At first I thought this would be a literal text-only social network, à la txti.
Text-Only Social Network
51–60 of 240 posts
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#52I prefer image boards and posting anonymously.
For example, see this mobile friendly image board:
I’d like to see more of the HN crowd come there. It might raise the quality of the content on Minichan.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#53"About -> Limitations: ASCII only because it works everywhere" This should be in the features. It is the strongest selling point of the site as I see it.
So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”? Yikes. These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband. No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reas…
totally agree with you. i went back and saw that the author wanted a english-only forum. so yes, the service is english only and ascii works well in that case.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#54Bringing back social isn't about getting rid of images and focusing on ASCII text, it's about getting rid of URLs and article snippets, and refocusing solely on user created content. Remember when streams were only filled with updates from old friends and family with things like birthday parties, vacations, graduations, concerts, restaurant meals, etc., and nothing else? (Sort of like Instagram still is, but with text allowed, two-way authorization only and without the "influencers".)
Now you log in (FB, Twitter, etc.) only to find out which of your casual acquaintances are the most gullible, racist, sexist, homophobic, sociopathic or worse by the news items they're spewing into their increasingly extreme echo chamber. Sure, the same thing could be conveyed by a selfie wearing a MAGA hat, but it would happen much, much less often.
All these services would have to do to get back to their social roots is provide a default filter for news items. But they refuse, and in fact are increasingly manipulating your feed instead to increase "engagement" (read: anger and hate).
I'm amazed that a social-only network hasn't taken off yet that provides this basic functionality. It feels like the time is right for something like this.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”? Yikes. These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband. No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reas…
totally agree with you. i went back and saw that the author wanted a english-only forum. so yes, the service is english only and ascii works well in that case.
English is one of the easier languages to shoehorn into ASCII; this is what ASCII was designed for, after all.
It's by no means a perfect fit; some of us need to resume work on our résumé, from time to time.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#56I prefer image boards and posting anonymously. For example, see this mobile friendly image board: http://minichan.org/ I’d like to see more of the HN crowd come there. It might raise the quality of the content on Minichan.
> It might raise the quality of the content on Minichan.
Coming from an imageboard myself, I think about this often. The "serious" users keep comparing themselves to Reddit when they should strive to be more like HN, instead. Now HN is home -- literally; it's my homepage.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#57As seen on twitch, letting people put emojis in their name on a black and white site sets up a system where scanning eyes just see those eye-candies and skip over the rest. This is useful on twitch as it highlights the streamer's paying subscribers but here it's just whoever is more obnoxious.
One solution to this issue is to use an emoji font that is designed to be color-free, like one of the variants of OpenEmoji.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”? Yikes. These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband. No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reas…
Those are all in the 8 bit "extended" ASCII table, aren't they?
Surely just a matter of selecting a code page no?
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#59Bringing back social isn't about getting rid of images and focusing on ASCII text, it's about getting rid of URLs and article snippets, and refocusing solely on user created content. Remember when streams were only filled with updates from old friends and family with things like birthday parties, vacations, graduations, concerts, restaurant meals, etc., and nothing else? (Sort of like Instagram still is, but with tex…
I am trying to build exactly this, positioning as a personal journal that you can share. But the end game is exactly what you described.
I'd love to have your feedback if you care to take a look: https://www.quidsentio.com
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#60 I wanted to see how it would handle non-ascii text so I typed 안녕하세요 and it romanized it to annyeonghaseyo. (This is "hello" in Korean). I did not expect that.
I really like the idea of a text-only social network, so I hope this takes off. I think the author should consider supporting other languages though. Seeing romanized text isn't very helpful to people that actually want to read or write in other character sets. It's a cute feature though.