As seen on twitch, letting people put emojis in their name on a black and white site sets up a system where scanning eyes just see those eye-candies and skip over the rest. This is useful on twitch as it highlights the streamer's paying subscribers but here it's just whoever is more obnoxious.
Text-Only Social Network
31–40 of 240 posts
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#32I've been trying to make something along those lines at podaero.com, and I'm actually trying to get HN users to join some of the small groups... see here if interested https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod
I did try signing up. The second I ran into the activity requirement quota I quickly got out of there. That's a huge red flag for me, why is there a quota imposed on me? Are you paying users or something? Why expect free work to be done?
I'm experimenting with it and I might get rid of it. It's mostly just to try to keep the group active, because it's a small group and if the activity level dies out, the group dies out.
But thanks for the feedback, I'm making a note of it.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#33How about adding a `latest top level posts' page? Many posts that you see on the search page don't make sense without seeing the post they're in reply to.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#34As seen on twitch, letting people put emojis in their name on a black and white site sets up a system where scanning eyes just see those eye-candies and skip over the rest. This is useful on twitch as it highlights the streamer's paying subscribers but here it's just whoever is more obnoxious.
Putting a filter: grayscale(); over the title makes the emojis melt more into the text. it makes it a bit more readable.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#35"About -> Limitations: ASCII only because it works everywhere" This should be in the features. It is the strongest selling point of the site as I see it.
So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”? Yikes. These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband. No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reas…
I agree with the overall sentiment of your comment but..
> It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about the same complexity.
At minimum, unicode does come with a lot of complexity in implementation, and a lot of potential vulnerabilities due to that complexity.
Not saying that excuses all websites, modern DBs handle unicode just fine after all, and the browser takes care of the rendering - (although some might crash your computer), and there are usually builtins for serverside web languages to help you sanitise strings... still, things would be way simpler with any fixed word <8bit encoding without glyph manipulation builtin. So yeah, it's complex, but it's usually worth it.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#36"About -> Limitations: ASCII only because it works everywhere" This should be in the features. It is the strongest selling point of the site as I see it.
So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”? Yikes. These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband. No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reas…
I don't think it was a technical decision. It sounds like a stylistic choice, I suspect in the sentiment of "everyone on the platform should be able to understand each other, no one should be locked off from interesting conversations due to a language barrier", and from there they selected the lowest common denominator language.
To play devil's advocate, I don't think your exampled limitations are meaningful handicaps. Money can be discussed as GBP or EUR. With context it's easy to understand 90F as temperature, and unicode quotes are hardly a compelling restriction.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#37"About -> Limitations: ASCII only because it works everywhere" This should be in the features. It is the strongest selling point of the site as I see it.
So this is not just a text-only social network, it is also an English-only social network.
Really, as long as other people make text-only social networks for other languages, maybe that's a good thing. I'm not sure that having all languages on one social network really buys the user anything (esp. since they can switch to other social networks for other conversations).
It buys the company running the social network something, if they're trying to have literally billions of users. But I'm not sure that's a good thing for the users, either.
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#38"About -> Limitations: ASCII only because it works everywhere" This should be in the features. It is the strongest selling point of the site as I see it.
So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”? Yikes. These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband. No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reas…
What makes technical reasons so special? Why are they the only valid reasons to restrict the character set?
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#39How are you handling content moderation?
Re: Text-Only Social Network
#40So it's Twitter but with no features? Why?
Without media it could be run at scale cheaper
What will happen is that people will just post links to imgur/giphy etc like they used to when Twitter came out.
Eventually for convenience they’d start getting embedded on the page.
The tracking implications with embedding media would occur. The media would either be proxied (same/more? bandwidth usage, less storage needed though) or just self hosted and then we’re back to Twitter again.
Twitter added features for a reason