danfang

I agree we need a new private social platform. But, I hope it isn't Facebook that wins that race.

I've been working on a social network that I believe represents "generational change" - no ads, no clickbait news, no public profiles. It goes against the grain of what current social networks are doing.

Check it out at https://get.thread-app.com.

It's still early days, but I would appreciate any feedback!

This is exactly what I'm aiming to do with Thread - an alternative social network that focuses on tight-knit groups and building more intimate relationships, for the purpose of improving our mental health.

One important thing to note is that it will be monetized through a subscription, not by selling consumer data or driving sales of targeted ads.

Check it out @ https://get.thread-app.com/

The community here on HN seems to have a very negative opinion of school. PG seems to talk about it quite frequently.

Here's a different viewpoint.

I personally really enjoyed school.

I enjoyed the social structure of school. I wasn't popular by any means, but I had my group of nerdy, academic friends who shared a passion for learning and building things.

Learning how to deal with social conflicts, when they inevitably arose, turned out to be super useful.

It was interesting just to observe all the different types of people. I learned a lot about myself by learning about others.

The relationships I made through school are much stronger than ones made later on. Maybe it's that I found like-minded people early on. But being put in a high-stress environment and going through shared struggles brought us closer together.

I also enjoyed the academic structure of school. It exposed me to a breadth of knowledge that I know I wouldn't have explored otherwise. I found it to be a great stepping stone to learn more on my own.

FWIW I went to a public school with decent academic rigor. I had mostly good teachers, a few great, and a few bad. Maybe my experience was "lucky" compared to most others here?

This is a plug for my personal project, Thread, which is a take on social media that serves the public's interests.

It's not propped up by VCs, and not funded by advertisements that suck up our attention via engagement metrics.

Would appreciate a look! https://get.thread-app.com

I'm glad the conversation is now turning towards ethical, human-centered alternatives to giants like FB and Instagram.

I would like to think we’re heading toward a future where people will want to pay for products and services to reclaim their attention - as opposed to using free ones that deliberately track and optimize for your engagement.

The past 15 years of social media has been a terrible experiment in attention-driven business models.

I’d like to think I’m helping buck this trend with my current project - a subscription based social network called Thread - https://get.thread-app.com

I do feel like I have to cobble together a number of products to meet my social needs. Event planning, messaging, photo sharing, payments, location sharing are all managed by different apps.

I've been hacking away on a project that pulls everything important back into one cohesive group experience. I recently shared it on HN! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771456

I would love to see if this is the type of product that would thrive in a post-Facebook era.

This is the nuanced perspective I really like hearing. I think people still want some avenue to keep in touch with and interact with their friends and family online, when meeting in person might be too difficult (geographic distance for example).

I feel super passionate about addressing the existing toxicity of existing social networks and making something more positive and uplifting - preserving what you call the "signal".

I launched something recently on HN about what I've been hacking on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771456

Hey HN! I shared an alpha version of Thread a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20933272.

I’m really excited to share that the product is now ready for more people to use!

To check it out, just go to https://get.thread-app.com. I’ll be responding to questions and feedback here and by email at daniel@thread-app.com.

The full story and latest updates below:

I started Thread because I was incredibly disappointed with what’s currently being referred to as “social networking”. I felt like these products are actually incredibly anti-social. They didn’t make me feel any more connected to my friends or family.

There seemed to be no place to easily share what I want with the people who matter most. I’m a pretty private person, and hated the pressure and dopamine-seeking incentives of public profiles. Not to mention all the ads, tracking, and clickbait news all centered on “engagement”.

Group chats worked OK, but IMO fell short on features that allow for long-lasting relationship building. They lacked the ability to persist things that matter in the long run, like photos, adventures, events, and important conversations.

So, I did the entirely irrational thing of quitting my job to start building something I could use with my friends and family.

The alpha release was a pretty simple group chat. Over the past three months, here’s what’s been added:

- Photo albums. All photos shared are stored in an archive. In the future, I hope this looks something more like Google Photos, with the ability to organize, export, and manage a group’s media seamlessly.

- Private stories. This is like a journal of thoughts, photos, and other media. I wanted a way to share these with certain people, but also have the option to keep them entirely private (which is the default).

- Event planning. One of the goals of Thread is to get people offline and actually do things together IRL. This necessitates fully featured event planning and scheduling tools. It’s getting there...

- Opt-in location sharing. Being able to see where my friends and family are can be incredibly useful when planning something, and helps me feel closer in spite of long physical distances.

