I would probably try to involve sociologists who specialize in a relevant field. I cannot stop thinking that every sufficiently large social network so far seemed to degenerate into a complete cesspool. Some important bits seem to be missing
Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
301–310 of 351 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#302I 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…
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.…
Talk about an appeal to absurdity. The point is made, however, it's a bit hyperbolic.
In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square". You can't have society without some agreed-upon rules.
The real question is where are the lines, and how do you police them (and who polices the police, etc etc). It's not like we haven't solved those. It's just that the solutions themselves are imperfect like the world we live in.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#303Earlier 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.
I can't agree that "global public square don't work for humans" - but even if that were the case, it's still too late to just reverse course. As long it's possible, viable and largely desired, the market will spit out a solution to this need.
Is not too late at all. If you remove the "is not my responsibility what my users publish" for forums beyond X thousand users, every forum will stay under that limit and twitter quickly will become thousands of independent sub-twitters ala reddit. No home page aggregating everything, no suggested tweets, no
country-scale public square
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#304I 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…
A mixed model would be kind of interesting... Like, first time signing up it's free but if you get banned then you have to pay, if you get permabanned, tough luck.
That doesn't work because people just sign up again with a different email, bots can do this all day for free. Its the up-front payment method that makes it possible to effectively ban people.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#305Main suggestion would be to remove advertising, keep it boring, and limit the geographic reach (by default). So, kinda like a public utility, boring boring boring.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm 100% positive that reddit is the better model in general -- at least with the old UI that didn't have all the dark patters to force you to stay on. I still quit it over a year ago because I noticed I was very addicted to it.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#307Poaster in the house.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#308I 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…
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.…
Reminds me another short story i once read, Lexicographicide, by Taban Lo Liyong. The dictator, every year, eliminates certain letters from the alphabet, or was it words from the dictionary - it's decades since i read it. Thereafter none can use the same.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#309Earlier 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.
It's different now though... "publish" means much more than it used to. Now, if you want to share a picture with a few friends, that means "publishing" it on Facebook/IG/etc... It's no longer just a physical photo that is controlled by you. By moving personal interactions online, you lose a lot of control and things that used to be temporary are now permanent. I don't think that it's possible to put this genie back in the bottle, so the next best thing would be to have different levels of data permanence.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#310I 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…
Well actually, an alternative Twitter is still missing the point. Twitter *is* microblogging. The real question Elon should have asked is what's beyond Twitter, i.e. what should he have built instead of trying to pivot Twitter towards, with all its baggage?
Twitter was microblogging. Its massive growth in the early years was based around being able to turn SMS into a broadcast medium. From there it became a kind of worldwide water cooler. It was fun because it wasn't all that serious.
Twitter is Serious Internet Business now. Which is why most of the noise comes from a very few individuals and it is riddled with bots. The value of your opinion is based entirely on your number of followers.
Building an alternative is difficult. Google has tried and failed, multiple times. I think Elon would prefer for it to return to the water cooler days.