Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening

> So yeah, the current window wouldn't work for me, but that's fine. Everything doesn't have to be for everyone. We all live in our bubbles anyway; creating artificial rules could actually be ways of creating new, unexpected interactions.

I like the idea that something like this could be open for 3 hours in the evening local time. Like, you'd get totally different communities coming on at different times, and having completely separate experiences together. But some other people would bridge the gap.

While you're online, every hour some people would be forced to leave and some other people could join.

An isolated subdomain for each timezone, with no way to interact between them, cet.seven39, est.seven39, etc.

Why not let the user pick the 3 hour window and not let them change it for another period after it was just changed?

A window based on region is like free load balancing.

I think a good alternative would be it's open twice, 7:39am and 7:39pm.

Makes it available for other regions but also the same (silly) idea.

I think there could be different sites for different continents like https://www.seven39.eu

now i want to see a map with all timezones called EST but meaning something else in each one

You could also just use a different time zone each day.

I'm actually part of a site like this, just a thing a friend of a friend made:

- You can write and edit one post at a time.

- This post, in whatever form it has then, gets published at 8 in the morning.

- You can only see posts for today. All old content gets deleted.

- No comments or feedback is possible.

- Only symmetric relationships are possible: you can add someone, but they won't see your posts and you won't see their posts until they add you back.

- All "friend" discovery is out of band. There are no recommendations, no boosting/retweeting, nothing.

This is obviously not a mass medium, but its reductionism gives it some interesting properties that have made me consider what a good social network would be. One post a day is a fantastic idea.

(I don't know if they intend for it to be named in public, so I'll refrain.)

I had the same idea and built:

onepostwonder.com

It's been running for over a decade, although the community has always been small.

It's currently invite-only, similar to how LiveJournal used to be, but drop tommybgoode@gmail.com a line and mention this post if you'd like to give it a try and I'll send you an invite, which will include invites to give others you'd like to hang out with.

I think you're just describing BeReal, which went viral but kind of died out.

One of the things that launched snapchat to popularity when it was first out was when DJ Khaled got lost on his jet ski and was posting updates every few minutes to the stories feature (which was a new thing at the time). Real time updates are definitely a feature that people want, for better or worse.

> social media where everyone gets one post every day

That was Fotolog at the beginning of the century.

There are, the founder is on this site

I know people that have used it for years

I forgot the name but its an app that sends you a notification at a random time each day, and it gives you 1 minute of use. If you miss it, you miss it.

In that 1 minute you can take a photo where you are right then, and can use the rest of the minute to browse someone else’s series of photos. Just the 1 person you were connected to that day.

It just shows how people are living.

In real life. I know its changed someone’s trajectory. All of their pictures were in an office cubicle and it pushed them to pursue other things sooner. Retirement in their case, to pursue drum circles and new age things because this was always fulfilling for them, they just kept delaying it beyond the rationality to delay it.

After 3 years of doing this, they send you a book of your memories.

No timelines or “algorithm” aside from whatever selects the person you get to see.

I'm convinced something like this will happen one day, probably more than once. If Facebook is the "McDonald's" market segment (the widely popular, wildly unhealthy option), there will eventually be a segment of the market where there is unrelenting demand for a significantly healthier product. Like this: https://www.foodnetwork.com/restaurants/photos/healthy-fast-...

The "health food" of social media will be a product category where there will be market share to capture and whoever gets it right will be rewarded. Those users, like the health nuts of today, will know what there are looking for.

Past: Path, Basement.

So exactly what twitter/bluesky followed tabs are?

what would It do, that WhatsApp currently doesn't ?

Defeat the feed

First we create the problem with modern social media and then we solve it with old-school forums.

I love this idea. The eclipse is coming around again. Don’t miss it!

I recall this occurring with college registration websites ~25 years ago. In retrospect, I suspect it was so students registering online didn't have an advantage over those registering in person (at the time, home internet access was common but nowhere near 100%).

One of the largest camera stores in the US is https://www.bhphotovideo.com/. Since B&H was founded in NYC by Orthodox Jews, you can’t event place an order on their website on Saturdays.

Some Swedish government agency websites and services do this, for the reason already mentioned, to avoid having to monitor the service or maintain it during out of business hours.

But this social media actually reminded me of old phone line BBS. I believe life was better when we had to wait for our enjoyment, and even stand in line for it.

One of the most popular sites hosted on Neocities would be closed on Mondays, so you would have to come back to see the site. https://melonking.net

I literally can’t place Costco Mexico orders and perform other tasks on Sundays because payment gateways are down (?). It’s quite frustrating. If it fails every weekend, they should in fact just shut down.

