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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

#241

Post by greensoap »

mawise wrote: post #238

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…

Does the "you only see what you subscribe to" increase the echo chamber of the web. Would it led to "here are more thoughts that you already agree with" which means people won't have a chance to see the other side of a coin?

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

#242

Post by ebiester »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #128
marcusverus wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]. A public square is "an open public area in a city or town where people gather". DNS is far too abstract to even remotely resemble a public square--just like "capitalism" or "zoning laws" are too abstract to resemble a public s…

DNS is the public town square: when using browsers, navigating across domains, we are all fundamentally gathered in the DNS space. Me having "foo.com" is akin to setting up a stall in this public town square and selling my vegetables, and you are free to visit "foo.com" and buy into my ideology, or simply never visit it. And yes, precisely, "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", cannot, by definition, be digit…

So, how do I know about foo.com?

Discoverability and noise filtering are the hard problem.

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

#243

Post by tootie »

dahart wrote: post #213
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.

Actuarial science might have a thing or two to say about that. All you need to do is make sure the average amount people pay is greater than the average cost for the life of an account. Before the recent explosion in subscription pricing for everything under the sun, we’d been selling software on one-time costs for fifty years. Subscriptions certainly are attractive and easier for businesses, probably easier to sell…

I've gotten wildly differing responses from saying that New Twitter should just be a non-profit. Have a mission for public good, disclose financials, earn sufficient revenue to operate and pay employees. Wikipedia does it and their biggest drama is that they get way more donations than they even need. They also seem to manage moderating gobs of content with relatively little public drama.

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

#244

Post by 0x445442 »

pjc50 wrote: post #221
istinetz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Abe Lincoln was assassinated well before the internet.

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

#245

Post by phailhaus »

For one, allow following hashtags as a first-class feature, and move them out of the tweet body.

The problems with Twitter are not technical, they are baked into its design.

1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider the six degrees of separation: applied to Twitter, we realize that it only takes 6 retweets to reach basically everyone. Following "Topics" is close but not good enough, because you cannot voluntarily opt into topics or really understand why a given tweet is within a topic; Twitter uses its Computer Magic to categorize tweets and makes all the decisions in a black box.

2. The only negative feedback is unfollowing. This is a problem because it means that practically all forms of engagement are treated equally. Oh, this tweet is getting a lot of comments, let's boost it so more people see it! Whoops, it was about space lasers. We are stuck repeatedly fighting Bad Takes because they have to be argued against every time they are brought up and always gain nonzero traction. They are never put to rest. There is very little negative incentive against being a garbage human on Twitter, especially if you're anonymous.

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

#246

Post by memetomancer »

pc86 wrote: post #96
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.

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.

| Particularly disgusting

A phrase particularly lacking in decency, making you a bad actor on this forum. Especially when you are wrong. It takes an elevated sense of self-importance to say that because you don't like a moderate opinion it is palpably revolting.

Twitter isn't a technical problem, as others have pointed out. It is a social problem. One that leads to behavior just as intolerant and dvisive as Fox News or any of the demagogues making their fortunes by bringing out the worst impulses of the stupidest people. One that leads people like yourself to drag down the discussion with such uncalled for invective.

Trying to discuss the problem invariably brings out dim outbursts, such as your own, meant to stifle discourse. Yes you feel entitled to your own set of rules and care little for the effect it has on others, but the effect of Twitter is destroying the fabric that coddles you, that protects you and allows you to have small selfish views at the expense of everyone else, with no evidence that you understand the consequences.

| You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact.

As long as Twitter remains a powerful platform for social influence - even if you explicitly avoid participation - you face the effects. Nobody in the U.S. can escape the grandstanding, the vitriol, the ostracizing, or the influence that the forum represents. The problem extends to many other nations. Something should be done and discussing it freely is a sane approach.

So choke down your bile, bite your tongue and make your points with some dignity. If we all pull together we can get through this, I just know it.

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

#247

Post by mdp2021 »

mdp2021 wrote: post #233
mbreese wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I would add: when exactly did the term 'prudence' fall from top positions to quasi-neglection in the ranking of frequency of use, and instead others like 'paranoia' started to climb?

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

#248

Post by jimbokun »

rectang wrote: post #207

Freedom of association is more fundamental than freedom of speech. If you can't stop the mob from shouting you down, your voice won't be heard. The foundational act of a Twitter alternative is to create silos where communities are allowed to exclude other users. The platform is not a public "town square" — it never was — it's a private forum, where users may choose who they associate with.

> The foundational act of a Twitter alternative is to create silos where communities are allowed to exclude other users.

So Reddit then.

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

#249

Post by taylodl »

kjellsbells wrote: post #164
bambax wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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. That's very true. Maybe a better Twitter could incorporate actual geographical distance. You would have to choose where you are and could only see message…

Isnt your proposal basically Reddit? Subreddits are nodes that require you to be close to them to see whats going on (via joining the sub), with a public square, /r/popular, artificially built from the top posts on those nodes. For some definition of "top".

Interesting. My use of Twitter has waned over the years while my use of Reddit has increased...I guess I'm voting with my time that Reddit is the better model.

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

#250

Post by GrinningFool »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #193
GrinningFool wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like saying your town is a public town square because everyone has an address that can be reached by post.

Not all analogies can be saved, nevertheless let's try: the town = the TCP/IP suite of protocols (UDP, QUIC, etc. included) the public town square = DNS a booth selling vegetables in the public town square = a domain, "foo.com", publishing whatever their opinion is about reality and everything else A great lie told again and again by "social media" domains is that they are "platforms", but a platform is meant to sust…

This is a truly heroic effort. I think you make a valid point that a domain can't be considered a public square, but am not convinced that the domain name registry system can.

DNS itself (in the form that gets used publicly) is controlled by a few actors -- arguably the 'true' owners of all the domains that are leased from them. This is underscored every time new TLDs are released and people have to scramble to secure their names and brands. In that context alone, DNS also can't qualify as the public square.

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