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

(www.seven39.com)
735 points mklyons | 3 comments | 11 Mar 25 01:05 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

I built this site as a quick test if a time boxed social media experience feels better than an endless one. So far I've just been using it with friends and it feels nice, but it seems like it is time to bring it to a larger audience.

Let me know what you think! It is just based on EST for now, sorry.

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danpalmer ◴[11 Mar 25 02:17 UTC] No.43328492[source]▶
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?

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Shawnj2 ◴[11 Mar 25 02:23 UTC] No.43328525[source]▶
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
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soulofmischief ◴[11 Mar 25 02:31 UTC] No.43328579[source]▶
People have completely lost sight of the importance of small forums.
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1propionyl ◴[11 Mar 25 04:30 UTC] No.43329162[source]▶
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.
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1. soulofmischief ◴[11 Mar 25 07:23 UTC] No.43329999[source]▶
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.

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2. kbelder ◴[11 Mar 25 17:39 UTC] No.43335022[source]▶
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.

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3. soulofmischief ◴[11 Mar 25 20:02 UTC] No.43336454[source]▶
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.