
Let’s replace Twitter with something much better - cpbotha
https://cpbotha.net/2016/11/19/lets-replace-twitter-with-something-much-better/
======
nixos
Google killed its golden egg.

Google lives off the open web. Two out of four of its main products depend on
the open web:

1\. Search - the less of an open web, the less is searchable by Google.
Facebook is a classic example. 2\. AdWords/AdSense - Facebook, CNN, BBC don't
need it. They have their own networks, and they 're big enough to offer a
"take it or leave it" approach.

(The only two main products not relying on Open Web is Google Cloud and
Android).

Google actually had everything set up, a social network (blogger), a wall
(reader), IM (Google Voice, email).

But they decided that FB is taking over. What did they do? They made "their
own FB". Which solved no one's problems. Google+ had nothing over FB (except
for circles, which FB promptly copied), and killed their old social apps.

Now their running around as a chicken without a head.

~~~
hellofunk
I don't understand how Blogger was a social network in the way FB is?

~~~
posterboy
a blog is a webbed personal log with comments and the core functionality fb
offers is just that, a simple to set up homepage? Blogs have a blogroll
instead of a friendlist, does that make a big difference? Seriously asking, I
don't use the latter.

~~~
hellofunk
Well the interface and way of sharing and communicating with people is totally
different, so I am surprised to see them compared.

~~~
posterboy
>the way of communicating with people is totally different

lol u srs? j/k <3

------
tschellenbach
1\. Nobody except your echo chamber cares about using a distributed or user
controlled system. In fact, the vast majority of users will actively avoid
such a system.

2\. RSS is great, we've just launched this little open source project
[https://github.com/getstream/winds](https://github.com/getstream/winds) But
by no means does RSS replace Twitter. RSS will never become mainstream like
Twitter has (to some extent)

3\. The author has a point about the various issues with Twitter's usability.

~~~
Nition
What this guy is wanting for Twitter is basically what Disapora tried to do
for Facebook. I even backed that Kickstarter[1] back in the day (2010!).

But like you say, the fact is not enough people cared.

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-
per...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-personally-
controlled-do-it-all-distr)

~~~
rebuilder
A big issue with federated or, going even further, P2P alternatives to
centralized platforms seems to be monetization. It's not so long ago that
everyone seemed to be wondering if FB could turn a profit on their platform.
What can an open, decentralized system do for revenue? Donations? Commercial
tech support for node operators? It must pale in comparison with FB's
advertising revenue.

This means a decentralized system can't beat a centralized one at marketing.
Even with large resources, beating an established competitor is hard, but when
the competitor has, and will always have, a huge edge in funds they can throw
at user attraction, the problem seems insurmountable.

~~~
rhizome
What does Facebook offer for all that money that is necessary, though? That
is, why is monetization such a big deal for a communications platform? A
marketing competition? There's no inherent need to participate in that.

