Social networks

How to run a small social network site for your friends is a neat guide.

Notes

• Facebook has recruited one of the world’s top AI teams, led by Yann LeCun. Their work and Google's are the equivalent of tobacco companies engineering cigarettes to ensure that nicotine hits a smoker's brain more quickly. Facebook and other social networks are the cigarette companies of the mind. Cigarettes blackened our lungs with tar, and social media blacken our brains with distraction, alienation, envy, and loneliness.
  • Social media networks will become ever more addictive, and by using AI to increase the click-through rate on the ads, they will squeeze ever more money out of their addicts. AI will be essential to the "capture and sale of attention," as Tim Wu puts it, walking users from curiosity to the cash register more and more efficiently.
  • Capitalism is an accelerant for addictive behavior, and we are only just realizing how unhappy people become as a result of the marketplace’s newest and most insidious products. What's worse, the necessary functions performed by our phones and the Internet are fatefully tangled with the apps that addict us. They put the heroin next to the tap water.
• FB simply prolonged relationships that should’ve died out a long time ago naturally
  • Generally you'd lose contact with all these people over time as you mature and just naturally drift apart. No shame in that, the ones you do want to keep in touch with you'd make a real effort for. Now it's so easy to just send a "like" , "congratulations!" or "Happy birthday!" that you find yourself very loosely connected to a bunch of people you don't want to be but feel like everyone else is still in "contact" so you don't want to miss out.
• When you realize that Instagram is someones curated life, you realize how manufactured their profile actually is. What you see is what they want you to see.
• The sad truth is that friendly face isn’t Facebook’s true face; it’s a sham, just like it’s a sham to sit on a tractor so people will think you’re tall. Mark Zuckerberg uses your most intimate connections, the literal faces of the people you love, to fool you into thinking that he’s not picking your pocket and taking a wrecking ball to our media, to the integrity of our society, and to democracy itself.
• I gained a following in part because developers with larger followings would share my work. If you have a large following I highly encourage you to share the work of other creators! It costs nothing to share a blog or video but can make a huge difference to that creator!
• Moderating a community is not censorship.
• Facebook knew its algorithm incentivized outrage. Instagram knew it hurt teen girls. Facebook has been shielding VIPs from moderation.
• The thing people don't see is that the problem isn't centralization, it's social media. Your decentralized social media will still be social media.
• I wonder how much any Facebook story now changes anyone's minds. There’s a group of people now quite convinced that Facebook is evil, who see any new story as proof, and the rest of us, who think it's all just a noisy mess. But what would change look like?
• FB (and social media generally) is amplifying the flaws in the human condition.
• The main benefit of taking a break from social media is that you stop living in a fictional world and finally start dealing with your own reality.
• Instead of asking “how will you make money?” Or with NFTs “how much money are you making right now buying and selling into the hype?”, please ask “how does this lead to deep habitual usage?”
• Social networks usage destroy attention span for many

