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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

#121

Post by ctvo »

The technical challenges are solved. It's not an interesting discussion to cheer for your favorite tech stack.

What's interesting is what value Twitter gives and what could a new platform target? For me, there's a slice of Twitter users that provide information, entertainment, and context that I can't get elsewhere. This could be something from a mid-level analyst re: market volatility or a college professor at a small Canadian university on Chinese politics. These people aren't consistent enough or polished enough to have established means of amplifying their opinions (a blog, newsletter, podcast, etc.) though they have so much domain expertise. Where do you find them? On Twitter. The low friction posting encourages them to share.

If I could get rid of the celebrities, the thought leaders, the self marketers, the low content hate, and the bots, and only be left with the above in a moderated environment I'd welcome this global town square.

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

#122

Post by TheCondor »

dimva wrote: post #80
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.…

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.

Maybe the internet isn’t a good analog of the square.

I’m sure there are taverns near any reader here where one could “say the wrong things” and be asked to leave or maybe roughed up or even worse. Those consequences might be an important part of this not-really-discourse-or-free-speech-but-we-want-to-treat-it-like-free-speech.

Hard to say what the best thing is. Huge parts of our society don’t like consequences for actions.

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

#124

Post by Gordonjcp »

annowiki wrote: post #42
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…

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, they knew exactly where to look, and why would you disturb that?

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

#125

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

istinetz wrote: post #41
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…

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.…

> 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 people to spread their thoughts, commentary and keep them semi-permanently online for a long time, decade or more.

I never stated I was solving the problem of people saying racist things. I'm challenging the assumption that designing a new social media platform should repeat existing designs that have public content with public comments driven by advertisements. In my opinion if someone designs with that premise it will end up the same as the existing social media platforms we have today (with a side effect of new JS frameworks being borne).

Is this the only product design Tech has: public content and sell advertisements?

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

#126

Post by kspacewalk2 »

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…

Let's think one level of abstraction higher - do we want to marginalize voices in the first place, given that some of them are fighting oppression and injustice, and others are advocating for bigotry and hate? That is, if we cannot effectively discriminate between those two types of voices, whether because "moderation doesn't scale" or any other valid technical reason, or because it's not always possible to disentangle "legitimate" from "illegitimate" marginalized voices. It's not a binary category, because people who advocate for stuff are not one-dimensional caricatures. Do we accept the bad in the name of $good_stuff_that_comes_with_making_marginalized_voices_heard, or do we marginalize it all straight into oblivion by going after the forums of spreading ideas?

The answer to this question seems almost implicit for you, but it's far from obvious to me.

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

#127

Post by shp0ngle »

Well, look at Trump.

Trump was kicked from Twitter, so he made an alternative one (Truth Social). It seems to be running on Mastodon, which is what you suggested; and he made some custom app, which you suggested.

Unfortunately, I cannot see Truth, as Truth is America-only, apparently.

edit: Gab made an alternative Twitter, also based on Mastodon.

You see... right-wingers _had_ to do alternative Twitters as they were kicked of the real one. They have an experience in this.

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

#128

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

marcusverus wrote: post #114
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. It's just that we, as in we the users, failed this great "public town square" because as soon as we get in the public we get scared and need to belong to a tribe: the Twitter tribe, the TikTok tribe, the Instagram tribe, and so…

> But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. A public square is "an open public area in a city or town where people gather". DNS is far too abstract to even remotely resemble a public square--just like "capitalism" or "zoning laws" are too abstract to resemble a public s…

DNS is the public town square: when using browsers, navigating across domains, we are all fundamentally gathered in the DNS space. Me having "foo.com" is akin to setting up a stall in this public town square and selling my vegetables, and you are free to visit "foo.com" and buy into my ideology, or simply never visit it.

And yes, precisely, "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", cannot, by definition, be digital public squares: they are just stalls, booths, were we go and check certain vegetables.

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

#129

Post by cnity »

azangru wrote: post #101
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…

> the royal 'we' as in all of humanity Sorry for being a prick; but the royal 'we' is the exact opposite of the 'we' in all of humanity. Royal 'we' is when the speaker refers to him-or-herself with the first-person plural pronoun, as was common among sovereigns ("we the Emperor of the French"). These days most commonly seen in academic articles, where single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason.

> 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.

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

#130

Post by dontbenebby »

I'll tell you what someone should have told Zuck.

You need to separate out the permissions for synchronous communication and async since we already build an "alternative twitter" in the 2000s -- it was called... SMS.

What you are going to need to do is VERY CLEARLY distinguish what is permission for lack of a better phrasing... "broadcast" from permission for synchronous comms, because those are two VERY different things, both in a social sense and in an IT sense.

(You do know what peer to peer means... right?)

I signed up for Facebook, and to me it was like "*Wait... do these goddamn pedophiles not know some of us went to computer camp?"

The air of entitlement off the folks I spidered off from that network of Harvard people was... intense.

For context, after Columbine, the school I was in told us how to dial out (9, then 911) and in parallel, told us if we wanted we could apply to the township police.

I didn't have the same ability to express myself back then, so I wasn't able to articulate what I will today, in a less threatening way:

Why the fuck would I call the police if someone shot my teachers? They abuse me. They smirk that they think it's funny because we have less money, we only get to sue them if it's a test case with the ACLU.

Right as I was getting to a point I could put it that simply, 9/11 happened, and it felt like they took those... techniques... and deployed them on the rest of the world. Which sucked, since back in 412, up until the Iraq war you could pump gas then go into the station to pay for it.

(They'd take down your plate if you drove off.)

Anyways, please include a voice chat option in your network... I am on the autistic spectrum, but I've gotten a lot better at spotting when someone is a literally a spy and voice gives a lot of information.

(Or you could skip all of the above, and focus on why people seem to need to move from network to network, when it feels like in a comedy context, we've known what's OK for a very long time?)

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