~~~
manigandham
Monetization is a big deal because communications service for 1.7B people is
expensive, and Facebook is actually a very efficient system compared to
regular telecom.

~~~
rhizome
A _centralized_ communications service for 1.7B people is expensive. Not that
decentralized or federated services would be cheap, but the costs would be
dispersed.

------
cocktailpeanuts
"Setting up a blog at for example WordPress.com is not much more complicated
than creating a new Twitter account."

I don't think I can take an idea seriously when it comes from someone who says
stuff like this. Anyone who's had to manage a product will know better. It's
like saying email and twitter are the same. But seriously, this post seems
pretty out of touch with the reality.

He uses politics as an example, but for majority of the people politics is
exactly why they leave Twitter because it's so annoying having to listen to
these people. It's like listening to your grandfather talking about the same
thing over and over again--most of his words are right, but after a while it
gets old and you want to get away from having to listen to same shit over and
over. Twitter is worse because it's not even some wisdom. Most tweets are low
quality and increasingly many tweets have negative energy.

Lastly, we don't have to worry about Twitter's future. This guy worries that
Twitter may go away, but I'm sure he wouldn't really care if it actually did.
Instead, some other service will come along and swoop up anyone who want to
keep using the format (Although it would be much smaller number since people
now know better)

------
cyorir
So you need to pre-approve posts? It seems like this would only increase the
"echo chamber" factor for the audience, since they'll only see whatever
opinions the author chooses to present in the comments section. I also don't
see how this reduces abusive posts or work for the author. The author still
has to read each post to review it, meaning they'll still see the abusive
posts even if they don't approve them. And the most viewed authors will
receive far too many responses to sift through. If you get 2000 comments, then
chances are you won't view them all.

So when the problem right now seems to be that people aren't being exposed to
diverse viewpoints, I don't think something like this would necessarily help.

I also don't necessarily think that giving Twitter our public history is bad.
I suppose you need an alternative if you want the things you type to be
forgettable, but I'm not sure that represents very many Twitter users. If you
are using Twitter, surely you intend to let people know how you stand now and
how you stood in the past? There isn't really a pretense of privacy with
Twitter, and I don't think there ever has been. It serves a completely
different purpose from something like Facebook, where there is a greater
expectation that access to your data will be limited.

The idea of a blog-based social media network already exists; it's called
Tumblr. I think Tumblr is much closer to meeting the needs of the Author, so
maybe that is a better model to start from. Users have more control of their
content there, from length of messages and mixing content to basic formatting.

~~~
mos_basik
Pre-emptive apology for longpost - not all of it is aimed at you!

This is the first time I've seen Tumblr mentioned in overarching discussion of
"what are we going to do about Facebook and Twitter?" that HN (and others)
have been having recently.

OP's two main concerns about Twitter both stem from the fact that it's a
centralized system belonging to one company:

1) It's a single point of failure; everything is lost if Twitter goes
bankrupt.

2) Twitter holds and (more visibly, recently) _is exercising_ supreme veto
power over who gets to use their product and what they use it for. (Note:
opinions diverge here; some think Twitter isn't effective enough at
identifying and curtailing abuse; others think Twitter is censoring free
speech. Both are possible because of centralization, both are bad.)

Tumblr is still centralized and thus solves neither of these concerns, but you
are aware of that; you cited it as a possible model, not as a drop-in
solution. But real, federated blogging already exists - OP is using Wordpress,
not Blogspot, Ghost, etc. (Hey, you can even self host Wordpress! or Jekyll,
Hexo, etc.)

As discussed elsewhere in this thread, basic tools exist for federated blog
networking and discovery - RSS, blog rolls, search engines. Like OP, I think
there is significant margin for improvement in the UX of those tools.

Tumblr's barrier to entry is almost nil - username, password, bam - but WP's
free hosted option honestly isn't far behind. That kind of setup would work
for average users. If it had good network/discovery tooling built into the
platform using open standards, it'd be on par with Tumblr.

But on top of that, a user banned from free WP hosting has the option of
buying shared hosting pre-installed with WP from another provider and still
being able to participate. It goes down a continuum of ease-of-setup vs.
degree of control through VPS to a machine in the basement.

"But why would you want people who get banned that much to still be able to
publish?" People get bullied off Tumblr not infrequently through malicious
mass reporting. The automatic thresholds are not that hard to trip; the people
that suffer are the ones that have developed a following but are not "famous".

I've seen a webcomic artist disappear from Tumblr because they drew a panel of
character A calling character B a virgin insultingly. A fan discussion
developed over whether B was canon asexual. The artist contributed and said
they weren't. This set off a whole bloc of users who started calling the
artist heteronormative and a lot of other things, and they eventually mass
reported the artist's accounts and got them banned.

