Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
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?
350 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadPeople 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
There's no way Jack doesn't know this already exists.
Honestly this project looks pretty interesting, and I hope it takes off. Want more decentralized tech without horrendous "defi" attached.
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)
discord, telegram?
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.
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)
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.
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?
Because you won’t become the next twitter, you probably won’t regardless….
I think there is more to asking the question than that.
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?
what was it called? now I'm curious.
The OP specifically asked about this, and reading the comments a lot of people here evidently do care.
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)
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.
https://cancel.pointless.click/
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.
>“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.
Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.
That way, you get to not hear racist stuff, and I get to not have my morality chosen by random americans.
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.
Then again, the solution to the hooligan yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre isn't to close the theatre...
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.
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.
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.
> a moderate opinion
> > Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have.
Tenuous argument that Twitter === "global public square" notwithstanding, saying some people don't warrant a public square is not a moderate opinion. It's borderline fascist, and disgusting is the most civil word I would use to describe it.
> Nobody in the U.S. can escape the grandstanding, the vitriol, the ostracizing, or the influence that the forum represents.
Oh please. If you're not on Twitter what does the ratioing or "ostracizing" do to your day to day? Even if you are, unless you're commonly delving into hot button topics or conversations between people you don't follow, there is very little drama unless you want there to do. I almost exclusively follow people I haven't met in real life, who are doing cool things in the tech space. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been subject to either grandstanding or vitriol, and I'm fairly active on the platform.
> If we all pull together we can get through this, I just know it.
Get through what? Musk buying Twitter isn't some apocalyptic event. Unless you're the type of sad person who gets their entire sense of self worth from having a little blue check mark next to your name, or you think it's generally a bad thing that people have a place to speak their mind, this will almost certainly be a complete non-issue. Have some dignity.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Sure some people will go down the rabbit hole anyway, but then they will limit their reach by virtue of being too extreme to appeal to "normal" or moderate people who don't think about this stuff too deeply and are put off by extremism reflexively. When things are more centralized, there's sort of a one-way ratcheting effect where you get exposed to mild versions of the thing enough to start getting into it, and then slowly get pulled into more and more extreme versions. That doesn't happen with forums that each have their own culture and identity, there isn't as much transitional/interstitial space to acclimatize you. You just jump in, read the vibe without being preconditioned, and make your instinctual call on whether you'd like to stay.
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.
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.
In my idea the place itself would be neutral/non-significant, and you could only be in one place at a time, like IRL.
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
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.
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.
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.
In terms of human groups, we've traditionally dealt with this by means of hierarchies (with all the built-in shortcomings).
Personally, I find a homogenous mob terrifying. Being in agreement with millions of others implies that the subject of the agreement is extremely basic and common (like "we all need air to breathe").
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.
No. You want moderation, because you don't want people saying The Bad Things™, 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.
Not that the IRL public square is immune to rule-breaking. In the heat of the moment, a mob can do horrendous things in a flash.
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.
Anyway, from a technical point of view, this is what Mastodon instances already can offer.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
It wouldn't be the same cost. Publishers charge advertisers in proportion to the number of people who see the ad.
[1] https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
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 façade 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
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.
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.
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
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.
Discoverability and noise filtering are the hard problem.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
The answer to this question seems almost implicit for you, but it's far from obvious to me.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a much harder problem to fix. There are some partial solutions, IMO. Although none are all that practical to implement.
- 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?
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
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.
Building something like Twitter is pretty simple.
Building something that scales to 400 million MAU is a really hard technical challenge.
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.
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.
Happy to share details with anyone interested.
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.
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.
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...
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.
When a social media site runs on ads, it will inevitably begin to shift to being advertiser friendly. When it's a paid site, it will struggle to get users. Might be worth investigating a Patreon or Reddit type funding, where paid users get benefits, awards that can be handed out, message amplification and ad blocking, but where anyone can create an account.
It might be useful to also integrate the Brave browser format where the users get credit for viewing ads that can be traded to other people or spent in an online store for fabulous toys and prizes.
The reason I'm saying all of this is that what an alternative to Twitter needs in order to serve the people is a funding method that does not rely on stocks and shareholders, but that also has a method to manage invasive business practice while remaining profitable. The system should be technically owned by the people and therefore be a place that people would want to gather together without the worry of money having to change hands in order to use it or have a painless experience.
Aside from that, it should offer frictionless open APIs to developers (<- very useful for getting people invested in the platform), it should have a topic filter (for instance, I am not interested in Sports at all, so being able to filter out Sports related topics would vastly improve the experience for me), and in addition to that, there should be a free-for-all town-hall section that removes any filter other than your personal blocklist and does not allow ad/business accounts to post but could have non-targeted generic ad billboards.
That should help minimize echo chambers or at least provide an easy way to step out of your echo chambers without abandoning them.
People need a place to speak and think and breathe without ads and agendas being shoved on them, where ordinary people can speak freely to other people and be evaluated on the quality of their thoughts and posts and not on artificial amplification of weaponized memes and polarizing agendas crafted to serve the financial desires of the wealthy elite.
Also, you can't trust one person (even yourself) to hold the line against the riches and power of the world, you can't trust even an organization founded on the purest of intentions (like Mozilla) to be able to resist both the peaceful and hostile machinations of such people should you reach market saturation.
The company charter would need to be built on principals designed to prevent the consolidation of power and control over the platform into the hands of the few, with some system in place to enable the people to eject other people from the platform entirely. I'm not sure what that would be, maybe every 3 months the top 10-1000 accounts get put to a vote (from verified human account users) and if there are enough votes then those accounts get memorialized and the user has to take 3 months off from the platform and then create a new account.
Sorry for the brain dump, but these are things that might have either improved Twitter or prevented it from becoming a billionaire's plaything and are therefore things I would like to see in whatever rises from its Phoenix Ashes.
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.
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.