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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

#271

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

GrinningFool wrote: post #250
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 secur…

Oh, sure, lots of issues with DNS itself and ICANN. Sort of a "democracy situation", if you will: the worst except for all the others.

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

#272

Post by throwayyy479087 »

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.

AWS swapped famously swapped out Oracle DB2

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

#273

Post by captainmuon »

I can't speak much about the technical stack, although I would probably write it in Python and or TypeScript because that is easiest for me, or in something exotic like Nim for fun.

If decentralized, I would think about a clause in the license that mandates some kind of federation. Although, it seems like the ability to not federate with certain instances is seen as a selling point for some Mastodon users.

Most importantly, I would not try to build a Twitter clone. Twitter is often "yelling into the void" aka write-only, and when you get something back it is often aggrivating. Sure, you can also have great exchanges and meet nice people, but all in all it is just not so pleasant.

What I would go for instead is a clone of early Facebook or MySpace. You have a profile page, you can present yourself as you like. You have statusses but no global feed by default. People can send you private messages, but they can also interact in some fashion with your profile. A social network, instead of social media.

One thing I'd like to experiment with is derived identities. Say you want to participate in a community (forum, group chat) with similar people. You want to use a pseudonym, but the community wants some assurance that you are really a teenager, or a woman, or a technology expert, or whatever. Your main profile would "prove" this, but you don't want to disclose your identity. So you create a new account, and the system would vouch that the new account is e.g. from a woman older than 21 with an account in good standing, but disclose nothing more. I think I can work out a cryptographic scheme so that even the server cannot connect the two accounts, but everybody can verify the proof... but it is tricky.

Looking forward to verified celebrites and government members with alt-accounts posting controversial stuff under pseudonyms ;-) ... OK maybe not, when I think about it.

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

#274

Post by throwayyy479087 »

joshxyz wrote: post #149
nebqr wrote: post #97

I think that the (dead, gay) Something Awful forums model is a decent solution to content moderation and monetization. An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back. Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars. Change your avatar? 5 dollars. Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars. Ad free? 10 dollars. Access to archives (posts over a cer…

> Change someone else's avatar This is hilarious

On rdrama.net you can buy awards with karma or money. These let you you ban a user, unban users, force them to include text in any comment ("Trans Lives matter") is a common one, or turn all of their text sideways.

It's hilarious to use and seems sustainable.

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

#275

Post by i_like_pie »

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…

think this is spot on. allude to this here https://acehigh.substack.com/p/operatingproduct-plan-for-twi...

to add to your point: 1/ tech stack/architecture isn't #1 or even #10 issue. think everyone (all) agree on this 2/ larger issue is how to handle open discourse. given how we are wired as species, is there a social network that is truly open that doesn't descend into vitriol? if so - what behaviors are rewarded, what are the policies etc. - this is #1 question

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

#276

Post by jpadkins »

Vox_Leone wrote: post #185
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…

I think one of the key problems with twitter is the presence of constituted authorities interacting with the populace free from the formal mediation of official channels. I am in Brazil and I bring as an example the disastrous presence of Bolsonaro in the social networks, directly instructing his followers, completely free from institutional constraints. In the case of Brazil, this was a major element of destabilizat…

This is an interesting point! Can you give more detail or examples of 'institutional constraints' moderating public officials interactions with the public (in the past)? Are there rules or policy written down about what can/cannot be said that the institution enforces that goes against what the public leader wanted?

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

#277

Post by jalapenos »

I think posts like this illustrate why MBAs retain their power over organisations, despite the constant complaints about them by engineers. There couldn't be a greater perspective gap.

The "how" is the absolute last question, the "what" is the first.

Can you imagine the following conversation:

"Hey you should sign up to Facebook!"

"Oh, why?"

"It's got a great tech stack!".

Me nether.

To design an alternative Twitter you must first understand what made Twitter popular in the first place. And then at some point, in the far distant future, let the name of a tech into your head, or a line of code onto your screen.

Said in good faith. I know so many engineers who wasted so much time because they couldn't understand that outside of the constraints of a job their skills had no monetary value by default.

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

#278

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#279

Post by Kye »

nickdothutton wrote: post #222
ceejayoz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I expect this would end up like Netflix's algorithm bounty. It turned out no one could do much better than Netflix's own engineers. Twitter already had a system that worked in the form of sharable blocklists, but they hobbled and eventually removed it for some reason.

I could easily build my own just by iterating through the follower lists of prominent objectionable people to block them if Twitter didn't prevent it.

"It looks like you're using automation!"

No shit.

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

#280

Post by matai_kolila »

Great discussion, one thing I would throw out there is that while we're all used to having some kind of "unique" thing in the market that attracts users, I think in this case one could feature-for-feature copy Twitter, and as long as Elon Musk isn't in charge that would be the "differentiator".

I think in the next couple of years we'll see more of this (or should, anyway); companies that are very similar but with different operating philosophies competing for the same market.

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