Of course there are support channels to rectify this sort of thing, but the
process, from what I've seen, is usually painful and slow and not guaranteed
to be successful. If the artist gets their account(s) back (which the one in
my story did), they now publish in fear of offending that one portion of their
fandom, which both dampens their motivation to publish (usually not high for
internet artists) and can result in work that panders to the disruptive fans,
to the displeasure of the others who were enjoying the artist's original work.
If the artist doesn't get their account back (refused by staff or too much
trouble), they often lose irreplaceable artwork and history (though shame on
them for not doing local backups). If they choose to open a new account, they
have have to rebuild their fandom from scratch and PMs to whoever they have
non-Tumblr connections with, or they will be found by the troublemakers again
and basically be in the same situation as if the account was reopened except
still missing all the archives. If both seem like too much trouble, they fold
and are never heard from again.

Anyway, this kind of thing has happened to too many people that I was
interested in who used Tumblr, which is what, three or so? Enough that it
seems like a problem.

\- - - -

This is somewhat of an aside, but the design choices Tumblr has made that make
it more than a simple blogging platform have strongly colored its community.

I found a blogpost titled "The Toxoplasmosa of Rage"[0] a while back that
mused at length about why and how people get so mad about the things they do,
especially now that we have the Internet facilitating it. Tumblr was only one
of many subjects he touched on, but it stuck with me the most. Put succinctly:
on Tumblr, you don't comment on posts; you reblog them and add your own
commentary. Both post and commentary are seen by the previous (re)blogger(s)
and your followers, who often share your views.

The result is that if material is only seen by people who like it, everyone is
happy - but if (as frequently happens) someone sees something they don't like
and are compelled to comment on it, Tumblr's system sets up a perfect storm of
vitriol as material is alternately bounced between clusters of the network
with opposing opinions.

All of which now seems especially ironic to me, given the recent uptick of
interest in more accurately identifying echo chambers in media (social and
otherwise), and attempting to negate them somehow, possibly by adjusting feed
algorithms to expose people to opposing ideas more often. Damned if you do,
damned if you don't.

It's worth noting that the traditional blog platform avoids this issue by
keeping comments confined to the post they were made on.

There are some systems that fuzzy the system so it isn't totally
compartmentalized. Disqus is its own little network, for instance. I think
Wordpress uses its own commenting ecosystem so people can click on the profile
pic of your comment and find your blog, if you have one. Backlinking also
increases connectivity by letting readers know who has responded to the piece
they're reading, which I hardly consider a bad thing. Maybe the context shifts
forced by systems like backlinking or comment linking dampen fly-off-the-
handle emotional reactions that fuel flame wars like on Tumblr or Twitter. HN
does something similar by hiding the reply link from the front page when a
chain nests deep enough, forcing you to go to the comment's own page to reply.
Just a little kick, asking "is replying really necessary?".

[0]: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-
rage/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/) (CTRL-F
for "completely different" if you only want Section V that mentions Tumblr)

------
mijustin
This is what the folks at [https://tent.io](https://tent.io) were trying to
do: create a messaging protocol that was decentralized (like email).

The problem is that it's hard to compete with momentum. People use Twitter
because it's where all their friends, followers, and interesting people to
follow are.

If you're going to create an alternative, it has to be able to hit critical
mass.

~~~
angry-hacker
Don't forget the free (?) advertising media gives them. Well media is who
using it in the first place of course, but it's strange twitter is not able to
leverage that to go more mainstream.

It's an echo chamber for journalists and activists. Normal people don't use
twitter either, they use fb, instagram, snapchat.

------
DanielBMarkham
I have a very simple dream, although I haven't taken the time to code it up.

I want a website with my name on it, owned by me, that auto-generates an index
of all public content I put on the net -- FB posts, Tweets, HN posts and
comments -- all of it. If I upvote a story on HN, it's listed on the site. If
I explain something on Quora, it goes on my site too. It should be easy to
download/backup. If I delete/modify something on my site, it gets deleted and
modified on the other platform.

In this fashion, online content providers can make a buck off of me if they
like -- but the stuff I create is primarily owned and managed by me. Which is
the way it should be.

------
jimmytidey
Shout out to mastodon.social [that's the address]- a Twitter alternative
running on GNU social.

I'm not part of the Dev team, but I do donate to the patreon because I'd love
it to succeed.

~~~
daveid
Thanks for the shout out!

