[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
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Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
So much talk about Twitter alternatives in recent days, including
people migrating to Mastodon and even Jack Dorsey announcing his
new decentralized social media platform. I was thinking, if I was
to build a new micro-blogging aka Twitter alternative, what
technological choices would I make to get it quickly off the ground
but allow for scale? What database technology or approach would
you go for? Would you build a (mobile first) web application first
or would you start straight away with a native iOS/Android app
(maybe Flutter)? Would you go for a centralised or decentralized
approach? If the latter, how would you decentralize it without
sacrificing the "public town square" effect that Twitter currently
has but is clearly lacking with the fragmentation of Mastodon? To
answer my own question, I would probably build a centralized
platform like Twitter is now, probably opt for a fast NoSQL
database like Google's Firestore in Datastore mode and to keep
things simple I would probably even make sure that tweets would get
automatically deleted after some years as I don't think it's needed
to build a forever growing database of people's thoughts in that
moment that persists for decades to come. Micro-blogging always
felt to me as a thing right now, a thought in this moment but that
thought could be different in a few days, months and definitely a
few years, so why store it forever. Feels like I could save a huge
operational cost and prevent abuse by not keeping tweets for beyond
their relevancy. What are your thoughts?
Author : dustedcodes
Score : 133 points
Date : 2022-11-01 11:09 UTC (11 hours ago)
| osrec wrote:
| I would keep it simple on the tech side, and would probably stick
| with an SQL DB, along with a solid full text indexing service
| running separately for search.
|
| From a UI perspective, I would probably also improve the way
| threads are shown, as currently I find it impossible to follow
| conversations on Twitter.
| srcmap wrote:
| What about this: Use SQLite.
|
| Make it one SQLite file per user. All the read/write are
| parallelized per user. Backup db file would be smaller, easier.
| Each service node can handle N users, less for heavy follow
| users. Should be easier to scale horizontally the with user count
| by adding system nodes and Storage, networks, web handling
| process.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Where do you put cross-user events? Like retweets or likes?
| geysersam wrote:
| Interesting idea. However, how do you query things like "list
| the followers of this user"?
|
| Edit: search also becomes difficult
| freeplay wrote:
| Interesting concept but it falls apart pretty quickly once you
| start adding in the "social" parts of the network.
|
| Also, you're still going to need to index all posts somewhere.
| Unless you don't want search functionality on your site.
| uptownJimmy wrote:
| First, we redesign the humans.
| exabrial wrote:
| Honestly, this is a bunch of excitement over nothing. I would
| move on.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| 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.
| _rm wrote:
| I think posts like this illustrate why MBAs retain their power
| over organisations, despite the constant complaints about them by
| engineers. There couldn't be a greater perspective gap.
|
| The "how" is the absolute last question, the "what" is the first.
|
| Can you imagine the following conversation:
|
| "Hey you should sign up to Facebook!"
|
| "Oh, why?"
|
| "It's got a great tech stack!".
|
| Me nether.
|
| To design an alternative Twitter you must first understand what
| made Twitter popular in the first place. And then at some point,
| in the far distant future, let the name of a tech into your head,
| or a line of code onto your screen.
|
| Said in good faith. I know so many engineers who wasted so much
| time because they couldn't understand that outside of the
| constraints of a job their skills had no monetary value by
| default.
| nprateem wrote:
| Well actually, an alternative Twitter is still missing the
| point. Twitter *is* microblogging.
|
| The real question Elon should have asked is what's beyond
| Twitter, i.e. what should he have built instead of trying to
| pivot Twitter towards, with all its baggage?
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Twitter was microblogging. Its massive growth in the early
| years was based around being able to turn SMS into a
| broadcast medium. From there it became a kind of worldwide
| water cooler. It was fun because it wasn't all that serious.
|
| Twitter is Serious Internet Business now. Which is why most
| of the noise comes from a very few individuals and it is
| riddled with bots. The value of your opinion is based
| entirely on your number of followers.
|
| Building an alternative is difficult. Google has tried and
| failed, multiple times. I think Elon would prefer for it to
| return to the water cooler days.
| simonw wrote:
| Don't delete my content because you don't think it will be
| interesting to me in the future.
| sixothree wrote:
| I know this isn't your question, but I would disallow media of
| any sort. I feel like it is contrary to the spirit of the
| platform and adds to moderation cost.
| freeplay wrote:
| I love this idea but the mainstream will hate it. Short
| attention spans need memes and reaction gifs.
| fareesh wrote:
| Decentralized, free, anonymous and out of reach of the
| kleptocracy. This is impossible presently since they own all the
| internet infrastructure.
| tough wrote:
| You mean you can't scale to giant without the kleptocracy
| blessing in 2022?
|
| There's lots of bare metal around
| fareesh wrote:
| Still have to go through the undersea cables!
| shubhamjain wrote:
| > I would probably even make sure that tweets would get
| automatically deleted after some years as I don't think it's
| needed to build a forever growing database of people's thoughts
| in that moment that persists for decades to come.
|
| IMO, that's an absurd proposal completely detached from reality.
| I wholeheartedly care about what I write/post on any site. It's a
| trip down the memory lane. Even on Hacker News when I see what I
| posted in my earliest days, I feel proud of how much I have grow
| since then. I would be pretty pissed if I can't trust the fact
| that what I post won't be preserved.
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| hoseja wrote:
| First I would make a thought-beam in my secret volcano lair. Then
| I would get some off-the shelf twitter clone. Then I would beam
| the instruction to use it into a couple billion people's brains.
| powera wrote:
| One key feature change: messages travel at 500mph.
|
| Send a tweet from New York, it takes six hours before people on
| the West Coast see it.
|
| (if you pay $20 per month, maybe it only takes two hours).
| anthropodie wrote:
| I said this in another Twitter thread and I will say it again
|
| Here's an idea: stop trying to fix social media and instead try
| to connect with people in real life and we as a society might be
| happy again
| amai wrote:
| Maybe something more like https://pol.is/ ?
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I wouldn't. Twitter is a garbage heap of trash that is no use to
| nobody and should die a forgotten death.
| matt_s wrote:
| 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 very valid points,
| that people don 't like to hear, about how the concept of
| someone/group choosing what MarginalizedVoice gets heard and what
| doesn't isn't fair. If the basis of a platform is "public town
| square" you're going to have to deal with _all_
| MarginalizedVoices.
|
| Content moderation (incl comments) doesn't scale so don't build
| something with public town squares. That's only a feature
| platform builders want in order to sell advertisements. If the
| thought of not having an ad-driven platform leads you to "users
| won't pay for it" then maybe think of a platform users would pay
| for or some other way to have it be sustainable.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| There are plenty of hateful and racist things said on Twitter
| like : "all I want for Christmas is white genocide."
|
| But no one blinks an eye. So HatefulRacistUncle might be
| "HorriblyMisguidedAndRacistYoungCollegeStudent" and that's also
| not ok to some of us.
|
| So who polices this? Maybe we just go back to not reading
| things we dislike. You can block people on Twitter ya know.
| kenjackson wrote:
| People saying hateful things isn't the problem. The inability
| of some to be reasonable after reading them is the problem.
|
| It's a much harder problem to fix. There are some partial
| solutions, IMO. Although none are all that practical to
| implement.
| azangru wrote:
| > 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.
| cnity wrote:
| > 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.
| meowface wrote:
| Are you certain that's the intention? That's not how I've
| interpreted it in papers.
| tough wrote:
| Oh, nice, would have never guessed
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| I think one of the key problems with twitter is the presence of
| constituted authorities interacting with the populace free from
| the formal mediation of official channels. I am in Brazil and I
| bring as an example the disastrous presence of Bolsonaro in the
| social networks, directly instructing his followers, completely
| free from institutional constraints. In the case of Brazil,
| this was a major element of destabilization of public
| discourse.
|
| I am convinced that the presence of authorities on social media
| has to be regulated, and if I were to launch an alternative to
| Twitter I would consider [and look for ways to] build ethical
| safeguards [concerning public officials] into the system.
| jpadkins wrote:
| This is an interesting point! Can you give more detail or
| examples of 'institutional constraints' moderating public
| officials interactions with the public (in the past)? Are
| there rules or policy written down about what can/cannot be
| said that the institution enforces that goes against what the
| public leader wanted?
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| >> Are there rules or policy written down about what
| can/cannot be said that the institution enforces that goes
| against what the public leader wanted?
|
| Well, I can't give an answer from a legal point of view,
| because I'm looking for it myself. But in various instances
| of life we see the requirement of formality between
| authorities and the public. In fact, all public interaction
| with the state is formal.
|
| Here's a problem: the state has a set of international
| commitments, but the head of that state makes personal
| statements that go against the very official line of the
| government he leads [the case of Bolsonaro in Brazil].
| Catalyzed by the dynamics of the network This quickly turns
| into another front of disinformation. The public is
| completely at the mercy of the machinations of the powerful
| entity.
|
| I don't think there is anything in the Republican rules
| that precludes proper legislation on this subject.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| One of the great/terrible things that's happened to
| communication over my lifetime is watching shared experience
| fragment. When I was a child most people used to read the same
| newspapers, watch similar TV. (It was boring!) Nowadays we're
| fragmented into different pieces of the Internet, which sucks
| even more.
|
| Twitter is part of that fragmentation, but it also accomplished
| something decent that competitors like Reddit _don 't_: while
| there are individual communities, the follow interface made
| them somewhat porous. People can slide into conversations or
| get boosted by just about anyone. Making this work without
| local "subreddit-style moderators" was really technically
| remarkable, just from a spam perspective. Making moderation
| work to the point where a company could actually run
| advertising was extremely impressive.
|
| I don't know what you're calling for exactly, but it sounds a
| whole lot more fragmented than what Twitter accomplished. I
| don't know that this will be a better outcome.
| abeppu wrote:
| I don't think it's necessary to totally kill the 'public
| square' concept. Rather, I think comparison with other social
| media products highlight that different product decisions
| encourage different behavior for most people. People just use
| Twitter differently from TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc,
| because of the informational and social environment these
| products create. These natural experiments can give us
| hypotheses about more explicit A/B tests for product changes:
|
| - Does LinkedIn show us that people have less hostile posts if
| their real world professional connections are watching? If
| Twitter tried to show your posts to people it thinks you know,
| whether or not you follow each other, would we all be more
| civil?
|
| - Does the higher bar of needing to generate an image or video
| to post (and a 2nd class presentation of comments) on some
| platforms, and lack of explicit 'reply' functionality stop
| arguments or bickering? The bar of typing a post in Twitter is
| just too low?
|
| - Does TikTok's recommendation based on behavior rather than
| "interests" create less polarized bubbles? Showing you a funny
| dance video just because it knows you'll watch it may disrupt
| you from seeking out The Enemy just to disagree with them.
|
| - Does removing an asymmetric "follow" relationship in favor of
| symmetrical "connections" disarm people whose hobby is having
| incendiary positions? If you can only have more "audience" by
| opening yourself up to see stuff from more people, do you then
| choose to connect with people that add value rather than
| valuing followers who will amplify you?
| ianai wrote:
| Agree. If anything I'd make it like a cross between FB-early
| days and twitter. i.e. whatever a post is only immediately
| view-able by direct contacts. Maybe even top off how many
| direct contacts an account can have and require payment
| (monthly/yearly, tiered) above that threshold. Also give users
| the ability to mute/delete posts unilaterally - from their view
| but also possibly from the site entirely. Maybe have an "auto-
| disconnect" available above a threshold. Trying to think of
| ways around the mob mentality stuff.
| istinetz wrote:
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| 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
| themselves are imperfect like the world we live in.
| istinetz wrote:
| >In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is
| absolutely required for any "public square".
|
| No. _You_ want moderation, because you don 't want people
| saying The Bad Things(tm), but it's not an absolute
| property of all discussion.
|
| Otherwise - you're missing the point that GP wants to
| destroy twitter in it's current form because we don't need
| a public square. It's not a matter of where we draw the
| lines for moderation.
| matt_s wrote:
| > 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?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >"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.
|
| and if you're a crazy person or verbally abusive or maybe
| just shouting things that while maybe true are insulting to
| the public morality then the police come and carry you
| away.