- Location bookmarking. I like to curate and share my favorite places and places I want to go. It also makes it easier to plan for longer term trips. This is kind of like Google My Maps, but a social version.

- Shared video watching. I wanted a quick and easy way to simulate a living room where everyone can watch the same things at once, and chat about it. This eventually could include news, music, and more.

- Threads (no pun intended). This facilitates topical discussions - you can switch from the main conversation to any other conversation with the same group of people.

- Pinned content. A simple way to keep track of important items and reminders.

- Some fun Easter eggs you can ask me about :)

Current flaws (or future opportunities):

- Not E2E encrypted or decentralized. I understand it’s a huge concern for many on HN. My focus is on new ways to communicate and organize social information, and less on how to secure that information. For now, the best private services would be things like Signal and Mastodon.

- Notification control and group management

- Invite system is based on phone numbers. It can be finicky.

I'm building exactly this! It's a very early product, but please try out Thread - https://get.thread-app.com

I've been hacking at a basic version of ad-free, subscription based group messaging, coordination, event planning, etc - check it out! https://get.thread-app.com/

I've been working on exactly this! https://get.thread-app.com/

It's a side project of mine at the moment, so it's quite basic, but I'd love it if you checked it out.

I wrote a similar article earlier this month, about the (hopefully) ad-free, tracking-free future of social media: https://medium.com/@dfang/what-will-next-gen-social-networks...

It really lines up well with your points about engagement, advertiser incentives, and political disinformation!

Here's to hoping people choose to use/build new social tools that better align with our interests and values.

So... to extrapolate, if you're implying that current solutions are too complex for the average user and make people less happy & fulfilled, do they not deserve better ones?

I'd say for the same reason Dropbox was a good solution even when people had rsync and scripts to do the same thing. The average consumer expects a more seamless experience that excels at managing a lot of different social interactions, like building groups and sharing different types of content easily.

You don't want it unlabeled in the source code though - a code reviewer will totally miss a swapping of parameters. It's best when fully supported and explicit in the language.

The title is pretty click-baity and I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion. The author raises a lot of good points about large systems being subject to corruption.

However, I think the internet is self-regulating. Eventually, users will choose new products, companies, and services that align with their values.

I think we're at the tail end of the first phase of internet mega-corporations. In the past 15 years we've learned a lot about how people interact on the internet, and how it's rife for abuse and misinformation. We've created systems that negatively influence the quality of our lives and relationships.

I don't believe that this is necessarily the status quo. There's certainly momentum and money on the side of existing incumbents, but I think the public is slowly catching on to their negative effects on society.

I'm actively working on what I think is the "second-generation" of social networking and I hope users will eventually vote with their dollars and time.

I think you're right that you can probably get some value out of pure client-side search and parsing. Here's my take:

1. I like being able to search through old archives and interactions that might have happened a long time ago. I believe there's value in preserving history and being able to easily look back on it.

2. We can provide value by doing basic message parsing. Right now, if your message includes a Youtube link or Spotify URL we'll give you a player to view that content in-line. If your message has a Yelp link, we'll pull the restaurant details such as where it is, how expensive it is, etc...

Our mission is to provide the best service to allow people to build meaningful, long-term relationships, because _that_ is a need that's not being addressed. A lot of the features we want to offer will require some centralized processing. If you want a purely anonymized, E2E encrypted service, I would recommend Signal or Telegram.

Shoot me an email at daniel@thread-app.com with your account details and we'll get your account deleted.

I don't believe average users gain much from federated, distributed, decentralized services (after you factor in the cost and limitations of such systems), but we'll consider it if there's a lot of demand.

There's a long road ahead of building trust with users, but I think if we're intentional about being the most open, transparent social networking company, we can build that trust with our actions and track record.

1. If you need to reset your pw at any point, we need either your email or phone number. We don't ask for your email. A phone number is most likely tied to a real person.

2. It's a unique identifier that allows you to add your existing contacts more easily. It's much more convenient than trying to figure out the usernames of all your friends and family.

3. It's harder to automate creation of users by requiring a valid phone number, versus usernames (and potentially even email).

Yeah - I don't see Thread as the right product for privacy nuts, as you refer to yourself. There are better services for that, like Signal.

I imagine Thread as a company that focuses more on delivering products that allow people to build more meaningful relationships and connections in a way that benefits their long term mental/social health. I believe we can do that in a way that delivers an 80/20 on privacy too, by not using targeted advertising, and having 0 incentives to sell your data.