Mastodon is a FOSS alternative to Twitter, with a focus on UX. Github:
[https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/](https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/)
Screenshot and demo video linked from the README

~~~
peatmoss
Can one move their account to a new instance if, for example, they start on
Mastdon, like what they see, and then decide to set up their own instance?

------
tedunangst
So, replace twitter with the thing that Twitter replaced?

~~~
cpbotha
It is a cunning plan!

------
rayalez
I'm working on a project with this purpose:

[http://hackertribe.io](http://hackertribe.io)

(It's still work in progress, launching soon)

Here's my vision for the ultimate platform:

\- Discovery system 1 is based on upvotes, like reddit.

\- Discovery system 2 is based on reposts, and works like twitter.

\- Subscription functionality works like RSS. You can follow people and see
their posts in a reverse-chronilogical order on your front page.

\- Publishing tools work like on Medium - beautiful editor, tags,
publications.

\- This platform is open source and decentralized. Anyone can easily export
their data and spin up their own instance, which will be automatically plugged
into the network(that functions like GNU Social).

\- It has an API that enables developers to do everything they wanted to do
with twitter API.

\- The community instance that I'm going to launch will have strict
moderation, like Hacker News, that will optimize for the quality of the
discussion. But anyone can launch their own instance, and that will enable the
absolute freedom of speech.

\- I am going to monetize it by offering easy and effortless hosting, the way
Discourse does. That will take care of the development and server costs, while
keeping the platform ad-free.

I think this sort of system would be perfect, and the only thing required to
build it was the right decentralization protocol, which has appeared recently
- ActivityPub.

At the moment I have implemented all the functionality aside from the most
challenging part - decentralization with AvtivityPub, which I am still
figuring out.

If you are interested in testing out this platform and would like to give me
some feedback and shape it's development - send me a
message(raymestalez@gmail.com), and I will invite you to the beta version.

If you would like to contribute to it's development - you can find the code
over here:

[https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus](https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus)

(I am currently cleaning up the backend code, and rewriting the frontend in
React).

~~~
tscs37
It doesn't look bad (miles better than GNU Social's UI)

I'll probably plug in my email later and check it out when there is some
progress! <3

------
rrggrr
A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking,
internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops
([https://deaddrops.com/](https://deaddrops.com/)).

"Why?", you may ask. Because around the world transparency and accountability
is under attack. The many dangers of anarchic information (there are many) are
mitigated by the many dangers of repression and influence operations globally.

The back and forth fight between the two is healthy.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh
> networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops
> ([https://deaddrops.com/](https://deaddrops.com/))._

Add APRS and regular ham radio.

I'm only half-joking, it would be pretty cool to have something like that! :).

~~~
duskwuff
I've heard some really interesting things about the LoRa packet radio
protocol. Runs in ISM bands (433/868/915 MHz), low-power, excellent range (2
km urban, 20+ km LOS).

------
jstimpfle
The difficult to decentralize parts:

\- hashtags (big aggregators are needed that can answer hashtag queries).
Similarly, proposing new tweeters to follow, etc.

\- _receiving_ messages. This needs more than RSS, which is only a pull
mechanism. It needs both push and pull.

Then there are social problems.

I don't know how far diaspora and OStatus/GNU Social have come. I think
diaspora is more concentrated on building a software platform than on
protocols (which if so I think is the wrong approach).

OStatus, i.e. thinking of communication protocols, is the right way to go.
However it's very very difficult to agree not only on a common protocol, but
also on data formats (what's a tweet, what is an album, etc.)

~~~
tschellenbach
At the end of the day users just don't care about decentralization. They do
care about:

* The network of users present on the app * Quality of the mobile and desktop clients * Ability to have success promoting their own voice/ content

Decentralization kills innovation in the underlying protocol. (see email for a
nice example of common standards holding things back). It also creates a
situation were nobody can effectively monetize the platform. Which makes it
hard to create a competitive product.

Sure, open standards work well for many things, don't think it will ever catch
on for social networks though.