| bad416f1f5a2 wrote:
| Or picketed so their speech is drowned out, or even
| punched in the nose by passers by.
|
| You can argue if this is good or bad, but it's a
| fundamental difference between the public square and
| digital recreations: in the real world, speech can have
| meaningful consequences. In the Twitter world, you create
| a new profile.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| It feels like a problem of scale. One person shouting and
| getting carried away, whoever is right or wrong in that
| scenario, is still one person. Now extend that to
| everyone shouting at everyone in what has become the de
| facto public square and the stakes involved in deciding
| who to carry away feel existential in scale.
| naravara wrote:
| > "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 individual bars and pubs and
| cafes that line the squares and boulevards.
|
| Each cafe and pub has the right to set its own rules for
| entry and set its own vibe and culture, but when there is
| an oligopoly of bars who are all megalomaniacs wanting to
| own the whole thing and keep people locked in their
| establishments for as long as possible, that does not lend
| itself to having a healthy community or vibe in any one of
| them.
|
| Let people self-segregate and affiliate with the
| communities they want to. 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.
| MereInterest wrote:
| > 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 numbers, but also the
| degree of violence used to enforce their bigotry. In
| addition, having pre-established communication makes it
| easier to organize violence, even with a small proportion
| of the population.
|
| I don't have a solution to these problems, as much as I
| wish I did, but wanted to bring them up as issues.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization
| somethingreen wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| > _" 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 messages from people that
| are actually near you. If you move, you see different
| messages.
|
| Or the distance could be ideological -- or better,
| theoretical.
|
| Any user would have to choose a place on a "map" / a set of
| coordinates. A user can move freely at any time, but
|
| - messages can't move and stay where the user was when they
| were posted
|
| - messages can only be seen when the user is near them.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Isnt your proposal basically Reddit? Subreddits are nodes
| that require you to be close to them to see whats going
| on (via joining the sub), with a public square,
| /r/popular, artificially built from the top posts on
| those nodes. For some definition of "top".
| taylodl wrote:
| Interesting. My use of Twitter has waned over the years
| while my use of Reddit has increased...I guess I'm voting
| with my time that Reddit is the better model.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I'm 100% positive that reddit is the better model in
| general -- at least with the old UI that didn't have all
| the dark patters to force you to stay on. I still quit it
| over a year ago because I noticed I was very addicted to
| it.
| raunak wrote:
| I would say it's also a mix of nextdoor - both of which
| are still just as toxic.
|
| Tempted to say the problem is just the internet breeding
| toxicity in general. Maybe we could all do better with
| less internet and more nature time
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's the original design of Facebook. You had to join
| based on real-world membership in a pre-existing network,
| in this case a university. You only got to interact with
| people from your university.
|
| There's something to be said for this. Schools have their
| problems. Plenty of drama, bullying, harassment,
| marginalization, extremism. But when it's limited to a
| school network, it doesn't swing national sentiment, aid
| and abet genocides, provide an outlet for foreign
| adversaries to subvert race relations in your country.
|
| But it does mean ad campaigns can't have global reach.
| janalsncm wrote:
| One other benefit of tying online groups to offline
| groups is that they are able to moderate themselves.
| Schools aren't perfect but they can deal with cyber
| bullying if all parties are students at that school.
| bambax wrote:
| True, but the significant difference is that you can
| belong to any number of subreddits at the same time, and
| they're organized by topic.
|
| In my idea the place itself would be neutral/non-
| significant, and you could only be in one place at a
| time, like IRL.
| awb wrote:
| Sounds like the Metaverse.
|
| Shouting is only 1 form of communication though.
| Newspapers and pamphlets have been around for centuries
| and travel farther and last longer than human generated
| sound waves. So your proposal kind of simulates pre-
| printing press days and maybe even pre-written language
| days.
| brandall10 wrote:
| I don't know if the limit needs to be geographical. I'd
| think it could be segmented by interest, ala discussion
| forums for particular hobbies. Those are private and
| heavily moderated, there are 'village elders'
| (mods/heavily active users), people are on good behavior
| because of this, they always seem to have a section for
| more controversial/political discussions for those who
| want it - and they tend to be civil, surprisingly enough,
| because users have a rep to protect in the more
| generalized sections and don't want to be a bad citizen.
| And nothing is indexed by search engines, you have to go
| to the site and search.
|
| Reddit has this a bit with subreddits but it's far more
| loose and indexed by search engines, which I think is why
| it is problematic in certain ways.
| sdiq wrote:
| Reminds me another short story i once read, Lexicographicide,
| by Taban Lo Liyong. The dictator, every year, eliminates
| certain letters from the alphabet, or was it words from the
| dictionary - it's decades since i read it. Thereafter none
| can use the same.
| dimva wrote:
| 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.
| TheCondor wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| For one, a real public square isn't anonymous. To add to
| your example, get thrown out the tavern too many times
| and they will eventually not let the person come back.
| This person can't simply create a new account and sneak
| back in.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| But is it. The world is very clearly (more clearly than at
| any other point in the past) one. It is entirely not
| obvious that our current level of global communication is
| sufficient to support this setup.
| istinetz wrote:
| 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.
| naravara wrote:
| TBH the issue is not that I can't stand to hear racist
| stuff, it's that there's well understood incentives to
| fear monger that have tangibly eroded social trust across
| the board and degraded the actual real life public square
| in the process. That's not just the heightened threats of
| terrorism and acrimonious political systems either, those
| are just the tips of the iceberg and there's a whole host
| of social maladies, mental health disorders, depression
| and anxiety symptoms, etc. coming out of this.
| humanrebar wrote:
| Right. Maybe we're much, much worse _without_ public
| fora. There are valid concerns about social bubbles, fake
| news, and alternative facts already.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Abe Lincoln was assassinated well before the internet.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| _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._
|
| Where is the elevated sense of self importance? Where did
| OP say it shouldn't exist. You read this with filters.
|
| OP simply stated that we need to build a product which is
| more aligned with how humans are and NOT how we wish
| humans were. A rebuttal would be to show that current
| products solve the problem we have and we do not need to
| change anything.
| counters wrote:
| Unfortunately the period from about 2015 to early 2021
| made it very clear that even while direct participation
| is avoidable, the implications of the platform and it's
| users aren't.
|
| Then again, the solution to the hooligan yelling "fire"
| in a crowded theatre isn't to close the theatre...
| naravara wrote:
| We do enforce fire codes though, including things like
| occupancy limits.
| pc86 wrote:
| I would love to hear what you think fire codes and
| occupancy limits have to do with Twitter and social
| media.
| memetomancer wrote:
| | 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 or any of the
| demagogues making their fortunes by bringing out the
| worst impulses of the stupidest people. One that leads
| people like yourself to drag down the discussion with
| such uncalled for invective.
|
| Trying to discuss the problem invariably brings out dim
| outbursts, such as your own, meant to stifle discourse.
| Yes you feel entitled to your own set of rules and care
| little for the effect it has on others, but the effect of
| Twitter is destroying the fabric that coddles you, that
| protects you and allows you to have small selfish views
| at the expense of everyone else, with no evidence that
| you understand the consequences.
|
| | You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact.
|
| As long as Twitter remains a powerful platform for social
| influence - even if you explicitly avoid participation -
| you face the effects. Nobody in the U.S. can escape the
| grandstanding, the vitriol, the ostracizing, or the
| influence that the forum represents. The problem extends
| to many other nations. Something should be done and
| discussing it freely is a sane approach.
|
| So choke down your bile, bite your tongue and make your
| points with some dignity. If we all pull together we can
| get through this, I just know it.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Correct. And I'm also not required to believe in the
| cultural relevance of Twitter at all.
|
| There's no digital analogue to the IRL long stare of
| death that is elicited when someone is out of line.
| Downvotes, ratios, and whatever ridiculous thing people
| invent aren't effective enough because the offender has
| little concern for being ostracized from a group of
| people they don't even know. It's all just avatars on a
| screen yelling at each other. This is why people say
| scale is the problem. Smaller communities can more
| effectively enforce norms because they create a localized
| culture, there is less to moderate, and they can more
| effectively identify and punish bad actors.
|
| These days I spend time on niche forums where people
| actively choose to be there and participate. There's no
| Internet Points to be gamed, no drama of the day, no
| personal brands to be pushing. It's absolutely
| refreshing. It moves slower, there's no sense of FOMO,
| it's not made to suck your attention span dry.
|
| Twitter is rotting: it's why the front page has to tell
| you it is relevant, and why they started requiring logins
| to read beyond a thread. It'd be farther gone if
| journalists didn't prop it up as a way to do their job
| faster.
| nells wrote:
| You hear that all the time here about Facebook. I don't
| like Facebook so Facebook should not exist for anybody.
| It's disgusting.
| uncertain-phr wrote:
| Marshall McLuhan came up with the concept of a
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village, which may be
| relevant here.
| mavidser wrote:
| I can't agree that "global public square don't work for
| humans" - but even if that were the case, it's still too
| late to just reverse course. As long it's possible, viable
| and largely desired, the market will spit out a solution to
| this need.
| nomdep wrote:
| Is not too late at all. If you remove the "is not my
| responsibility what my users publish" for forums beyond X
| thousand users, every forum will stay under that limit
| and twitter quickly will become thousands of independent
| sub-twitters ala reddit. No home page aggregating
| everything, no suggested tweets, no country-scale public
| square
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Read Mother Night.
| Applejinx wrote:
| 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.
| dave333 wrote:
| Well how about if the millions determine which are the best
| tweets to show by default, but do it so that quality or
| novel content comes through and political snark and
| misinformation is hidden.
| annowiki wrote:
| 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.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > 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?
| AaronM wrote:
| It also turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You ban the
| boards and they just immediately come back under a
| different name.
| balaji1 wrote:
| Inventing some protocol around the Dunbar number is
| interesting.
|
| There was something similar in the Weatherford's book on
| Genghis Khan [1][2]. This system was described to be very
| effective for communicating and coordinating the huge
| military.
|
| > In Genghis Khan's military system, a tumen was recursively
| built from units of 10 (aravt), 100 (zuut) and 1,000
| (mingghan), each with a leader reporting to the next higher
| level.
|
| Note: I am not aware of how good the Weatherford book is, it
| felt one-sided to me. So I am not sure how good the civic
| system that depended on the Tumen was in the mongol era.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingghan
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumen_(unit)#Genghis_Khan's
| _or...
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Dunbar's number is discredited reactionary nonsense, see
| wengrow/graeber research
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Is there some research on a law of 5? As in 5 is the max
| amount of connections and permutations in a group of
| people which it's possible for a member to work out the
| permutations?
|
| For example in a group of 3 me bill and Alice I can model
| bills view of me and Alice alone, me and Alice together,
| me Alice and bill together, etc etc
|
| Beyond a certain number it's not really possible.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| no
| CSMastermind wrote:
| As far as I can tell the vast majority of the scientific
| community still consider it valid.
|
| I also discovered in searching that you're talking about
| David Graeber. I recently read his "Bullshit Jobs" book
| because someone on here cited it. It was one of the worst
| books I've ever read. It was clearly a contrived
| political manifesto (I suppose for "anarchy") with the
| thinnest veneer of popular science wrapped around it. I
| think ancient aliens probably got more anthropology
| correct.
|
| So if you're going to appeal to an authority instead of
| actually transmitting the argument yourself then David
| Graeber seems like probably one of the worst you could
| pick to cite.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| oh so you didn't read the research. googled one of the
| non graeber papers for ya since you decided you didn't
| like the guy for his politics https://twitter.com/davidwe
| ngrow/status/1116786595351470080?... you can find the
| full contents on scihub. I trust you can overcome your
| appeal to the authority of popularly engrained opinions
| pjc50 wrote:
| Pretty much every effective military in history has had
| this kind of hierarchical structure, by both imitation and
| convergent evolution. I'm sure there's a post on
| https://acoup.blog/ about it.
| balaji1 wrote:
| Makes sense that effective militaries are well-organized
| like this. Militaries have conducted big engineering
| projects for civic purposes, all thru history - don't
| remember the exact anecdote. But found a wiki[1] by quick
| google search.
|
| I will checkout this blog, maybe it has some posts about
| non-military initiatives also.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States_
| Army_Co...
