>3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

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.

If the things I'm posting could get feedback but don't, that tells me that the things I'm saying aren't really hitting with any of my friends. That's a valuable thing to know, whether or not you choose to act on it.

Facebook in the early years was for the most part exactly like what you are suggesting, but with likes, and I at least remember it being a pretty enjoyable place for a few years there (I joined at the very end of 2006).

"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.