~~~
confounded
Another thing that they care about _way_ more than we recognize, is

" _the latest trend among tech nerds_ "

Focusing on the Everyman is essential if your criteria for value is a consumer
mindshare natural-monopoly (and an exit for VCs) within five years.

The next five years will probably have less of those companies than the last
five, and (if the tone of newspapers are anything to go by) ordinary people
are becoming distrustful of large monopolistic companies.

Now seems like a good time to hack on what we want. I can't think of a better
time for a new, open, social network.

------
lucaspiller
Over the last few years there have been many open projects trying to displace
the big names in social media, but none of them seem to have even taken baby
steps into fulfilling their goals in becoming a widespread open standard. On
the other hand siloed services, such as Slack, pop up out of nowhere and take
the tech world by storm.

What is the solution here, because it just seems to be getting worse? I don't
want all my data to be controlled by a single company, on the other hand I
don't want to like like a hermit in a cave.

~~~
jlj
What if the corporate structure reserved ownership shares for the users,
and/or per-impression ad revenue went directly to the content creators. Some
way to keep control distributed instead of centralized, that is baked into the
company charter from day 1.

~~~
lucaspiller
I don't think that would really solve anything. You can go out and buy shares
in Alphabet if you want, but if (without the funds of say Warren Buffet) you
think that's going to stop them selling your data to advertisers, good luck.

~~~
jlj
I meant something where the content creators are the owners from day 1, and
are always the owners, like a co-op. Then any profits left over after
infrastructure costs get paid as a dividend proportional to the audience size
of the content creators or the ad revenue they generate.

Somehow removing the middle man that is Alphabet, Twitter, facebook while
still providing the infrastructure.

------
murtnowski
Why replace twitter? just do your own thing and let twitter do its thing

~~~
welly
I suspect your own thing probably wouldn't have the same visibility as twitter
and that's partly the appeal of something like twitter.

------
gengkev
One problem with distributed systems is the lack of a centralized authority
for usernames. (Who says @POTUS is POTUS?) So why not create a custom TLD for
a Twitter-like service? Each domain would be required to implement the API for
that service. This would solve the username problem, and allow the registar to
remove abusive users, but also let users host their own content. The only
problem is domain registration fees, but hey, .tk domain names are still free.

------
quinndupont
It's never been attempted before! Oh wait... (app.net; Path; identi.ca;
Ello...)[1] [1]
[http://alternativeto.net/software/twitter/](http://alternativeto.net/software/twitter/)

------
seanwilson
> Blogs and RSS, the latter a system for subscribing to a collection of blogs,
> and being able to read their posts in a single chronological stream, almost
> exactly like Twitter, have been around forever.

> ...Setting up a blog at for example WordPress.com is not much more
> complicated than creating a new Twitter account. Readers can subscribe to
> your blog using any number of apps, for example the WordPress.com Reader or
> any other so-called aggregator, such as Inoreader or Feedly. Your list of
> subscriptions can be freely exported from one aggregator and imported into
> another.

"almost exactly like Twitter"..."not much more complicated"...

So the alternative is to sign up to a blog service, write posts that have
content similar to tweets, sign up to a separate RSS service, subscribe to RSS
feeds and hope other people you want to follow do the same?

Some coders really underestimate how much even a tiny bit of friction can stop
ideas from going viral especially when there's an integrated and easy to use
alternative. Regular people don't want to cobble together their own brittle
solution.

~~~
cpbotha
That's why the following section in the post is titled "what needs to happen"
:)

I have a good idea of the challenge involved. Because of that, I don't have
that much hope that this will succeed, but, due to the fact that the building
blocks have been available (and used) for so long, it's interesting to think
about (and experiment with) how much effort would be required to make
blogs+rss as slick as Twitter.

------
kovrik
Honestly, I'm really tired of all these 'Let's replace Twitter', 'Twitter is
dead' etc. stuff.

Yes, Twitter is not perfect from business perspective, but users should not
care.

Twitter is also not perfect from users' perspective, but it works and people
use it. That is enough.

