Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by nebqr » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #138

nebqr wrote: post #97

I 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…

You're missing the most important detail of why that worked. Forcing payment solves issues surrounding identity. Permabans on other platforms don't work when you can make a new email and sign up again. Sure, there's a cost to bans ($10) but it's minimal, but evading a permaban means finding a new means of payment not linked to your identity which is a lot harder. Not impossible, but enough that it stops most bad acto…

Yeah, it's a good system.

Also, on the forums, you can look at anyone's rap sheet and see exactly the post that they got banned (or probated or permabanned) for. Let's you know what sort of person you are dealing with.

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

#152

Post by nebqr » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

joshxyz wrote: post #149

nebqr wrote: post #97

I 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…

> Change someone else's avatar This is hilarious

That's the real money-maker.

EDIT: The way it ends up working on the forums is that if you do something to annoy someone that isn't against the rules, they can spend 10 bux and change your avatar to a photo of something that you don't want showing up on every post you make (and likely giant red text that says something like "Ask me about [something offensive]), and then you have to spend 5 bux to undo it.

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

#153

Post by jefftk » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

eddieroger wrote: post #139

jefftk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

Because why market to some people when you can market to all people for the same cost? Particularly if that square can tell you that tech people look in a certain direction but cooking enthusiasts look in another, so you can pick where to put which sign since you've already paid to post your signs. 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, w…

> why market to some people when you can market to all people for the same cost?

It wouldn't be the same cost. Publishers charge advertisers in proportion to the number of people who see the ad.

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

#154

Post by tootie » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #132

tootie wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lots of devices attached to ongoing services today are sold for a one-time fee. For most of their existence, Microsoft and Adobe had very sustainable businesses based on one-time fees. It is a fine model. Software companies today are addicted to "recurring revenue" (thinking that is the only way to get sustainable cash flow), but a lot of people will pay you $20 once who would never pay you $1/month, and there will a…

That was for desktop software. The era of buy it, download it and it's yours forever. Not an ongoing service.

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

#155

Post by naravara » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

istinetz wrote: post #93

dimva wrote: post #80

Earlier 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.

Okay, humble suggestion - remove yourself from the public square, but don't destroy it for me. That way, you get to not hear racist stuff, and I get to not have my morality chosen by random americans.

TBH the issue is not that I can't stand to hear racist stuff, it's that there's well understood incentives to fear monger that have tangibly eroded social trust across the board and degraded the actual real life public square in the process. That's not just the heightened threats of terrorism and acrimonious political systems either, those are just the tips of the iceberg and there's a whole host of social maladies, mental health disorders, depression and anxiety symptoms, etc. coming out of this.

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

#156

Post by sixothree » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

I know this isn't your question, but I would disallow media of any sort. I feel like it is contrary to the spirit of the platform and adds to moderation cost.

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

#157

Post by anthropodie » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

I said this in another Twitter thread and I will say it again

Here's an idea: stop trying to fix social media and instead try to connect with people in real life and we as a society might be happy again

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

#158

Post by wahnfrieden » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

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…

Dunbar’s number is discredited reactionary nonsense, see wengrow/graeber research

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

#159

Post by shkkmo » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #66

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).

>RSS - People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds. RSS might replace Twitter for your particular use case. However, it doesn't replace Twitter in general case for the public because RSS is one-directional. The phenomenon of the "Twittersphere" includes bi-directional activity like replies and retweets. As an analogy, this Hacker News site has users taking part in reading and writing activities. A few use…

That's a client side question, IMHO. If you want your client to show you replies, then you configure it with a crawler that scans other RSS feeds for posts that reference the post you are interested in. Content moderation is thus all user based due to who the user decides to follow and what crawler(s) they choose to use to find related posts in feeds they aren't directly following.

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

#160

Post by naravara » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

counters wrote: post #135

pc86 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately the period from about 2015 to early 2021 made it very clear that even while direct participation is avoidable, the implications of the platform and it's users aren't. Then again, the solution to the hooligan yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre isn't to close the theatre...

We do enforce fire codes though, including things like occupancy limits.