Links

• A plan to rescue the web
• How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us
• Growing apart and losing touch is human and healthy
• Sex, Beer, and Coding: Inside Facebook’s Wild Early Days in Palo Alto
• Reinvent the social web - André Staltz (2018)
• Anti Social Media (2018)
• Timeliner - All your digital life on a single timeline, stored locally.
• Regret-stergram (2018)
• Sherlock - Find usernames across social networks.
• Mark Zuckerberg discussing future journalism platform with Mathias Döpfner (2019)
• Sherlock - Find usernames across social networks.
• Sacha Baron Cohen on what is wrong with social media & ways to fix it (2019)
• Killing my social media addiction (2019)
• Jack Dorsey Wants to Decentralize Twitter (HN)
• tilde.club - Not a social network it is one tiny totally standard unix computer that people respectfully use together in their shared quest to build awesome web pages.
• Planetary - Building an open and humane alternative to Facebook.
• Twitterverse - Interactively explore visualizations of Twitter networks. (Tweet)
• Opportunities in consumer social (2020)
• Pleroma - Free, federated social networking server built on open protocols. (Article) (HN) (Lobsters) (Deploy a Pleroma Server)
• Moa - Mastodon, Twitter, and Instagram Cross-poster.
• Lessons I've Learned After Gaining 100,000 Twitter Followers (2020)
• Bridgy - Connects your web site to social media. Likes, retweets, mentions, cross-posting, and more.
• A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military (2018) (Reddit)
• How Facebook Is Complicit in Myanmar’s Attacks on Minorities (2020) (HN)
• Auralite - New social network for the future. (Tweet)
• De-Escalating Social Media (2020) (HN)
• PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN (2020)
• Instagram Morphs into an Information Powerhouse (2020) (HN)
• Proof of X (2020)
• TikTok and the Sorting Hat (2020) (HN)
• How to run a small social network site for your friends (Lobsters) (HN) (Tweet) (HN)
• A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement (2018)
• All the world's a stage. On alt accounts and communicative friction. (2020)
• Wisdom Shelf - Social network focused on personal development.
• Relevant - Social Network Built On Trust.
• The Social Dilemma (HN)
• Books and resources to read to learn more about challenges of social networks
• How TikTok's design makes the algorithm work (2020) (HN)
• Is this real life? (2020)
• Social Cooling - Big Data's unintended side effect. (HN)
• What Is Social Cooling? (2017) (HN)
• Gurlic - Free and Open Communities. (HN) (Web tech used)
• Twt - New way to social media.
• Going Viral as a Woman in Tech (2020) (HN)
• Why Social Media Is So Good at Polarizing Us (2020) (Tweet)
• Party at My House: Darius Kazemi on Human-Scaled Social Media (2020)
• Clusters rule everything around me (2020) (HN)
• The political economy of platforms (2020)
• Media Manipulation Casebook - Digital research platform linking together theory, methods, and practice for mapping media manipulation and disinformation campaigns.
• Cooper - Private professional network. Get quality introductions from people you trust.
• Contra - New professional network for your independent journey.
• LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe (2020) - How the professional platform makes networking weird. (HN)
• Hiven - Chat platform from the future. (Themes)
• Hive Index - Discover Online Communities. (HN)
• Orbit Model - Framework for building high gravity communities. A high gravity community is one that excels at attracting and retaining members by providing an outstanding member experience. (Why Orbit is Better Than Funnel for Developer Relations)
• Why your Instagram Engagement Kinda Sucks Right Now (2020)
• Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018) (HN)
• Social Analyzer - Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites. (HN)
• Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives? (2021)
• Ask HN: Who is working on fully decentralized social networking? (2021)
• My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network (HN)
• Myrme - Prosocial network. (Article)
• Martin Kleppman: Decentralized content moderation (2021)
• Hypergrowth Network - Get advice from the best go-to-market leaders in tech.
• CTZN - Distributed social network. Twitter-style feed and posts.
• FeoBlog - Distributed blogging platform. It takes a lot of its inspiration from Mastodon and Scuttlebutt.
• Creeping as a Service (HN)
• TikTok and the Network Effects of Creativity (2021)
• Zenly - Live map of your friends and family. (GitHub)
• He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can't fix its misinformation addiction (2021) (Tweet)
• SELLFF - Zero-cost, ad-free alternative to LinkedIn. (HN)
• How Clubhouse the "next big thing going to fail (2021) (HN)
• Osintgram - OSINT tool on Instagram. Offers an interactive shell to perform analysis on Instagram account of any users by its nickname.
• How Polarization Ate Our Brains (2021)
• The Crypto Social Network is Here. Meet BitClout. (2021)