~~~
wallacoloo
Yeah, just like Notepad "works" as a text editor. If there's room for
improvement, why not improve?

~~~
kovrik
Agree: "Then improve", but not "Write another blog post about it"

~~~
igor47
That's just ludicrous. Promoting a new product is part of building that
product.

------
fixxer
Better idea: Let's turn it off and not replace it.

------
apatters
The main thing this guy seems to want to do is curtail abuse, or in other
words he wants to restrict the ability for people to say things to you that
you don't want to hear. Given that, I'm surprised he's advocating a
distributed system where this would probably be an even harder problem to
solve.

But frankly I don't understand why "Twitter abuse" is seen as such a big
problem. In general if you wish to publish something and provide a channel for
people to respond, it's practically impossible for anyone to guarantee you'll
be happy with all the responses you get. This is one of the hard parts of
being a publisher, which is what you become when you sign up to Twitter. It's
sad if someone is hurt by the responses they receive, but it's not really
Twitter's problem. Twitter does provide ways to shield yourself from hostile
and abusive users but the expectations being placed on them seem unreasonable
to me.

It's interesting that this exact same conversation is going on about Reddit
(how people are offending each other, and we need to "fix" this). It's as if
no one grasps that this has been going on since the beginning of time and if
there's more of it at the moment that might point to _a deeper problem in
society which needs to be resolved through dialogue._

~~~
cpbotha
There's a huge difference between criticism (good) and abuse (bad).

You're most probably (I say that in the statistical sense) a white middleclass
guy (I am too BTW). For us it's easy to airquote "twitter abuse" and ask what
the problem is. However, for a great number of non-white-middleclass-guy-
people it's a huge and real problem that we should do our absolute best to
help address.

~~~
apatters
I'm sorry but this idea that there's mysterious knowledge of hardship which
white, male members of the middle class automatically don't possess is garbage
and is exactly the sort of thing I was hinting at in the last sentence of my
comment. You can be as polite about it as you want but it immediately shuts
down dialogue and informs the original speaker that he is the replier's
intellectual inferior and his opinion isn't valued. In short it's a form of ad
hominem. No matter how well-meaning it distracts from the discussion of the
actual issue and drags us into identity politics.

In this specific case I think it also demeans publishers who are not white and
male. Plenty of non-white, non-male people have been publishing controversial
material since long before Twitter existed. Just like the white and male ones,
they learned to take the heat or get out of the kitchen. Things like the civil
rights movement were accomplished within this context. The issue at hand is
not a race or gender issue. All races and genders are being attacked on
Twitter. The issue is that some Twitter users don't realize how hot the
kitchen can get before they walk into it.

~~~
zimpenfish
> All races and genders are being attacked on Twitter.

Do you have any statistics and/or data about that?

------
mmbaghdad
I think a better step for twitter would to be decentralize the admin powers to
its users with better blocking options (blocking on chosen words, regex for
racist memes?), but in this case there will be the possibility that you're
just building more echo chambers. One could only wish that one day an AI would
be able to analyze a long incoherent rant and distill it to some debatable
arguments.

~~~
soyiuz
I love the first part of your comment: something like Reddit communities
(subreddits) with their own cultures of moderation, but on Twitter.

------
fabrika
Even if you build a superior p2p platform you won’t make Elon Musk and Katy
Perry sign-up.

My guess is you have to copy iMessage approach. Partner with awesome Twitter
clients like Tweetbot which are also not happy with the way Twitter going.
Authorize with Twitter account, integrate original Twitter feed, replies and
conversations, add the killer feature and make authentic tweets feel like
“green bubbles”.

------
bikamonki
I am not too concerned about Twitter keeping content b/c in the wall/river
model of showing posts the past is irrelevant, even to the point that if a
user wants to save a post for future reference/accountability a screenshot is
far more effective than say scrolling down forever and find it (if it wasn't
deleted). In other words: Twitter is more like a news channel not a blog.

