by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
One of the biggest problems with using the old Usenet UX as the basis of a new, modern “Twitter Killer” is scalability. If you have a few hundred million users, individual Groups could be so full of users to manage that the whole idea just collapses.
And, remember, there is a key problem with the Group concept that you would have to figure out — by definition, the same questions would be asked over and over again and you would have to create a FAQ. I really, really hate how the Group concept usually forces the existence of FAQs because it’s pedantic and way too much work in this age of Tik-Tok. What’s more, both Usenet and Reddit have shown that having a Group inevitable causes an little microculture to develop where are Us and Them.
This is probably one of the best features of Twitter — there’s no Us and Them. There’s no rigmarole for new users to plow through to simply use the fucking service. You can literally as a new User, jump right in and participate.
There are few ways, I think, to manage the issues of scalability and microculture.
You fix scalability by managing who can Post into any particular group if they don’t own it. This really fixes a lot of problems, especially if a Group was REALLY POPULAR, with potentially millions of people reading it. But you would have to be really careful about such things, otherwise you endup with complex bloatware with way too many granular features that will turn people off.
It should be simple — when you create a Group, you’re asked — who can post to this group? So, you might have the option to say Only Verified Users, or whatever with the option to include specific Users that you feel can contribute to the discussion, even if they’re not Verified. This way, you have the best of both worlds.
You get the power of a Group, without it being overloaded by thousands and thousands of Users all struggling to comment. This also really would help the signal to noise ratio. It also, hopefully, might solve the troll problem that seems to plague so much of social media these days.
Now for the innate parochial nature of the Group concept.
In addition to controlling who can Post, the existence of the Feed feature would do a lot to end this problem. It cuts through Groups so you can passively monitor what’s going on in the Groups you follow without having to actually be a regular user.
Controlling who can Post would probably be controversial — the thing the Tech Press would talk about all the time when you first introduced the platform — but in the end I think people would love it for obvious reasons.
Now to win PowerBall so I can found this thing. Wink.
