Comment by readitalready
16 hours ago
I really wish more social networks would have a "fading connections" limit. So many social networks suffer from stale connections and networks, and these connections should expire after a year. Otherwise, it will permanently define a social network's content and editorial direction without algorithmic control. For example, Selena Gomez will always have 400million followers on Instagram, but she's socially irrelevant now. Same with other celebrities, like Kim Kardashian. If connections expired after a year (or 3 months or 6 months), people would have to maintain their social relevance, and it becomes a natural editorial filter, keeping the overall network fresh and relevant.
If you want a business model, require payment for long-term subscriptions or large celebrity/news accounts, but you have to overcome the network effect first. Maybe have a dozen or so permanent connections to start with, like MySpace's 8 priority friends.
I feel like that was what made Google Plus better and yet because it was Google shoving everything into Google Plus itself to force numbers… it failed. Circles in Google Plus is the most underrated thing I have ever seen. You can basically group friends under specific labels, so if you want to only share some posts / photos with family, only family will see it, wanna share posts with former and current coworkers? Have at it. Or share with multiple circles or everyone / global.
Its a damn shame Google nerfed it after forcing it on people who werent asking to be forced into it. Google Plus was a very tech heavy Social Media platform, if Google had half a brain they could have built their own serious LinkedIn alternative.
I completely agree. Circles were great. Unfortunately, they're one of the things that killed Google+. I remember reading an article from one of the creators of Google+ years and years ago. They talked about how asymmetric friending (Alice adding Bob to one of her circles didn't add Alice to any of Bob's circles) prevented the viral network effect that Facebook was able to achieve.
It's a damn shame. I feel like Google giving up on Google+ and Microsoft giving up on Windows phones were both mistakes.
> and Microsoft giving up on Windows phones were both mistakes.
You hit me right in the gut, are we long lost siblings? Lol
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I never tried a Windows phone - but everyone I knew with one loved them. (Most of the owners worked for Microsoft...)
I loved Google+ - it was like Facebook without the dark patterns. So of course, nobody was on it (which I didn't dislike exactly).
i think it was just poorly implemented. i didn't use the circles feature because all my friends would be in one circle and my family were all offline, but i still had to deal with it for no personal benefit
opt in probably would have been better, like just default everyone to one circle and make it obvious how to split them up after you're a bit more comfortable with the platform
they made a bunch of other obvious blunders like attempting to force real names and spread them to youtube, mandatory account linkage etc etc but i think there were probably just too many conflicting high level voices at google trying to set direction
I had a few different circles depending on if friends were interested in running, cycling, hiking or computers and then I could make posts that could be just for specific groups.
Facebook has that feature and has for many years. That is a good idea, but there are many bad ideas that negate the good ideas even when the good ones are implemented.
it goes back even further - LiveJournal, which was a social network like any other - more importantly without algorithmic optimization.
It's a great idea in principle, but it requires some manual work, which most users aren't gonna bother with.
> it requires some manual work, which most users aren't gonna bother with
Dowsing a user's circles from their public information and Gmail inbox seems like a perfect task for AI.
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I don’t think it’s about the effort needed. The basic idea is just too complex for most people.
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Apparently Facebook does/did support posting to certain groups? Maybe the UI isn't great as I never knew it was possible but a workmate told it was.
You can but it's a very cumbersome UX.
As I understand my FB account, I can easily post to a group. But I can't easily adjust the membership of that group. Otoh, I post maybe once a year, so who knows.
> Circles in Google Plus is the most underrated thing I have ever seen.
Facebook now has 'Audience', which is quite analogous to 'Circles'
WeChat in China was early to implement friend group-based posting
Circles was a lot of busy work though
Messages group chats are the circles now.
Also Discord - tons of people use Discord as a social network and keep up with friends. I must have 5 friend groups that have their own Discords with some overlap.
What killed Google+ is the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good. They had a brief window where everyone wanted to use it, and they kept it locked behind a hard to get invite system for months and months.
It was worse than that: they forced _everyone_ into it, whether or not you had any interest in using it.
