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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

#221

Post by pjc50 »

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.

Not hearing the stuff does not prevent someone who does hear the stuff from breaking into your house with a hammer, as Paul Pelosi discovered.

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

#222

Post by nickdothutton »

ceejayoz wrote: post #112
nickdothutton wrote: post #73

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…

You say "powerful", I hear "complicated". If you're on Twitter and you get targeted by, say, Ben Shapiro, the horde that comes at you isn't trivially filterable/blockable. There'll be thousands of them, and they're creative; just like spammers/phishers, they make a game out of evading mitigation measures. At volume, this is a very tough problem to solve.

I don’t doubt that the problem is a tough one to solve. This is (partly) why I suggest offering a marketplace for filters, and so a reward for those who crack the problem. Of course there are always going to be some people who which deploying any kind of filter is just too much work. There were always some for whom editing a .killfile was too much.

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

#224

Post by mbreese »

delecti wrote: post #199
mdp2021 wrote: post #144

Whatever platform does not allow a search like "What did user U publish on day D" has a specific label: it is substantially the Soviet Pravda. Imre Lakatos defined totalitarianism in terms of "how distant in the past can I retrieve documents" - the shorter the span of accessible data, the worse. In historical totalitarianism regimes such obstacle was instated to hide possible ideological changes in the regime, to giv…

I think an audit trail of a government is very different from being able to pick through the personal posts of an individual person. I think it'd actually be a fantastic feature to have history gently fade away. If I could disable other people viewing my tweets older than 1 year, I'd enable it in a heartbeat, and I'd think nearly everyone else should too.

I think the right to be forgotten is one of the worst things we've lost in the modern Internet era. People should be allowed to say/do something stupid when they are young without it coming back to bite them when they are older.

Within reason -- for example: pictures from college parties. There's no reason why these should be forever accessible. A nice, graceful decay on some data would make sense.

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

#225

Post by MereInterest »

naravara wrote: post #134
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> "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. 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 individ…

> 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.

The problem with this approach is group polarization [0], the tendency for groups with similar opinions to become more extreme and entrenched over time. The danger posed by bigots is not just from their numbers, but also the degree of violence used to enforce their bigotry. In addition, having pre-established communication makes it easier to organize violence, even with a small proportion of the population.

I don't have a solution to these problems, as much as I wish I did, but wanted to bring them up as issues.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization

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

#226

Post by bad416f1f5a2 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #133
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>"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. 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.

Or picketed so their speech is drowned out, or even punched in the nose by passers by.

You can argue if this is good or bad, but it’s a fundamental difference between the public square and digital recreations: in the real world, speech can have meaningful consequences. In the Twitter world, you create a new profile.

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

#227

Post by jmull »

rustyf wrote: post #131
peterhunt wrote: post #54

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…

I've never actually seen anyone in 40 years actually swap out that database.

Heh, of course you get a bunch of responses about database swaps...

But I think the point is still valid. You probably don't want your early design to focus on an edge case.

That said, a clear API between your DB and app is worthwhile for a lot of reasons (in general).

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

#228

Post by mdp2021 »

delecti wrote: post #199
mdp2021 wrote: post #144

Whatever platform does not allow a search like "What did user U publish on day D" has a specific label: it is substantially the Soviet Pravda. Imre Lakatos defined totalitarianism in terms of "how distant in the past can I retrieve documents" - the shorter the span of accessible data, the worse. In historical totalitarianism regimes such obstacle was instated to hide possible ideological changes in the regime, to giv…

I think an audit trail of a government is very different from being able to pick through the personal posts of an individual person. I think it'd actually be a fantastic feature to have history gently fade away. If I could disable other people viewing my tweets older than 1 year, I'd enable it in a heartbeat, and I'd think nearly everyone else should too.

If what you write should better at some point disappear, you should not write it in the first place.

This, of course, in the collector with the purpose I am imagining - the replying poster clearly wants to visit a very different place. In the restaurant you get "restored" through proper treatment, while at the bar the idea is to get disturbed through every device: restaurants shall not be bars.

When I, in the distant past, thought about checking T., it was because some specific great minds had approached it: I checked it on the idea to consult the statements from specific prestigious Intellectuals - not random posts.

And: the replying poster has not provided a speckle of a justification for the "bohemian" idea proposed.

> an audit trail of a government is very different

The platform that the submitter proposed for discussion reportedly has an extraordinary participation of leaders, ministers, politicians and official speakers. So, while my original statement was a parallel in an absiological context ("if something important was submitted it has to be retrievable"), even a direct more literal application of the idea is possible.

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

#229

Post by throwaway5752 »

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.…

Read Mother Night.

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

#230

Post by jimbokun »

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…

Is there a business model to be found for building "social networks" around domain names?

Making it even easier to register domain names. Rebuilding your friend network between the DNS names of friends, family and other associates. Sharing photos and videos and birthday reminders.

I feel like it's marketing all of the technologies of the early web that enabled these things, but with great UX and an order of magnitude less complexity for getting all of it setup.

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