriminatory because necessarily exclude those who generally aren’t interested, or act in bad faith.

Community is local.

The one that immediately jumps out to me is » Man Butchers Wife With A Cutlass In Akwa Ibom (Photos) «. There is some stuff like that on reddit, but I cannot imagine it ever reaching the front page.

Night workers or shift workers would have a different take on it. They’d be the ones posting in your area maybe?

Communities like The WELL did and they spawned a million other things.

> Personally, I enjoy reading about world news, hearing about TV shows I might want to watch that aren't in my language.

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.

Ironically that's what Facebook initially was.

I mean night workers also don’t get to do other traditional evening events like go to a concert or bar so this doesn’t bother me. Night workers in nearby time zones would be able to use it either before or after their shift depending on their location

> You've immediately assumed that by "diverse perspectives" I mean controversial perspectives.

Where is the controversy in the examples?

For what it’s worth, HN is already a bit like this.

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.

Alright, but he needs to stay out of the news for about 1 week.

You're absolutely right and this is something I've studied and thought about quite a lot. The dark aspect of group chats does fundamentally separate them from forums, which had the benefit of searchability, permanence and topic longevity.

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.

Local social media used to be huge here in Sweden, we had options for everyone long before facebook or x/twitter was a thing. Great times.

It sounds more like a social network than social media, i.e the pre-timeline, pre-algorithm version of Facebook. Back when the content came from people you know rather than people you don't.

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.

It’s easy to have geographically diverse echo chamber. On the other hand, there’s a lot of diversity of thoughts inside pretty much any geographical region.

Imagine the disadvantage I am at by living in Australia, just about everything is posted while I am asleep. With that said this is a disadvantage across just about all social platforms, not just HN though.

[flagged]

The solution is of course to create a second sun and eliminate our need for sleep. /s

If you look in the comments there are often discussion on appropriate levels of disciplining your wife (read: domestic abuse), "traits" of people who believe in certain religions, and ethnic stereotypes that would be banned quite quickly on most platforms.

Some places have bars that open at 7am for people coming off the night shift.

What makes you think they are triggered?

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.

Wow, I hadn't made that connection. We should somehow bundle a current state-of-the-art LLM in a timecapsule right now, and maybe another one every decade.

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.

That would be an incredible modern analogue to the Arecibo message or Golden Record. Imagine being on the receiving end of such an artifact and not knowing how to operate it and being worried about breaking it.

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.

Yup, we need to start bringing back the idea of the village on the Internet. There is no good reason why I need to know what someone on the other side of the globe thinks about stuff going on in my country and vice versa.

How was I triggered?

Thanks!