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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

#291

Post by throwaway0asd »

You don't. You build something better.

Twitter is a form of low quality information broadcast in that roughly 10% of the active users post anything and the remaining 90% consume it, so at this point its basically just an overpriced RSS feed + friend of a friend logic (FOAF).

Social media is in decline, so building new social media is the last desperate resort of people seeking to broadcast their opinions in a venue they control. If you are like Elon Musk and have made enormous wealth by encouraging people to inflate the value of your stock then control of social media is important especially when your primary value channel is at risk of removal after calling people pedophiles or challenging the SEC. Same for Donald Trump.

For everybody else social media is either a party of deplorables or just a venue for mindless streaming entertainment (TikTok).

Unless you own large advertising media channels in need of eyeballs I would recommending investing all your time and money into that next thing that will replace social media out right.

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

#292

Post by dragonwriter »

> I was thinking, if I was to build a new micro-blogging aka Twitter alternative, what technological choices would I make to get it quickly off the ground but allow for scale?

This is fundamentally the wrong first question. The first question is “what is the problem with the existing Twitter compared to what some identified market wants that I am going to solve that will make my product a compelling alternative, and how do I solve it”? Technology comes after, and is shaped by, that decision.

Otherwise, even with optimal tech decisions, you end up at best with a Twitter clone with no users and no reason for people to choose it, abd a tech stack whose ability to scale doesn’t matter.

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

#293

Post by somethingreen »

pdinny wrote: post #253

I 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 m…

Town square is invoked because it is what worked for spreading new ideas before. It is spreading the new ideas part that is important in this context, not the particular historical vehicle for it.

The point of the public square proponents is that it would be nice if one of public platforms would step up to perform the function in a way suitable for it.

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

#294

Post by dave333 »

Applejinx wrote: post #231
istinetz wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.…

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.

Well how about if the millions determine which are the best tweets to show by default, but do it so that quality or novel content comes through and political snark and misinformation is hidden.

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

#296

Post by nonameiguess »

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".

It's the original design of Facebook. You had to join based on real-world membership in a pre-existing network, in this case a university. You only got to interact with people from your university.

There's something to be said for this. Schools have their problems. Plenty of drama, bullying, harassment, marginalization, extremism. But when it's limited to a school network, it doesn't swing national sentiment, aid and abet genocides, provide an outlet for foreign adversaries to subvert race relations in your country.

But it does mean ad campaigns can't have global reach.

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

#297

Post by CSMastermind »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #158
balaji1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inventing some protocol around the Dunbar number is interesting. There was something similar in the Weatherford's book on Genghis Khan [1][2]. This system was described to be very effective for communicating and coordinating the huge military. > In Genghis Khan's military system, a tumen was recursively built from units of 10 (aravt), 100 (zuut) and 1,000 (mingghan), each with a leader reporting to the next higher le…

Dunbar’s number is discredited reactionary nonsense, see wengrow/graeber research

As far as I can tell the vast majority of the scientific community still consider it valid.

I also discovered in searching that you're talking about David Graeber. I recently read his "Bullshit Jobs" book because someone on here cited it. It was one of the worst books I've ever read. It was clearly a contrived political manifesto (I suppose for "anarchy") with the thinnest veneer of popular science wrapped around it. I think ancient aliens probably got more anthropology correct.

So if you're going to appeal to an authority instead of actually transmitting the argument yourself then David Graeber seems like probably one of the worst you could pick to cite.

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

#298

Post by wahnfrieden »

CSMastermind wrote: post #297
wahnfrieden wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunbar’s number is discredited reactionary nonsense, see wengrow/graeber research

As far as I can tell the vast majority of the scientific community still consider it valid. I also discovered in searching that you're talking about David Graeber. I recently read his "Bullshit Jobs" book because someone on here cited it. It was one of the worst books I've ever read. It was clearly a contrived political manifesto (I suppose for "anarchy") with the thinnest veneer of popular science wrapped around it.…

oh so you didn’t read the research. googled one of the non graeber papers for ya since you decided you didn’t like the guy for his politics https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080?... you can find the full contents on scihub. I trust you can overcome your appeal to the authority of popularly engrained opinions

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

#299

Post by pclmulqdq »

fragile_frogs wrote: post #206
tootie wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was for desktop software. The era of buy it, download it and it's yours forever. Not an ongoing service.

Yeah, you would have to raise the one-time payment constantly in order to keep up with your own recurring costs, the more users you have the greater your costs will be.

You can also charge people their net present LTV upfront. For most forums, that's something like $10 worth of ads, which is why several popular forums worked well with a one-time $10 "pro" fee. You don't need recurring revenue from people to get their entire LTV, and you don't need an endowment to make that model sustainable. You need to make them pay you in whatever form maximizes your net present value (NPV).

Twitter, Facebook, and Google have used ads to collect revenue from their users in the past. SaaS apps and services today use recurring subscriptions, which is nice because it lets you match up your inflows to your outflows. Old desktop software, which had high recurring costs too, used single payments (although they also charged for updates). Modern desktop software tends to use subscription fees.

Companies need to make their revenue models match what customers expect in order to get payment. That means that you should be selling your SaaS as a subscription or a metered API even if you (hypothetically) do not have recurring costs. It also means that Twitter might have to stay with a $0/month fee and collect its revenue in the form of ads and "direct payments for services."

For Twitter, "influencers" might pay as much as $1000 for a "verified influencer" label on their profile despite that many of them are upset at $20/month, particularly if you make it annoying for them (so they feel that they are actually spending their money on getting "verified" and the verification will be hard to fake). Maybe you can get $100/year as a "renewal fee" on those labels, too. If you offered the rest of us a $50 "not a bot" green checkmark that takes a few custom photos and an ID, you will probably get plenty of those too.

It's all psychology. Fixed fees and recurring fees can have the same NPV. The game is maximizing that NPV.

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

#300

Post by meowface »

cnity wrote: post #129
azangru wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the royal 'we' as in all of humanity Sorry for being a prick; but the royal 'we' is the exact opposite of the 'we' in all of humanity. Royal 'we' is when the speaker refers to him-or-herself with the first-person plural pronoun, as was common among sovereigns ("we the Emperor of the French"). These days most commonly seen in academic articles, where single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason.

> single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason They mean "we" as in "you (the reader) and I (the author)". "We can see that", etc. It's as if the author is a guide on a journey.

Are you certain that's the intention? That's not how I've interpreted it in papers.
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