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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

#311

Post by rozhok »

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.

I did it once in my career. We've had one legacy PHP project designed to work for MySQL. I was in charge of bringing it back to live and I decided to host in on Heroku for the sake of simple deployment. While Heroku does have MySQL addons I opted for using Postgres.

So we've just switched underlying connection and fixed a dozen of (mostly reports) places with plain SQL queries with MySQL-specific syntax. ORM library handled rest just perfectly.

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

#312

Post by peterhunt »

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.

I think it's fairly common to swap out your core datastore when you take your prototype / MVP and bring it to production, or the first time your product experiences hypergrowth. At point the codebase, schema and team are still small enough that this is feasible. In fact I suspect every Firestore app that hits any degree of scale swaps out the DB for at least a subset of the app.

So I agree with you with this one important exception.

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

#314

Post by Vox_Leone »

jpadkins wrote: post #276
Vox_Leone wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>> 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?

Well, I can't give an answer from a legal point of view, because I'm looking for it myself. But in various instances of life we see the requirement of formality between authorities and the public. In fact, all public interaction with the state is formal.

Here's a problem: the state has a set of international commitments, but the head of that state makes personal statements that go against the very official line of the government he leads [the case of Bolsonaro in Brazil]. Catalyzed by the dynamics of the network This quickly turns into another front of disinformation. The public is completely at the mercy of the machinations of the powerful entity.

I don't think there is anything in the Republican rules that precludes proper legislation on this subject.

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

#317

Post by janalsncm »

nonameiguess wrote: post #296
kjellsbells wrote: post #164

Earlier 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".

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…

One other benefit of tying online groups to offline groups is that they are able to moderate themselves. Schools aren’t perfect but they can deal with cyber bullying if all parties are students at that school.

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

#318

Post by istinetz »

r00fus wrote: post #302
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.…

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 t…

>In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square".

No. You want moderation, because you don't want people saying The Bad Things™, but it's not an absolute property of all discussion.

Otherwise - you're missing the point that GP wants to destroy twitter in it's current form because we don't need a public square. It's not a matter of where we draw the lines for moderation.

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

#320

Post by drc500free »

baxtr wrote: post #13

Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb. If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around. Which existing social networks (not media on…

But focusing on the product doesn't address what color the logo should be, or how many bikes can fit in the employee bikeshed.
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