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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a giant, global social network protocol. Open and distributed that connected all of us. Email, but more modern to capture the kind of stuff that Reddit and Twitter are great at. Photos, videos, discussion.

I then wish we could overlay filtering to keep out the high-noise drivel and advertising. Probably using social graph metadata.

I'd like to have an anonymous or pseudonymous presence, the ability to cryptographically sign my posts, and automatically elevate the score of individuals along my interest graph. This should "just work" and be invisible to the average user. It shouldn't seem like geeky technology.

I know that this is probably a terrible thing to bring into the world given all the conspiracy theory groups (it keeps them in their filter bubble), but I'm dying to have something that removes marketing and spam and only brings me high quality content.

Marketing and spam are still the biggest problems on the Internet.

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I've been thinking about a reddit like site where the communities are organized categorically using a btree like structure. Posts bubble up through the tree as they get more attention.

Filtering would be easy. Don't like cooking? Clip that subtree. Only want nsfw? Make that subtree your root.

Did you recently find Stargate SG1 and want to know what other kind of sci-fi is out there? Check /t/tv/sci-fi and see what else is popular.

It would be tough making sure subtrees are categorized correctly. Modding would also be tough since parents probably need ways to block children but that feature can be abused.

Many topics should have multiple parents which would complicate things some. Maybe internally everything is a single graph that's represented as a tree visually for users.

I guess there's plenty left to think through but it would be a cool experiment.

Low effort spam is easier to deal with then "marketing", because marketing is about reputation and intent not content.

If there is a thread on the HN front page for some Cisco zero day and the top comment is explaining the user's positive "personal experience" with Ubiquiti gear, is that marketing or just some network engineers sharing their genuine opinion on a tech forum?

The content is the same but is received differently based on the user's reputation and their intent.

HN, Reddit, Slashdot + many more try the score/points approach but it hasn't solved the problem.

>I know that this is probably a terrible thing to bring into the world given all the conspiracy theory groups (it keeps them in their filter bubble),

So exactly what social media sites do already?

How do you moderate marketing and spam without also 'accidentally' censoring controversial views on an open platform?

You’d subscribe to viewing sites that implemented the view protocols / spam fighting you wanted.

ActivityPub exists.

And what is blocking it's wide adoption? If it's so great, why can't I use it to get my mom off that damn facebook?

Because your mom, like many people, probably trusts corporations more than random service hosts. Plus her social circle is already on Facebook, network effects.

I wouldn't write ActivityPub off as a failure. It has a healthy developer ecosystem and is doing fine so far in its adoption.

Marketing. They have zero budget when compared to Facebook.

You can, you just chose not to. That is what is blocking wide adoption.

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