HN Explorer

Ask HN: What Comes After Twitter?

5 points by gremlinsinc ↗ HN
I feel like social media was meant to unify and unite not divide, part of me feels a lot of the division is manufactured by cults of personality.

Is it possible to create a social network that brings together people from all walks of life, like the old school social networks did in the beginning?

If so, what features would such a network need in order to be successful and gain market share?

A few of my ideas include: Gamifying moderation by making it a controversial activity. When something is flagged, it could go into a "controversial fight" where people debate whether it deserves moderation or not. Karma could be earned double for participating in moderation activities, to encourage people to use the feature. But it's more like a community involved thing. Alternately, mod teams could be elected paid positions and up for reelection yearly using ranked choice voting. It might be a cool opportunity to experience ranked choice voting on a wide scale.

Another option might be to use AI to categorize every post based on political leanings (e.g. center left, center right, left field, right field, neutral/apolitical). Profiles could act as a link tree of their own, and potentially even as an aggregator for imported online activity (e.g. RSS feeds, Facebook posts, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.).

In this politically polarized world, it's hard to predict what the next iteration of social media will look like. Will text-based platforms like Twitter continue to dominate, or will a TikTok-style attention grabbing platform for text emerge? What do you think the future of social media will look like, and how can we create a platform that is successful and brings people together from all walks of life?

8 comments

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mikece
Why is everyone so down on Twitter? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Elon is as evil as you think/people say he is: does that stop Twitter from "working?" I've heard it said that "Facebook is for talking to people you know and Twitter is for talking to people you don't know" and I think there's a lot of truth to that. Searching for topics by hashtag is a powerful use of twitter (one my company's IT staff actually uses as an early warning of AWS issues because people are tweeting to the #awsoutage hashtag). Sure, people with large followings and evil in their hearts can spout ignorant rhetoric but I'm not required to see that stuff in order for Twitter to be useful to me.

"Is it possible to create a social network that brings together people from all walks of life, like the old school social networks did in the beginning?"

I think we'll see more and more focused communities of interest popping up which is ironic: as the means to communicate increases the number of people we have in our social circles will decrease for various reasons. There is no digital replacement for meeting people in the real world.

viraptor
> does that stop Twitter from "working?"

Sometimes yes. Some people I followed were banned because... they mentioned mastodon I guess? Will someone else disappear for a random reason tomorrow? Maybe. If you don't know what the rules are today because they'll be announced tomorrow, that's not really "working".

Meanwhile for the community I follow, almost everybody but crossposters is gone. Effectively for my interests, Twitter is dead, even if it contains many more people / is more successful overall.

rsynnott
Musk has said that posts from people who pay him $8 a month will be prioritised, and people they block will be downmodded. Now, Musk says a lot of things, few of them true, but that sort of pay-for-attention mechanic is extremely corrosive to the functioning of a social network.

And then of course there’s just the constant arbitrary nonsense, the increasing flakiness of twitter… as someone who rather enjoyed twitter, I’m pretty much expecting it to die and have moved accordingly.

okokwhatever
More Twitter. Get into the platform and you'll see normal people (not us, perfect people) use it more and more. Wishful thinking doesn't work.
mdrzn
"I feel like social media was meant to unify and unite not divide"

Who said so? Who said that the outcome of creating social media networks would be unification and not civil wars and unrests?

Aren't we made to have 150 friends max? I think the human brain is not designed for social media, and there won't be a global platform anytime soon (unless a Gov does it, like WeChat)

WallyFunk
> a social network that brings together people from all walks of life

Twitter has different cohorts that intermingle and it's interesting to watch wildly different people discuss things together. You have the shitposters, the political zealots, the meme-lords, the sports aficionados, the karens, boomers/zoomers, literal government spies/spooks/natsec types, celebrities, brands, infosec types, etc

All chatting away to each other. It's fun to watch, if you take the time.

bediger4000
You missed the science types: paleontology Twitter was a thing, for example.

I quit Twitter because I realized my valuable Intellectual Property was going towards enriching Twitter shareholders. Any Twitter replacement must address that problem, otherwise people will hold back anything other than throwaway memes and rubbish

jdmtheNth
Disparate large groups of people will always create friction, and I'm pretty sure you can't force or legislate civility. HN seems a civil place, and succeeds at this with the idea of unlocking functions as a person learns to adapt to the culture and only offer things that the hierarchy agrees with. This is the only real solution, I think; disallowing disagreeable people until they choose to come around to the preferred ideology.