Everyone seems to forget that Twitter was extremely interesting because people on MSN/GTalk were "sync" their status to a web list.
Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
251–260 of 351 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Absolutely, that's why ever since Lycos and AltaVista we relied on certain third-party domains to solve both discoverability and noise filtering.
However, now, after we, the users, have created such Leviathans [1] as Google, Meta, and so on, we, the developers, must go back to the drawing board and solve discoverability, noise filtering, payments [2], and much more at the protocol level. Which is not even a new or outrageous idea, even Mr. Jack Dorsey seems to agree to this [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#253I find the frequent invocation of a town square a bit perplexing. It evokes the idea of a place where strangers may gather to have an exchange of ideas, which sounds quite pleasant at face value.
However this is not something that I've ever done IRL and I rather doubt that most of those who invoke this idea do this regularly either.
The kinds of discussions that you might imagine having in public with strangers who might have different values and backgrounds would be wildly different from the same discussions online. The metaphor is quite a broken one and at this point about as useful as pretending that the screen I'm looking at is an analog to my actual desktop (which mostly one exists to hold the screen).
While this may come across as mere pedantry I think it is actually quite important to ensure that when we discuss platforms that are going to be nothing at all like a town square that we are more realistic about what kinds of conversation and interactions we might want to encourage or discourage.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#254Decentralized, 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
Still have to go through the undersea cables!
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#255Whatever 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.
Mastodon has a built-in post culler for this purpose.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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.
Marshall McLuhan came up with the concept of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village, which may be relevant here.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#257I’d build it by creating Xanadu. Xanadu is the feature set.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#258I 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 don't think it's necessary to totally kill the 'public square' concept. Rather, I think comparison with other social media products highlight that different product decisions encourage different behavior for most people. People just use Twitter differently from TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc, because of the informational and social environment these products create. These natural experiments can give us hypotheses about more explicit A/B tests for product changes:
- Does LinkedIn show us that people have less hostile posts if their real world professional connections are watching? If Twitter tried to show your posts to people it thinks you know, whether or not you follow each other, would we all be more civil?
- Does the higher bar of needing to generate an image or video to post (and a 2nd class presentation of comments) on some platforms, and lack of explicit 'reply' functionality stop arguments or bickering? The bar of typing a post in Twitter is just too low?
- Does TikTok's recommendation based on behavior rather than "interests" create less polarized bubbles? Showing you a funny dance video just because it knows you'll watch it may disrupt you from seeking out The Enemy just to disagree with them.
- Does removing an asymmetric "follow" relationship in favor of symmetrical "connections" disarm people whose hobby is having incendiary positions? If you can only have more "audience" by opening yourself up to see stuff from more people, do you then choose to connect with people that add value rather than valuing followers who will amplify you?
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#259Earlier 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. 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…
Sounds like the Metaverse.
Shouting is only 1 form of communication though. Newspapers and pamphlets have been around for centuries and travel farther and last longer than human generated sound waves. So your proposal kind of simulates pre-printing press days and maybe even pre-written language days.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#260> What database technology or approach would you go for? I feel like people consistently underestimate the difficulty of creating a data backend for a social network. It has to be readable and writable in real time, yet still performant enough for picky consumers. It needs to be able to handle text search. It needs to handle many-to-many relationships at scale (something that mainstream (NO)SQL databases struggle wit…
> Building something like Twitter is still, in 2022, a really hard technical challenge.
Building something like Twitter is pretty simple.
Building something that scales to 400 million MAU is a really hard technical challenge.