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Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

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181–190 of 351 posts

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

#181
post #67

Decentralized, free, anonymous and out of reach of the kleptocracy. This is impossible presently since they own all the internet infrastructure.

You mean you can't scale to giant without the kleptocracy blessing in 2022?

There's lots of bare metal around

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

#183

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…

There are plenty of hateful and racist things said on Twitter like : “all I want for Christmas is white genocide.”

But no one blinks an eye. So HatefulRacistUncle might be “HorriblyMisguidedAndRacistYoungCollegeStudent” and that’s also not ok to some of us.

So who polices this? Maybe we just go back to not reading things we dislike. You can block people on Twitter ya know.

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

#184

> would get automatically deleted after some years Some people may not be allowed to delete (or to be deleted by someone else) their "tweets". US Presidents are one such category of people - all of their works while in office belong to the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act In some lawsuits, records such as tweets need to be produced in what is called "discovery". It is possible to lose l…

This simply means those people must ensure those records are copied and stored elsewhere. Communication services don’t have to store records for the president.

Twitter has deleted many tweets subject to the rules you cite and it’s well within their right to do so.

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

#185

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…

I think one of the key problems with twitter is the presence of constituted authorities interacting with the populace free from the formal mediation of official channels. I am in Brazil and I bring as an example the disastrous presence of Bolsonaro in the social networks, directly instructing his followers, completely free from institutional constraints. In the case of Brazil, this was a major element of destabilization of public discourse.

I am convinced that the presence of authorities on social media has to be regulated, and if I were to launch an alternative to Twitter I would consider [and look for ways to] build ethical safeguards [concerning public officials] into the system.

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

#186
The biggest problem I have with twitter as a platform and as a concept is that individual tweets lack any and all context. "Threading" together tweets doesn't make them linear. If you want to restrict post size, then you have to make threads linear or you wind up losing any and all context farther down the thread. There winds up being a large group of people who try to argue things that have already been said further up the thread or you have people arguing over a misunderstanding because they missed the first 10 tweets because somebody they know retweeted the 11th because it had a snarky soundbite.

Twitter right now is all noise and no signal. It's a bunch of people running through a crowded train station where everybody's shouting but nobody can hear more than a few words of what any single person is saying. How can that ever be a useful platform for civil discussion? It does make for a great broadcast platform. "The train from Chicago is leaving in half an hour. Mick wishes his mother a happy birthday."

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

#187
I'd take a couple of steps back and try to fix the problem at the core. What the Web needs is a way to do backlinks. If we had them, everybody could just host their own content, in whatever format they want, and others could respond to it on their own servers.

Add some GPG signatures into the mix, and people could be mirroring and caching content as much as they want without there being a problem authenticity.

Now of course doing backlinks in a way that isn't open to abuse and spam is difficult. But I consider that a much more worthwhile endeavor than just hacking together yet another Twitter clone that fundamentally suffers from all the exact same problems as Twitter does. I don't need yet another middle man to decide what I can and can't view.

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

#188
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. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb. what was it called? now I'm curious.

Yet Another Twitter - YaTwit

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

#189

I grew up in the golden age of Myspace. There was a lot of value, I think, in needing to directly choose to have someone in your social circle. If you didn't add someone as a friend, you didn't see their posts. It's a lot easier to be civil online when you know all the people you're interacting with. And perhaps a lot safer.

https://spacehey.com/

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

#190

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…

> You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once. You don't have to shut them down, you know. The British Government did this all throughout the 1970s to 1990s, where pubs (and later online services) where Republican terrorists hung out were very much left alone. They could have swooped in and scooped the lot up, but they didn't. Because if they ever did want to scoop them all up, th…

It also turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You ban the boards and they just immediately come back under a different name.
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