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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

#71

Post by linsomniac »

The time seems to be ripe for moving to Mastodon. A few people in my twitter feed have made the move over the last few days, so I decided to give it a go again, and it's pretty nice. The down side is only a handful of the people I follow are over there. But people seem to be looking for alternatives now, so maybe there will become a critical mass.

It's easy: Go to https://mastodon.online/auth/sign_up and sign up. Go to https://twitodon.com/ to try to automatically follow your Twitter friends on Mastodon. Then use the search bar to search for other of your friends. Click on their followers/following to look for other people to follow.

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

#72

Post by sithlord »

Less about the tech, I think basically anything would work. I think from the start I would go with 300 characters, and allow edit with a button that has an audit log of all edits.

I think a nice approach would be to be mobile first on my end, ios/android app and expose a nice api for people to build their own frontends. The only downside of that is how do you keep a popular frontend from hijacking someones tweets and modifying the text.

What I do not have an answer for is, how do you handle the comments, to me, they are generally more interesting than the tweet itself, so how does one get those front and center.

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

#73

Post by nickdothutton »

I can’t help but think part of the answer is to offer users more powerful filtering, so that they may exercise their own free will over what they see and hear. Sure some would choose an extremely narrow subsection of society to hear from, but others would cast their net wider. One might even choose to monetise “smart filters” that took the legwork out of building and maintaining such filters. The “smartness” need not be an algo either, one might choose to outsource filtering to another human offering that service.

I wrote a little about this after a particularly irritating experience with LinkedIn, but the same goes for twitter or any public forum.

https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/

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

#74

Post by pjc50 »

Apreche wrote: post #45

You know that image people share occasionally that illustrates how all the different functions of Craiglist were carved up into separate specialized apps? That’s what I think I’d personally like to see for Twitter. Journalists that need a place to post live updates as well as links to their long-form stories? Make a platform that does that, and only that. Bots that post a jpg every day? Make an app that does that and…

> Get customer service by DMing companies directly because they respond on Twitter for some reason?

This is sort of what https://www.resolver.co.uk/ is. But the main reason companies respond on Twitter is that it's also a place where you can catch the attention of journalists. There's positive synergy in having everyone fight on the same platform.

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

#75

Post by prox »

jefftk wrote: post #55
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.

While its true, it’s like asking “what nail and hammer am I going to fabricate?” , all while the market is flooded and capped to the brim with hammer and nail companies.

The better question is how to reach people and get them off their insert favourite platform , what makes you unique? What can you do to make sure people start buying into it? What’s your value proposition?

It’s far more a social question than a technology question (still with respect to OP who is interested in the tech)

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

#76

Post by balaji1 »

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…

Inventing some protocol around the Dunbar number is interesting.

There was something similar in the Weatherford's book on Genghis Khan [1][2]. This system was described to be very effective for communicating and coordinating the huge military.

> In Genghis Khan's military system, a tumen was recursively built from units of 10 (aravt), 100 (zuut) and 1,000 (mingghan), each with a leader reporting to the next higher level.

Note: I am not aware of how good the Weatherford book is, it felt one-sided to me. So I am not sure how good the civic system that depended on the Tumen was in the mongol era.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingghan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumen_(unit)#Genghis_Khan's_or...

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

#77

Post by tkk23 »

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…

>though our tech was superb.

Please don't leave us hanging. How had you designed it?

I would like to know even more: Did you have integration with other networks via ActivityPub or other protocols?

There is a huge risk of wasting time if I cannot migrate my social network. New services are prone to being discontinued, why should I invest in a new network that locks me in?

I don't understand why not all new networks offer ActivityPub migration by default. Distribution should be much easier.

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

#79

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

jefftk wrote: post #52
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)

A "public town square" that allows anyone to post and comment is going to be paid by page views. The way to get more page views is to have controversial or viral content because it will bring the comments and page views. That will get the most advertisers. A closed/private group platform isn't going to get as many advertisers.

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

#80

Post by dimva »

istinetz wrote: post #41
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…

This reminds me of a short story Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in a novel of his: >“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.” “This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors.…

We gotta build things for the humans we have, not the humans we wish to have.

Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.

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