| eterps wrote:
| But that is also a recipe for echo chambers.
|
| Anyway, from a technical point of view, this is what Mastodon
| instances already can offer.
| lstodd wrote:
| You can't fight echo chamber effect with technical
| measures, forget about it.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| 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 forth.
|
| [1] https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
| dimva wrote:
| The internet is not a public square for the same reason the
| world isn't a public square - it requires effort to see
| things from outside your own community. Twitter (and
| Facebook), on the other hand, will regularly push things to
| me from fascists, communists, "environmentalist" degrowthers,
| and other weirdos who I have no interest in hearing from.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| DNS is not tantamount to the internet: you can very well
| have a TCP/IP connection to a computer through the
| internet, i.e. wires and waves, and not use DNS at all.
|
| Having a DNS domain is akin to going into a public town
| square and setting up your stall selling whatever
| vegetables you grew in your garden. But just as the
| individual farmers were run over by large corporations who
| invented the hyper-market, just as so the individual users
| have been fleeing, increasingly in the past 15 years, to be
| under the umbrella of big-corp-du-jour.com. Making another-
| service.com with the facade of a "public town square" is
| just making another hypermarket.
|
| And also, it's called a "public town square", with accent
| on town, as in "group of houses" [1], because it's meant
| for a relatively small population. There is perhaps a
| reason we don't have "public megacity squares" (stampedes
| and crowd crushes aside). And there is perhaps something
| inherently wrong when an individual has 100+ million
| "followers": in a public town square a stall could not sell
| vegetables to 100+ million people since there aren't that
| many people in the town in the first place.
|
| [1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town
| marcusverus wrote:
| > 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 square.
|
| Nor is foo.com a digital public square (just like your house
| isn't a physical public square). Public squares (digital and
| physical) are places where people _already_ gather.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| 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.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| That seems like saying your town is a public town square
| because everyone has an address that can be reached by
| post.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Not all analogies can be saved, nevertheless let's try:
|
| the town = the TCP/IP suite of protocols (UDP, QUIC, etc.
| included)
|
| the public town square = DNS
|
| a booth selling vegetables in the public town square = a
| domain, "foo.com", publishing whatever their opinion is
| about reality and everything else
|
| A great lie told again and again by "social media"
| domains is that they are "platforms", but a platform is
| meant to sustain something else beyond itself. "foo.com",
| "twitter.com" are merely individual booths, where all the
| value is owned by the person/company owning that domain,
| irregardless of how "easy" it is to "post" on "foo.com"
| and how difficult it is to setup a new booth/domain on
| DNS: DNS _is_ that platform we have been hearing ad
| nauseam.
|
| And even more, a domain, such as "foo.com", or
| "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", is fundamentally
| someone's estate, owned by a master [1]: it's a glaringly
| obvious contradiction in terms to say that a domain could
| ever be a "public town square".
|
| Entering and adding value to someone else's domain is
| akin to belonging to a feudal master, a technofeudalism
| if you will [2]. And some tehnofeuds are great, I
| personally enjoy "github.com", but believing that
| "github.com" is a "public town square" for code, not
| backing up your work in other places, it's at the very
| least irresponsible.
|
| [1]
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/domain#etymonline_v_13918
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMSNpq4K67o
| GrinningFool wrote:
| This is a truly heroic effort. I think you make a valid
| point that a domain can't be considered a public square,
| but am not convinced that the domain name registry system
| can.
|
| DNS itself (in the form that gets used publicly) is
| controlled by a few actors -- arguably the 'true' owners
| of all the domains that are leased from them. This is
| underscored every time new TLDs are released and people
| have to scramble to secure their names and brands. In
| that context alone, DNS also can't qualify as the public
| square.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Oh, sure, lots of issues with DNS itself and ICANN. Sort
| of a "democracy situation", if you will: the worst except
| for all the others.
| ebiester wrote:
| So, how do I know about foo.com?
|
| Discoverability and noise filtering are the hard problem.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Absolutely, that's why ever since Lycos and AltaVista we
| relied on certain third-party domains to solve both
| discoverability and noise filtering.
|
| However, now, after we, the users, have created such
| Leviathans [1] as Google, Meta, and so on, we, the
| developers, must go back to the drawing board and solve
| discoverability, noise filtering, payments [2], and much
| more at the protocol level. Which is not even a new or
| outrageous idea, even Mr. Jack Dorsey seems to agree to
| this [3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)
|
| [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)
| naravara wrote:
| When people talk about the town square in this sense
| they're sort of groping at the concept of a "public sphere"
| that Habermas talked about.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Is there a business model to be found for building "social
| networks" around domain names?
|
| Making it even easier to register domain names. Rebuilding
| your friend network between the DNS names of friends, family
| and other associates. Sharing photos and videos and birthday
| reminders.
|
| I feel like it's marketing all of the technologies of the
| early web that enabled these things, but with great UX and an
| order of magnitude less complexity for getting all of it
| setup.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Is there a business model? Absolutely, you just have to not
| want to be the techno-imperator of the network graph and
| not want to become a trillionaire from building social
| services.
|
| Disclaimer: I am building such a "social technology" around
| domain names, letting users truly own the database of their
| interaction with a service,
| https://github.com/plurid/deserve
| jefftk wrote:
| _> don 't build something with public town squares. That's only
| a feature platform builders want in order to sell
| advertisement_
|
| Why would advertisers prefer public town squares? They just
| want people to see their ads.
|
| (I also like "public town square" places, as a user)
| eddieroger wrote:
| Because why market to some people when you can market to all
| people for the same cost? Particularly if that square can
| tell you that tech people look in a certain direction but
| cooking enthusiasts look in another, so you can pick where to
| put which sign since you've already paid to post your signs.
|
| I don't have a problem with the local public town square, but
| I do agree that giving equal voice to all the bad ideas,
| while also making it easier for those with bad ideas to find
| each other, is dangerous. It's made more dangerous in an era
| where our elected leaders also say bad ideas out loud, which
| emboldens others to do the same. Even in a public square, you
| can't just yell "fire" without consequence.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> why market to some people when you can market to all
| people for the same cost?_
|
| It wouldn't be the same cost. Publishers charge advertisers
| in proportion to the number of people who see the ad.
| matt_s wrote:
| A "public town square" that allows anyone to post and comment
| is going to be paid by page views. The way to get more page
| views is to have controversial or viral content because it
| will bring the comments and page views. That will get the
| most advertisers. A closed/private group platform isn't going
| to get as many advertisers.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| STOP! DON'T CLICK SUBMIT! DID YOU INSTALL GRAMMARNAZI?!!?
|
| No, the adverts are going to go in your private posts and
| messages, so you have to see the advert before you get the
| message.
|
| Like this one.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| > When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard
|
| Why do we have to do that? Isn't the idea of having easy access
| for all enough? What people are so marginalized that they can't
| mute hateful speech and get on with their day?
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| One of the big problems with harassment on a platform like
| Twitter, and this seems to be pretty hard to get across to
| people who haven't been subject to it -- or don't know
| someone who's been subject to it, at least -- is the speed
| and intensity of what's coming at you if a true pile-on
| happens, or if a particular group decides you are The Enemy.
| You can mute and block a handful of jerks and get on with
| your day, perhaps, but if everything you post is greeted with
| hundreds (or even thousands!) of responses along the lines of
| "we're going to dox you and I hope someone rapes you to
| death," we're talking about something very different than
| "people are being mean to me on the internet."
|
| I'm not sure if all of Twitter's problems come from mere
| scale; it suffers from what analyst Ben Thompson has called
| the Pollyannaish Assumption: we focus on the upsides of the
| "global public square" without accurately evaluating the
| downsides, and bluntly, I see this a lot in discussions on
| HN. It's the subtext of "why can't people just block and move
| on." Arguably, focusing on the downsides without accurately
| evaluating the upsides, which I _also_ increasingly see a lot
| on HN, isn 't really an improvement -- but if we're going to
| have platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the question of
| "what do you do about harassment, hate speech, and stochastic
| terrorism on those platforms" needs a better answer than
| "suck it up, buttercup."
| somethingreen wrote:
| The reason this particular problem still exists is not
| technical. But solutions are not compatible with
| engagement-graph-go-up business model.
|
| You are correct to point out the downsides and dangers of
| "public square" platform, but we haven't really even
| started trying to implement any reasonable solutions to
| them.
| i_like_pie wrote:
| think this is spot on. allude to this here
| https://acehigh.substack.com/p/operatingproduct-plan-for-twi...
|
| to add to your point: 1/ tech stack/architecture isn't #1 or
| even #10 issue. think everyone (all) agree on this 2/ larger
| issue is how to handle open discourse. given how we are wired
| as species, is there a social network that is truly open that
| doesn't descend into vitriol? if so - what behaviors are
| rewarded, what are the policies etc. - this is #1 question
| wufufufu wrote:
| 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".
| mindcrime wrote:
| Bingo. This is exactly what I recently proposed for Twitter.
| The idea of user defined "filter-sets" where the user chooses
| what they want to be exposed to. And even further, I proposed
| the ability to name those filter-sets and share them with
| others. So if a given user is, for the sake of argument, a
| "raging Liberal" they can choose a "raging Liberal" filter-
| set. Likewise, a "raging Conservative" can choose the "raging
| Conservative" filter-set, a Libertarian can choose the
| "Libertarian" filter-set, and so on. Much like your market-
| place idea mentioned above.
|
| "But, but, what about filter bubbles / echo chambers???" one
| says. To which I say "it's not a problem I'm trying to solve,
| or particularly interested in. I'm not even sure that's
| actually a _problem_ per-se to begin with. " Seriously, the
| world is too big, there are too many people and too many
| ideas, for any one of us to accept being exposed to
| _everything_ that 's "out there".
|
| Filters are a _good thing_ , in fact a _necessary_ thing. Of
| course we 'd like to think that in a well educated,
| civilized, rational society, people would choose to make
| _some_ effort to gain exposure to new and contradictory ideas
| for the purpose of expanding their minds and adapting and
| learning and what-not. But be that as it may, you still have
| to accept that some people will choose to filter out things
| to a lesser or greater degree than some others, and that some
| people will choose to filter things differently than you
| will. And that 's OK.
| nus07 wrote:
| OP are you Elon Musk ?
| est wrote:
| Everyone seems to forget that Twitter was extremely interesting
| because people on MSN/GTalk were "sync" their status to a web
| list.
| fergie wrote:
| > What database technology or approach would you go for?
|
| I feel like people consistently underestimate the difficulty of
| creating a data backend for a social network.
|
| It has to be readable and writable in real time, yet still
| performant enough for picky consumers. It needs to be able to
| handle text search. It needs to handle many-to-many relationships
| at scale (something that mainstream (NO)SQL databases struggle
| with). It needs a robust authentication layer, and probably a
| load of other things on top of this.
|
| Building something like Twitter is still, in 2022, a really hard
| technical challenge.
| freeplay wrote:
| > Building something like Twitter is still, in 2022, a really
| hard technical challenge.
|
| Building something like Twitter is pretty simple.
|
| Building something that scales to 400 million MAU is a really
| hard technical challenge.
| jantypas wrote:
| Let's step back a bit and not ask about the mechanics. Twitter
| was, and, so far as I'm concerned, the nervous system of the
| Internet. It's main strength is saying "Hey, you were interested
| in this -- go to this URL". It's a pubsub system. There are many
| places, many industries that don't care about the latest celeb or
| Elon, but they do want a signaling system -- and they want it
| secure and encrypted. As an example, the oil and gas industry has
| to communicate with about 200,000 stations. The messages are
| simple -- why not a private Twitter for them? Sure, they could
| use NATS or Kafka on a private net, but why not this?
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| I'm increasingly believing a "public town square" is of little
| value across major economic class lines, as any "conversation"
| meant to represent reality will simply at some point devolve into
| rhetorical struggle between the haves and have-nots. The haves
| will then respond with various reality-distortion campaigns,
| winning over enough of the have-nots to keep the economy spinning
| for them, and at that point you may as well just go watch
| Saturday morning cartoons which will make more sense than any
| "public town square."
|
| To solve this problem: You should be periodically required to
| submit evidence of your income to this alternative Twitter, and
| only be allowed to post and see posts of those in your economic
| class. If your income changes then the class you are visible
| with/to also changes.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| 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?)
