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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

#41

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. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.”

“Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?”

“No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”

=========

Your solution is somewhat similar. You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square. Going for the root of the problem, I suppose.

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

#42

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 course.

I have no way to distribute anything. I tried to do my own annotations board on literature but no one joined. I just think it sounds cool to be in a personable board like that.

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

#45
You know that image people share occasionally that illustrates how all the different functions of Craiglist were carved up into separate specialized apps? That’s what I think I’d personally like to see for Twitter.

Journalists that need a place to post live updates as well as links to their long-form stories? Make a platform that does that, and only that.

Bots that post a jpg every day? Make an app that does that and only that.

Get customer service by DMing companies directly because they respond on Twitter for some reason? Make an app that does that and only that.

And so on.

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

#46
post #19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think how is still an interesting question.

Interesting yes. But mainly a waste of time.

Depends the reason for asking it. I wrote this Ask HN because I thought I could maybe learn/discover something (technically) new from responses on how people would build this with today's knowledge and tech options.

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

#48
post #3

RSS People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds. No server side agorithm and api just returns feeds sorted by users preference. If I follow too many people to view chronological, then I can have client side algorithms to sort. Aggregate queries across all the feeds on the server identify hashtag trends and create useful metrics (retweets, likes, etc).

I like the idea of an RSS twitter but discovery needs to be solved. Maybe you could also automatically publish the feeds you're subscribed to?

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

#49
post #19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think how is still an interesting question.

Interesting yes. But mainly a waste of time.

Waste of time why?

Because you won’t become the next twitter, you probably won’t regardless….

I think there is more to asking the question than that.

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