Wanna fix Twitter? Fix trolls. It is far too obvious for the _real_ users to
spot when trolls are pushing a trend or flamming. Why can't Twitter setup some
AI to mitigate troll activity? Same thing with big bucks pushing dubious
campaigns a la Trump.

Two features that will make it better user experience: bookmark a tweet and
add subjects/tags to tweets or accounts so users can have multiple streams
well classified by subjects. Having a shampoo of content in chrono order
forces scroll down to the point where one left last time.

However, all these fixes would make Twitter less profitable. So, nevermind.

~~~
hyperdunc
"Fix trolls" will turn into a euphemism for "censor contrary opinions".

~~~
grzm
While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment of not wanting to silence legitimate,
civil discourse, I'd like to think there's some middle ground that's broadly
acceptable.

We don't tolerate people running around cussing at others with impunity. (I'm
not going to go into the "contrary opinions" aspect of it, because I think at
least for a first approximation general uncivil speech works well enough.)

The penalties for doing this in real life are also offset by the cost of
actually doing it: you have to physically be there, and others can retreat to
private spaces. Online you can spin up fake accounts and bots with nearly all
of the cost of dealing with it on the part of the recipient (by for example,
blocking the user).

What do you think? This is something I've been thinking earnestly about and
I'm interested in others opinions.

------
motiw
Would love you gentel opinion on a related experiment we have with crowd
moderated forums. If each group member rate just one new post, the group as a
whole can collectively filter through thousands of ideas. See more informaion
here [http://blog.postwaves.com/about](http://blog.postwaves.com/about)

~~~
soyiuz
So, Reddit?

~~~
motiw
Dynamics is very different than Reddit since each new post is sent only to a
small random group of users to vote whether it should be public, no one else
sees the post before that, and voter dont know who the submitter is so votes
are less biased.

------
keyle
In the first 3-4 years of Twitter, the internet was full of blog post about
"writing a twitter killer". Please give it a rest.

The only way to replace twitter is with a big push in protocols, and with open
source software based on those protocols: easy one click install apps on the
cloud or self-hosted.

Imagine if tweets were RFC'd like emails were, or NTP and then clients were
built around it. It could work like IRC where you still have servers which
only purpose is to link the nodes. You'd have internet splits like in the good
old days (unless you cache everything everywhere, but then there are privacy
concerns on delete tweets) but such a system would be open, and you'd retain
your data and your feed's.

------
pmlnr
> Let’s replace Twitter with something much better

Federated XMPP?

------
riffic
OStatus/GNU social.

------
makomk
Now I'm imagining all the viral tweets I've seen lately containing fake news,
and how much help pre-approval would be in stopping the inconvenient replies
containing Snopes links. More control is a tool that cuts both ways.

------
facepalm
Why did gnu social fail? What happened to diaspora?

I think what blogs were missing where the social network. They had the
blogroll, but it wasn't enough. Tumblr almost got it right, but somewhere
along the way they seem to have messed up.

~~~
fermuch
GNU social didn't fail. It still has a growing community. Check out
mastodon.social to see a newborn server (with it's own implementation of
everything, in Ruby) for example. It was featured here some weeks ago.

------
akerro
There is Twister[1], distributed, P2P, open-source, censorship-proof Twister
clone.

[http://twister.net.co/](http://twister.net.co/)

------
f_allwein
Interesting in this context: In 2013, David Gelernter proposed a future stream
based web ("The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced
by a time-based worldstream"): [https://www.wired.com/2013/02/the-end-of-the-
web-computers-a...](https://www.wired.com/2013/02/the-end-of-the-web-
computers-and-search-as-we-know-it/)

------
thinkmassive
_In the coming weeks, I will be running a little experiment by trying to post
even my short, previously twitter-only blurbs to this blog. I will have to
cross-tweet these, but at least the primary source will be right here in my
own database._

So basically the blogger plans to start adding tweet-length blog posts, and
otherwise will continue using both Wordpress and Twitter as they're intended
to be used.

------
mschuster91
The problem with blogs is: they lack private, instant communication channels.

Blogs may be better if you're e.g. a politician, philosopher or anyone who
wants to distribute long-form content - but they're unusable if you like to
engage in personal conversation.

I surely would not have found my last girlfriends without Twitter, just
saying... it has unique advantages over FB, blogs, mail, Tinder and anything
else out there.

------
foxhop
I think a better twitter would literally be twitter but instead of a feed, it
would be a dashboard of all your follower's most recent tweet.

Then if you get bored you can click on a username to view a complete
(chronological) feed.