If you're not willing to trust our servers, I don't think the product is right for you. Hopefully we build trust as a company that does right by our users in the long run, unlike what I'm seeing from companies today.

Two things.

1. We'll be transparent about the services that we use. That way you'll know who your data is being shared to, and what data will be shared.

2. We'll try to take an Apple-like approach of anonymizing data as much as possible and only sharing the few pieces of information we need to deliver a better product.

I'm sorry there's no fool-proof way to guarantee perfect data privacy - at some point you'll have to trust us to do the right thing with your data. We hope that our incentives will . be aligned. Our service is predicated on keeping your information private and that's what you'll be paying for.

These will both be addressed in the next release. Thanks for the due diligence.

Fixed.

It now reads: "We may disclose personal information to: third parties, including agents or sub-contractors, who assist us in sending direct marketing about our new products and features"

What I meant about legal expertise is that we don't want to be in violation of our privacy policy if we decide to use tools to understand our users better, or if we decide to email users about new products and features. Which is why I left some room in the privacy policy to enable such features.

We'd probably go more cross platform with something like Electron. It makes sense given our heavy React stack.

1. We're not restricted to the Apple ecosystem. A majority of the world's users are on Android. There's a lot of evidence that the exclusivity of iMessage is causing anxiety and stress in certain social circles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20715188

2. We plan to offer a very different kind of product than "simple secure messaging" (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram). We want to truly capture meaningful, social interactions beyond just quick messages. I want to build a service that better ties in event planning, payment splitting, and location sharing into your groups. An experience like Google photos where you can build shared albums in your groups. One where sharing music and videos feels natural and you can have "shared" experiences. We plan to integrate with a ton of third parties to offer intelligence on top of your messages (restaurant ratings, flight tracking, etc).

3. We want to build a better platform on top of messaging. Plugins and bots are pretty useless right now. We think we can offer apps and services that live in your conversations in really meaningful ways. It will be strictly opt-in, so users are choosing which services they want to integrate with.

We're starting with messaging because that's the starting point for meaningful group interactions, but I don't see anyone else in the space filling the gap for the things I mentioned.

Founder here.

This is great feedback. My interpretation of the clause is that we can use services like Mailchimp to send you marketing materials for when we release new products and features. These would be strictly opt-in.

I'm not a legal expert, but I will try to come up with a policy that more clearly expresses that you will NOT receive marketing about third-party services and our only usage of these services would be to update you all on our new product offerings.

We're considering offering E2E encryption, but we believe that we can deliver a ton of value by allowing users to search through their messages and for us to efficiently organize and categorize your content. I think there is a middle ground where we can encrypt non-pertinent data, but still preserve metadata so we can provide some intelligence on top of the content you choose to share on the platform.

Thanks for your input. I've never been really satisfied with the level of interaction of messengers. They usually end up as a firehose of short messages, where everything meaningful and important is lost in the noise. It's good for quick notifications, for sure.

What I'm imagining, for the types of things that I like to do with friends and family, is more oriented around long term social interactions. This means being able to plan and view events, view and split payments, and build a persistent group album -- to start. When I'm sharing videos, music, or recommendations, I don't want it to get lost as soon as it reaches the top of the screen.

This is where messaging falls short and I believe it can be supplemented by a lot of the features of traditional social networks.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "asymmetry information advantage"?

Personally, I've used tons of social media services growing up - AIM, MSN Messenger, GChat, G+, Blogspot, FB, IG, etc. I think all of them have positive traits, at least had positive traits when they started out. I've also experienced a healthy balance between online relationships and in-personal relationships. I just think it's super critical for our generation to move back to platforms that are healthier and better for our mental and social wellbeing.

Yeah, I'm definitely considering a freemium model. My own struggle is that I believe deep, interpersonal communication should be for everyone - it feels wrong to "exclude" people from certain mediums of expression just to make a profit. I have some more 'experimental' ideas that I think would allow Thread to remain free at its core, but still charge users for additional, advanced services.

I actually think there are two main camps here: people who take photos to share to their followers, and people who take photos for their own recollection and to share with the people closest to them (e.g. family photo albums).

I totally agree that the former is toxic and damages our mental health in many ways, like a digital version of smoking and vaping.

I recently launched a tool for our generation to manage and maintain a healthy relationship with social media - it moves away from the current trend of superficiality that exists on FB and IG right now.

I'd super appreciate if you all checked it out and let me know what you think! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20933272