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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

#81

Post by pjc50 »

balaji1 wrote: post #76
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…

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 le…

Pretty much every effective military in history has had this kind of hierarchical structure, by both imitation and convergent evolution. I'm sure there's a post on https://acoup.blog/ about it.

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

#82

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

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…

But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. It's just that we, as in we the users, failed this great "public town square" because as soon as we get in the public we get scared and need to belong to a tribe: the Twitter tribe, the TikTok tribe, the Instagram tribe, and so forth.

[1] https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

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).

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by espadrine »

Do you ask about how to build Twitter if it didn’t exist, or how to build something that people would switch away to?

The №1 issue to overcome in the latter is to achieve Twitter’s network effect fast, so the first goal would be to design for easy bridging, connecting or aggregating.

For the former, people open the page to see content they yearn for. That depends on their interests. If you only show content from their follows, there is too little; if you show content from the whole platform, their interest will be drowned in things they don’t care about.

One easy trick is to show messages from people you follow with high probability, and messages from people they follow with lower probability, and so on. But unfortunately, you eventually need a stronger recommendation algorithm, which can show viral tweets (like the “dress color” illusion from 2015) and suggest people that tweet about your interests. This is the main reason people come back to the app every day.

The replies feature is actively radioactive. I’d recommend only showing replies from people you’ve approved, and putting other replies in a separate menu without a notification counter.

On decentralization, unless you add a hefty seasoning of cryptography and replication, it does not make sense. Beyond fragmentation, the risk of servers going down or in malicious access to private information or forgery is better addressed in a centralized fashion. Trust is easily lost.

Besides, the tech becomes a no-brainer with a central system. Go for a relational database and index as things take steam. Start synchronous, then move to async batch jobs.

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

#85

Post by nobodyandproud »

Distributed. Possibly peer-to-peers and easier via regional? Or via air? And extremely easy to get into if you’re “in the area” and know at least one person.

Difficult without being “in-person” and in the know.

A centralized platform has brought more problems than solutions.

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

#86

Post by dimva »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #82
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…

But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. It's just that we, as in we the users, failed this great "public town square" because as soon as we get in the public we get scared and need to belong to a tribe: the Twitter tribe, the TikTok tribe, the Instagram tribe, and so…

The internet is not a public square for the same reason the world isn't a public square - it requires effort to see things from outside your own community. Twitter (and Facebook), on the other hand, will regularly push things to me from fascists, communists, "environmentalist" degrowthers, and other weirdos who I have no interest in hearing from.

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

#89

Post by osrec »

I would keep it simple on the tech side, and would probably stick with an SQL DB, along with a solid full text indexing service running separately for search.

From a UI perspective, I would probably also improve the way threads are shown, as currently I find it impossible to follow conversations on Twitter.

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

#90

Post by tkk23 »

benrutter wrote: post #38

What I've always wished existed for social media was something more along the lines of a protocol (like email or rss) than a platform (like Facebook or Twitter). It seems like as long as a communication form is tied in to one specific provider by design, then there is always going to be unsolvable problems with deplatforming users, content moderation etc. That's what I'd love to see- decentralization in the sense of…

It already exists. Have you never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub ?
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