[Idea validation] Social networks are useless - and how to fix it
Hi Indie Hackers,
I'm quite new here, and I'm so amazed by the community - you rock! I'd love to hear your opinion on this one.
Social networks these days are built to deal with content - which might be interesting, but in most cases serves procrastination, and is generally useless. What is useful is knowledge. But sharing it through social networks just turns it to content - rapidly consumed and forgotten. So:
The problem
The problem that we're trying to solve is that human everyday knowledge today is mostly stored...in their heads, with occasional records like phone contact lists or notebooks of all sorts. It's usually good enough when the only person that needs to use this knowledge is the same person who has it; the problem arises when other people need this knowledge as well.
For example, you look for a cool fresh playlist, tasty recipe for a cake, or a plumber which you can actually trust; what's the best source for such information? The answer is probably - your friends or family; but how do you get this info?
Today, you need to actually reach out to someone and explicitly ask them for help. This situation can possibly pose countless problems - you don't know exactly who of your peers have the desired info, you don't always feel comfortable to reach out and ask for it, and so on. As I see it, it's a helluva problem.
Modern social media platforms kinda try to address this pain: instead of asking your peers one-by-one you can now make a post and hope that someone you trust will see it and answer something useful. While this is definitely an upgrade, what if you could just browse your peers' knowledge?
The solution
At first, we thought to create such a platform to share information about cool and trustworthy businesses around (and it's almost ready). But then we saw that the issue is actually bigger: most of the social knowledge today is buried in the unusable silo.
So the ultimate target is to create a knowledge-sharing platform with semantically defined post types, where people can share things that they want others to know are good. This achieves two outcomes: first, it's a place to organize the knowledge for yourself, and second (which comes a bit later, when the network fills up) - you can make a search on the platform and get the most trusted knowledge possible.
Monetization is done through an embedded marketplace - no ads, no data brokerage.
What do you think?
- Do you have this problem?
- Is it something that you would like to exist in this world?
- Would you share your knowledge there, and if yes - what would be your use-cases?
- Would you invite your friends to use it?
Of course, all of the above - given that the UX is good...
Thank you!
P.S. I've updated the title to reflect the pain more.
What value do I get from this?
Great question, thanks.
The value that you get from it is double-sided.
One side of the value is an ability to store your knowledge in a structured, searchable way. It's especially crucial in the age of unlimited amounts of information that just piles up in the way that many times when you need to dig up something you know, it's easier to just find something new in the net.
The second side is that your friends can do the same, and you can connect with them on this platform. This way, you can just browse their knowledge, in the same structured and searchable way - so if you need advice from a friend, you can just put a word in a query field, and you know what do your trusted peers know.
I do realize that not every sort of knowledge can be conveniently stored this way. I think of it as a place for information about the everyday, more or less consuming-related topics.
Thanks for your answer. I understand now what you are trying to achieve. I think that this is a problem that people are trying to solve from the dawn of human age. "How to store and share knowledge." I'm not a person who uses services like this, so I will not comment anymore because my opinion can affect your end goal, which can be at the end great.
Keep going, man!
the most important opinions to me are those that differ from mine. There were two points for this post - see that there are some people that share this vision, and to hear out those that don't :) the first part is already there and seems like you have something to say for the second part - which I'd love to hear :)
Okey :)
You wrote
Social networks are built to connect people online. Marketers and businesses use social networks as tools to spread their offers and sell sell sell. It's not about knowledge at all.
Is this a real problem? I don't want people to be brainless zombies :D
99% ... ok, 80% of people are lazy as F. They would first ask in a post, comment or chat and wait for a minute rather than use search and waste their energy. It's easier and more accurate. And then, there is Google. Google is superior in general and everyday knowledge.
I strongly disagree that this is a problem or at least a good example of the problem you are trying to solve. Can you imagine that you will open some app before you ask your mother how to bake your favourite cookies? How do I get this information? Hmm ... it's easy. I ask her. Your solution missing social interactions and it is one of the main components of social networks. Therefore from your description of your service, you are not building a social network.
In general, I think you are going too wide. Focus on some niche. If I understand right, your initial plan was to focus on businesses recommendations. All of a sudden, you overthought it and ended up with a solution that doesn't solve anything from my perspective. Stick to your original idea.
I think that:
People won't share unless there is demand.
People are sick of social networks.
People are lazy
PS:
I can be totally wrong. I'm not an expert. Just take that to account.
Thank you for sharing your point of view, it's so important to have multiple perspectives :)
okay, you got me here :) This is actually a "you may say I'm a dreamer" kind of post, just to check out if someone else sees the issue. I will, of course, stick with the initial idea for now, but the general line of thought behind it is quite the same - structure the information and automate word-of-mouth.
You're definitely right about most points you mention. The goal of the rest of this comment is not to argue but to look at the points you mention from another point of view.
