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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

#261

Post by ninth_ant »

greensoap wrote: post #241
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?

Is a public-mostly forum like Twitter actually good at escaping bubbles though?

It seems to me that most of what passes for discourse there is yelling at the “other side” and smug/snarky in-group posts.

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

#262

Post by freeplay »

srcmap wrote: post #91

What about this: Use SQLite. Make it one SQLite file per user. All the read/write are parallelized per user. Backup db file would be smaller, easier. Each service node can handle N users, less for heavy follow users. Should be easier to scale horizontally the with user count by adding system nodes and Storage, networks, web handling process.

Interesting concept but it falls apart pretty quickly once you start adding in the "social" parts of the network.

Also, you're still going to need to index all posts somewhere. Unless you don't want search functionality on your site.

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

#263

Post by freeplay »

groffee wrote: post #239

> what technological choices would I make to get it quickly off the ground but allow for scale? Wrong question. End users don't give a shit about your tech stack. You should be thinking of requirements and features.

But you need a tech stack to make sure those features are performant and highly available.

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

#264

Post by godshatter »

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.

Let people create whitelists as well as blacklists when it comes to letting users post replies so that they can go "whitelist only" when that happens, at least until the furor dies down.

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

#265

Post by freeplay »

sixothree wrote: post #156

I know this isn't your question, but I would disallow media of any sort. I feel like it is contrary to the spirit of the platform and adds to moderation cost.

I love this idea but the mainstream will hate it. Short attention spans need memes and reaction gifs.

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

#266

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

jimbokun wrote: post #230
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #82

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]. 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…

Is there a business model? Absolutely, you just have to not want to be the techno-imperator of the network graph and not want to become a trillionaire from building social services.

Disclaimer: I am building such a "social technology" around domain names, letting users truly own the database of their interaction with a service, https://github.com/plurid/deserve

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

#267

Post by throwayyy479087 »

naravara wrote: post #167
ctvo wrote: post #121

The technical challenges are solved. It's not an interesting discussion to cheer for your favorite tech stack. What's interesting is what value Twitter gives and what could a new platform target? For me, there's a slice of Twitter users that provide information, entertainment, and context that I can't get elsewhere. This could be something from a mid-level analyst re: market volatility or a college professor at a sma…

> If I could get rid of the celebrities, the thought leaders, the self marketers, the low content hate, and the bots, and only be left with the above in a moderated environment I'd welcome this global town square. Sadly many of those people come for the self-marketers and thought leaders though. I've noticed this in Reddit too. A lot of posters in places like AskHistorians and AskScience have left, questions just don…

Political fighting on Reddit is fascinating to me. It's mostly against people who _aren't in the room_ - caricatures of the Right, or centrists even.

My real life experience is very different - I know a ton of gay Republicans, for example. Most people in a group are not the median, and all the Reddit approach does is alienate anyone that _was_ open to new ideas.

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

#268

Post by [deleted] »

delecti wrote: post #191
rustyf wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I did once in my last job, because we were told AWS was sunning down SimpleDB. We were able to swap to DynamoDB with relatively little fuss (though obviously not none, no migration is entirely painless) because we abstracted it so well. Turns out that several years later, SimpleDB is still up and running, but it was probably a good migration anyway. Probably a bigger benefit though, is being able to use a different D…

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by somethingreen »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #208
rdevsrex wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard Why do we have to do that? Isn't the idea of having easy access for all enough? What people are so marginalized that they can't mute hateful speech and get on with their day?

One of the big problems with harassment on a platform like Twitter, and this seems to be pretty hard to get across to people who haven't been subject to it -- or don't know someone who's been subject to it, at least -- is the speed and intensity of what's coming at you if a true pile-on happens, or if a particular group decides you are The Enemy. You can mute and block a handful of jerks and get on with your day, per…

The reason this particular problem still exists is not technical. But solutions are not compatible with engagement-graph-go-up business model.

You are correct to point out the downsides and dangers of "public square" platform, but we haven't really even started trying to implement any reasonable solutions to them.

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