Today is the official launch day for Radiopaper, a new social network focused on fostering thoughtful, interesting conversations.

We initially opened Radiopaper up to the public a couple years ago with an HN post, and got a lot of great responses, despite not doing a big public launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31210680

The site now has a new and much improved design, but the same troll-resistant mechanisms are in place: Replies are private messages by default, until the OP chooses to engage.

Today we're debuting a major new feature: you can commission people with real money (privately) to respond to posts (publicly).

There are some really cool conversations on the site going on right now, including about the history of eyeliner, the color blue in Christian mysticism, and John Rawls.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974231

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Our thinking about this was that we want to make it as easy as possible to follow a conversation between two people, however long and involved the conversation gets. So, while conversations can branch endlessly, it's always easy to follow what any two people are saying to each other.

In the longer term, we might also add some features around seeing an overall conversation branching structure, but it's not on the short-term roadmap.

You're right that the conversations going on now are mostly a bit high-brow or formal. This is mostly an accidental feature of the way we rolled out the site to people we thought would like it. Many of them are professional writers!

But absolutely, Radiopaper is also a good place for banter or conversations about whatever (keeping in mind our content policy, naturally: radiopaper.com/policies). Sports gossip, politics, whatever — go for it!

1. First, a clarification about our mechanism: * only the first message in a conversation or thread requires a reply or approval for publication. The algorithm is not "for every n messages in a conversation, publish n-1." The reason for this is discussed in some of your comments: if every message requires a reply to publish, then either party in a conversation can unilaterally end a conversation at any time. * Instead, once a conversation or a thread is published, either party can add messages to the conversation in any order. Does this mean that once you get past the first-message test, you can troll to your heart's content? Not really. Yes, you can keep publishing messages into the conversation. But unless your counterparty replies to you, additional messages will be considered "post-scripts." Post-scripts do not push a conversation to the top of any feeds, whether on a user page or on the Explore page. This will remain the case even when we have individual feeds and a more complex algorithm than simple reverse-chrono. What this means is that a conversation gets less and less discoverable the longer it goes without both parties jumping in.

2. Second, a clarification about our ambitions: * no system is perfectly troll-proof. We call Radiopaper "troll-resistant," rather than "troll-proof," for a reason. But we also believe that our level of troll resistance is sufficient to radically change the experience of using Radiopaper in the long term, vs other social sites. * two reasons for this: one is that most trolls are pretty lazy. Raising the bar even slightly eliminates 90%+ of the worst actors. More importantly, however, we reduce incentives for trolling. Right now a good way to gain clout on social networks is to post inflammatory or insulting replies. On Radiopaper, that will just get you ignored. On Radiopaper, the incentives are instead to strike a balance between engaging your interlocutor and engaging your audience. We believe this will eventually disproportionally attract the best minds on the internet to the site.

3. Third, a note about where we're headed: our next steps in the medium term are to add social features like following, notifications, reactions, and individual feeds. This will make Radiopaper a bit more like Twitter or Facebook, and a bit less like Reddit or HN. Our goal is to be more social network than forum.

4. Lastly, a call to action: if you like the concept and/or the design, we'd love it if you started a conversation! One important feature of the site is that you can converse on Radiopaper with someone purely via their email address. Only one person in a conversation ever even needs to log in or make an account. This feature is available at radiopaper.com/new. If you don't have any ideas for who to start chatting with, check out my user page: radiopaper.com/DavidSchaengold. I'd be happy to talk.

The full set was -Agree -Disagree -Interesting -Beautiful.

We still use them internally. You can see what they look like here: https://twitter.com/DavidSchaengold/status/15202075451048468...

Additionally, other users on Radiopaper will understand the mechanism. So, if they see a controversial post with 100% fawning replies, they're going to understand what's happening, and discount the credibility of those replies accordingly.

Either party can keep adding messages to the conversation in any order, but only a back-and-forth is considered an update to the conversation as a whole, for the purposes of sending it to the top of the feed. That way, if a conversation turns sour, one person only needs to stop replying, and the conversation will gradually sink down the list into oblivion, even if new messages continue to be added by the ignored party.

There will of course still be cases where Radiopaper moderators need to step in. We have a content policy that outlines the reasons we might do so: https://radiopaper.com/policies. But our hope is that most of the worst stuff will just never get published, because it will simply be ignored.

Email is in some ways like a whole hidden social internet. A lot of people use email who have no interest in Twitter, Facebook, etc. And many of those people are really interesting. Radiopaper provides a way for them to have public conversations online without having to learn a new technology, and without having to worry about what might end up associated with their online presence in the absence of active management.