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I grew up in the golden age of Myspace. There was a lot of value,
| I think, in needing to directly choose to have someone in your
| social circle. If you didn't add someone as a friend, you didn't
| see their posts. It's a lot easier to be civil online when you
| know all the people you're interacting with. And perhaps a lot
| safer.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| https://spacehey.com/
| amai wrote:
| Elon, is that you asking this question?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I was thinking, if I was to build a new micro-blogging aka
| Twitter alternative, what technological choices would I make to
| get it quickly off the ground but allow for scale?
|
| This is fundamentally the wrong first question. The first
| question is "what is the problem with the existing Twitter
| compared to what some identified market wants that I am going to
| solve that will make my product a compelling alternative, and how
| do I solve it"? Technology comes after, and is shaped by, that
| decision.
|
| Otherwise, even with optimal tech decisions, you end up _at best_
| with a Twitter clone with no users and no reason for people to
| choose it, abd a tech stack whose ability to scale doesn't
| matter.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| Great discussion, one thing I would throw out there is that while
| we're all used to having some kind of "unique" thing in the
| market that attracts users, I think in this case one could
| feature-for-feature copy Twitter, and as long as Elon Musk isn't
| in charge that would be the "differentiator".
|
| I think in the next couple of years we'll see more of this (or
| should, anyway); companies that are very similar but with
| different operating philosophies competing for the same market.
| prepend wrote:
| 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).
| jasode wrote:
| _> RSS - People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS
| feeds._
|
| RSS might replace Twitter for your particular use case.
| However, it doesn't replace Twitter _in general case for the
| public_ because RSS is one-directional.
|
| The phenomenon of the "Twittersphere" includes _bi-directional
| activity_ like replies and retweets.
|
| As an analogy, this Hacker News site has users taking part in
| reading _and writing_ activities. A few users like to spread
| the word that they consume HN via RSS just fine (e.g. maybe get
| feeds from https://hnrss.github.io/).
|
| But users (who are not just pure lurkers) can't use RSS to
| upvote/downvote comments or post their own replies. Therefore,
| RSS can't replace HN's website for general usage.
|
| Likewise, RSS can be a way of consuming NYTimes newspaper, but
| RSS can't replace the NYTimes itself.
|
| RSS is an undeniable _convenience for readers_ but its limited
| scope does not provide viral mechanics and feedback loops for
| writers publishers.
|
| RSS works at the abstraction level of "protocol for data
| download". Sites like Twitter and HN, etc work at abstraction
| level of "virtual marketplace of ideas" -- and that function is
| out of scope for RSS.
|
| So whatever can replace Twitter will look like something closer
| to Twitter than RSS.
|
| EDIT reply to: _> That's a client side question, IMHO. If you
| want your client to show you replies, _
|
| I was talking about the RSS-user-themselves wanting the
| capability to _write_ the replies and not reading others'
| replies. RSS is not a read+WRITE protocol. It's a pull-based
| reading protocol.
| shkkmo wrote:
| That's a client side question, IMHO. If you want your client
| to show you replies, then you configure it with a crawler
| that scans other RSS feeds for posts that reference the post
| you are interested in. Content moderation is thus all user
| based due to who the user decides to follow and what
| crawler(s) they choose to use to find related posts in feeds
| they aren't directly following.
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| How would you handle replies and nested replies using RSS? I
| believe that is a major appeal of Twitter.
| WithinReason wrote:
| 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?
| prepend wrote:
| I remember Google reader used to let you "like" articles and
| view articles with lots of likes.
|
| Also you could add friends and view what they subscribe to
| and like.
|
| And just a basic text search is useful to find material
| related to a topic of interest.
|
| I think it's important to remember that this isn't meant to
| consume infinite time but just a way to see what you've noted
| as interesting. I think it's like a newspaper where you spend
| 15-60 minutes reading. Not something that consumes every
| waking moment with infinite discovery and content.
| [deleted]
| dale_glass wrote:
| The technology to a huge extent doesn't matter, except for things
| like decentralization because those impact how end users use it.
|
| Honestly, I'd probably just build Mastodon. I use it
| sporadically. My feed is exactly what I subscribed to, and
| nothing more. That of course doesn't make for an amazingly
| engaging platform that constantly pushes people to engage and to
| create new accounts, but that's precisely how I like things to
| be.
|
| You probably won't get rich from catering to people like myself,
| though.
| Zealotux wrote:
| A thing I truly liked about Google+ was the ability to separate
| contacts into "circles" to differentiate between real-life
| friends, family, online friends, colleagues, etc. I wish more
| social networks used that kind of approach.
| nisegami wrote:
| Twitter just launched a feature called Circles that has been
| very well received in my social....circle.
| Kye wrote:
| They give you exactly one circle. Twitter missed the point
| entirely.
| zulu-inuoe wrote:
| I didn't get to use Google+ in its prime as I was averse to all
| social media at the time, but I totally agree. That was a great
| concept
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Twitter is not a technical problem. We as a society are simply
| unable to wield such a tool in any useful way.
|
| When you combine three obvious truths:
|
| * people are tribal to the point of irrationality
|
| * controversial clickbait bullshit travels fast and right to page
| 1, erudite corrections go on page 7 and are cheerfully ignored
| (see point 1)
|
| * people don't listen, they wait to talk
|
| There is no value in giving everyone such a platform. It achieves
| no useful purpose whatsoever that cannot be achieved more
| neutrally, deliberately, and less sensationally.
|
| On Bullshit is required reading.
| nebqr wrote:
| I think that the (dead, gay) Something Awful forums model is a
| decent solution to content moderation and monetization.
|
| An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have
| to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back.
|
| Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars.
|
| Change your avatar? 5 dollars.
|
| Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars.
|
| Ad free? 10 dollars.
|
| Access to archives (posts over a certain number of years old) 10
| dollars.
|
| Not too expensive and no recurring costs for good citizens,
| prohibitively expensive for bots/trolls.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| You're missing the most important detail of why that worked.
| Forcing payment solves issues surrounding identity. Permabans
| on other platforms don't work when you can make a new email and
| sign up again. Sure, there's a cost to bans ($10) but it's
| minimal, but evading a permaban means finding a new means of
| payment not linked to your identity which is a lot harder. Not
| impossible, but enough that it stops most bad actors.
| nebqr wrote:
| Yeah, it's a good system.
|
| Also, on the forums, you can look at anyone's rap sheet and
| see exactly the post that they got banned (or probated or
| permabanned) for. Let's you know what sort of person you are
| dealing with.
| pc86 wrote:
| I think there's a really good point in here that you sort of
| touch on that is lost on a lot of new products.
|
| I'd pay $20 one-time for ad-free Twitter even though I can just
| have a (free) browser extension do it. I'd pay $20 one-time to
| remove all suggested posts/users/etc, even though the same
| extension does that too. Archival access would be really
| interesting on something like Twitter where just about
| everything gets archived externally or screenshotted anyway.
|
| But the minute any of these become recurring costs, even on the
| order of $1/mo, I'm out.
|
| I feel like the search for recurring revenue has hampered a lot
| of company's ability to make _real_ revenue.
| duxup wrote:
| >I feel like the search for recurring revenue has hampered a
| lot of company's ability to make real revenue.
|
| There's a weird mess of consumers and incentives on the
| internet.
|
| Users generally don't want to pay, so now they're the
| product. Just to get users products offer unsustainable free
| services and then die when they reach the breaking point or
| fail to get folk to pay. Users get upset when the products
| ask them to pay or revoke their free tier or just vanish ...
|
| Wash rinse repeat.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| A mixed model would be kind of interesting... Like, first time
| signing up it's free but if you get banned then you have to
| pay, if you get permabanned, tough luck.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| That doesn't work because people just sign up again with a
| different email, bots can do this all day for free. Its the
| up-front payment method that makes it possible to effectively
| ban people.
| duxup wrote:
| IIRC App.net was a pay version of twitter.
|
| I loved the idea, it got a lot of attention, but it didn't pick
| up enough users to get going.
| eddieroger wrote:
| It was, with tiers for users, devs, etc. It lacked users, but
| it also was born in an environment where Twitter wasn't yet
| "awful" by most people's definition, let alone owned by
| someone with mixed popularity. If app.net launched today, it
| may be a different story.
| duxup wrote:
| I would certainly like to see more attempts as time goes
| on.
| Kye wrote:
| App.net went braindead in 2014 and finally died in 2017. 2014
| was a long time ago in internet terms. Just look at Mastodon:
| people are always declaring it dead, but the project's
| official instances alone are bigger than App.net at peak and
| it's funded on Patreon subscriptions. Mastodon's part of the
| fediverse ranges from 750k to 1m active monthly users using
| this model before adding in comparable and compatible stuff
| like Pleroma and Misskey. There's been a shift in people's
| willingness to pay for services that doesn't start or stop
| with social media.
|
| Edit to add: App.net also had the problem of needing to
| justify $3m in funding. It "failed" because its model
| couldn't do that quick enough to make investors happy. A
| normal platform with slow but steady growth that depends on
| subscriptions doesn't have that problem as long as the bills
| are paid and enough people are happy with it to maintain
| growth. Mastodon proves it can be done, still running and
| growing a half decade after the entire SV media declared it
| dead because they didn't understand how self-funded platforms
| work. Others can learn from and build on it.
| mmmpop wrote:
| tootie wrote:
| One-time fees are not very sustainable. Unless the model
| included essentially building an endowment the first ten years
| and then funding the business off of interest.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Lots of devices attached to ongoing services today are sold
| for a one-time fee. For most of their existence, Microsoft
| and Adobe had very sustainable businesses based on one-time
| fees. It is a fine model. Software companies today are
| addicted to "recurring revenue" (thinking that is the only
| way to get sustainable cash flow), but a lot of people will
| pay you $20 once who would never pay you $1/month, and there
| will always be new people using popular products.
|
| One-time fees are a perfectly fine model for a business, even
| if it is unfashionable currently.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| They were releasing new version every other year. You
| cannot sell a new version of a website.
|
| > and there will always be new people using popular
| products.
|
| If you succeed in being the go-to platform for every new
| generation you might be able to coast on that. But the last
| 20 years have shown that each generation gets its own new
| social network.
| tootie wrote:
| That was for desktop software. The era of buy it, download
| it and it's yours forever. Not an ongoing service.
| fragile_frogs wrote:
| Yeah, you would have to raise the one-time payment
| constantly in order to keep up with your own recurring
| costs, the more users you have the greater your costs
| will be.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| You can also charge people their net present LTV upfront.
| For most forums, that's something like $10 worth of ads,
| which is why several popular forums worked well with a
| one-time $10 "pro" fee. You don't need recurring revenue
| from people to get their entire LTV, and you don't need
| an endowment to make that model sustainable. You need to
| make them pay you in whatever form maximizes your net
| present value (NPV).
|
| Twitter, Facebook, and Google have used ads to collect
| revenue from their users in the past. SaaS apps and
| services today use recurring subscriptions, which is nice
| because it lets you match up your inflows to your
| outflows. Old desktop software, which had high recurring
| costs too, used single payments (although they also
| charged for updates). Modern desktop software tends to
| use subscription fees.
|
| Companies need to make their revenue models match what
| customers expect in order to get payment. That means that
| you should be selling your SaaS as a subscription or a
| metered API even if you (hypothetically) do not have
| recurring costs. It also means that Twitter might have to
| stay with a $0/month fee and collect its revenue in the
| form of ads and "direct payments for services."
|
| For Twitter, "influencers" might pay as much as $1000 for
| a "verified influencer" label on their profile despite
| that many of them are upset at $20/month, particularly if
| you make it annoying for them (so they feel that they are
| actually spending their money on getting "verified" and
| the verification will be hard to fake). Maybe you can get
| $100/year as a "renewal fee" on those labels, too. If you
| offered the rest of us a $50 "not a bot" green checkmark
| that takes a few custom photos and an ID, you will
| probably get plenty of those too.
|
| It's all psychology. Fixed fees and recurring fees can
| have the same NPV. The game is maximizing that NPV.
