Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening (seven39.com)
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.
375 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadI 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.
Likely to enable batch processing in the evening without dealing with sync issues
One day we'll have the manpower and brains to figure out how to just have out of hour entries added to the next day's batch.
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.
To me it just sounds like popping down to the pub for a couple pints. I love the idea.
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?
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.
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.
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 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 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.
I do think of this as an opportunity for you to create your own site that meets your standards, however.
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.
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.
Where is the controversy in the examples?
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.
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.
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.
Quite the contrary. Welcoming ecosystems are discriminatory because necessarily exclude those who generally aren’t interested, or act in bad faith.
Community is local.
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.
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.
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.
Why make an entirely new social media network for this and just make it a timed client for ATProto or ActivityPub?
BTW, it shows now:
> seven39 is currently closed
> Opens in -4h -3m
I think the negative numbers might be a bug?
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/HelpCenter/StoreInfo.jsp
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.
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.
People move and travel.
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.
All of the (continental) US is in similar enough timezones, that whatever 3 hour window is convenient for one part is still easily accessible for the others.
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
Those small shifts don't transform a convenient time into 4am.
Sorry, what does that mean? What are phone wait times, and what do they have to do with time zones?
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.
Then again the drama of Nextdoor communities probably means this is largely dead...
For example, Finland, Romania, Turkey and South Africa are on the same time zone.
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.
...and that was BEFORE the layoffs =/
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
What happens during dailight savings time?
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.)
On what planet a day is 35h long?
I guess OP is having some hard time with date calculations :D
I miss the MSN days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeReal
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.
That being said, I like it as a way to just journal a picture a day, even without any contacts in the app.