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Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

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Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#101

Post by azangru »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #24

I think you're jumping into the technical bits right away without thinking through requirements/features. Maybe we (the royal 'we' as in all of humanity) shouldn't have a public town square? When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard you are also including all marginalized voices. The MarginalizedVoice super object has EqualRightsForSquirrels as well as HatefulRacistUncle child objects. There are v…

> the royal 'we' as in all of humanity

Sorry for being a prick; but the royal 'we' is the exact opposite of the 'we' in all of humanity. Royal 'we' is when the speaker refers to him-or-herself with the first-person plural pronoun, as was common among sovereigns ("we the Emperor of the French"). These days most commonly seen in academic articles, where single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#102

Post by rich_sasha »

srcmap wrote: post #91

What about this: Use SQLite. Make it one SQLite file per user. All the read/write are parallelized per user. Backup db file would be smaller, easier. Each service node can handle N users, less for heavy follow users. Should be easier to scale horizontally the with user count by adding system nodes and Storage, networks, web handling process.

Where do you put cross-user events? Like retweets or likes?

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#103

Post by matthewdgreen »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #24

I think you're jumping into the technical bits right away without thinking through requirements/features. Maybe we (the royal 'we' as in all of humanity) shouldn't have a public town square? When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard you are also including all marginalized voices. The MarginalizedVoice super object has EqualRightsForSquirrels as well as HatefulRacistUncle child objects. There are v…

One of the great/terrible things that's happened to communication over my lifetime is watching shared experience fragment. When I was a child most people used to read the same newspapers, watch similar TV. (It was boring!) Nowadays we're fragmented into different pieces of the Internet, which sucks even more.

Twitter is part of that fragmentation, but it also accomplished something decent that competitors like Reddit don't: while there are individual communities, the follow interface made them somewhat porous. People can slide into conversations or get boosted by just about anyone. Making this work without local "subreddit-style moderators" was really technically remarkable, just from a spam perspective. Making moderation work to the point where a company could actually run advertising was extremely impressive.

I don't know what you're calling for exactly, but it sounds a whole lot more fragmented than what Twitter accomplished. I don't know that this will be a better outcome.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#104

Post by andsoitis »

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Twitter isn’t the proverbial “town square” but rather the “gladiator arena”. Several reasons.

I suggest thinking deeply about what you want to accomplish (use cases) and then work backwards to what needs to be build (user flows etc.)

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#105

Post by pc86 »

nebqr wrote: post #97

I think that the (dead, gay) Something Awful forums model is a decent solution to content moderation and monetization. An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back. Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars. Change your avatar? 5 dollars. Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars. Ad free? 10 dollars. Access to archives (posts over a cer…

I think there's a really good point in here that you sort of touch on that is lost on a lot of new products.

I'd pay $20 one-time for ad-free Twitter even though I can just have a (free) browser extension do it. I'd pay $20 one-time to remove all suggested posts/users/etc, even though the same extension does that too. Archival access would be really interesting on something like Twitter where just about everything gets archived externally or screenshotted anyway.

But the minute any of these become recurring costs, even on the order of $1/mo, I'm out.

I feel like the search for recurring revenue has hampered a lot of company's ability to make real revenue.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#106

Post by duxup »

nebqr wrote: post #97

I think that the (dead, gay) Something Awful forums model is a decent solution to content moderation and monetization. An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back. Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars. Change your avatar? 5 dollars. Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars. Ad free? 10 dollars. Access to archives (posts over a cer…

IIRC App.net was a pay version of twitter.

I loved the idea, it got a lot of attention, but it didn't pick up enough users to get going.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#107

Post by geysersam »

srcmap wrote: post #91

What about this: Use SQLite. Make it one SQLite file per user. All the read/write are parallelized per user. Backup db file would be smaller, easier. Each service node can handle N users, less for heavy follow users. Should be easier to scale horizontally the with user count by adding system nodes and Storage, networks, web handling process.

Interesting idea. However, how do you query things like "list the followers of this user"?

Edit: search also becomes difficult

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#109

Post by mavidser »

dimva wrote: post #80
istinetz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a short story Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in a novel of his: >“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.” “This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors.…

We gotta build things for the humans we have, not the humans we wish to have. Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.

I can't agree that "global public square don't work for humans" - but even if that were the case, it's still too late to just reverse course. As long it's possible, viable and largely desired, the market will spit out a solution to this need.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#110

Post by duxup »

pc86 wrote: post #105
nebqr wrote: post #97

I think that the (dead, gay) Something Awful forums model is a decent solution to content moderation and monetization. An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back. Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars. Change your avatar? 5 dollars. Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars. Ad free? 10 dollars. Access to archives (posts over a cer…

I think there's a really good point in here that you sort of touch on that is lost on a lot of new products. I'd pay $20 one-time for ad-free Twitter even though I can just have a (free) browser extension do it. I'd pay $20 one-time to remove all suggested posts/users/etc, even though the same extension does that too. Archival access would be really interesting on something like Twitter where just about everything ge…

>I feel like the search for recurring revenue has hampered a lot of company's ability to make real revenue.

There's a weird mess of consumers and incentives on the internet.

Users generally don't want to pay, so now they're the product. Just to get users products offer unsustainable free services and then die when they reach the breaking point or fail to get folk to pay. Users get upset when the products ask them to pay or revoke their free tier or just vanish ...

Wash rinse repeat.

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