They did this before having notification control or usable filtering[1] so what this meant was for most of year, you'd login to Gmail and see the upper right notification badge be !!!LOOK AT ME!!! red only to click on it and see it was telling you that some dude who no-showed on a Craigslist sale 10 years ago in a different city had been forced to “join” Google+. Even worse, it took like 6 months for their iOS developers to give you any control over push notifications so you got all of that as push notifications until you deleted the app.
They also annoyed key communities like Google Reader users: that wasn't their largest popular social network but it was one which people actually liked and it disproportionately skewed towards people like journalists, bloggers, etc. who recommended technology to other people. The conversion to Google+ was really clumsy and they did things like replacing the popular Reader commenting system with a Google+ “integration” which didn't work at all on mobile devices[2], which meant that a ton of influential people had a really negative experience and told everyone they knew about it.
1. The “circles” idea reportedly worked well when it was Google employees using it internally but it relied on the poster picking an audience for a post, which failed in the real world when the spammiest people think everyone is interested in their every word.
2. The dialog was sized for a desktop display so the post button was inaccessible off the screen.
Thats not the only thing that killed google+ though. I think their aggressive push was their demise, forced all their users to use google+, mangled with youtube and gmail accounts and all that pissed off a lot of users.
> the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good.
That's not it at all. Bluesky is simply just too political.
X is too political. Bluesky is too political. When you focus on content and sharing and having a good time, then the network takes off.
I'm not saying politics isn't important. I'm saying it can't become the miasma that pervades the entire service and makes the entire point of the social network complaining about politics, polarized attacks, etc.
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I can only imagine someone looking over my shoulder on vacation to see what I'm posting: "oh, you have a 'close friends' group; why am I not in it?"
Arbitrary labels are great ... until they're not.
Arbitrary labels make it really easy to give groups of close friends silly in-joke names rather than "close friends"...
> If connections expired after a year (or 3 months or 6 months), people would have to maintain their social relevance, and it becomes a natural editorial filter, keeping the overall network fresh and relevant.
This is a weird comment because it treats connections like they're only an asset for the person being followed.
The people doing the following aren't even considered. They're supposed to continuously re-follow the people they want to follow?
I don't see any upsides to this for anyone. I'm not reading social media every day. I don't want the network to automatically expire my follows and force me to remember and re-discover who I want to follow all the time. I don't want the people I follow feeling like they desperately need to pursue relevance instead of just being themselves.
If Selena Gomez is "socially irrelevant" then why do you care that she has 400 million followers? What does this take away from you in any way?
Because I don't want to see all her posts on my timeline anymore. I have to actively unfollow her to do that, which is more work.
That's more work than even following someone, because it asks for confirmation or pops up a separate modal to unfollow, which it doesn't do for following someone. And so I don't even bother.
This leads to stale social networks and algorithmic timelines.
>keeping the overall network fresh and relevant
What does this mean? Like in practical feature terms and benefit to the end user?
Your system kills the social networks ability to act as someone's modern day rolodex of contact information of previous acquaintances. What do they get in exchange for that?
Social networks aren't rolodexes. They're newspapers.
As someone who's been working on social networking and adjacent services for over 15 years, hard disagree.
An ideal social network should not have any agency of its own, period. If your feed is too crowded because you follow too many people, then so be it. It's your problem, you did this to yourself. Only you know how to fix it for yourself, if you do even want it fixed in the first place.
real world social networks have agency if you define ephemerality as agency. It's an accident of digital platforms that nothing is ever forgotten, not a feature inherent to normal human relations. In the real world you drop phone numbers, you forget events, unused relationships atrophy. And that's not a bug, forgetting is a feature. For anyone who isn't convinced of this, Black Mirror did an admirable job in its first season putting the pathologies of social technologies on display that record everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
It can be argued that humans actually hate forgetting things. That's why we invented writing. Spoken language lets us share arbitrarily abstract thoughts with others. But human memory is imperfect, so spreading knowledge or memories through word-of-mouth is unreliable. Writing lets us preserve that information as intended by the original author, potentially indefinitely. That's also why we always wanted to be able to record and play back what we hear and see, and our civilization only fairly recently, in terms of history, got advanced enough to have technologies to do that.
