Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 351 posts

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

#341

Post by btbuildem »

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 a real public square, moderation is both official (the police, keeping the peace or enforcing authoritarian oppression, depending on where you are) and organic (a loudmouth nazi sympathizer getting knocked out and nobody-having-seen-anything).

Not that the IRL public square is immune to rule-breaking. In the heat of the moment, a mob can do horrendous things in a flash.

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

#342

Post by btbuildem »

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.

The question of scale is extremely relevant here. It's a well-known phenomenon that as organized/structured entities grow, there are certain thresholds at which they transmute - the structure itself changes to support the new level of scale.

In terms of human groups, we've traditionally dealt with this by means of hierarchies (with all the built-in shortcomings).

Personally, I find a homogenous mob terrifying. Being in agreement with millions of others implies that the subject of the agreement is extremely basic and common (like "we all need air to breathe").

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

#343

Post by btbuildem »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #124
annowiki wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have me thinking about kind of a cool board idea. 150 person twitter boards. Cap it at 150. People in that group can all vote on their own moderation, they can't interact with groups in other boards through quote tweeting or voting, though obviously they can copy paste. You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once. 150 being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number of co…

> You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once. You don't have to shut them down, you know. The British Government did this all throughout the 1970s to 1990s, where pubs (and later online services) where Republican terrorists hung out were very much left alone. They could have swooped in and scooped the lot up, but they didn't. Because if they ever did want to scoop them all up, th…

I've always thought that was the right way to handle it -- allow people to self-express, however abhorrent they may be. For the worst offenders, dedicate resources to make sure no harm is done (for example, monitor these watering-wells for any activity indicative of planning a terrorist attack, etc).

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

#344

Post by pc86 »

memetomancer wrote: post #246
pc86 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact. There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.

| Particularly disgusting A phrase particularly lacking in decency, making you a bad actor on this forum. Especially when you are wrong. It takes an elevated sense of self-importance to say that because you don't like a moderate opinion it is palpably revolting. Twitter isn't a technical problem, as others have pointed out. It is a social problem. One that leads to behavior just as intolerant and dvisive as Fox News…

My supposed lack of decency has nothing to do with whether I'm acting in good faith or not.

> a moderate opinion

> > Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have.

Tenuous argument that Twitter === "global public square" notwithstanding, saying some people don't warrant a public square is not a moderate opinion. It's borderline fascist, and disgusting is the most civil word I would use to describe it.

> Nobody in the U.S. can escape the grandstanding, the vitriol, the ostracizing, or the influence that the forum represents.

Oh please. If you're not on Twitter what does the ratioing or "ostracizing" do to your day to day? Even if you are, unless you're commonly delving into hot button topics or conversations between people you don't follow, there is very little drama unless you want there to do. I almost exclusively follow people I haven't met in real life, who are doing cool things in the tech space. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been subject to either grandstanding or vitriol, and I'm fairly active on the platform.

> If we all pull together we can get through this, I just know it.

Get through what? Musk buying Twitter isn't some apocalyptic event. Unless you're the type of sad person who gets their entire sense of self worth from having a little blue check mark next to your name, or you think it's generally a bad thing that people have a place to speak their mind, this will almost certainly be a complete non-issue. Have some dignity.

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

#345

Post by matt-attack »

bambax wrote: post #145
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square "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. Social media like twitter allows millions of peop…

> "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…

Nextdoor is literally this. It’s twitter/Reddit but for geographically isolated groups.

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

#346

Post by goldenchrome »

pjc50 wrote: post #221
istinetz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, humble suggestion - remove yourself from the public square, but don't destroy it for me. That way, you get to not hear racist stuff, and I get to not have my morality chosen by random americans.

Not hearing the stuff does not prevent someone who does hear the stuff from breaking into your house with a hammer, as Paul Pelosi discovered.

Do you think if someone hit your 82 year old grandfather on the head with a steel hammer that he would “make a full recovery”?

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

#347

Post by BizarroLand »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #34

If you want to design an alternative Twitter then my advice would be to not start with the tech. There seems to be plenty of stuff out there than you can bolt together to get things started, and which comes with options for scaling if you subsequently need it . Some thoughts: - Start with thinking about how you're going to maintain engagement without pushing people into algorithmically-generated echo chambers, or int…

For real. What is plausible and what is maintainable should be very high on the list.

When a social media site runs on ads, it will inevitably begin to shift to being advertiser friendly. When it's a paid site, it will struggle to get users. Might be worth investigating a Patreon or Reddit type funding, where paid users get benefits, awards that can be handed out, message amplification and ad blocking, but where anyone can create an account.

It might be useful to also integrate the Brave browser format where the users get credit for viewing ads that can be traded to other people or spent in an online store for fabulous toys and prizes.

The reason I'm saying all of this is that what an alternative to Twitter needs in order to serve the people is a funding method that does not rely on stocks and shareholders, but that also has a method to manage invasive business practice while remaining profitable. The system should be technically owned by the people and therefore be a place that people would want to gather together without the worry of money having to change hands in order to use it or have a painless experience.

Aside from that, it should offer frictionless open APIs to developers (That should help minimize echo chambers or at least provide an easy way to step out of your echo chambers without abandoning them.

People need a place to speak and think and breathe without ads and agendas being shoved on them, where ordinary people can speak freely to other people and be evaluated on the quality of their thoughts and posts and not on artificial amplification of weaponized memes and polarizing agendas crafted to serve the financial desires of the wealthy elite.

Also, you can't trust one person (even yourself) to hold the line against the riches and power of the world, you can't trust even an organization founded on the purest of intentions (like Mozilla) to be able to resist both the peaceful and hostile machinations of such people should you reach market saturation.

The company charter would need to be built on principals designed to prevent the consolidation of power and control over the platform into the hands of the few, with some system in place to enable the people to eject other people from the platform entirely. I'm not sure what that would be, maybe every 3 months the top 10-1000 accounts get put to a vote (from verified human account users) and if there are enough votes then those accounts get memorialized and the user has to take 3 months off from the platform and then create a new account.

Sorry for the brain dump, but these are things that might have either improved Twitter or prevented it from becoming a billionaire's plaything and are therefore things I would like to see in whatever rises from its Phoenix Ashes.

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

#348

Post by BizarroLand »

godshatter wrote: post #264
ceejayoz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "powerful", I hear "complicated". If you're on Twitter and you get targeted by, say, Ben Shapiro, the horde that comes at you isn't trivially filterable/blockable. There'll be thousands of them, and they're creative; just like spammers/phishers, they make a game out of evading mitigation measures. At volume, this is a very tough problem to solve.

Let people create whitelists as well as blacklists when it comes to letting users post replies so that they can go "whitelist only" when that happens, at least until the furor dies down.

Brilliant. Whitelist only mode would be that only the people you follow and who follow you can message you, and the ability to mention, ping, or find you is turned off.

That's so easy that a Jr. Programmer of moderate talent could whip that up in a long weekend.

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

#349

Post by mradek »

BizarroLand wrote: post #348
godshatter wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let people create whitelists as well as blacklists when it comes to letting users post replies so that they can go "whitelist only" when that happens, at least until the furor dies down.

Brilliant. Whitelist only mode would be that only the people you follow and who follow you can message you, and the ability to mention, ping, or find you is turned off. That's so easy that a Jr. Programmer of moderate talent could whip that up in a long weekend.

They work 84h a week so yes totally doable.
Post reply on HN