| dahart wrote:
| Actuarial science might have a thing or two to say about
| that. All you need to do is make sure the average amount
| people pay is greater than the average cost for the life of
| an account. Before the recent explosion in subscription
| pricing for everything under the sun, we'd been selling
| software on one-time costs for fifty years. Subscriptions
| certainly are attractive and easier for businesses, probably
| easier to sell with freemium models, but they do have
| downsides like cancellations and not much money up front (may
| take longer to recoup investments).
|
| > Unless the model included essentially building an endowment
| the first ten years and then funding the business off
| interest.
|
| Ten dollars is surely much greater than the server costs for
| a single user for a month, or a year. That one-time cost may
| well be designed to be an endowment of sorts. Plus the avatar
| changing fees are probably, on average, not one-time fees.
| tootie wrote:
| I've gotten wildly differing responses from saying that New
| Twitter should just be a non-profit. Have a mission for
| public good, disclose financials, earn sufficient revenue
| to operate and pay employees. Wikipedia does it and their
| biggest drama is that they get way more donations than they
| even need. They also seem to manage moderating gobs of
| content with relatively little public drama.
| nebqr wrote:
| The SA forums have been going since 1999.
| joshxyz wrote:
| > Change someone else's avatar
|
| This is hilarious
| nebqr wrote:
| That's the real money-maker.
|
| EDIT: The way it ends up working on the forums is that if you
| do something to annoy someone that isn't against the rules,
| they can spend 10 bux and change your avatar to a photo of
| something that you don't want showing up on every post you
| make (and likely giant red text that says something like "Ask
| me about [something offensive]), and then you have to spend 5
| bux to undo it.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Yup. Profiting directly from the drama. More drama? More
| money! At least in the short term. In the long term it just
| became a weird cliquey mess. I think that hurt their growth
| prospects as it put off potential new users. But those
| users just went to reddit anyways.. reddit consumed their
| entire audience in the end.
| nebqr wrote:
| That's one way of looking at it. For someone who still
| loves that SA forums, reddit taking all of the low effort
| posters and 4chan taking all the racists/incels has been
| a real boon to the forums.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| On rdrama.net you can buy awards with karma or money. These
| let you you ban a user, unban users, force them to include
| text in any comment ("Trans Lives matter") is a common one,
| or turn all of their text sideways.
|
| It's hilarious to use and seems sustainable.
| jsemrau wrote:
| I put my thoughts about next-gen social into a concept that I
| like to call "Eigensocial" and expressed that through the
| Finclout project.
|
| 1. Micro-blogging doesn't add much in 2022. Velocity of content
| is too high and comment vs content is real. What would it have
| what Discord or Telegram can't provide? The content distribution
| to the world? Is that really a feature in 2022?
|
| 2. Followers are a terrible approximation of shared interest.
|
| 3. We use social media to be entertained and not to work. Ideally
| to connect with people that can help us move ahead. Stack
| overflow : Learn from smarter programmers. Finclout: Learn from
| smarter investors.
|
| 4. Do we really need a public global town square? Even if yes,
| there will always be boundaries based on spoken languages.
| (Chinese, English, Spanish, French, etc). How much does it help
| us that an Indian doctor can talk American politics to a South
| African?
| https://twitter.com/majornirmal/status/1587129879341867008
|
| 5. How is moderation baked into the product? People will exploit
| all your weaknesses to get ahead. For Finclout we implemented
| that as incentivized tasks for all users. How much do you allow
| for "edge" content. How does your system define "edge"?
|
| 6. Bots create engagement. Engagement creates DAUs. What's your
| strategy to use bots in your growth path? For finclout we don't.
| However, we have content partnerships in place so the app never
| feels empty.
|
| 7. What added value does decentralization bring? We partnered up
| with DeSo and ran a node for a while. Yet at this time, I think
| the only valuable innovation is decentralized identity
| management. Probably SBT will be the better solution here.
|
| 8. In 2023 we should go to a social sites because it provides us
| with the userbase to connect us with interesting people. I love
| Lunchclub for that exact reason. IMHO, this is how a social
| platform should be.
| anotheryou wrote:
| I have some plans (but no time) for an experiment on how the
| timeline works. I want to focus on curation and have the poster
| rate items he curates. You'd read from most to least important
| (with a lot of balancing, but as transparent as possible).
|
| Happy to share details with anyone interested.
| screye wrote:
| I dunno why the technical bits matter at all. I would use a
| 'better' twitter even if it consumed 2x the data or had 2x the
| latency. The thing about the backend, is that it is the 'back'
| end.
|
| The UX will be central to such a platform, and that's all we
| should be having a conversation about. I'd go as far as to say,
| that the central challenge of convoluted technical solutions like
| 'decentralized platforms' is to find a way to hide the backend
| away from the user. You want them to be none the wiser about what
| goes on behind their pretty website / app.
| pdinny wrote:
| 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 might have different values and backgrounds
| would be wildly different from the same discussions online. The
| metaphor is quite a broken one and at this point about as useful
| as pretending that the screen I'm looking at is an analog to my
| actual desktop (which mostly one exists to hold the screen).
|
| While this may come across as mere pedantry I think it is
| actually quite important to ensure that when we discuss platforms
| that are going to be nothing at all like a town square that we
| are more realistic about what kinds of conversation and
| interactions we might want to encourage or discourage.
| somethingreen wrote:
| 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.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| What is your goal is the first question you need to ask yourself.
| If your goal is to replace Twitter at its scale, then it's
| completely absurd, Twitter will continue to be popular for a good
| decade, no matter what Musk does because network effect.
|
| You shouldn't try to design an alternative to Twitter, you should
| design a social network that catters to a crowd that is not
| Twitter or don't care about Twitter.
|
| Tiktok, no matter how much I despise this social network, didn't
| try to copy Twitter, Facebook or Youtube, it did its own thing,
| and with the help of massive VC investment and marketing
| campaign, it became popular, because it was different.
|
| Yet another Twitter knock off isn't going to replace Twitter.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| > _would get automatically deleted after some years_
|
| Some people may not be allowed to delete (or to be deleted by
| someone else) their "tweets". US Presidents are one such category
| of people - all of their works while in office belong to the
| country.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act
|
| In some lawsuits, records such as tweets need to be produced in
| what is called "discovery". It is possible to lose lawsuits - by
| default - for either destroying or refusing to turn over such
| records. A modern example of how expensive such behavior can be
| would be to look at how much Alex Jones is going to be paying
| out.
| kube-system wrote:
| This simply means those people must ensure those records are
| copied and stored elsewhere. Communication services don't have
| to store records for the president.
|
| Twitter has deleted many tweets subject to the rules you cite
| and it's well within their right to do so.
| tough wrote:
| It was also pretty funny to read Elon's DM's with his
| billionaire friends and aids about the twitter takeover due to
| this when he wanted out.
|
| Kudos to -discovery-
|
| If you don't want something read on the future, don't write it.
| Its that simple
| bdcravens wrote:
| Pick your favorite stack. Quick iteration is far more important
| than scale until you reach critical mass. Twitter did the same
| thing.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Build a protocol specification instead, and we can have multiple
| competing implementations (like Email). This is what Jack Dorsey
| was suggesting.
| epsteinisntdead wrote:
| Doesn't this already exist in the form of ActivityPub? Whether
| you're using Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely, etc., you can
| interact with instances that use that protocol.
|
| There's no way Jack doesn't know this already exists.
| alexb_ wrote:
| It's mentioned here: https://atproto.com/guides/faq
|
| Honestly this project looks pretty interesting, and I hope it
| takes off. Want more decentralized tech without horrendous
| "defi" attached.
| Timja wrote:
| Based on cryptographic signatures.
|
| If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg
| 33419574 by dustedcodes. Signed: mejutoco", then nobody could
| take this converstion away from you. It would be federated by
| all competing services that use this protocal.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Sounds a bit like the Nostr protocol.
|
| https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
| aynyc wrote:
| I would pitch to top influencers a certain percentage of the
| company if they can bring in the fellowers and skip the VCs. Even
| if the top influencers take 40% of the company, you still come
| out on top.
| lokedhs wrote:
| How many though? I assume that the top influencers are not
| going to move to your platform exclusively (using yours in
| addition to what they already use isn't going to work, at best
| you'll just get crossposting from the other networks) unless
| they get offered enough.
|
| Since they risk their entire following, I'm guessing the top
| posters want to have a potential profit of about 100 million
| dollars, and possibly more than that. That means that by the
| time you have 100 influencers, you have to convince your
| members that you'll be a 20 billion company in a year.
| phelmig wrote:
| Nice try, Elon ;-)
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| 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 into attack/defence behaviour that will just
| turn your New Twitter into the same cesspit as Old Twitter.
|
| - Also think about how you're going to moderate content - because
| you're going to have to do it whether you like it or not, and its
| going to have to be at various scales from post-level to policy-
| level. There's a very good argument to be made that Legacy
| Twitter's product _is_ content moderation [1], not software.
| Human nature being what it is, you may find that eventually it 's
| your product too.
|
| - Also, consider how you are going to deal with state-level and
| semi-state-level actors who will attempt to infiltrate your
| platform to use it as an amplifier.
|
| The tech platform will help with the above, of course, but above
| all I think you need to consciously design the thing that you're
| building. That thing isn't a software platform or a social
| network or a community. It's something else. Figure that out
| first.
|
| And if you want to build something that makes the world better
| (as opposed to worse, as in Old Twitter), you might consider how
| people can use your new platform to _get stuff done_ in the
| world, rather than just shouting and meme-ing. I wish I knew how
| to do that though.
|
| If you do build something like Twitter then please try to build
| it so that it doesn't cause harm.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-
| twitt...
| thereddaikon wrote:
| "- Also, how are you going to deal with state-level and semi-
| state-level actors who will attempt to infiltrate your platform
| to use it as an amplifier."
|
| Not just state actors but anyone with an agenda and budget
| really. companies, ngos, political parties etc. Manipulating
| twitter to push an agenda or narrative is big business and not
| limited to nation states.
| rw2 wrote:
| I think twitter now would be something like tiktok where relevant
| and entertaining stuff will be shown to me without browsing for
| it. That is the true value of Tiktok, saving the search time for
| something interesting.
|
| Also one reason I think Tik Tok is successful is the lack of
| political content which is toxic and stressful. A lot of
| political content is designed to get you to be angry at the
| "opposition" which is not a healthy state of mind.
| rtpg wrote:
| I feel like people are overstating the effects of mastodon
| fragmentation. Email "works" and is functionally extremely
| similar to what is going on with Mastodon and ActivityPub (the
| data stuff is not exactly equivalent, but...).
|
| The beauty of a lot of it is how HTTP URLs to other domains just
| work. You see a thing, you click a link, you see their profile.
| Sure it's on another domain etc, but..
|
| There's definitely a lot of busted data at the federated timeline
| level. But maybe that's actually fine. Gives the entire network a
| bit of an analog quality.
| linsomniac wrote:
| The time seems to be ripe for moving to Mastodon. A few people in
| my twitter feed have made the move over the last few days, so I
| decided to give it a go again, and it's pretty nice. The down
| side is only a handful of the people I follow are over there. But
| people seem to be looking for alternatives now, so maybe there
| will become a critical mass.
|
| It's easy: Go to https://mastodon.online/auth/sign_up and sign
| up. Go to https://twitodon.com/ to try to automatically follow
| your Twitter friends on Mastodon. Then use the search bar to
| search for other of your friends. Click on their
| followers/following to look for other people to follow.
