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Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
321–330 of 351 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#322For one, allow following hashtags as a first-class feature, and move them out of the tweet body. The problems with Twitter are not technical, they are baked into its design. 1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider…
Going to nerd out on you here and point out that in a six-degrees-of-separation situation, you'd need 7! retweets to reach everyone. Carry on!
Edit: or maybe 7! - 1
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#323> 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.
Not until you have enough users!
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#324I’d definitely use blockchain. Basically every tweet would go on the blockchain and if a tweet reaches 100 likes you could sell it to someone as an NFT.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#325Twitter seems like a great tool for organizations and people to make announcements to me, but a terrible format for providing actual content or conversation.
If I were to design something that would replace twitter what I would design would ultimately be way less popular, but I think it'd be a much better place, and if nothing too similar to original twitter could ever be created would lead to a better world (from my point of view) than one with twitter in it.
The short answer would be: I would as much as possible design it to not function as a place for discussion. It would exist, entirely, for people to share content they found interesting.
So if not conversation what would this platform be good for? Making announcements and linking to interesting content that is hosted on places that aren't twitter.
Step one in achieving this would be to eliminate the concept of "threads". If I never see another 30 tweet long thread that should have been a fucking blog post somewhere it will be too soon. (I'd be perfectly happy to build in long form content tools that this platform would host and could be linked to in "!tweets", just that they wouldn't show up in "!tweet" feeds).
Step two would be to as much as possible limit or discourage things like commenting. You could "retweet" something you found interesting with a comment on it, but you can't comment on anyone else's tweet directly. They will not be shown your "retweet" unless they follow you.
So that'd be my version. Basically the people you follow can "tweet" links to content that exists elsewhere, along with a short amount of text describing why you care. Alternatively they can do a (single, not a thread of) "tweet" which is just text in order to enable things like small status updates, "Just letting everyone who follows me know I survived the earthquake", or "We have sold out of the cinnamon biscuits" type of things.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#326For one, allow following hashtags as a first-class feature, and move them out of the tweet body. The problems with Twitter are not technical, they are baked into its design. 1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider…
Going to nerd out on you here and point out that in a six-degrees-of-separation situation, you'd need 7! retweets to reach everyone. Carry on! Edit: or maybe 7! - 1
What do you mean? Six degrees of separation implies that you can connect with any person on Earth with just 6 hops.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#327I 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 was a very intelligent and targeted way of not answering the question.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#328I 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…
Hmm... If all of humanity would be better off as you say, then then why should the royal we have have to deal with racist voters? Or racist people going about free in public at all?
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#329Earlier 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".
I would say it’s also a mix of nextdoor - both of which are still just as toxic. Tempted to say the problem is just the internet breeding toxicity in general. Maybe we could all do better with less internet and more nature time
Nextdoor is very indicative of where you live. There are often time joyous earnest "here's a pretty picture of a bird" posts, and if you live somewhere nice, typically rural, there's not even the usual dreck.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#330I 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.
The old "town square" worked fairly well...for a bunch of people who already had a lot of other social ties, shared social norms, and were (socially) pretty heavily invested in their communities. When those other conditions were not met (say, Saturday night and a crowd of cowboys from a cattle drive, or laborers from a nearby RR construction project, or ...), then the old town square absolutely did NOT work for the good, long-term locals.
On the internet, enforcing the preconditions needed for the town square to work well is difficult at best.