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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

#331

Post by mdp2021 »

mbreese wrote: post #309
mdp2021 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

> By moving personal interactions online

And by saying that, do not you get a vibe that makes you go "Wait a minute there...".

> different levels of data permanence

It makes more sense to discriminate "personal common spaces" and "The Public Statements of Sam Artist / of Noam Thinker / of Henry Statesman / of Theodor Ruler".

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

#332

Post by dusted »

I'd use blawg chain technology (if you don't know what that is, look it up in a few weeks when I've finished the toiletpaper).

I'd build a desktop only native application. You'll have to route ports down to your desktop to receive incoming connections, maintain a list of peer nodes in a text-file by hand.

It won't even support encryption, but you can always post base64 encoded pubkey encrypted stuff if you want to.

Everyone will be a content moderator, but nobody can really do anything but remove messages from their local storage (I don't know how moderation can even work with blawg chain technology, I'll have to keep this in mind when I write the toiletpaper).

There won't be algorithmic content federation though.. There will be a list of posts from everyone on the network, and there will be another list of posts from people you follow, and a third list of posts from people who follow you.

It will start off as a joke, but a few.. special people.. will see it as the answer to everything and it will become a booming success and make everyone, except myself, very wealthy.

It's going to be wonderful, I promise.

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

#333

Post by pdinny »

somethingreen wrote: post #293
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.

I agree that it would be nice if more platforms facilitated this kind of exchange . I don't see Twitter doing this at all. The majority of my observations suggest ideas being lobbed at high speed, attached to a heavy object.

Besides that I'm unconvinced that this kind of platform for spreading new ideas is what most users on Twitter want from Twitter. The metaphor has become repeated so often that it almost sounds like it is Twitter's reason to be but I rather doubt that it was designed with that in mind.

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

#334

Post by feoren »

meowface wrote: post #300
cnity wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm sure conventions differ, but in Mathematics papers, yes, that is the idea behind "we".

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

#335

Post by cnity »

meowface wrote: post #300
cnity wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You know, I'm not actually certain. But it's how I've interpreted it and been taught to interpret it in academic circles, albeit unofficially. If anyone has any formal indication that it means otherwise I'd love to read more about it. I'm also interested in your interpretation.

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

#336

Post by dalmo3 »

wufufufu wrote: post #118
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…

What if we let people design their own content filters? That way the platform itself doesn't have to. You can easily select popular filters from a marketplace and the number one option will probably be "hide hate speech" or "hide all politics".

Until your list of "popular filters" include ones such as "hide jews" or "hide blacks", following clamours for a central authority to ban those filters, or to shut down the entire platform.

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

#337

Post by twishmay »

The Anti Social Network

Here is our humble take on a new MVP much better Twitter where you:

* discover links using swipes * curate & share stream feeds * follow ideas not people

https://mutter.cards

Check this out, and help us build this better, by sharing your suggestions on:

feedback@psytech.ai

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

#338

Post by naravara »

MereInterest wrote: post #225
naravara wrote: post #134

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. I disagree that it's a fallacy, the issue is that platforms have an interest in claiming themselves to be a public square. But the platform is not the square THE INTERNET, which is to say the open World Wide Web, is the public square. Platforms are the individ…

> The racist shitheads will find their spaces, but they only start to multiply when they're able to wheedle their fearmongering propaganda in front of people who wouldn't otherwise want anything to do with them. The problem with this approach is group polarization [0], the tendency for groups with similar opinions to become more extreme and entrenched over time. The danger posed by bigots is not just from their numbe…

I actually think having large, centralized platforms actually makes the polarization problem worse because they encourage usage habits that keep people only within the milieu they've had curated for them within that platform. A more confederated system, like having multiple independent fora, means most people can dabble in and out of multiple different communities at once and not have their perspective on how the world is skewed in the same sort of systematic way.

Sure some people will go down the rabbit hole anyway, but then they will limit their reach by virtue of being too extreme to appeal to "normal" or moderate people who don't think about this stuff too deeply and are put off by extremism reflexively. When things are more centralized, there's sort of a one-way ratcheting effect where you get exposed to mild versions of the thing enough to start getting into it, and then slowly get pulled into more and more extreme versions. That doesn't happen with forums that each have their own culture and identity, there isn't as much transitional/interstitial space to acclimatize you. You just jump in, read the vibe without being preconditioned, and make your instinctual call on whether you'd like to stay.

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

#339

Post by naravara »

somethingreen wrote: post #232
naravara wrote: post #134

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. I disagree that it's a fallacy, the issue is that platforms have an interest in claiming themselves to be a public square. But the platform is not the square THE INTERNET, which is to say the open World Wide Web, is the public square. Platforms are the individ…

Usual argument is that your solution also "works" if you replace racists with, say, abolitionists at the point in history when the general public consensus was that slavery is just fine (except with internet). Enabling good ideas to spill out of their origin communities into general public discourse is the main point of "public square" and "free speech" concepts.

They can still spill out through activist work, they just can't be as easily astroturfed by troll-farms so people will have to come by their influence honestly, through moral suasion and persuasive powers.
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