There are lots of different types of platforms that are built to connect people online (see marketplaces for example), and modern social networks have two distinctive properties - they 1) connect people that already know each other and 2) do it by enabling people to share content. If you look only on the marketing side of things here - yes, marketing ain't no knowledge; but as you state
and this is all about knowledge, exactly the kind I'm talking about; the recommendation given in a comment or chat will be after that buried deep and totally unexplorable, while it's not becoming much less valuable over time.
no :D the problem is that our heads lack any developer-friendly APIs to access the storage - which by itself is excellent. The worse thing is, that if you need any information stored in someone's head - you can't just get it.
These are precisely my points :) the only way to ask for a recommendation when you don't know who to ask is to throw a post or ask in some groups. But responses take time, and there's no control over who answers, so doing it is waste of energy
YES, yes, yes! Because it is a good search engine. You give it an input (what do you want) and get output (something that can suit you) in just a few milliseconds, with zero time and energy waste. That's why people love it ;) but the information there is provided by people you don't know, therefore is less trusted; that's why I think that the search engine that will provide customers with recommendations of their friends will have its crowd.
You're right again, zero problems exist when you know exactly who to ask. The problem arises when you don't know who of your peers can help you.
You're probably right regarding the examples though. Just something that popped out at that moment :)
My solution is missing synchronous social interactions while providing the asynchronous ones. Seems that it'll fit introverts the most - as they'd default to async interactions in most of the cases.
Great point I thought of too. I'd really appreciate it if you could share a bit more of your thoughts about it.
You're right again. People are sick of the endless pointless dopamine loop that the content-based social networks are today. That's one of the biggest points of this post.
As you said, 80% of them are, and it's all right :) 20% is more than enough to kickstart a knowledge-based network.
I really like the fact that even the contradiction of this idea still brings up the same points that comprise its basis. Again: I don't think that it's wise to start a network of every knowledge in the world. At the same time, I'm really sick of social networks in their current incarnation, and as a developer, I find it nonsense that while Internet has my social graph and the knowledge of most of my peers it can't connect me to it. It's like JOIN for SELECT query, but somehow this DB lacks the JOIN feature.
silo’d info isn’t a problem just for SNs, right? isn’t this a large problem, in general? what is the social part?
In general, it's much less of a problem, at least from the average consumer point of view. There's a lot of knowledge out there, all you need to do is to go to Google and find it. However, it most probably comes from some abstract human you don't know, therefore the level of trust in such knowledge is defined by your guts.
The social part is, that word-of-mouth is the most trusted information channel for the vast majority of people (>90%), and as for today, there's no technologically straightforward way to use it.
(As I know, there is a tool to do this in China, as WeChat is both marketplace and social network. But I didn't have a chance to use it, so I can't tell for sure)
Hi Greg,
That makes a lot of sense! We're trying to solve a similar problem within the Travel Space. I think the biggest challenge is getting people to actively post and to share this knowledge - what are you doing to incentivize people to do this?
This is a tough question.
There's a good chance I'll change my mind or think about something better, but for the moment I think that the initial approach should combine two aspects:
Later on, post-revenue, lots of incentive strategies can be applied (based both dopamine and money/free stuff). But the kickstarting will be the most challenging part.
Regarding travel - it's an interesting niche, although it seems like the only one that has two big established social networks in it - Foursquare and Tripadvisor. How do you plan to differentiate from them?
Agreed with your 1 and 2 - it's something I've been thinking about and think along with a few additional features it could help with at least the initial userbase.
Regarding Foursquare and TripAdvisor, I find that people rarely use these as part of their planning process - not sure if you find yourself in this same boat?
Foursquare really seems to silently get off the social part of their business, leaving just the features necessary for the data harvesting (as users location data brokerage became their primary business model lately). I do see people use it, make lists, and leave reviews there, but the main social feature, the search filter "recommended by the people I follow" - doesn't work for me for some reason.
Regarding Tripadvisor you're right - it seems like it's mostly used during the trip to find some spontaneous eatery/stay/whatever. It seems to have some basic planning features, but it seems kinda..clunky? I've tried to create a trip now, and could not figure out how to add places or something to it.
Regardless, it seems like there is a place for a new, community-centric, meaningful platform. I'll be happy to share some findings from my ongoing market research :)
Social networks are built for narcism with tiny dose of dopamine at a time, content are just a language for it. Hence people(we) choose to like, what they(we) believe in, irrespective of facts & truth in a social network. So, social networks rarely are trust worthy information hub and definitely not a knowledge hub.
Where as non-social networks like HN, Reddit and even Indie Hackers serve has a knowledge hub as the incentives are not purely aimed at fuelling narcism because community interests play an important factor here.
dopamine loop is another issue. If social networks could keep me in the dopamine loop, but still serve me the information I need when I need it - I'd shut up. But they keep all of the information analysis to their advertisers, so there is a problem.