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| The biggest problem I have with twitter as a platform and as a
| concept is that individual tweets lack any and all context.
| "Threading" together tweets doesn't make them linear. If you want
| to restrict post size, then you have to make threads linear or
| you wind up losing any and all context farther down the thread.
| There winds up being a large group of people who try to argue
| things that have already been said further up the thread or you
| have people arguing over a misunderstanding because they missed
| the first 10 tweets because somebody they know retweeted the 11th
| because it had a snarky soundbite.
|
| Twitter right now is all noise and no signal. It's a bunch of
| people running through a crowded train station where everybody's
| shouting but nobody can hear more than a few words of what any
| single person is saying. How can that ever be a useful platform
| for civil discussion? It does make for a great broadcast
| platform. "The train from Chicago is leaving in half an hour.
| Mick wishes his mother a happy birthday."
| silvanoshei wrote:
| If you are thinking alternative to twitter. You first think
| concept rather than tech stack. Because tech is not a problem
| today. You can select or create what you needs about tech.
| Twitter does not offer tech.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| I'd build it by creating Xanadu. Xanadu is the feature set.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Main suggestion would be to remove advertising, keep it boring,
| and limit the geographic reach (by default). So, kinda like a
| public utility, boring boring boring.
| viraptor wrote:
| If this was aiming for the scale of twitter replacement, the
| realistic answer is: read as much as possible from what was
| published about the current twitter architecture and try to
| replicate that while avoiding things they used in the past. If
| you're thinking in terms of a specific database rather than
| queues that write into partitions distributed around the world,
| you've probably already lost. Maybe think really hard about
| splitting out mostly-readers and pop-stars and whether they need
| input/output that's architected differently. Find people who
| design event stream architectures.
|
| Because let's be serious. Apart from youtube comments, I don't
| think there's anything the scale of twitter for short messages at
| the moment. (and even that's much simpler problem)
| hnaccy wrote:
| >Apart from youtube comments, I don't think there's anything
| the scale of twitter for short messages at the moment.
|
| discord, telegram?
| cedias wrote:
| The complexity in twitter is that you have one channel per
| user, so you want to scale the "personnalized timeline".
| Whereas telegram/discord have clear channels.
| vasco wrote:
| I'd bet between, whatsapp, messenger, instagram chat, meta
| probably deals with the most volume of short messages, likely
| more than slack / discord / telegram,but hard to know
| viraptor wrote:
| Those are not the same category. In communicators you can
| store the user / channel from a given time period in a
| specific partition and that's about it. It's likely never
| going to be queried after delivery since everyone has a local
| copy. If it does, you just download a slice based on a
| client-side generated hash. And the metadata basically
| doesn't change either.
|
| Compare to Twitter where new people continuously query old
| messages with quickly changing replies, likes, retweet,
| mutes, blocks, etc to account for. But you don't want to
| materialise everyones timeline on every change either.
| However you likely do want to keep highly replicated
| snapshots of popular tags and popstars instead of processing
| actual events. And then you need some system that can query
| both and merge them into a usable personalised view.
| bombcar wrote:
| Doesn't Google search basically all of Twitter Anyway?
| Doesn't that mean whatever Google has could easily itself
| be Twitter?
| viraptor wrote:
| It's not indexed in realtime. (tweets from 20min ago are
| still not searchable) It has no interactivity either
| which makes the problem few orders of magnitude easier.
| And they don't care about subscriptions.
|
| Implementing search: just chuck the last hour of fire
| hose into s3 and update the ngrams.
|
| Implementing real timeish view: ok, so we need to
| distribute+replicate the data so timeline queries can
| happen in parallel and get fresh info depending on
| subscriptions.
|
| Implementing the number of likes ticking up as you watch
| the tweet: basically alien technology. (I assume it's
| optimised somehow because otherwise that would convert a
| single tweet view into 1 + however long someone stays on
| the page / 2s _times_ the load in naive implementation)
| andsoitis wrote:
| The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Twitter
| isn't the proverbial "town square" but rather the "gladiator
| arena". Several reasons.
|
| I suggest thinking deeply about what you want to accomplish (use
| cases) and then work backwards to what needs to be build (user
| flows etc.)
| rectang wrote:
| Freedom of association is more fundamental than freedom of
| speech. If you can't stop the mob from shouting you down, your
| voice won't be heard.
|
| The foundational act of a Twitter alternative is to create silos
| where communities are allowed to exclude other users. The
| platform is not a public "town square" -- it never was -- it's a
| private forum, where users may choose who they associate with.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > The foundational act of a Twitter alternative is to create
| silos where communities are allowed to exclude other users.
|
| So Reddit then.
| sithlord wrote:
| Less about the tech, I think basically anything would work. I
| think from the start I would go with 300 characters, and allow
| edit with a button that has an audit log of all edits.
|
| I think a nice approach would be to be mobile first on my end,
| ios/android app and expose a nice api for people to build their
| own frontends. The only downside of that is how do you keep a
| popular frontend from hijacking someones tweets and modifying the
| text.
|
| What I do not have an answer for is, how do you handle the
| comments, to me, they are generally more interesting than the
| tweet itself, so how does one get those front and center.
| grumbel wrote:
| I'd take a couple of steps back and try to fix the problem at the
| core. What the Web needs is a way to do backlinks. If we had
| them, everybody could just host their own content, in whatever
| format they want, and others could respond to it on their own
| servers.
|
| Add some GPG signatures into the mix, and people could be
| mirroring and caching content as much as they want without there
| being a problem authenticity.
|
| Now of course doing backlinks in a way that isn't open to abuse
| and spam is difficult. But I consider that a much more worthwhile
| endeavor than just hacking together yet another Twitter clone
| that fundamentally suffers from all the exact same problems as
| Twitter does. I don't need yet another middle man to decide what
| I can and can't view.
| blowski wrote:
| I don't understand the problem with fragmentation. I specifically
| don't want to have all my online presence to be centralised in a
| single account on a single system.
|
| So it's OK for me to have 5 different Mastodon accounts, each
| representing a different aspect of my life.
| water8 wrote:
| tinyhouse wrote:
| So much talk about content moderation. When you have a good
| community then they do the content moderation. Like here and good
| subs on Reddit. It's all about the quality of the community. The
| problem with Twitter is that there were too obsessed with growing
| the user base over anything else.
| water8 wrote:
| jmyeet wrote:
| To quote Nilay Patel [1]:
|
| > I say this with utter confidence because the problems with
| Twitter are not _engineering problems_. They are _political
| problems_.
|
| Things you mention like the backend data store truly do not
| matter. LIke at all. If Facebook can run billions of users on
| MySQL it just doesn't matter.
|
| You then get into product questions, which (IMHO) are more
| interesting. Twitter grew originally as mobile-only. As in, the
| 140 character limit came from the (then) SMS limit and you signed
| up with a phone number. That's interesting history but would you
| do it the same today? No. Smartphones are ubiquitous.
|
| It might be useful to reduce spam to tie an account to a phone
| number but that's a separate question.
|
| What people on HN tend to focus on however is:
|
| 1. The API; and
|
| 2. Whether it should be federated or not.
|
| For a truly open API, Twitter 2.0 just becomes plumbing, and not
| very interesting plumbing at that. Are you building a company or
| something like the Wikimedia Foundation? If it's a company, you
| lose the ability to easily advertise (ie monetize) your users
| with third-party clients so an open API is only ever going to
| exist until you get enough traction to throw all the third-
| parties off. We've seen this time and time again. It's Lucy and
| the football. It boggles my mind people keep falling for it.
|
| You could monetize with a subscription model but users don't want
| to pay for things. We've seen this time and time again too.
|
| As for federation, HNers seem to like this. They want Email 2.0.
| But email is terrible _because_ of federation. Federation allows
| bad actors. more importantly, it doesn 't solve any problem
| actual users care about. So it's going to be centralized.
|
| Which leaves us to the biggest problem of all: the network
| effect. How do you get users on a social platform when everyone
| is on the existing platform? The answer is you really don't
| unless you invent a new product (rather than copying an existing
| one).
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-
| twitt...
| mawise wrote:
| I'll chime in here, since I'm building one. Twitter does one
| thing that I opted to change--everything is public. The short-
| form, low-effort, public posting that defines twitter leads to a
| platform that promotes trolling over discourse. Haven[1] instead
| promotes private discourse where every post is private.
|
| It's fully decentralized in that everyone runs their own
| instance, but with all open protocols (RSS), it would be trivial
| for someone to build a centralized/federated instance that can
| still interoperate. The open protocol which enables a
| decentralized model is the most important part of that decision.
|
| With RSS as the protocol, you get interoperability with every
| blog ever for free. Combine private posting with public content
| and you get something really neat--the ability to have private
| conversations about public content all on the platform.
|
| You also get an elegant solution to free-speech vs civility. No
| public content means no discovery so you'll never see anything
| from a source you didn't explicitly opt-in to. No trolls and no
| spam.
|
| Arguably, this is more of a Facebook alternative than a Twitter
| alternative but I still think it is a very valuable approach to
| creating more civility in our broader society.
|
| [1]: https://havenweb.org
| greensoap wrote:
| Does the "you only see what you subscribe to" increase the echo
| chamber of the web. Would it led to "here are more thoughts
| that you already agree with" which means people won't have a
| chance to see the other side of a coin?
| ninth_ant wrote:
| Is a public-mostly forum like Twitter actually good at
| escaping bubbles though?
|
| It seems to me that most of what passes for discourse there
| is yelling at the "other side" and smug/snarky in-group
| posts.
| mawise wrote:
| It's definitely a risk. I remember talking with peers in
| undergrad about the campus bubble we lived in compared to
| the surrounding community (which was not as affluent).
| Ultimately I think people need safe spaces to explore
| ideas. If they are surrounded by a world that is a
| battleground over identity, then they're going to dig in
| and fight. If they are surrounded by people they trust,
| then I think they have room to explore different ideas.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I can't help but think part of the answer is to offer users more
| powerful filtering, so that they may exercise their own free will
| over what they see and hear. Sure some would choose an extremely
| narrow subsection of society to hear from, but others would cast
| their net wider. One might even choose to monetise "smart
| filters" that took the legwork out of building and maintaining
| such filters. The "smartness" need not be an algo either, one
| might choose to outsource filtering to another human offering
| that service.
|
| I wrote a little about this after a particularly irritating
| experience with LinkedIn, but the same goes for twitter or any
| public forum.
|
| https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| godshatter wrote:
| 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.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I don't doubt that the problem is a tough one to solve. This
| is (partly) why I suggest offering a marketplace for filters,
| and so a reward for those who crack the problem. Of course
| there are always going to be some people who which deploying
| any kind of filter is just too much work. There were always
| some for whom editing a .killfile was too much.
| Kye wrote:
| I expect this would end up like Netflix's algorithm bounty.
| It turned out no one could do much better than Netflix's
| own engineers. Twitter _already_ had a system that worked
| in the form of sharable blocklists, but they hobbled and
| eventually removed it for some reason.
|
| I could easily build my own just by iterating through the
| follower lists of prominent objectionable people to block
| them if Twitter didn't prevent it.
|
| "It looks like you're using automation!"
|
| No shit.
| benrutter wrote:
| What I've always wished existed for social media was something
| more along the lines of a protocol (like email or rss) than a
| platform (like Facebook or Twitter).
|
| It seems like as long as a communication form is tied in to one
| specific provider by design, then there is always going to be
| unsolvable problems with deplatforming users, content moderation
| etc.
|
| That's what I'd love to see- decentralization in the sense of
| anyone can feasibly host a server, rather than the web 3.0 /
| cryptosphere sense. I genuinely think that would solve most of
| the issues we see from monopoly platforms.
| tkk23 wrote:
| It already exists. Have you never heard of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub ?
| kadomony wrote:
| Spot the engineer looking to build something without doing any
| real empathy research first. This is why the Metaverse is
| currently flopping, bruh. Take a step back and stop getting erect
| over tech strategies. Ask if people even want this first, and
| then concern yourself with user requirements first and foremost.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| Why so many (wrong) presumptions and anger over your own
| presumptions?
|
| HN has a largely technical audience. The "how" is the question
| here as that is what I was interested to hear from other people
| with a variety of experiences. Twitter was just an example
| which feels topical today and it also has an interesting
| problem to solve. It's much harder to scale a public town
| square than let's say the same volume of messages sent over
| WhatsApp where it's mostly 1:1 and some n:m conversations where
| n and m are relatively small numbers.
|
| Not looking to build a new Twitter, don't have the time or
| desire, but I find the how interesting nevertheless.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Whatever platform does not allow a search like "What did user U
| publish on day D" has a specific label:
|
| it is substantially the Soviet Pravda.
|
| Imre Lakatos defined totalitarianism in terms of "how distant in
| the past can I retrieve documents" - the shorter the span of
| accessible data, the worse. In historical totalitarianism regimes
| such obstacle was instated to hide possible ideological changes
| in the regime, to give an appearance of monolithic consistency.
