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114 sats \ 9 replies \ @elvismercury 7 Jul 2023 \ on: Daily discussion thread
Has there ever been a writeup about the evolution of SN? I'm new here, but the development / search through feature space seems to be unfolding thoughtfully, trying to curate the right vibe and the right interactions. It would be interesting to follow this along from the beginning, to see what was tried, what happened, etc.
Has anyone written an analysis or retrospective along the way? Can anyone recommend a strategy for unearthing such a narrative trail, if it doesn't exist?
It might help to read the origin story and then we have a manually maintained and incomplete, but high level, change log.
IMO the game theory evolution is perhaps the most interesting. That's really what's new. I need to write it up or something though.
Zaps represent the only fundamentally new innovation in social media.Everything else is a distraction.
I really think zaps are just the tip of the iceberg. Bitcoin is the fundamentally new innovation in social media and it enables far more than zaps.
the development / search through feature space seems to be unfolding thoughtfully
We get distracted like anyone, but I try the best I can to build in a low time preference way which mostly involves prioritizing consideration of the big, hard, and unsolved problems that most people neglect. I feel pretty strongly that everything we're building is a draft of what the digital commons will be in the future.
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One more question:
Reading through the change log, I followed a link to the SN post about web of trust. This made me think of something I've been thinking about a bunch lately, from using PKM tools (Logseq is my current one) where making it easy to talk about things is a design goal. Making it easy to talk about things through links, search, and automatic back links, causes a densely structured graph to emerge, a very useful kind of semantic knowledge store. It's pretty remarkable how it all pops out.
This is relevant bc at first SN looks like Hacker News, with the familiar features; but the more I dig into it, the more it seems like you're playing around with hybrid ideas about how communication should work online -- you alluded to some, above, wrt Zaps. I'm curious if this, too, is something you've thought about playing with: other ways to structure conversations, make them findable, referenceable, etc., beyond the familiar message board paradigm?
Don't get me wrong, doing the familiar thing well is a substantial contribution, and there's enough experimentation w/ btc integration to keep anyone busy. Just wondering how far your experimental aspirations go :)
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I do want the board to be atypical, e.g. recursive sub-boards (subs have subs), a variety of economic ranking algorithms (there are so many different auction algorithms), marketplaces, financial incentives and economy management tools for running sub-boards, etc.
We've talked about internal linking shortcuts like #205407 would reference the comment I'm replying to. Comments or posts could accumulate references kind of like github issues and context could cascade. We could do the same with mentions.
I've also been encouraged to read about Project Xanadu (I'm a sucker for tech history) but I have an embarrassingly deep book queue atm.
Other than that, I haven't thought a whole lot about conversation structure yet. I've focused primarily on the game theory/incentives because I find most people are bored by it, it's under explored, yet it's probably the single most powerful tool for generically skewing behavior.
Thanks for bringing this up. You've convinced me I'm not thinking about it enough!
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This comment was featured on This Day in Stacker News.
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Yeah, that ethos comes across, even from a quite brief exposure.
What I like most is that, even if you don't care about btc at all, there's a real question unfolding in the world of how to build a good online community, what a good community even is, and what primitives are needed to do it. The ability to signal-boost by sacrificing money, requiring proof-of-sacrifice (spending sats) to speak, all of it, is so important and interesting, and the way you're approaching all of this w/ the tools btc offers is so fascinating.
Thanks for the link to the change log -- please keep documenting!
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Cool story. Are you disappointed you ended up with a bunch of "tech-challenged" animals like me in the zoo?
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No not at all. Tbh I wasn’t expecting anyone to show up. And most of you are like 80th percentile of technicality population-wide given you understand and desire to use bitcoin/lightning.
Bit devs attendees are only 10-20% programmers I’d guess so we are probably meeting that requirement pretty well.
Many name brand devs read here but can’t be bothered to participate yet. I suspect that’ll change as we get more people with enough overlapping expertise.
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I think that is roughly correct. I feel like an absolute Neanderthal reading some of the technical heavy posts on here but outside of people who actually work in/with tech I have a better understanding of than most people.
I was aware of HackerNews because of this week in startups podcast but when I tried the site I was completely lost. Then last November I saw your twitter account or maybe it was the SN account mention Stacker News was like Hacker News except you can earn sats so I tried the site out and found that a lot of the discussion was bitcoin and macro along with the technical stuff so it was right up my alley and I could learn a bit more of the technical stuff just by being more broadly engaged with the SN community.
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Check out old episodes of SNL on YouTube we started covering Stacker News weekly in Feb of 2022 about 8 months after it launched give or take.
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