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Wait Kim and Selena are irrelevant? I guess I'm not keeping up with the times
Yeah that was the most out of touch HN comment I’ve seen in a long, long time.
Persistent irrelevant celebrities are a real thing, but those two wouldn’t crack the top 500.
I mean Kim & Selena will always have a certain level of celebrity status but people like Sydney Sweeney are currently a lot more popular. This is in terms of "are they the most popular people right now" as their instagram count states. They are literally in the top 10 on instagram right now.
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I honestly can't imagine a stronger indicator of somewhere I don't want to be than it having 400m Kim Kardashian fans
For example, I know a gal who foolishly invited her whole friend list to her 26th birthday party.
Did that weird guy from 3rd grade show up? He sure did.
That… actually seems kinda fun…
I know this wasn’t the point I was supposed to take from your comment but I’m liking this idea
It was really awkward, I can tell you.
The lesson here is not to invite your whole friend list.
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Nah, bad idea. The timeframe of an active connection really varies by age and type. Some important connections are once-every-few-years communications. A year, or two years, etc is too arbitrary.
I am confused... what is harmed by having stale connections? Why would connections be used as an editorial filter?
Because you don't want to see posts from stale connections.
I assume you would just unfollow them if you want to stop seeing their posts? It sounded more like the person I was talking to was more concerned with follower counts being accurate, which doesn’t seem relevant for feed algorithms.
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> but she's socially irrelevant now.
I'm pretty sure there was a Black Mirror episode about social scoring dictating peoples value/relevance. That was a good place for such a concept, because letting social media sites dictate someone's relevance is just weird. Relevance is a personal opinion, and should remain that way. People are free to stop following others. It works, and isn't dystopian.
I would hate it if the system removed nodes from my network without my influence. Perhaps a rules engine with user defined criteria would be useful.
Ultimately, users define their network in current-day social media and the relevance of any celebrity or other person within it.
400M people still find Selena Gomez relevant to themselves - she’s simply not relevant to you. I asked Gemini very simply “is Selena Gomez relevant” and it responded with essentially “more in 2026 than ever.”
Could potentially show you withering connections you havent interacted with, almost an auto recycle bin with the option to dig on there and bring it back later on but dissapear from your main radius of attention if withered.
Slack has started doing this in the last year or two - these are channels that you rarely interact with - want to leave?
Instagram has something like this where it shows you "least interacted with". It seems broken to me though, as it showed me people who I do interact with.
Don't worry, Facebook already has Fading Connections
You can be married to each other and your posts won't show up on the other person's feed (there's a post on HN about this)
Xitter was kind of doing the same thing: I can’t see anything my mom posts, but I definitely have to see everything Elon’s mom does.
X actually kinda solved this. You have 3 tabs which solve all use cases IMO
- For you: Fully algorithmic, shows stuff even from people you don't follow
- Following (recently): Chronological posts from people you follow
- Following (popular): Algorithmic ordering just from people you follow
> Xitter
Is this an alternate front-end (Nitter) or shorthand for X/Twitter?
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I don’t post on Facebook—HN is my closest analogue. But I assure you my partner(s) have no interest in seeing whatever I post here. Any more than I want to be in the thick of the extended-family group chats. Or, frankly, Facebook.
In that sense, maybe this is Facebook doing its part for domestic harmony…
I think the point was two people can be the absolute closest of friends, and Facebook will still fail to show them relevant posts.
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Yup, it's annoying as all hell.
What in the world lol
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16278631
Followers is a somewhat meaningless metric. Instead look at something like likes or views. The most relevant posts will spread via the algorithm and get the most views.
i understand the intent, but selena is still extremely popular, especially amongst women...maybe a bad example
A comically atrocious take.
Can you please not post shallow dismissals or call names in HN comments? We're trying for something else here.
You're of course welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Apologies.