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

I think it's a really cool idea. I signed up because I had a brain fart and thought that "EST" was "European Standard Time" (I was of course thinking of CET).

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?

> 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.

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.

I think a good alternative would be it's open twice, 7:39am and 7:39pm.

Makes it available for other regions but also the same (silly) idea.

now i want to see a map with all timezones called EST but meaning something else in each one

It was always a small source of joy on Discord to see Americans getting on the server while East Asians would go to sleep, with us Europeans being in the middle. It always feels so cute for some reason I can't explain, but I do love that every time.

like a tavern

Or Second Life in 2006...

like a third place

WDYM? There is exactly one time zone called EST.

I think there could be different sites for different continents like https://www.seven39.eu

You had this on IRC and the good old phpBB forums back in the days too.

Definitely remembering the appearance of the "morning crew" looking for whatever recent stuff they had missed out on ;)

The “real” EST means “Eastern Standard Time”. The top commenter thought it was “European Standard Time” which could for instance be equivalent to WET (“Western European Time”). What your parent comment is suggesting is a joke to come up with other definitions which would fit EST to other time zones. E.g. MST (“Mountain Standard Time”) could be EST (“Eagle Summer Time”).

You could also just use a different time zone each day.

This happens on Reddit- you'll make a comment that makes sense to Europeans or Asians, and it gets n upvotes. Then America wakes up and all of a sudden it gets n downvotes.

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.

I can see the addicts rewinding their clocks already :)

you could have the same site, but running different servers to serve different timezones / locales. kind of like old-school video game servers

are you a frontend engineer? cause I'd hope the time checking happens on the server ;-)

What about using vpns to connect through different timezones ?

Why not let the user pick the 3 hour window and not let them change it for another period after it was just changed?

It was a total brain fart though – I know what EST is and I know that my time zone is CET; just had some neurons misfiring!

Where is the server getting information about the user's timezone from pray tell?

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.

Yeah. There are many fun experiments one could do. Now I got this idea instead: what if it opened up on 07:39 PM on January 1st, but then the window moved forward 3 minutes and 56.7 seconds each day so that it was back on 07:39 PM a year later. That sounds like it would be extremely useless, but fun.

The user can choose their time zone when they sign up, and the service can prevent them from changing it (or heavily limit how often it can be changed)

Allow everyone to choose their time windows, but require at least 24 hours span between the two time window changes.

A moving window would be just like what you already get with somewhat global communities. E.g. hn while Europe and Africa is mostly sleeping vs hn while the Americas are mostly sleeping. As I understand it, seven39 is not so much about only being allowed to chime in during a specific time window, but about it being offline outside that window. You could have multiple instances from date line to date line, but they'd have separate content and user identities (even if some people might have accounts in different timezones).

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.

thanks for explaining, i meant something like xkcd would do

Or, have N available 3 hour windows, and if you've interacted (viewed the website/posted) in any way with the website during one of those periods, you cannot use the other periods for that day.

So basically the same idea, but letting the decision be more dynamic.

The sibling comments are a perfect demonstration why projects tend to balloon in complexity and ever-increasing requirements just to deal with rare corner cases.

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.

Or different instances of the site on the same server, serving different locales. Only one instance would be running at a time.

An isolated subdomain for each timezone, with no way to interact between them, cet.seven39, est.seven39, etc.

> why hasn't this concept been completely chewed through,

Perhaps because it would be self-defeating from a profit perspective

One approach might be to have many instances, like we do with Discord etc, and have the admins choose a timezone, so an instance for French people would be on Paris time, etc.

Or even just choose the start of the time range directly. French joggers might prefer a different time to French Counter-Strike players.

s/had/have

It doesn't matter if they fake it. They're only getting one window per 24 hours.

A window based on region is like free load balancing.

I came to say the same, and also why not let it wander around looking for an optimal time.

They could be allowed to interact but only with a delay that caches interactions until the next window. If I post at 8pm my time, it should wait until 8pm your time to make it appear on your instance.

A complete opposite approach: same instance for everybody, but you can choose the hours when you sign up. Changing is allowed once every 4 weeks or something.

This happened to me in Twitter a lot of times (back when it was good). I’ve seen different parts of my time wake up at different times – a very peculiar effect.

This happens on HN too of course!

Personally, I think we need less balkanization + telephone game rather than more.

Problem: user goes on vacation three time zones west of their usual location, and now they can’t access the site tomorrow.

Back in late 1990s I had xplanet-rendered sun-synchronous rotating Earth as my desktop background. It had the nicknames of our IRC channel regulars placed at their lat/long… it felt cyberpunk af.

Worth it.

Not a map, but there is a list of semi-standard time zone abbreviations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zone_abbreviation...

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 think that what sets this type of apart is its position as a response to the fatigue people feel from social media in its current form. I don't think something like this would have resonated as much when social media was in its infancy.

> 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.

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.

Sounds like something Randall from xkcd would cook up.

Another idea is that the window drifts slowly, so everyone gets an optimal time. Make the period non divisible by 7 so it doesn't line up on the same day of week every time.

One simple script that automatically connects to your account on the current time frame's server and unifies all into a single timeline will kill the fun.

Pretty much every day that I comment on HN, at least a couple of the comments I write get to +3 or so by the end of the day, and then in the middle of the night they're at +1 or 0. Consistently. I assume it's this.

Have seen this happening too often when my sister, brother, or wife were using the iPhone time limit for apps.

True. Also in the very old days, people actively "went online" at certain times. Dial in the modem, visit the Internet Cafe, things like that. A web community would better be ready and waiting.

But then on the other hand, there have been a few years between that time and the present...

Why not allow the user to start a “session” at any time of day and then they only have 3hrs from that time