• The Ponzi Career (2021) - Future of work is a pyramid scheme, where every person sells his favorite person to the next person. (HN)
• Is content moderation a dead end? (2021) (HN)
• Sophie Zhang, Facebook whistleblower AMA (2021) (HN)
• LinkTalk, a Network for Thoughtful Conversations (2021)
• Better alternatives to LinkedIn (2021)
• Polywork - Professional network that represents all the wonderful things you actually do as a professional.
• Granary - Fetches and converts data between social networks, HTML and JSON with microformats2, ActivityStreams 1 and 2, Atom, RSS, JSON Feed, and more. (Code)
• Garnet - One app to unite your community.
• The Anxiety of Influencers (2021) - Educating the TikTok generation. (HN)
• Genies - Custom 3D Avatars For Consumers and Celebrities.
• Tiktok, Emergent Creativity, The Limits of Social Graphs (2021)
• Inside the Bubble at Facebook
• The Cold Start Problem Book (2021) - How to start and scale network effects. (Tweet) (Notes)
• The Great Online Game (2021) (Tweet)
• Redact - Mass Delete your Social Media. (HN)
• How to build communities to build better products?
• BeReal - Your Friends. For Real.
• Status, Wealth, & Power: Network Effects Demand A New Social Contract (2021)
• Этические социальные сети c @sitnik (2021)
• Content density: Why TikToks trounce Stories (2020) (Tweet)
• The End of Social Media (2021) (HN)
• HN: FB messenger silently censoring links, claims they were sent (2021)
• EagleEye - Stalk your Friends. Find their Instagram, FB and Twitter Profiles using Image Recognition and Reverse Image Search.
• How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks (2021) (Tweet)
• Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show (2021) (HN)
• Reasons To Quit Social Media (2021) (HN)
• Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP)
• Facebook is other people (HN)
• What our research says about teen well-being and Instagram (2021) (HN)
• You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation (2021) (HN)
• Facebook Thrives on Criticism of “Disinformation” (2021) (HN)
• Facebook's Latest Scandals: The Banality Of Hubris; The Messiness Of Humanity (2021) (Tweet)
• Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it (2021) (HN) (Opening statement)
• Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs (2021) (HN) (HN) (Tweet)
• Statement from Mark Zuckerberg (2021) (HN) (Tweet)
• Bombshell (2021) - Instagram's suicide farm, media distortion, and navigating three weeks of Facebook hysteria. (Tweet)
• Pinterest - Image sharing service. (GitHub)
• Fast Facebook Activity Deletion - Clean up a Facebook account without deleting the entire account.
• And you will know us by the company we keep (2021) (HN)
• Unique on Facebook: Formulation and Evidence of (Nano)targeting Individual Users with non-PII Data (2021) (Tweet)
• Facebook Papers: ‘History Will Not Judge Us Kindly’ (2021)
• In many parts of the world, Facebook IS the internet (2021)
• Feedless - Non-addictive social network. (Code)
• How Instagram and Twitter buried the hatchet (2021)
• A Beginner's Guide to Social Media Verification (2021)
• The benefits of staying off social media (2021) (HN)
• Racket - Audio twitter. (Twitter) (Tweet)
• Junto - Evolution of social media begins with redesigning the fundamentals. (GitHub)
• Dito - Design your post once then apply the same design for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest in one click.
• Circles - Private app for the most important people in your life. (HN)
• Most things shared are a lie or can be completely unverifiable in times of conflict (2022)
• Sterra - Instagram OSINT tool to export and analyze followers | following with their details.
• One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine (HN)
• instauto - Instagram bot / automation library written in JavaScript for Node.js.
• Thoughts on free speech with respect to social networks (Twitter/Reddit) (HN)
• Slow Social - Social network built for friends, not influencers. (HN)
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid (2022) (Tweet)
• Radiopaper - Troll-resistant public conversations. (HN)
• Making friends on the internet (2022) (HN)
• Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause (2022) (HN)
• Ask HN: Has social media reached its saturation point? (2022)
• Trust and safety research is hard
• Ourspace - Decentralized social networks and reputation systems.
• Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
• instantgram - Bookmarklet for download photos in Instagram.
• Farcaster - Sufficiently decentralized social network. It is an open protocol that can support many clients, just like email. (Twitter) (Article) (Farcaster Search) (Farcaster Search Code) (Article) (Protocol)
• retrospring - Q/A based social network. (Code)
• Movim - Social and chat platform that act as a web frontend for the XMPP protocol. (Code)
• cohost - New social media platform built from the ground up. (Twitter)
• TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants (2022) (HN)
• The unlikely odds of making it big on TikTok (2022) (HN)
• Is this the end of social networking? (2022) (HN)