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Text-Only Social Network

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101–110 of 240 posts

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#101

Post by jchook »

tomxor wrote: post #35
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 agree with the overall sentiment of your comment but.. > It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about the same complexity. At minimum, unicode does come with a lot of complexity in implementation, and a lot of potential vulnerabilities due to that complexity. Not saying that excuses…

> unicode does come with a lot of complexity in implementation

As far as I know, ASCII is a proper subset of UTF-8. That makes implementation quite natural in most cases (e.g. string replacement).

EDIT:

Looks like Lucian built this site in PHP, which easily handles UTF-8, as well as most DBs.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#102

Post by biztos »

rossdavidh wrote: post #37
LeoPanthera wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is not just a text-only social network, it is also an English-only social network.

Really, as long as other people make text-only social networks for other languages, maybe that's a good thing. I'm not sure that having all languages on one social network really buys the user anything (esp. since they can switch to other social networks for other conversations). It buys the company running the social network something, if they're trying to have literally billions of users. But I'm not sure that's a…

So if I want to post something in a combination of English and Hungarian and German, for my fairly large set of friends who speak all three, which network should I use?

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#103

Post by zomglings »

newman8r wrote: post #22

I've been trying to make something along those lines at podaero.com, and I'm actually trying to get HN users to join some of the small groups... see here if interested https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod

I just signed up for your hackernews pod. Here is some feedback, if you want it:

1. Why is there a minimum commitment to post? It makes it more difficult to overcome the inertia required to sign up in the first place.

2. Why do I need to write an intro before I can see any content? Without seeing any content, I don't know if it's worth spending any time writing up an intro. This really rubbed me the wrong way. I haven't written an intro yet, although I will probably half-ass one just to get a look at what kind of discussions are taking place.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#104

Post by Sebb767 »

bigiain wrote: post #84
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 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”? Those are all totally argument-for-the-sake-of-argument nit-picks, in my opinion. To be honest, I rarely enough need to refer to UK pounds, Euro, or Yen - that I'd much more likely just type it out like that instead of try to remember/experiment what the magic key combination to p…

> To be honest, I rarely enough need to refer to UK pounds, Euro, or Yen - that I'd much more likely just type it out like that instead of try to remember/experiment what the magic key combination to produce them properly is.

The description says 'english only', not 'US only'. There are quite a few english speaking people all over the world. Not to mention that Britain, which I'd consider pretty english, definitely needs the pound sign quite often. And European keyboards produce the €-sign with ease, I even have it explicitly marked.

I can see your point about intensional constraints and social experiments, but I fully disagree with your point that a lack of UTF-8 is a 'nit-pick' or that is is unneeded for english conversation. You can work around it, sure, but that does not make it great.

> That argument seems to me to inevitable end with some combination of 4chan-ish image boards (because "people want to communicate in memes") or Snapchat-ish 100% video content (because "people want to communicate in video"). If you want those things - go use those things.

Including images or videos is a feature with quite some overhead, while romanizing UTF-8 input is putting in extra work just to disallow it. So this goes in quite a different direction.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#105

Post by chrismartin »

We can't embed media but we can still link to it? I welcome efforts to encourage higher-quality discussion on social media, but I don't see how this gets us there.

https://subreply.com/about

"Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks."

What does "untrustworthy" mean in this context, and how is Subreply easier to trust by comparison? The entire terms are "be nice or else". What exactly does "nice" mean and what are the consequences of violating this vague standard? It doesn't say. I don't understand how that's trustworthy.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#109

Post by cinquemb »

grishka wrote: post #62
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.…

Does the same thing with Russian as well. (I wonder how it would tell the difference between Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian though?)

>>> import langdetect

>>> probabilities = {x.lang: x.prob for x in langdetect.detect_langs(text)

Works for me, for differentiating Russian and Ukrainian text.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#110

Post by [deleted] »

chrismartin wrote: post #105

We can't embed media but we can still link to it? I welcome efforts to encourage higher-quality discussion on social media, but I don't see how this gets us there. https://subreply.com/about "Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks." What does "untrustworthy" mean in this cont…

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