Hello everyone!
An ad-free social network? Without an invitation to the NSA? 😉 Without following any profit-driven interests? Is that really possible?!
A lot of us are currently concerned about the future of social networks, especially after our trust has been betrayed after the Facebook data scandal (which by the way is just the tip of the iceberg, as you all know). And understandably many people have brought up important questions about Human Connection and how it is different from the big commercial networks that we all know and use. However, as a small team we cannot always respond to all your concerns individually or go into details that some expect and we’d wish to be able to.
In order to counteract this fact in the labor-intensive creation phase, we organize regular open meetings that EVERYONE is welcome to attend. In those meetings you can speak with members of our team, ask us questions, learn about the state of the programming from our developers, and generally share concerns, ideas or feedback about the alpha!
I ask you all to help so that the available time in those open meetings can be used as best as possible. Those meetings also help us use your donations in the most responsible and effective way. Instead of posting questions in the comments on Facebook etc or post questions in the alpha, I encourage you to use the direct way of communication in our open meetings, especially if it’s a complex topic where you want us to answer as precisely as possible. Clarifying complicated issues in e-mails or comment columns takes time. Time that we already lose with general service requests. This alone requires that we hire and pay an additional employee. To take care of community management on social media would require an additional person – but we’d rather spend that money on the development of Human Connection.
Human Connection is on a good way to finance its basic operation, and more and more notable supporters are recommending Human Connection; nevertheless, we still lack 50% of the required amount and time is running out when it comes to fully securing our financial foundation. At the moment our hands are tied and there is no possibility to work magic. So I can only ask you to be patient when it comes to the fact that not everything is ready yet on the alpha and not everything is running perfectly yet. The good news is that we are creating a social, knowledge and action network that combines all three components in one interface. This includes useful functions
such as filters, topics, sorting, etc., clearly arranged like a news magazine and easily to navigate and filter/sort by you, the user. We don’t have any profit-driven algorithms on our platforms that are designed to distract you and keep you on the platform as long as possible just for the sake of gathering information about your user behavior. Our vision, on the other hand, is entirely different – it’s one based on the credo: by the people – for the people.
Human Connection is a non-profit project that should be measured against the real circumstances. You can’t compare our venture to multi-billion dollar for-profit company, like Facebook for example, that spends 5 billion dollars per year (and more) on research and development alone. In addition, Human Connection will be constantly affected by new legal changes in the future – GDPR was just the beginning. Everything must be checked, considered and fulfilled. The liability risks are immense. What will it cost to operate the network in a legally compliant manner? And what else do we have to anticipate? There’s a lot to speculate about. So, let’s stay in the moment and do what we can right now – that’s best for YOUR network.
Every Human Connection team member is investing a lot of time in order to be able to participate in the development of this ambitious project. Sometimes it takes weeks or months of training someone, and a lot of work has to be done late into the night – just as you would envision from a startup. Mind you, we are only a few people who are handling all of the different tasks that are in front of us. So for us the launch of the alpha (and hopefully, the beta soon) is no less exciting than a launch of a rocket is for Elon Musk. I can only appeal to your patience when it comes to establishing such a big project such as Human Connection. I encourage you to stay positive and continue to help us spread the word so that, together, we can get Human Connection from the alpha to the public beta. Your contribution matters and it makes a difference. We haven’t arrived at our destination yet, but with your help we can get there faster.
THANK YOU!
Kind regards,
Dennis Hack
