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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

#191

Post by delecti »

rustyf wrote: post #131
peterhunt wrote: post #54

No one here is answering your question so I will :) Database: I’d use whatever you know and helps you get to market, but abstract it away from the rest of your app so you can swap out later. Lots of good choices here; I’d pick mysql or postgres running on rds. I would also design for sharding by user on day 1 because that can be extremely painful to add later, however, care would have to be taken to ensure it doesn’t…

I've never actually seen anyone in 40 years actually swap out that database.

I did once in my last job, because we were told AWS was sunning down SimpleDB. We were able to swap to DynamoDB with relatively little fuss (though obviously not none, no migration is entirely painless) because we abstracted it so well. Turns out that several years later, SimpleDB is still up and running, but it was probably a good migration anyway.

Probably a bigger benefit though, is being able to use a different DB in production (probably big scale) vs on your personal machine while developing.

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

#193

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

GrinningFool wrote: post #168
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS is the public town square: when using browsers, navigating across domains, we are all fundamentally gathered in the DNS space. Me having "foo.com" is akin to setting up a stall in this public town square and selling my vegetables, and you are free to visit "foo.com" and buy into my ideology, or simply never visit it. And yes, precisely, "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", cannot, by definition, be digit…

That seems like saying your town is a public town square because everyone has an address that can be reached by post.

Not all analogies can be saved, nevertheless let's try:

the town = the TCP/IP suite of protocols (UDP, QUIC, etc. included)

the public town square = DNS

a booth selling vegetables in the public town square = a domain, "foo.com", publishing whatever their opinion is about reality and everything else

A great lie told again and again by "social media" domains is that they are "platforms", but a platform is meant to sustain something else beyond itself. "foo.com", "twitter.com" are merely individual booths, where all the value is owned by the person/company owning that domain, irregardless of how "easy" it is to "post" on "foo.com" and how difficult it is to setup a new booth/domain on DNS: DNS is that platform we have been hearing ad nauseam.

And even more, a domain, such as "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", is fundamentally someone's estate, owned by a master [1]: it's a glaringly obvious contradiction in terms to say that a domain could ever be a "public town square".

Entering and adding value to someone else's domain is akin to belonging to a feudal master, a technofeudalism if you will [2]. And some tehnofeuds are great, I personally enjoy "github.com", but believing that "github.com" is a "public town square" for code, not backing up your work in other places, it's at the very least irresponsible.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/domain#etymonline_v_13918

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMSNpq4K67o

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

#195

Post by mattgreenrocks »

pc86 wrote: post #96
dimva wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact. There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.

Correct. And I'm also not required to believe in the cultural relevance of Twitter at all.

There's no digital analogue to the IRL long stare of death that is elicited when someone is out of line. Downvotes, ratios, and whatever ridiculous thing people invent aren't effective enough because the offender has little concern for being ostracized from a group of people they don't even know. It's all just avatars on a screen yelling at each other. This is why people say scale is the problem. Smaller communities can more effectively enforce norms because they create a localized culture, there is less to moderate, and they can more effectively identify and punish bad actors.

These days I spend time on niche forums where people actively choose to be there and participate. There's no Internet Points to be gamed, no drama of the day, no personal brands to be pushing. It's absolutely refreshing. It moves slower, there's no sense of FOMO, it's not made to suck your attention span dry.

Twitter is rotting: it's why the front page has to tell you it is relevant, and why they started requiring logins to read beyond a thread. It'd be farther gone if journalists didn't prop it up as a way to do their job faster.

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

#196

Post by Karunamon »

baxtr wrote: post #169
Shadowed_ wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you waste time on something that's interestning to you, time is not being wasted.

Not if your proclaimed goal is to create a Twitter alternative.

It is probably not for you to decide if how someone spends their time is a waste. That is something only the person can decide.

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

#197

Post by nells »

pc86 wrote: post #96
dimva wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact. There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.

You hear that all the time here about Facebook. I don’t like Facebook so Facebook should not exist for anybody. It’s disgusting.

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

#198

Post by rokhayakebe »

pc86 wrote: post #96
dimva wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact. There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.

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.

Where is the elevated sense of self importance? Where did OP say it shouldn't exist. You read this with filters.

OP simply stated that we need to build a product which is more aligned with how humans are and NOT how we wish humans were. A rebuttal would be to show that current products solve the problem we have and we do not need to change anything.

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

#199

Post by delecti »

mdp2021 wrote: post #144

Whatever platform does not allow a search like "What did user U publish on day D" has a specific label: it is substantially the Soviet Pravda. Imre Lakatos defined totalitarianism in terms of "how distant in the past can I retrieve documents" - the shorter the span of accessible data, the worse. In historical totalitarianism regimes such obstacle was instated to hide possible ideological changes in the regime, to giv…

I think an audit trail of a government is very different from being able to pick through the personal posts of an individual person. I think it'd actually be a fantastic feature to have history gently fade away. If I could disable other people viewing my tweets older than 1 year, I'd enable it in a heartbeat, and I'd think nearly everyone else should too.
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