| In general, if you have a collector and checking history is not a
| basic feature, than it is nothing but a joke.
|
| (PS: the first post on HN is the 'Y combinator' submission from
| pg, Paul Graham, on October 9, 2006 - you find this with one URL.
| This is how it is supposed to be - the distantmost past is as
| accessible as the recentmost addition.)
| delecti wrote:
| I think an audit trail of a government is very different from
| being able to pick through the personal posts of an individual
| person. I think it'd actually be a fantastic feature to have
| history gently fade away. If I could disable other people
| viewing my tweets older than 1 year, I'd enable it in a
| heartbeat, and I'd think nearly everyone else should too.
| Kye wrote:
| Mastodon has a built-in post culler for this purpose.
| mbreese wrote:
| I think the right to be forgotten is one of the worst things
| we've lost in the modern Internet era. People should be
| allowed to say/do something stupid when they are young
| without it coming back to bite them when they are older.
|
| Within reason -- for example: pictures from college parties.
| There's no reason why these should be forever accessible. A
| nice, graceful decay on some data would make sense.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _something stupid_
|
| I would say a good example of "something stupid" would be
| to publish something that should remain private.
| mbreese wrote:
| 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 in the
| bottle, so the next best thing would be to have different
| levels of data permanence.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| And I would add: when exactly did the term 'prudence'
| fall from top positions to quasi-neglection in the
| ranking of frequency of use, and instead others like
| 'paranoia' started to climb?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| If what you write should better at some point disappear, you
| should not write it in the first place.
|
| This, of course, in the collector with the purpose I am
| imagining - the replying poster clearly wants to visit a very
| different place. In the restaurant you get "restored" through
| proper treatment, while at the bar the idea is to get
| disturbed through every device: restaurants shall not be
| bars.
|
| When I, in the distant past, thought about checking T., it
| was because some specific great minds had approached it: I
| checked it on the idea to consult the statements from
| specific prestigious Intellectuals - not random posts.
|
| And: the replying poster has not provided a speckle of a
| justification for the "bohemian" idea proposed.
|
| > _an audit trail of a government is very different_
|
| The platform that the submitter proposed for discussion
| reportedly has an extraordinary participation of leaders,
| ministers, politicians and official speakers. So, while my
| original statement was a parallel in an absiological context
| ("if something important was submitted it has to be
| retrievable"), even a direct more literal application of the
| idea is possible.
| groffee wrote:
| > what technological choices would I make to get it quickly off
| the ground but allow for scale?
|
| Wrong question. End users don't give a shit about your tech
| stack. You should be thinking of requirements and features.
| freeplay wrote:
| But you need a tech stack to make sure those features are
| performant and highly available.
| kaptainscarlet wrote:
| Get users first and worry about scaling later.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Make a experience where you need actual verification like kyc to
| enable certain features.
| tootie wrote:
| Your tech choices will have nearly zero impact on your success or
| failure. You need to figure out content moderation and
| monetization.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Elon, is that you?
| [deleted]
| FriedrichN wrote:
| Very simple, I wouldn't.
| krisboyz781 wrote:
| Just add the same features but focus on a Reddit like format with
| communities.
| Apreche wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Get customer service by DMing companies directly because they
| respond on Twitter for some reason?
|
| This is sort of what https://www.resolver.co.uk/ is. But the
| main reason companies respond on Twitter is that it's _also_ a
| place where you can catch the attention of journalists. There
| 's positive synergy in having everyone fight on the same
| platform.
| Apreche wrote:
| I agree. I was just thinking of examples of things people do
| on Twitter.
| Finnucane wrote:
| I'd make users pay before posting. A small amount, just pennies.
| But you'd have to click on the payment before any post. No ads,
| no data collection, none of that. Just the fees. A lot of noise
| just wouldn't get posted.
| muskmusk wrote:
| This question was relevant 15 years ago when the tech for
| building something like this did not exist. Today the tech exists
| so it really doesn't matter.
|
| A still unsolved problem is how to moderate effectively. Spend
| your time with that problem instead.
| genjii931 wrote:
| Figure out the business model first. Until you can do that, you
| will fail no matter how clever your technological solution is.
| dboreham wrote:
| Problem #0: how to make money to pay for all that tech.
| notmyfriend wrote:
| [deleted]
| yrgulation wrote:
| The design of a new twitter doesnt start with the how question.
| You can write it in php or even python for all i (or the market)
| care. The question is what a new twitter should be used for.
| Politics and social issues will always be loud and argumentative,
| so we probably dont need that as thats what twitter already does.
| A nice community for people to follow other people for various
| crafts and topics would indeed be nice. Maybe a place where we
| can follow popular scientists, technical organisations, artists,
| actors, and generally speaking anyone non political. Something as
| basic as twitter in terms of ui but without the garbage twitter
| has.
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| I think the tech stack would whatever is easiest for the specific
| team you have. The app doesn't seem complicated.
|
| The platform that I would like would: - Block
| links. The platform is for sharing personal thoughts and quips,
| not spreading marketing or propaganda. - Block "re-
| sharing." This would include detecting and deleting duplicate
| posts across accounts. - Cost a token amount of money.
| Enough to filter out scammers and bots. - No "engagement
| algorithm," your feed is exactly what you design it to be.
|
| I just want a place where I can see what people are doing, what
| they have to say, without all the BS, and where people are
| accountable for the content that they produce.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| The problems are political, not technical
| al2o3cr wrote:
| probably opt for a fast NoSQL database
|
| I hear MongoDB is badass rockstar tech /s
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| How about we all go back to having little forums and chatrooms
| for our niche interests and finding cliches of people online we
| fit in with instead of making a Twitter ripoff
| captainmuon wrote:
| I can't speak much about the technical stack, although I would
| probably write it in Python and or TypeScript because that is
| easiest for me, or in something exotic like Nim for fun.
|
| If decentralized, I would think about a clause in the license
| that mandates some kind of federation. Although, it seems like
| the ability to _not_ federate with certain instances is seen as a
| selling point for some Mastodon users.
|
| Most importantly, I would not try to build a Twitter clone.
| Twitter is often "yelling into the void" aka write-only, and when
| you get something back it is often aggrivating. Sure, you can
| also have great exchanges and meet nice people, but all in all it
| is just not so pleasant.
|
| What I would go for instead is a clone of early Facebook or
| MySpace. You have a profile page, you can present yourself as you
| like. You have statusses but no global feed by default. People
| can send you private messages, but they can also interact in some
| fashion with your profile. A social network, instead of social
| media.
|
| One thing I'd like to experiment with is derived identities. Say
| you want to participate in a community (forum, group chat) with
| similar people. You want to use a pseudonym, but the community
| wants some assurance that you are really a teenager, or a woman,
| or a technology expert, or whatever. Your main profile would
| "prove" this, but you don't want to disclose your identity. So
| you create a new account, and the system would vouch that the new
| account is e.g. from a woman older than 21 with an account in
| good standing, but disclose nothing more. I think I can work out
| a cryptographic scheme so that even the server cannot connect the
| two accounts, but everybody can verify the proof... but it is
| tricky.
|
| Looking forward to verified celebrites and government members
| with alt-accounts posting controversial stuff under pseudonyms
| ;-) ... OK maybe not, when I think about it.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I would probably try to involve sociologists who specialize in a
| relevant field. I cannot stop thinking that every sufficiently
| large social network so far seemed to degenerate into a complete
| cesspool. Some important bits seem to be missing
| noaheverett wrote:
| Can speak to the DB side of things: Redis in front of an RDBMS
| scaled well for me at https://glue.im/noah
|
| Timlines/activity are built from the RDBMS and served from Redis
| as a cache. New posts are added to the cache directly as well so
| only needs to rebuild if you lose the entire cache which only
| happens if we need to restart the server. Also not storing full
| posts in Redis, just IDs, pulling via primary key from DB is very
| fast.
|
| That same setup was used for a previous app that had a few
| million user base (don't remember the concurrent user numbers
| though) and it ran well with a clear path to scale it up.
|
| More thoughts: build a mobile friendly web app first, you're
| gonna need some sort of back-end to run the iOS app anyways and
| tweaking a web app UI is much quicker than resubmitting iOS
| builds to the App Store.
| espadrine wrote:
| Do you ask about how to build Twitter if it didn't exist, or how
| to build something that people would switch away to?
|
| The 1 issue to overcome in the latter is to achieve Twitter's
| network effect fast, so the first goal would be to design for
| easy bridging, connecting or aggregating.
|
| For the former, people open the page to see content they yearn
| for. That depends on their interests. If you only show content
| from their follows, there is too little; if you show content from
| the whole platform, their interest will be drowned in things they
| don't care about.
|
| One easy trick is to show messages from people you follow with
| high probability, and messages from people they follow with lower
| probability, and so on. But unfortunately, you eventually need a
| stronger recommendation algorithm, which can show viral tweets
| (like the "dress color" illusion from 2015) and suggest people
| that tweet about your interests. This is the main reason people
| come back to the app every day.
|
| The replies feature is actively radioactive. I'd recommend only
| showing replies from people you've approved, and putting other
| replies in a separate menu without a notification counter.
|
| On decentralization, unless you add a hefty seasoning of
| cryptography and replication, it does not make sense. Beyond
| fragmentation, the risk of servers going down or in malicious
| access to private information or forgery is better addressed in a
| centralized fashion. Trust is easily lost.
|
| Besides, the tech becomes a no-brainer with a central system. Go
| for a relational database and index as things take steam. Start
| synchronous, then move to async batch jobs.
| phailhaus wrote:
| For one, allow following hashtags as a first-class feature, and
| move them out of the tweet body.
|
| The problems with Twitter are not technical, they are baked into
| its design.
|
| 1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow
| individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network
| effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially
| with the number of followers they have. Consider the six degrees
| of separation: applied to Twitter, we realize that it only takes
| 6 retweets to reach basically everyone. Following "Topics" is
| close but not good enough, because you cannot voluntarily opt
| into topics or really understand why a given tweet is within a
| topic; Twitter uses its Computer Magic to categorize tweets and
| makes all the decisions in a black box.
|
| 2. The only negative feedback is unfollowing. This is a problem
| because it means that practically all forms of engagement are
| treated equally. Oh, this tweet is getting a lot of comments,
| let's boost it so more people see it! Whoops, it was about space
| lasers. We are stuck repeatedly fighting Bad Takes because they
| have to be argued against every time they are brought up and
| always gain nonzero traction. They are never put to rest. There
| is very little negative incentive against being a garbage human
| on Twitter, especially if you're anonymous.
| peterhunt wrote:
| No one here is answering your question so I will :)
|
| Database: I'd use whatever you know and helps you get to market,
| but abstract it away from the rest of your app so you can swap
| out later. Lots of good choices here; I'd pick mysql or postgres
| running on rds. I would also design for sharding by user on day 1
| because that can be extremely painful to add later, however, care
| would have to be taken to ensure it doesn't slow you down too
| much early. I'd also just use an rdbms for caching unless it
| becomes a problem, only then would I reach for redis. I would
| also avoid a fanout-on-write approach in favor of fanout-on-read.
| It will save you a lot of headaches later.
|
| Firestore is nice but can get expensive quickly so I'd plan for
| it to be a temporary thing.
|
| 2. Would go for a react native app first but there are lots of
| options to choose from. Go with tech you know but keep in mind
| that it's basically impossible to get a AAA mobile experience on
| web, and in this space polish really matters.
|
| 3. Decentralized social networks never took off because they are
| too hard to build. Avoid at all costs unless you have some angle
| (ie you have some novel tech discovered during your PhD). A
| middle ground could be a centralized network that is open source
| and makes data portability front and center.
|
| I'll also say that growth matters a lot here. As a founder I
| think 20% of the teams headspace should be thinking about
| engineering. The rest on growth and retention.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| Thanks, really good points and I agree with a lot of it.
| rustyf wrote:
| I've never actually seen anyone in 40 years actually swap out
| that database.
| simonw wrote:
| I've been on a team that ported a production system from
| MySQL to PostgreSQL, because we wanted the ability to add
| columns without downtime (this was a few years ago before
| MySQL gained the ability) and we wanted to build features
| using trigram indexes.
