I agree with a lot of what you say here. I’ve been running a 3h daily time boxed social media site for the past 6 months and even though traffic is now a crawl compared to the initial burst of activity when I started it, there are users who check in daily and it ends up being a lovely experience I think.
I am working on mobile apps and redesigning and reengineering a lot of the site and I love your thoughts on a blog focus. I’d love to let people host a small blog on the site that would also connect to their actual blog. I’ll add that to the roadmap.
I like the concept though having the limited time would make more sense if the site was structured around a specific topic or interest. Otherwise, I don’t get the appeal of having a fixed time to social media with random people over nothing in particular. But if you told me that there’d me a gathering of <<insert fav hobby/interest>> for three hour block each evening (or even just a couple times per week), I’d be excited to check it out.
That's an interesting idea. If, for instance, there was a window of time for people interested in a show to come together to discuss the latest episode (assuming the episodes aren't just dropped all at once), then I think it would be an interesting place to visit since everyone is there for the very same reason and there's something of interest that happened recently that would focus the discussion.
I will say I did visit the site months ago and found that just hanging out with random people wasn't that compelling to me. In the early days, it was fun because it was new and there was a lot of energy, but after that, you really do need something to bring you back day to day.
What youre missing is that most people have self control issues, and your product is essentially a commitment device. As most addicts - they reject such devices.
I like what youre doing but just saying - youre dealing with a very difficult problem.
That’s a fair point. I don’t see it as the antidote for people who are addicted though. It’s just a nice place for people who want to engage less. I’m definitely aware it won’t be a big thing.
If you’re looking for an actual antidote to the addiction, I don’t think that will exist in the form of a product, that will come from individuals themselves if it ever does.
There's also a subset of users that embrace such devices. I'd wager that's OPs target audience. The ones that would reject it are a lost cause and shouldn't even be considered.
Hey, sorry about that. I mistakenly believed that my email template had an unsubscribe button built in. I will make sure that the next one has one. If you want to message me your email directly I can remove you so you don't even receive the next notification that the site is opening back up.
What do you mean you can't sign in though? I will add password resetting soon but I'm curious if you're running into an issue with the login system.
I want to delete my account—not unsubscribe. It's a cool idea, but only accessible to me between 00:39:00–03:39:00 (UTC-01:00). I'm too old for that! :P
I assume there is a way to delete my account behind the login wall… but I can't log in outside of the "open" hours.
Therefore, I'm stuck: I can't be online during the "open" hours and the login button is disabled and reads "Log in (unavailable)" during the "closed" hours.
I also tried to reply to your email with a data deletion request, but the delivery failed. There is no support email on the homepage, nor a way to message you directly via HN.
Running into this same issue. I tried to send you an email but it bounced. The error was "Your message couldn't be delivered ... because the remote server is misconfigured ... 554 5.7.1 : Relay access denied". Just FYI :)
That's pretty close to what I'm thinking. If you remove the endless, always-on nature of social media, could it create better content and better experiences? "Better" is subjective of course, so it is hard to have a tight hypothesis.
> could it create better content and better experiences? "Better" is subjective of course, so it is hard to have a tight hypothesis.
Worth thinking about what metrics you think reflects “better” (content, experience). Something that measures quality of engagement. Retention should work.
One thing you’ll be up against is that thoughts don’t keep office hours, but someone might still want to share with their circle. You could consider creating a holding pen for things a user comes up with - they can record it, but it doesn’t flow yet. That also gives cooling off period which I bet could simultaneously give the satisfaction of immediate gratification (writing it down) and quality content (reflect before post).
haha I'm with you on the too silly side of it, but I have some time to run the experiment and see where I can go with it.
Yes, was not expecting it to hit as much of an audience as it did at the end there. Definitely need some mechanisms to stop the spam it saw at the end.
I think there is still an issue. I think it is counting down to the next 7:39 local time. Right now it says opens in 22h 50m for me (I am in mountain time) (this was at 8:49 MST / 10:49 EST)
My college's class scheduling website also had hours of operation. One of the rumors was that it would stop students from drunkenly dropping all of their classes, but the real truth was that it was based on an old system that needed to process things overnight and they couldn't get funding to modernize it. This was UMD -- it was notorious when I was there for being annoying but still cracks me up.
Thanks! I'm glad you like it. I do think it could have some cool dynamics but that is what I'm testing right now.
Neat app, simple and well done.
I wonder if you could allow people to create their own riddles and rank them by difficulty and satisfaction rate with upvotes.
I am working on mobile apps and redesigning and reengineering a lot of the site and I love your thoughts on a blog focus. I’d love to let people host a small blog on the site that would also connect to their actual blog. I’ll add that to the roadmap.
Definitely stop by some time! https://seven39.com/