"Hitting" with any of your friends is precisely the type of interaction I want to suppress. The way you know if what you say to your friends in real life is interesting to them is if they engage with it. If your feedback mechanism is anything other than the other side of a mutually interesting conversation, you probably aren't having ordinary conversation with friends. What real life feedback mechanisms most closely resembles likes? Applause. Who applauds? An audience.

Friends *can* give non-verbal cues in real life that they are interested (nodding, laughing, etc.), but likes are very much not like those non-verbal cues. Non-verbal cues only work in a very small group. There is no non-verbal cue that works to show interest in the context of "any of your friends" in real life. Emoji reactions in the context of a back-and-forth chat could work as non-verbal cues, but again, those are very different from drive-by likes with no additional engagement.

In this hypothetical social network, if you post something and no one responds to it or engages with it in any way verbally, you would be encouraged to do the same thing you would do in real life if you kept trying to talk about something in a group of friends and no one engaged with it verbally... find something else to talk about (or find a different group for that topic).

The goal is very much to mirror the experience of talking to your friends, but facilitated in a way that makes it more asynchronous and scalable (within the limit of your actual real life connections).

There are a lot of people in my life I would love to stay better connected with, but maintaining a direct chat can be difficult (what to say) and it doesn't always make sense to put people in group chats because the group might only make sense to me (people I used to work with that I actually like, for example). If I could post about what's going on in my life, what I'm working on, what I'm into right now, etc. and have my real-life friends opt-in to an actual conversation about that... well then it's much easier to stay in touch. I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing. If we aren't mutually talking to each other, we aren't engaging as friends no matter how much they may like it. They're just my audience if they have nothing to say back.

Sorry I didn't have time to make this shorter. My goal isn't to convince anyone of anything, just to share a perspective that might be interesting to you, OP or anyone else building something "social". You might sum it all up with the question: What if social media tried to be as much like real life friendship and as little like "influencing" as possible?

Yeah, if you don't give people some way to "like" things, you'll just get lots of comments that are nothing but heart emojis and such. It'd be like when AOL users discovered Usenet and there were lots of "Me too!" posts because they wanted to agree but didn't have anything to add.

> I agree with most of these, but I'm iffy on this one. "No one tracks a score with their friends" is not really true, it makes people feel good to see encouragement and feedback from their friends. There's no reason that encouragement has to be restricted to text comments and messages. Without feedback, you're essentially just screaming into the void knowing someone could be listening.

Good :D Let's revalue meaningful nuanced interactions over meaningless single bit signals. Even an emoji response rather than a like makes for better connection.

It’ll end up being number of comments. Which is great, because that’s the purpose of a social network; socializing.

What do I say to my cousin that I see a few times a year but would like to maintain a connection with? Do I just randomly send them pictures of my food and posts about what I've been up to? Do I send an occasional random banality like "how's the weather"? Neither of these seem like good strategies.

But if I could see the occasional (low frequency) update on things in their life or interesting to them... I could maybe see an opportunity to reach out for a real conversation about something of mutual interest.

Imagine you're suddenly teleported to a party with a hundred people you know and like but aren't super close to. How do you join a conversation? I mean, if it was people you were really close to, you'd just go up and talk to someone. That's group chat / SMS. But if it's more aquaintence level... one of two things probably happens: You overhear something that you're interested in and connect on that, or you randomly drop in various conversations at a surface level until something clicks.

That's what I'm after. Conversation that naturally flows from a spark. You don't need that with your closest friends, but you don't need a social network to keep up with your closest friends either. I imagine social networking as the tool to provide ongoing sparks for real direct interactive conversations on an occasional but ongoing basis with people you aren't close enough to to just call/text.

Yes, but with better UX.

What's left is to resurrect the correct site: geocities.com

That's what they mean, those 50 acquaintances are your mutual connection, not those 20 each you've never met.