First, we redesign the humans.
Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
21–30 of 351 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#22Build a protocol specification instead, and we can have multiple competing implementations (like Email). This is what Jack Dorsey was suggesting.
Doesn't this already exist in the form of ActivityPub? Whether you're using Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely, etc., you can interact with instances that use that protocol.
There's no way Jack doesn't know this already exists.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#23If this was aiming for the scale of twitter replacement, the realistic answer is: read as much as possible from what was published about the current twitter architecture and try to replicate that while avoiding things they used in the past. If you're thinking in terms of a specific database rather than queues that write into partitions distributed around the world, you've probably already lost. Maybe think really har…
I'd bet between, whatsapp, messenger, instagram chat, meta probably deals with the most volume of short messages, likely more than slack / discord / telegram,but hard to know
Those are not the same category. In communicators you can store the user / channel from a given time period in a specific partition and that's about it. It's likely never going to be queried after delivery since everyone has a local copy. If it does, you just download a slice based on a client-side generated hash. And the metadata basically doesn't change either.
Compare to Twitter where new people continuously query old messages with quickly changing replies, likes, retweet, mutes, blocks, etc to account for. But you don't want to materialise everyones timeline on every change either. However you likely do want to keep highly replicated snapshots of popular tags and popstars instead of processing actual events. And then you need some system that can query both and merge them into a usable personalised view.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#24I 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 very valid points, that people don't like to hear, about how the concept of someone/group choosing what MarginalizedVoice gets heard and what doesn't isn't fair. If the basis of a platform is "public town square" you're going to have to deal with all MarginalizedVoices.
Content moderation (incl comments) doesn't scale so don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisements. If the thought of not having an ad-driven platform leads you to "users won't pay for it" then maybe think of a platform users would pay for or some other way to have it be sustainable.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#25> What database technology or approach would you go for?
I feel like people consistently underestimate the difficulty of creating a data backend for a social network.
It has to be readable and writable in real time, yet still performant enough for picky consumers. It needs to be able to handle text search. It needs to handle many-to-many relationships at scale (something that mainstream (NO)SQL databases struggle with). It needs a robust authentication layer, and probably a load of other things on top of this.
Building something like Twitter is still, in 2022, a really hard technical challenge.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#26I'm increasingly believing a "public town square" is of little value across major economic class lines, as any "conversation" meant to represent reality will simply at some point devolve into rhetorical struggle between the haves and have-nots. The haves will then respond with various reality-distortion campaigns, winning over enough of the have-nots to keep the economy spinning for them, and at that point you may as well just go watch Saturday morning cartoons which will make more sense than any "public town square."
To solve this problem: You should be periodically required to submit evidence of your income to this alternative Twitter, and only be allowed to post and see posts of those in your economic class. If your income changes then the class you are visible with/to also changes.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#27Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb. If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around. Which existing social networks (not media on…
> Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb.
what was it called? now I'm curious.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd bet between, whatsapp, messenger, instagram chat, meta probably deals with the most volume of short messages, likely more than slack / discord / telegram,but hard to know
Those are not the same category. In communicators you can store the user / channel from a given time period in a specific partition and that's about it. It's likely never going to be queried after delivery since everyone has a local copy. If it does, you just download a slice based on a client-side generated hash. And the metadata basically doesn't change either. Compare to Twitter where new people continuously query…
Doesn’t Google search basically all of Twitter Anyway? Doesn’t that mean whatever Google has could easily itself be Twitter?
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#29I put my thoughts about next-gen social into a concept that I like to call "Eigensocial" and expressed that through the Finclout project.
1. Micro-blogging doesn't add much in 2022. Velocity of content is too high and comment vs content is real. What would it have what Discord or Telegram can't provide? The content distribution to the world? Is that really a feature in 2022?
2. Followers are a terrible approximation of shared interest.
3. We use social media to be entertained and not to work. Ideally to connect with people that can help us move ahead. Stack overflow : Learn from smarter programmers. Finclout: Learn from smarter investors.
4. Do we really need a public global town square? Even if yes, there will always be boundaries based on spoken languages. (Chinese, English, Spanish, French, etc). How much does it help us that an Indian doctor can talk American politics to a South African? https://twitter.com/majornirmal/status/1587129879341867008
5. How is moderation baked into the product? People will exploit all your weaknesses to get ahead. For Finclout we implemented that as incentivized tasks for all users. How much do you allow for "edge" content. How does your system define "edge"?
6. Bots create engagement. Engagement creates DAUs. What's your strategy to use bots in your growth path? For finclout we don't. However, we have content partnerships in place so the app never feels empty.
7. What added value does decentralization bring? We partnered up with DeSo and ran a node for a while. Yet at this time, I think the only valuable innovation is decentralized identity management. Probably SBT will be the better solution here.
8. In 2023 we should go to a social sites because it provides us with the userbase to connect us with interesting people. I love Lunchclub for that exact reason. IMHO, this is how a social platform should be.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#30I have some plans (but no time) for an experiment on how the timeline works. I want to focus on curation and have the poster rate items he curates. You'd read from most to least important (with a lot of balancing, but as transparent as possible).
Happy to share details with anyone interested.