| peterhunt wrote:
| I think it's fairly common to swap out your core datastore
| when you take your prototype / MVP and bring it to
| production, or the first time your product experiences
| hypergrowth. At point the codebase, schema and team are still
| small enough that this is feasible. In fact I suspect every
| Firestore app that hits any degree of scale swaps out the DB
| for at least a subset of the app.
|
| So I agree with you with this one important exception.
| rozhok wrote:
| I did it once in my career. We've had one legacy PHP project
| designed to work for MySQL. I was in charge of bringing it
| back to live and I decided to host in on Heroku for the sake
| of simple deployment. While Heroku does have MySQL addons I
| opted for using Postgres.
|
| So we've just switched underlying connection and fixed a
| dozen of (mostly reports) places with plain SQL queries with
| MySQL-specific syntax. ORM library handled rest just
| perfectly.
| jimbokun wrote:
| My company did, when the DB vendor quoted as an astronomical
| price per server when the original licensing agreement
| expired.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I've seen it with postgres-compatible DBs and Cassandra-
| compatible DBs. Lots of databases build their frontends this
| way so that people can switch from postgres/cassandra to
| their product when they need a bigger DB or better
| performance. I've never seen anyone swap any other kind of
| database.
| delecti wrote:
| I did once in my last job, because we were told AWS was
| sunning down SimpleDB. We were able to swap to DynamoDB with
| relatively little fuss (though obviously not none, no
| migration is entirely painless) because we abstracted it so
| well. Turns out that several years later, SimpleDB is still
| up and running, but it was probably a good migration anyway.
|
| Probably a bigger benefit though, is being able to use a
| different DB in production (probably big scale) vs on your
| personal machine while developing.
| [deleted]
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| AWS swapped famously swapped out Oracle DB2
| jmull wrote:
| Heh, of course you get a bunch of responses about database
| swaps...
|
| But I think the point is still valid. You probably don't want
| your early design to focus on an edge case.
|
| That said, a clear API between your DB and app is worthwhile
| for a lot of reasons (in general).
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| What even does the idea of a decentralized social network look
| like?
|
| Every social web I imagine branches out from me (if I am the
| user in question) and then goes out to gather information from
| there. So on and so forth. Unless I'm thinking about the wrong
| information gathering system.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| I'd go for redis a bit earlier, it's just so easy to use! I
| wouldn't cache much at all to start, then at like 10k users (or
| wherever my benchmarking says to) I'd include it w/redis.
|
| React is a decent choice also here because you can port it
| wherever. One code base for web/iOS/Android is probably
| critical given how few dev resources you'd want to spend on it
| (you've got the right idea there too).
|
| Also agree w/r/t decentralization. I think this is a fantasy
| for nerds but most people really do not care about privacy no
| matter how much people try to explain it to them.
|
| I guess one thing I would add here is I'd work _very_ hard to
| minimize operational costs for as long as I can, until you can
| show the explosive growth that 'll interest investors. There
| are a ton of scrappy ways to save money on a tech stack like
| this early on, and you can probably find a way to get that
| AWS/GCP/Azure credit money to basically make this free to
| operate until your F&F round.
|
| One you have a userbase, just... idk, iterate with them.
| Everyone and their mother probably has ideas for what they'd
| like Not-Twitter to be, but finding what the GCD is for that
| would be important to sustain growth I bet.
| baxtr wrote:
| Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a
| twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I
| failed even though our tech was superb.
|
| If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how
| you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the
| platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to
| stick around.
|
| Which existing social networks (not media ones, real ones) would
| you try to capture first? Facebook and Tinder both did the Uni
| campus strategy quite successfully. Slack did the Bay Area
| startups strategy. What's your strategy?
| contravariant wrote:
| Maybe also think about WHY you want a twitter alternative.
|
| Communicating via short untargeted messages was _always_ going
| to be a shitshow, why not let Elon Musk run it if he so
| desperately wants to?
| mromanuk wrote:
| Yes, every software problem is a marketing problem.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a
| twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I
| failed even though our tech was superb.
|
| what was it called? now I'm curious.
| jenscow wrote:
| Yet Another Twitter - YaTwit
| tkk23 wrote:
| >though our tech was superb.
|
| Please don't leave us hanging. How had you designed it?
|
| I would like to know even more: Did you have integration with
| other networks via ActivityPub or other protocols?
|
| There is a huge risk of wasting time if I cannot migrate my
| social network. New services are prone to being discontinued,
| why should I invest in a new network that locks me in?
|
| I don't understand why not all new networks offer ActivityPub
| migration by default. Distribution should be much easier.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a
| twitter alternative. No one cares._
|
| The OP specifically asked about this, and reading the comments
| a lot of people here evidently do care.
| baxtr wrote:
| That's fair enough :) I can't stop this anyways. Just lending
| my thoughts.
| prox wrote:
| While its true, it's like asking "what nail and hammer am I
| going to fabricate?" , all while the market is flooded and
| capped to the brim with hammer and nail companies.
|
| The better question is how to reach people and get them off
| their _insert favourite platform_ , what makes you unique?
| What can you do to make sure people start buying into it?
| What's your value proposition?
|
| It's far more a social question than a technology question
| (still with respect to OP who is interested in the tech)
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| I think how is still an interesting question.
| baxtr wrote:
| Interesting yes. But mainly a waste of time.
| Shadowed_ wrote:
| If you waste time on something that's interestning to you,
| time is not being wasted.
| baxtr wrote:
| Not if your proclaimed goal is to create a Twitter
| alternative.
| Karunamon wrote:
| It is probably not for you to decide if how someone
| spends their time is a waste. That is something only the
| person can decide.
| baxtr wrote:
| Absolutely. I think it's still ok and enriching to put
| energy into debating priorities.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Distributed. Possibly peer-to-peers and easier via regional? Or
| via air? And extremely easy to get into if you're "in the area"
| and know at least one person.
|
| Difficult without being "in-person" and in the know.
|
| A centralized platform has brought more problems than solutions.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| Not sure about the technical tools I'd use (my default flask and
| mysql? Or django and postgresql?) but I would definitely revive
| Vine as part of my platform instead of just letting it die like
| Twitter did.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| I can think of lots of ways I would design a twitter that was a
| better user experience. I can't think of many ways that improve
| it while also being profitable. And that's the rub.
| pkrumins wrote:
| I'd use centralized approach with Mongodb as the database and
| definitely mobile first with no desktop version even.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| You don't. You build something better.
|
| Twitter is a form of low quality information broadcast in that
| roughly 10% of the active users post anything and the remaining
| 90% consume it, so at this point its basically just an overpriced
| RSS feed + friend of a friend logic (FOAF).
|
| Social media is in decline, so building new social media is the
| last desperate resort of people seeking to broadcast their
| opinions in a venue they control. If you are like Elon Musk and
| have made enormous wealth by encouraging people to inflate the
| value of your stock then control of social media is important
| especially when your primary value channel is at risk of removal
| after calling people pedophiles or challenging the SEC. Same for
| Donald Trump.
|
| For everybody else social media is either a party of deplorables
| or just a venue for mindless streaming entertainment (TikTok).
|
| Unless you own large advertising media channels in need of
| eyeballs I would recommending investing all your time and money
| into that next thing that will replace social media out right.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| It would be minimal and ephemeral, much like 4chan - but without
| anonymity and 0 tolerance for illegal content.
| Marazan wrote:
| Twitter is not a technical problem.
|
| I mean, don't get me wrong, there are interesting technical
| challenges in a high volume site like Twitter. However, the
| problems and real existential challenges Twitter faces have
| nothing to do with tech.
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| Poaster in the house.
| seydor wrote:
| The format doesn't matter too much but make sure it is very
| leftist. Twitter became popular as a leftist bubbles and most
| journalists are leftists too so they will join and the rest will
| be history. Now is your opportunity
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| It may show how much I've gone down the dark side in recent
| years, but it feels like the wrong question; unless and until the
| business case/plan, and functional requirements, are figured out,
| technology is immaterial and undefined.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I think the issue is when everyone has a platform, not everyone
| is heard. Loud, controversial minorities win over other content.
| The critical thinking level of the global population, on average
| is terrifyingly low. We forget this in engineering circles.
|
| There's also the issue of accepting that what we find
| distasteful, offensive or horrific is a cultural artifact of the
| time we live. Generally accepted common sense today would've had
| you at the gallows not that long ago.
|
| I think the only way forward is with compassion. Compassion for
| people who hate, who are racist, who think the world is flat, who
| have views that we can't stand. These people are maginalised BY
| us. Their opinions do not reflect cultural norms, and our varied
| norms fail to co-exist on a global level.
|
| Compassion. Tolerance and kind acceptance of those we dislike. We
| don't have to agree, and we should certainly control those that
| do physical harm to others.
|
| The rest is compassion and education as the river of culture
| winds around.
|
| If we can't build that into a system, the system will just be
| either a repeat of Twitter or echo chambers of toxic
| agreeability.
| djbusby wrote:
| Decentralized, signed and/or encrypted messages. Search and topic
| management done on different providers. Use Activity Pub. Bridge
| to others - at least to read/view.
|
| Been working on something but it's not ready to release.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I'd take a step back. Twitter did the right thing when they
| switched "favourite" for "like" for example.
|
| Mastodon still only has favourites. There's no way to say "I like
| this toot, but not enough to retwe... boost it" on Mastodon.
| Favouriting is more like "this is the best ever and I want to
| return to this later" -style bookmarking in my mind.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I already built the alternative. Check out the video on the front
| page for an intro.
|
| https://cancel.pointless.click/
| jabagonuts wrote:
| 1. Start with a simple tech stack you're already familiar with
| though this will likely change over time 2. Build a few of your
| favorite features, either because you want to use them yourself
| or because you like building that kind of feature 3. Get your
| friends and family to use it with you 4. Listen to their
| feedback, or ignore it, and build the next few interesting
| features 5. Get your friends' friends and family to try it out
| and give you feedback 6. Keep going as long as you enjoy the
| process
|
| You may not end up where you set out to go, but at least you
| enjoyed the ride and learned something new!
| ctvo wrote:
| 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.
| naravara wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Sadly many of those people come for the self-marketers and
| thought leaders though.
|
| I've noticed this in Reddit too. A lot of posters in places
| like AskHistorians and AskScience have left, questions just
| don't get answered as much anymore and the quality of responses
| has gone way down. I expect those people came for the memes and
| interesting articles (and maybe /r/GoneWild) and participated
| in this value additive stuff while they happened to be around.
| But as Reddit got less interesting, more focused on memes and
| political fighting, and generally became less of a fun place to
| hang out they seem to spend less time on it and post less.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Political fighting on Reddit is fascinating to me. It's
| mostly against people who _aren't in the room_ - caricatures
| of the Right, or centrists even.
|
| My real life experience is very different - I know a ton of
| gay Republicans, for example. Most people in a group are not
| the median, and all the Reddit approach does is alienate
| anyone that _was_ open to new ideas.
| cphoover wrote:
| Seems like you are looking for an intelligent filtering tool-
| set.
| NateEag wrote:
| As others have said, I wouldn't. Twitter is a cesspool because
| its design and human nature fundamentally work together in very
| unfortunate ways.
|
| I might consider building something vaguely similar with a
| different featureset meant to fill a vaguely similar niche. A few
| half-formed thoughts about possible features for such a system:
|
| - There is a hard limit on the number of users a given account
| may reply to, loosely inspired by Dunbar's Number. Let's say 50.
| This forces people to prioritize carefully who they want to
| interact with.
|
| - Adding or removing someone to your reply list takes a day to
| take effect. This might reduce the degree to which flame wars can
| spread - by the time people have unlocked the ability to reply to
| something controversial, they'll have had a little time to cool
| down / have people generally lose interest.
|
| - Limiting the number of tweets, retweets, and replies an account
| can make per day. I don't have any concrete numbers here, but the
| goal is to make people think more about what they actually want
| to reply to.
|
| I'm not confident anything Twitter-like is actually a salvageable
| concept. These are some things I think might improve the odds of
| building something similar that isn't a toxic dumpster fire by
| nature.
| aliqot wrote:
| Launch it on a $5 VPS first. When you get enough folks to knock
| it over, you've validated the need.
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