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Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

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Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#51

Post by eterps »

annowiki wrote: post #42
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #24

I think you're jumping into the technical bits right away without thinking through requirements/features. Maybe we (the royal 'we' as in all of humanity) shouldn't have a public town square? When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard you are also including all marginalized voices. The MarginalizedVoice super object has EqualRightsForSquirrels as well as HatefulRacistUncle child objects. There are v…

You have me thinking about kind of a cool board idea. 150 person twitter boards. Cap it at 150. People in that group can all vote on their own moderation, they can't interact with groups in other boards through quote tweeting or voting, though obviously they can copy paste. You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once. 150 being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number of co…

But that is also a recipe for echo chambers.

Anyway, from a technical point of view, this is what Mastodon instances already can offer.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#52

Post by jefftk »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #24

I think you're jumping into the technical bits right away without thinking through requirements/features. Maybe we (the royal 'we' as in all of humanity) shouldn't have a public town square? When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard you are also including all marginalized voices. The MarginalizedVoice super object has EqualRightsForSquirrels as well as HatefulRacistUncle child objects. There are v…

> don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisement

Why would advertisers prefer public town squares? They just want people to see their ads.

(I also like "public town square" places, as a user)

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#53

Post by viraptor »

bombcar wrote: post #28
viraptor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are not the same category. In communicators you can store the user / channel from a given time period in a specific partition and that's about it. It's likely never going to be queried after delivery since everyone has a local copy. If it does, you just download a slice based on a client-side generated hash. And the metadata basically doesn't change either. Compare to Twitter where new people continuously query…

Doesn’t Google search basically all of Twitter Anyway? Doesn’t that mean whatever Google has could easily itself be Twitter?

It's not indexed in realtime. (tweets from 20min ago are still not searchable) It has no interactivity either which makes the problem few orders of magnitude easier. And they don't care about subscriptions.

Implementing search: just chuck the last hour of fire hose into s3 and update the ngrams.

Implementing real timeish view: ok, so we need to distribute+replicate the data so timeline queries can happen in parallel and get fresh info depending on subscriptions.

Implementing the number of likes ticking up as you watch the tweet: basically alien technology. (I assume it's optimised somehow because otherwise that would convert a single tweet view into 1 + however long someone stays on the page / 2s times the load in naive implementation)

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#54

Post by peterhunt »

No one here is answering your question so I will :)

Database: I’d use whatever you know and helps you get to market, but abstract it away from the rest of your app so you can swap out later. Lots of good choices here; I’d pick mysql or postgres running on rds. I would also design for sharding by user on day 1 because that can be extremely painful to add later, however, care would have to be taken to ensure it doesn’t slow you down too much early. I’d also just use an rdbms for caching unless it becomes a problem, only then would I reach for redis. I would also avoid a fanout-on-write approach in favor of fanout-on-read. It will save you a lot of headaches later.

Firestore is nice but can get expensive quickly so I’d plan for it to be a temporary thing.

2. Would go for a react native app first but there are lots of options to choose from. Go with tech you know but keep in mind that it’s basically impossible to get a AAA mobile experience on web, and in this space polish really matters.

3. Decentralized social networks never took off because they are too hard to build. Avoid at all costs unless you have some angle (ie you have some novel tech discovered during your PhD). A middle ground could be a centralized network that is open source and makes data portability front and center.

I’ll also say that growth matters a lot here. As a founder I think 20% of the teams headspace should be thinking about engineering. The rest on growth and retention.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#55

Post by jefftk »

baxtr wrote: post #13

Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb. If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around. Which existing social networks (not media on…

> Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares.

The OP specifically asked about this, and reading the comments a lot of people here evidently do care.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#56

Post by lokedhs »

aynyc wrote: post #32

I would pitch to top influencers a certain percentage of the company if they can bring in the fellowers and skip the VCs. Even if the top influencers take 40% of the company, you still come out on top.

How many though? I assume that the top influencers are not going to move to your platform exclusively (using yours in addition to what they already use isn't going to work, at best you'll just get crossposting from the other networks) unless they get offered enough.

Since they risk their entire following, I'm guessing the top posters want to have a potential profit of about 100 million dollars, and possibly more than that. That means that by the time you have 100 influencers, you have to convince your members that you'll be a 20 billion company in a year.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#57

Post by lstodd »

eterps wrote: post #51
annowiki wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have me thinking about kind of a cool board idea. 150 person twitter boards. Cap it at 150. People in that group can all vote on their own moderation, they can't interact with groups in other boards through quote tweeting or voting, though obviously they can copy paste. You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once. 150 being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number of co…

But that is also a recipe for echo chambers. Anyway, from a technical point of view, this is what Mastodon instances already can offer.

You can't fight echo chamber effect with technical measures, forget about it.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#58

Post by thereddaikon »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #34

If you want to design an alternative Twitter then my advice would be to not start with the tech. There seems to be plenty of stuff out there than you can bolt together to get things started, and which comes with options for scaling if you subsequently need it . Some thoughts: - Start with thinking about how you're going to maintain engagement without pushing people into algorithmically-generated echo chambers, or int…

"- Also, how are you going to deal with state-level and semi-state-level actors who will attempt to infiltrate your platform to use it as an amplifier."

Not just state actors but anyone with an agenda and budget really. companies, ngos, political parties etc. Manipulating twitter to push an agenda or narrative is big business and not limited to nation states.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#59

Post by dustedcodes »

kadomony wrote: post #39

Spot the engineer looking to build something without doing any real empathy research first. This is why the Metaverse is currently flopping, bruh. Take a step back and stop getting erect over tech strategies. Ask if people even want this first, and then concern yourself with user requirements first and foremost.

Why so many (wrong) presumptions and anger over your own presumptions?

HN has a largely technical audience. The "how" is the question here as that is what I was interested to hear from other people with a variety of experiences. Twitter was just an example which feels topical today and it also has an interesting problem to solve. It's much harder to scale a public town square than let's say the same volume of messages sent over WhatsApp where it's mostly 1:1 and some n:m conversations where n and m are relatively small numbers.

Not looking to build a new Twitter, don't have the time or desire, but I find the how interesting nevertheless.

Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

#60

Post by prepend »

WithinReason wrote: post #48
prepend wrote: post #3

RSS People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds. No server side agorithm and api just returns feeds sorted by users preference. If I follow too many people to view chronological, then I can have client side algorithms to sort. Aggregate queries across all the feeds on the server identify hashtag trends and create useful metrics (retweets, likes, etc).

I like the idea of an RSS twitter but discovery needs to be solved. Maybe you could also automatically publish the feeds you're subscribed to?

I remember Google reader used to let you “like” articles and view articles with lots of likes.

Also you could add friends and view what they subscribe to and like.

And just a basic text search is useful to find material related to a topic of interest.

I think it’s important to remember that this isn’t meant to consume infinite time but just a way to see what you’ve noted as interesting. I think it’s like a newspaper where you spend 15-60 minutes reading. Not something that consumes every waking moment with infinite discovery and content.

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