Ask HN: If Social network is created today, what do you want to see?

Privacy first. Everything else is secondary.

true social network

- I choose my network

- I never see anything (literally) that isn’t a post from someone in my network - full stop

- post are chronological

that’s it. I have been off all social media platforms since 2017 but would “return” if true social network existed. there isn’t one anymore, the best description of what we have currently are ad networks, there is nothing social about today’s social networks to the point that it really makes no sense that we still refer to them as social

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no ai bots

no social engineering

freedom to say whatever you want however you want

- no bots, ai slop stopped at the door

- feed from people I actually follow, in an actual chronological timeline (not optimized for engagement, not deprioritized because it has an external link)

- topical feeds with topical filters (e.g. I don't care about politics but care about tech news)

Like instagram but focused on still photos but with less annoyances like dm scams, text in pictures, sexy selfies, etc.

A business model that does not exploit users, ever.

If you make it one where loss of trust leads to immediate loss of revenue and forces you to take the user side on all matters, well then all features are there to improve and maintain trust.

I just need forums, social network can go away.

I want 2006-era Facebook. No algorithmic feed. No viral posts. No AI slop. Just updates from my friends and acquaintances.

An emphasis on driving users towards IRL socialization, and strengthening geographically local communities.

What would it look like if social media were optimized for flourishing rather then engagement?

Bring your own filter/ranking algorith?

I wonder if there's not a fundamental conflict. Social media is essentially _addictive_ media. The most pro-flourishing move you can make is to disengage from social media.

We don’t need one. Fool me once, shame on me.

Everything posted publicly should have a permanent url that anyone can see.

There should be arbitrary and orthogonal ranking dimensions, that can be created by users at will. You should be able to have your own algorithms to decide what you want to see.

For instance, a post could be funny 0, in US English 1.0, political 0.5, physics 0.0, etc.

Every rating tied back to the person or bot that did the rating.

And of course you can rate the ratings or raters.

Confusing, but soooo powerful

Kindness as the default. If it wouldn't fly in a face-to-face conversation, it does not fly on the network.

One thing that keeps HN pleasant is dang's enforcement of good conduct.

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allow me to pay, no more than $2.99/month. don't ever sell my data. don't act "smart" about what I may want to see. allow me to follow and only see content from profiles i follow. if you want content, allow some kind of monetization. something like a revenue share for people who actually invest in creating relevant content for the rest of the group. or a simple tipping system.

Almost all the descriptions have a simple answer: Mastodon :)

However, I think we should come back to IRC it gave us so beautiful moments.

I've built Cosmos47, which is a public social feed that shows all posts chronologically and there are no likes or upvotes. It's one single feed that appears the same to all users, from all over the world. No algorithm or ranking people by popularity.

All posts are analyzed with AI when posted and each post gets tagged with its language, topics, tone, format, length, location, and other characteristics. Then, readers can then filter the feed themselves (if they wish) to see only specific languages, only posts from people they follow, posts related to specific topics, etc. The idea is that distribution comes from relevance rather than popularity.

It’s still an early experiment. Most of the content currently on the platform is actually AI slop test content that I created to test multilingual feeds, filtering, moderation, embeds, search and indexing.

https://cosmos47.com