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Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

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Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#121

Post by elcomet »

onion2k wrote: post #67
mradek wrote: post #11

I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts. Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example. I'm just some random guy who works at a so…

I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts. Elon has proposed selling blue check marks for $240/year. That's a lot of money for a lowly academic and nothing to a rich kid who wants to shout about their chosen topic. If that happens yo…

> They've never been a mark of subject matter authority.

That's false, the owner has to be notable enough to get a blue check mark. Authenticity is just one of the requirements

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#122

Post by theragra »

alphabettsy wrote: post #54
Tozen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe soft porn is a bit of a reach or possibly not the best way to describe it, but it does seem people come for the visuals, not the text. Instagram comes off as much more sexualized (even if indirectly) and female oriented.

Again, this is all about what you interact with. I don’t see that.

Agree. I see posts from my.friends, NASA, ESA, hikers. The only soft porn account is porn actress i specifically subscribed to

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#123

Post by blitzar »

verisimi wrote: post #112
afinlayson wrote: post #62

It'd be nice if there was a platform that was specifically designed for People, not bots / propagandist. Corporations should need to pay to be identified as such, and we should know when a person vs a corporation says something. Does this exist... not that I've seen. Vanity metrics like number of users have become real metrics for valuation... until that's broken we can't have these discussions. But my biggest proble…

> It'd be nice if there was a platform that was specifically designed for People, not bots / propagandist. I don't know how you can say this, when they were/are one of the main drivers? Did anyone ban Hillary Clinton from speaking? No. But, nevermind characters such as Alex Jones etc, they banned the sitting president from speaking on their platform! Whatever your political position, I find it amazing that banning op…

> parroting the apparent consensus opinions

> People should try to become a bit more resilient of diverse opinions

Why is it hard to accept the "diverse opinion" that children were shot and killed at a school shooting, and that their parents were not actors trying to steal your guns from you? Does it trigger you that you didnt need to form a crew and go round and set them straight?

Here is a diverse opinion for you - not everything that happens in the world is done by crisis actors trying to force you to have interracial gay sex while taking your gun from you and giving it to an illegal immigrant.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#124

Post by impossiblefork »

samwillis wrote: post #99

Picks any two of these three, I don't believe it's possible to do all three: 1. Decentralised 2. No Spam/manipulation 3. No censorship (The boundary between what is classed as manipulation, and what shouldn't be censored will never be solved)

I think it's the opposite, and that all these can easily be achieved together.

Instead I believe that the difficulties with running social media companies come from not wanting these: there's a desire to control narratives, to push advertisements and to have central control. If these are the requirements the result is a behemoth of a company, which must do a great deal.

Meanwhile, if you have something noncommercial, where you just want some kind of forum where people can communicate with you and others, you can let them filter as they like, turning the knob down on any kind of spam-- because the user is running their machine and getting the benefit of the communication they desire, there is no need for any centralized control of the information flow-- the user decides what he sees, nor any need for advertisements, and because of the absence of advertisements there is no need for censorship or control in that regard. Furthermore, because messages are public the difficulties with dealing with things like e-mail spam disappear-- you will simply see what people think about a certain message, and you will not decide to see it if people in the tree of people you like like it.

I think internet technology is ready for this kind of thing. It's a bit of work though. To make a distributed WebRTC-Reddit where even people on phones can contribute to the communications network is a bit of work, but, I think, no longer infeasible.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#126

Post by holler »

tayo42 wrote: post #14

If Instagram had better text post support, I think everyone would just go there. They basically are already. Bands and companies promote them selves there already more frequently. Stories let people already share their stupid political hot tales. Honestly not sure what Twitter has over Instagram. Instagram starting from scratch for small text posts would allow them to fix a lot of mistakes Twitter made Maybe reddit,…

I wonder if Instagram adding text would push some people away who want it for the original use of photos? It already feels extremely bloated and unusable with latest shopping stuff (to me).

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#127

Post by IAmGraydon »

verisimi wrote: post #112
afinlayson wrote: post #62

It'd be nice if there was a platform that was specifically designed for People, not bots / propagandist. Corporations should need to pay to be identified as such, and we should know when a person vs a corporation says something. Does this exist... not that I've seen. Vanity metrics like number of users have become real metrics for valuation... until that's broken we can't have these discussions. But my biggest proble…

> It'd be nice if there was a platform that was specifically designed for People, not bots / propagandist. I don't know how you can say this, when they were/are one of the main drivers? Did anyone ban Hillary Clinton from speaking? No. But, nevermind characters such as Alex Jones etc, they banned the sitting president from speaking on their platform! Whatever your political position, I find it amazing that banning op…

Trump and friends were attempting to weaponize social media, and they were successful. They were causing harm in the real world. That’s why they were banned.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#128

Post by Ambolia »

klabb3 wrote: post #118
blacklight wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActivityPub has been around for much longer. I consider Nostr and Bluesky rip offs of what ActivityPub has been trying to build for more than a decade.

From AT protocol (bluesky) FAQ: > Why not use ActivityPub? > [...] Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements.

I like the Nostr approach where "the data IS the network".

It is true that their current approach of having "relays" as their main distribution system is not that censor resistant, but once you have that "network in the data" it is trivial to switch at any point to swapping encrypted files or even USB-sticks with your friends if you want.

Has ActivityPub anything similar?

Edit: and this is not just important for distribution, but for archiving. How many interesting Twitter threads and Youtube videos have been lost in the ether unless you manually archived them? And even if you archived it nobody can't tell if they are the same as the originals. With Nostr you can solve this with clients that do archiving automatically, and all the links stay "fresh" and shareable as long as somebody keeps the data.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#129

Post by Gordonjcp »

blacklight wrote: post #110

Millions have been using the Fediverse for years, I haven't looked back for the past two years myself. It's built on open protocols and it's multi-platform by definition. You can even follow your Twitter accounts from Mastodon. So what exactly are you folks waiting for, and why do I have to keep hearing the "is there an alternative to social network X" question every couple of days? Just jump on any Mastodon instance…

There are three problems with Mastodon:

1) It's hard to get on it, unless you know someone who is running an instance.

2) No-one I know is on it, and can't get on it since they don't know anyone running an instance.

3) The people who are on it all have names like xXxFuchsSturm1488xXx and think I want to see a constant rolling feed of politically-orientated furry pr0n.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#130

Post by alias_neo »

worldsayshi wrote: post #108
alias_neo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a very "positive/optimistic" outlook on how this would go down; My immediate thought was that an implementation of this platform would be using legal identification to prove humans, allowing for one a huge depository of highly-accurate personally identifying information; a security and privacy nightmare in my opinion. This already happens in many places, but those are regulated companies, banks etc, I couldn…

You don't have to have the social networking site handle the privacy information. You could integrate eId as identity providers and for a site like Twitter only provide guarantee that this is a human and this identity is unique for this human on this service. You wouldn't be anonymous but you could be anonymous towards everyone but the identity providers.

Good point, I had totally forgotten about identity providers. I've only had to use one, which I totally disagree with; I can't remember which one, but some government site here in the UK required an IDP and the options were things like the "Post Office"; Not the sort of organisation I want to be trusting with my identity/login for any government site.
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