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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

#231

Post by Applejinx »

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.…

It's a fair question whether 'public' for a person should mean ten people, or three hundred, or three million. In practical terms people can't cope with a public square the size of a million. It's too big. The range of possible 'people I'm sharing my public square with' is too great to manage.

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

#232

Post by somethingreen »

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…

Usual argument is that your solution also "works" if you replace racists with, say, abolitionists at the point in history when the general public consensus was that slavery is just fine (except with internet).

Enabling good ideas to spill out of their origin communities into general public discourse is the main point of "public square" and "free speech" concepts.

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

#233

Post by mdp2021 »

mbreese wrote: post #224
delecti wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> something stupid

I would say a good example of "something stupid" would be to publish something that should remain private.

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

#234

Post by kenjackson »

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…

People saying hateful things isn’t the problem. The inability of some to be reasonable after reading them is the problem.

It’s a much harder problem to fix. There are some partial solutions, IMO. Although none are all that practical to implement.

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

#235

Post by jimbokun »

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.

My company did, when the DB vendor quoted as an astronomical price per server when the original licensing agreement expired.

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

#236

Post by rw2 »

I think twitter now would be something like tiktok where relevant and entertaining stuff will be shown to me without browsing for it. That is the true value of Tiktok, saving the search time for something interesting.

Also one reason I think Tik Tok is successful is the lack of political content which is toxic and stressful. A lot of political content is designed to get you to be angry at the "opposition" which is not a healthy state of mind.

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

#237

Post by Apreche »

pjc50 wrote: post #74
Apreche wrote: post #45

You know that image people share occasionally that illustrates how all the different functions of Craiglist were carved up into separate specialized apps? That’s what I think I’d personally like to see for Twitter. Journalists that need a place to post live updates as well as links to their long-form stories? Make a platform that does that, and only that. Bots that post a jpg every day? Make an app that does that and…

> Get customer service by DMing companies directly because they respond on Twitter for some reason? This is sort of what https://www.resolver.co.uk/ is. But the main reason companies respond on Twitter is that it's also a place where you can catch the attention of journalists. There's positive synergy in having everyone fight on the same platform.

I agree. I was just thinking of examples of things people do on Twitter.

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

#238

Post by mawise »

I'll chime in here, since I'm building one. Twitter does one thing that I opted to change--everything is public. The short-form, low-effort, public posting that defines twitter leads to a platform that promotes trolling over discourse. Haven[1] instead promotes private discourse where every post is private.

It's fully decentralized in that everyone runs their own instance, but with all open protocols (RSS), it would be trivial for someone to build a centralized/federated instance that can still interoperate. The open protocol which enables a decentralized model is the most important part of that decision.

With RSS as the protocol, you get interoperability with every blog ever for free. Combine private posting with public content and you get something really neat--the ability to have private conversations about public content all on the platform.

You also get an elegant solution to free-speech vs civility. No public content means no discovery so you'll never see anything from a source you didn't explicitly opt-in to. No trolls and no spam.

Arguably, this is more of a Facebook alternative than a Twitter alternative but I still think it is a very valuable approach to creating more civility in our broader society.

[1]: https://havenweb.org

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