Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Text-Only Social Network

subreply.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 240 posts

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#131

Post by bigiain »

microcolonel wrote: post #112
inopinatus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An honest UI might use the word “echo” rather than “retweet”.

Retweet used to actually retweet things (i.e. pretend "RT" and the OP's handle), so it's like the floppy disk icon. Parler uses a megaphone.

It's amusing to me the retweets (and hashtags) were emergent behaviour of early Twitter users, not any sort of well thought out plan for how the platform was intended to work.

And then the platform owners mostly misunderstood the problem and emergent solution, and natively implemented something similar but optimised for advertising sales metrics ("engagement!") instead of what the users were actually doing.

And then as the user base changed from it's early-userbase to being heavily biased to marketers (sorry, "influencers" and/or advertisers), and social media expert gurus started talking about "message amplification" - and so we end up with new contenders in the field thinking that the lack of ability to shout "brand messages" through a megaphone was the problem those early users "invented" retweeting to solve...

(And now I'm imagining a world where a St*rbucks-like cafe chain hands megaphones to everybody as they enter the store, with the implicit understanding that you shout out every interesting bit of conversation you overhear, which inevitably quickly develops into people only shouting out other people's megaphone shouts because that's all you can hear, until eventually if crescendos into a Hendrix-esque never ending earsplitting feedback wail - probably Star Spangled Banner for maximum crudeness... Has Black Mirror done this yet?)

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#132

Post by postalrat »

jcun4128 wrote: post #113
andreygrehov wrote: post #77

This is the only JavaScript file they use [0]. It's a pure joy. [0] https://subreply.com/static/script.js?v=6

Why do (almost) all the functions have event.preventDefault() ?

They are probably submit handlers on forms and they don't want the default form submit to happen.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#133

Post by swiley »

patcon wrote: post #130

As i understand, there's some evidence that visual social networks are preferred by females, e.g. pinterest. I recall a hypothesis that it has to do with women (or rather, neurotypes bell-curving around female gender identification) tending to use social media to discuss interpersonal and emotion-based content rather than facts and knowledge-sharing. There is more value placed on relationships with others when using…

I wouldn’t think of reddit as text based. Most of the self posts in subreddits I’m subscribed to link to i.reddit.com or imgur.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#134

Post by bigiain »

dorkwood wrote: post #129
ehsankia wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The character limit is the last of Twitters issue, in my opinion. I think the #1 issue is the retweet model, it leads to people just brainlessly sharing low effort content with a single click. It's similar to how fake news and misleading content thrive on Facebook. But notice how Instagram where it's impossible to easily re-share content (well, you can now in stories) is far less toxic.

The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unknown artist or developer can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit.

"The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unwanted company or brand can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit."

Said nobody ever.

(I also somewhat agree with you, I have a bunch of real world friends now, who I first came to know via Twitter retweets - back in Twitter circa 2011 before the "brands" arrived. I'd totally given up by about 2018 and deleted my account.)

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#135

Post by dgb23 »

jcun4128 wrote: post #113
andreygrehov wrote: post #77

This is the only JavaScript file they use [0]. It's a pure joy. [0] https://subreply.com/static/script.js?v=6

Why do (almost) all the functions have event.preventDefault() ?

Not on desktop right now to inspect.

But this is typically the most compatible way to prevent standard anchor and button (or others) functionality.

If you want the specific answer you could inspect where these handlers are attached to and then check the MDN documentation for default behavior.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#137

Post by 65536 »

bigiain wrote: post #116
65536 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It’s not proprietary. Yeah. I was being snarky without enough context to make myself clear there... Sorry. > Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable, What mechanisms do you see in place to stop this being an inevitable result for Minichan as well? It's a social problem not a technical one... > With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site…

These are good points and I think you are right. I just wish it was possible for such a dream place like I wish for to exist.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#138

Post by newman8r »

zomglings wrote: post #103
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 have…

Much appreciated -

The minimum commitment of posting once every 25 days is mostly an incentive to keep people active. In my experience, if these groups go a certain amount of time without activity, they're effectively dead anyway.

Regarding the requirement to post an introduction - it's my experience that without this requirement, there's often barely enough activity in the beginning to even get things started in a given group. While I do lose about 30% of people who sign up and decide not to post an intro, the introduction posts are usually the nucleus for all discussion that follows.

As far as half-ass writing an intro - that's completely fine, and a lot of people do that too. I should make it more clear that that's 100% fine - if you want to write "hello, just curious about what's going on here" that works.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#139

Post by cortesoft »

bigiain wrote: post #134
dorkwood wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unknown artist or developer can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit.

"The retweet is my favourite part of twitter! It means a relatively unwanted company or brand can have their work massively amplified and shared around despite having only a small number of followers. I don't know of any other service that offers that sort of benefit." Said nobody ever. (I also somewhat agree with you, I have a bunch of real world friends now, who I first came to know via Twitter retweets - back in T…

Did you just say "said nobody ever" to someone who literally just said that? There is clearly at least one person who feels that way.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#140

Post by bigiain »

leephillips wrote: post #128
bigiain wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have :-) It is, as you and everybody you know seems to have worked out, not really worth the effort, unless you are amused in just the right way by such things. (I did start the French novel influenced by it, but my decades-rusty high school French comprehension was not up to the task...)

Is that by Queneau? (Probably spelled that wrong.)

I'd love to make a gag about how it couldn't possibly be - because Queneau has the letter e in it twice...

But the one I was referring to is La Disparition by Georges Perec - with the letter e four times... :shrug:

Post reply on HN