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…
Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
131–140 of 351 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#132I think that the (dead, gay) Something Awful forums model is a decent solution to content moderation and monetization. An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back. Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars. Change your avatar? 5 dollars. Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars. Ad free? 10 dollars. Access to archives (posts over a cer…
One-time fees are not very sustainable. Unless the model included essentially building an endowment the first ten years and then funding the business off of interest.
One-time fees are a perfectly fine model for a business, even if it is unfashionable currently.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them. Social media like twitter allows millions of peop…
and if you're a crazy person or verbally abusive or maybe just shouting things that while maybe true are insulting to the public morality then the police come and carry you away.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them. Social media like twitter allows millions of peop…
I disagree that it's a fallacy, the issue is that platforms have an interest in claiming themselves to be a public square. But the platform is not the square THE INTERNET, which is to say the open World Wide Web, is the public square. Platforms are the individual bars and pubs and cafes that line the squares and boulevards.
Each cafe and pub has the right to set its own rules for entry and set its own vibe and culture, but when there is an oligopoly of bars who are all megalomaniacs wanting to own the whole thing and keep people locked in their establishments for as long as possible, that does not lend itself to having a healthy community or vibe in any one of them.
Let people self-segregate and affiliate with the communities they want to. The racist shitheads will find their spaces, but they only start to multiply when they're able to wheedle their fearmongering propaganda in front of people who wouldn't otherwise want anything to do with them.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact. There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.
Then again, the solution to the hooligan yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre isn't to close the theatre...
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#136No 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…
Every social web I imagine branches out from me (if I am the user in question) and then goes out to gather information from there. So on and so forth. Unless I'm thinking about the wrong information gathering system.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#137Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#138I think that the (dead, gay) Something Awful forums model is a decent solution to content moderation and monetization. An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back. Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars. Change your avatar? 5 dollars. Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars. Ad free? 10 dollars. Access to archives (posts over a cer…
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#139I 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)
I don't have a problem with the local public town square, but I do agree that giving equal voice to all the bad ideas, while also making it easier for those with bad ideas to find each other, is dangerous. It's made more dangerous in an era where our elected leaders also say bad ideas out loud, which emboldens others to do the same. Even in a public square, you can't just yell "fire" without consequence.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#140So it's OK for me to have 5 different Mastodon accounts, each representing a different aspect of my life.