a quick sketch for a social network

[oligopsony]

This is just a thought experiment, with no consideration as to e.g. feasibility.

Imagine your usual setup, where you can subscribe to people and tags, and you can post whatever and re share them (dependent on restrictions set by the originator.) You can like things, &c.

The gimmick is that the site updates only once a day.

If you go into Recent View, you'll see everything posted during the last update window in a random order, with multiple reblogs of the same thing treated as one item (unless you've seen that exact version before, in which case you'll skip it; or people are adding modifications/comments, in which case they'll appear together.)

You can also read Archive View. The amount of likes something gets can impact what order you read Archive View of a user or tag, but you can't like from there. I don't know whether you should be able to reblog from there or how posts should be aggregated together - most of the obvious ways of answering that seem to be degenerate in some way - but the goal would be something that doesn't produce perverse incentives or let things compound on themselves.

Comments

[youzicha]

Not sure exactly what you are aiming to accomplish, but I note that in the late 1600s in England, post was delivered two or three times per day, so all the Royal Society dudes would get a letter in the morning, reply to it, and then get the reply back in the afternoon in their coffee shop. I feel that might be the ideal, intellectually vibrant, timescale: quick feedback but still enough time to jot down some effortposts.

Actually, come to think of it, here's my own social network concept---it works roughly as current sites do, but you can only read it while you sit in the coffee shop drinking coffee. (I think something like Scuttlebutt could probably be hacked into this.) I have a hunch that something like that could be really pleasant. :)

[oligopsony]

That does sound nice!

[discoursedrome]

I think I'd still want chronological ordering at least as an option, even with this sort of setup. Definitely when browsing users' post I have no interest in seeing them ordered by likes and a lot of interest in seeing them ordered by time, though I don't see any problem with offering both options.

Three possible thoughts on the issues this might create:
First, I imagine a lot of convoluted etiquette around how things are reblogged. Reblogging something in a way that doesn't collapse tidily is likely to scan as being much "ruder", which could create weird incentives.
Second, users in very different time zones are going to have a very different experience using the site simply because the rollover time will fall at a different time of day for them.
Thirdly, I think conversations might get confusing simply because you'd have a lot more lengthy cross-replies -- it's easy to imagine a thread where each of 4 people responds individually to each of the other 3, just because you have no feedback on who's replying to what and a lot of time to draft posts.

[sonata_green]

That could also affect the "pile-on" effect – there's no way to see that a hundred other people already said the same thing earlier today.