This sucks for anyone in a different timezone.

What's wrong with having different hours for website and support? Even restaurants have different hours for drinks, food, and overall opening times.

For what it’s worth, HN is already a bit like this.

Back when I lived in the ‘states, I’d wake up in the morning and participate in all sorts of interesting discussions on a bunch of fresh posts.

Now, living in Europe, I wake up to a homepage full of “7 hours ago” top comments with 200 points on them. Any contribution we make from here will last maybe a minute or two before getting sorted down out of view.

I spend most of my time now reading what y’all had to say about stuff.

I kind of like the idea of a regional social media app which literally doesn’t work in other parts of the world. It makes the space a little more special than something trying to reach everyone IMO

It sounds more like a social network than social media, i.e the pre-timeline, pre-algorithm version of Facebook. Back when the content came from people you know rather than people you don't.

I really like the idea, it sounds like a very healthy way to engage. If you took a photo on holiday you wouldn't be able to share it until the evening, so you'd just put the phone away. It becomes a camera. At the moment I see people take a photo and then for the next hour they're distracted by reactions, comments, feeling obligated to respond to comments... they miss the whole experience. Sharing when your friends are actually online would also be more interactive.

Of course, if you're on holiday then your three hour home time window may be unusable. But then, worst case scenario, you bulk upload everything when you get home. It would be like the old days of returning from a trip and getting friends round to see a slide show - quite charming, really.

Why should it have “diverse and worldwide perspectives”? Must a Muslim site be open to all Christians? Must a Japanese site admit me even though I don’t know Japanese? Should a site for Ukrainians be forced to allow Russians?

I do think of this as an opportunity for you to create your own site that meets your standards, however.

If I’m discussing a local event with people I know, what would diverse and worldwide perspectives add?

I find any “deep” topics to be pretty shallow except on specialist boards that wouldn’t appeal to the layman but nonetheless do vet people before letting them on.

I like the idea of users being able to pick their 3-hour window and timezone, and maybe only can change your window setting once per day (or maybe only pick a new window that starts at least 24 hours in the future). But crucially, each such 3-hour window and time zone combination has entirely isolated and independent content, as if it is a different site.

So my community could be 7:02-10:02pm EST. And if I instead switch to say 6am-9am IST instead, I can check in with the folks who like to meet in the mornings in india, but I am temporarily gone from my own local community.

> It's an interesting idea, but if it's only open at a convenient time for a particular group, it's going to lack diverse and worldwide perspectives, and those are important for building a welcoming ecosystem.

This sounds like a nice sentiment, but I don't think this is strictly true. I would go as far as to say that it is largely untrue. Diverse and worldwide perspectives may damage building a welcoming ecosystem. Whatsapp for example is probably the most popular social media site across the world, and thats because different groups close off themselves into private chat groups.

Take a look at Nairaland, one of the most popular Nigerian social media sites. The content on that site would most certainly not be welcome on any of the silicon valley run sites.

Name a social media site that has diverse and worldwide perspectives that also feels welcoming.

Quite the contrary. Welcoming ecosystems are discriminatory because necessarily exclude those who generally aren’t interested, or act in bad faith.

Community is local.

The better way would be to choose a time slot when you sign up. Then you always socialise within that slot. Allowing you to use any time any day kills the concept.

genius!

[edit] I realised as soon as I pressed send that immediately there will be a service that let's you open 8 accounts and seamlessly operate them as a single one.

You were be able to chat and share pics only with nearby people

I like how this is considered weird. Like, yeah, let’s talk and share our pictures globally in an instant to people we don’t know.

What did you learn from running that site?

Did you ever launch it, or was it just a fun weekend project?

I know a bank in Sweden that does _not_ do this and apparently runs various batch jobs at something like 1-3 am. So, one night I made a transaction to it and it looked just fine in the app, then it was mysteriously gone in the morning! On the receiving side; my cash had still been withdrawn! I called the support and we eventually realized that no, you shouldn't do transfers at 2 am on a Saturday because it's likely to fail and then we have to wait for the weekend to be over for them to reappear. I was like... "Alright, thanks. But maybe you should close your app these hours..."

The software engineer within me shudders at the thought of running batch jobs in production while there are ongoing transactions, and where conflicts can and are fully expected to happen.

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.

The US social security administration site did (and still might) do this as well.

Likely to enable batch processing in the evening without dealing with sync issues

Federal EIN registration site does this as well