~~~
foxhedgehog
If twitter let you filter tweets and easily build lists around users, it would
be most of the way towards being a more functional platform that let you
easily finds signal amidst noise.

------
deboboy
Twitter would be useful if they gave me the firehose in my feed. Having to
follow someone is so caveman era stupid. I would even pay for the firehose
then let my friends spam me with their 'ads'.

~~~
gipp
You're gonna have to elaborate -- usually Twitter's "firehose" means the
entire unfiltered stream of all Tweets, which would be beyond useless as a
normal user for obvious reasons.

------
hollander
Twitter should be like the blockchain, distributed, signed and independent.

------
carapace
The problem isn't technical. (Any three readers of HN could bang together
something "much better" than Twitter in N weeks!)

The problem is getting three hundred million dumbasses to use it.

~~~
reitanqild
Accounting for hyperbole I agree to a certain point, however:

> The problem is getting three hundred million dumbasses to use it.

You would probably be more likely to succeed in that if you start thinking of
them as humans, humans who aren't familiar with computers, don't have much
time etc etc ;-)

Oh, and that guy with the social network said something like that at some
point and it is now the most famous quote from him.

------
esafwan
Isn't medium.com everything that you are proposing with more features like
intelligent recommender system, flexible layout control etc?

------
jaxondu
Maybe a modern Usenet? Any idea what are the pain points of Usenet?

~~~
pfarnsworth
Reddit is the modern Usenet. And it's about 1000x better, from my own personal
experience.

------
mrmondo
I too love twitter, but we NEED something distributed in nature.

------
hashkb
'member xanga and Livejournal?

------
magoon
I've Got $50

------
mrwnmonm
i used to read a lot of blogs before, i don't know why now i can't stand
reading a long article

------
mlinksva
Free time.

------
throwaway420
I'm a huge fan of blogs, agree with the author in general, but think he's
defining "something much better" in a way that doesn't make sense to the
average person.

Twitter is at least easy enough for the average person or even dopey +
clueless non-technical celebrity to add to their phone, search, and use
normally.

Blogs give infinitely more customization options, and in theory are easy to
setup, but in practice are still a lot more work and harder to setup. All of
their advantages are for nothing when it takes a lot more work to setup
compared to a Twitter account for the average person.

Regardless, Twitter is done for. They're trying in vain to achieve an
impossible politically correct goal (all of their new safe spaces features to
eliminate trolling and name calling) rather than actually innovating or coming
up with a business model that can sustain them.

------
oniMaker
Not to mention the fact that Twitter will censor views that it does not agree
with. Don't support companies that engage in censorship.

There's already an alternative available, and it's growing:
[https://gab.ai](https://gab.ai)

It doesn't solve the problem of giving your data to a company, but it's a hell
of a lot more open and inclusive than any other platform.

~~~
mikeyouse
Gab is predictably filled with Nazis, which isn't unrelated to that idiotic
Pepe frog they use as a logo. Who would willingly go there?

~~~
oniMaker
People who believe in freedom of speech.

~~~
cyorir
Does Twitter have no right to freedom of speech, when there are alternatives
to it? If they don't want to be associated with white nationalists, then why
should they allow themselves to be?

~~~
oniMaker
That's what I'm saying. They have rights to their platform, and we have the
right to use it or not. That's why I linked to an alternative.

------
mzw_mzw
A burning dumpster full of medical waste would be better than Twitter, so
fortunately the bar is low.

------
toomuchstuff
how does he manage to sound so insufferable over something so insignificant.
this is prime hn content.

