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Text-Only Social Network

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Re: Text-Only Social Network

#71

Post by ilovetux »

soneca wrote: post #69
ilovetux wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the gp, but i like the look and feel of the site. I also love the idea. I've been using group messages (mms) for this purpose and its been working great. It has the advantage that nobody needs to go to a website or download an extra app, but it has the drawback that sometimes people forget that I started a group message and will use that thread to start a new conversation with someone and people get messages…

Thanks! About the sharing, I am sorry, but I didn't want to claim that it is impossible to share. I will check the phrasing, but the idea is that it doesn't have a sharing feature (like retweeting or the share button on phones). You can't click on a button to forward the content. You still can copy/paste and screenshot normally. It is not built-in, so not encouraged by design.

> there is no way to share content outside of the list of who posted it.

I can see how I misunderstood. Still it seems like it might be a good compromise and would get me around the issue I described with mms of unintentional sharing. I'm going to see if I can get some of my family and friends to sign up with me.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#72

Post by 0-_-0 »

jbaudanza wrote: post #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.…

Python strings have a method called casefold() that normalises text in a similar way (although it doesn't seem to work on Korean).

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#73

Post by bigiain »

65536 wrote: post #52

I 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.

So you'd prefer a proprietory centralised re-invetion of usenet (with binaries) rather than this proprietory centralised re-invention of IRC?

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#74

Post by joe_the_user »

When you say "social network", do you mean Twitter Clone?

It seems like developers in particular have come to regard Twitter as archetypal social networks despite it's many problems and the way the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph. IE, N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality, just for example and Twitter isn't something most people enjoy being on but I think it's what people get on to seem/feel important.

I think by earlier terminology Facebook/Myspace/Friendster/linkedin are social networks and Twitter/Mastodon/etc are "microblogging services".

I think the clone-Twitter impulse is kind of terrible. Not even to say Facebook is inherently better but because I don't think ways of defining one's own social network have been exhausted by all the networks out there (Discord is another format with increasing presences which shows that new ways of organizing connections are still possible).

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#75

Post by Mandatum »

65536 wrote: post #52

I 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.

Anything with the word -chan never had good moderation. HN is good because of the moderation and the work dang does. He's pulled me up multiple times and it reminds me to keep discussion in-line with the vision of the website.

Look at the top post of that board. It's a different crowd - sure there might be some cross contamination but it's definitely not a site you'd expect to see the same content and level of discourse on.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#76

Post by bigiain »

leephillips wrote: post #44
crazygringo wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

Stay tuned for my uppercase-only social network. Also, we don’t allow the letter Z nor semicolons, as they are rarely used.

Wanna try making that the letter E?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#78

Post by crazygringo »

spiffytech wrote: post #36
crazygringo wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

I don't think it was a technical decision. It sounds like a stylistic choice, I suspect in the sentiment of "everyone on the platform should be able to understand each other, no one should be locked off from interesting conversations due to a language barrier", and from there they selected the lowest common denominator language. To play devil's advocate, I don't think your exampled limitations are meaningful handicap…

MacBooks sold in the UK have a £ sign on them, where a # is found on a US keyboard.

So in the country the English language originated in, you're not allowed to use a character on the default keyboard. (And that's just one -- the € is on there too, among others.)

We're not talking obscure key combos, we're talking characters in use everywhere you go every day. Would you really appreciate not being able to use the $ character on a forum? Every time you type a comment about a price, a key on your keyboard doesn't work, or the comment is rejected for an invalid character, or the character is silently deleted? Forget about it.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#80

Post by 65536 »

bigiain wrote: post #73
65536 wrote: post #52

I 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.

So you'd prefer a proprietory centralised re-invetion of usenet (with binaries) rather than this proprietory centralised re-invention of IRC?

It’s not proprietary.

https://github.com/Minichan/Minichan

It’s open source and MIT licensed.

Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable, and besides, having everyone use the same interface and see images alongside is different from having people use a multitude of different clients that present binary attachments in various different ways.

With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site. The crowd would be small enough that I don’t think there would be much point in decentralizing it. Besides, with centralization then mods still have a fighting chance of keeping the quality of the posts up to par, if they felt so inclined.

The value of anonymous discussion is that every thread is a fresh start. You can express yourself about what’s on your mind without be constrained by your own desire to make everything you say fit into some bigger picture of an identity of self. If that makes sense. But also, it is different from making throwaway accounts on sites where all other people are using identities. Admittedly on Minichan there are many people that use names and tripcodes. But the ability for threads to exist where everyone is on an equal footing is valuable.

I’m thinking not so much in terms of discussion itself actually but in terms of creative potential. At their peak, chan style imageboards can be amazingly creative.

Imagine an imageboard with people from HN, where people were producing graphics and music like in the Demoscene, but together and for no purpose other than creativity itself. No names or anything. Just pure unfiltered creativity.

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