by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Ok, suppose we’ve designed a new Twitter-like service inspired by Usenet UX — then what? Well, the first thing I would do is have an invite-only program designed to seed the service with content providers — especially the type that Elon Musk is doing everything in his power to alienate at the moment.
This artificial scarcity would not only allow the service to gradually boostrap itself up, it would also generate a lot of buzz that would make people want to join as soon as possible. This worked really well with the original launch of Gmail.
Anyway, what would be the reaction of your typical Twitter user once the there was a mass migration to this new, hypothetical service?
I think the first thing that Twitter users would note is how there was a lot of control over who could actually Post to the service. This would probably the the thing that was the most controversial. Right wing nutjobs would blast the service as too restrictive and “censoring” them from be racist, misogynistic and generally caustic and abusive.
But once people got used to that element of the service, the next thing that Twitter users would find weird is how much space they had when they did Post. Instead of just 280 characters, they could really get into whatever subject they wanted to talk about. They could throw in video, pictures and, hell, a podcast that they recorded, as well.
Now, obviously, there is a problem with this — sometimes, people just want to write less than 280 characters. There are two ways to look at this. One is the “medium is the message” and as such, by definition, people will write a lot more simply because they can or feel obliged to.
The other idea is that you would have to manage shorter Posts in some way. I think one way to do this is you would have some sort of Executive Summary feature where you could write essentially a tweet. Remember, this service would have a Feed like Twitter and Facebook and, as such, would already excerpt a portion of the longer Post found in a Group. You could lean into that use that excerpt need as the place to feature shorter Posts.
Or something.
I guess the point is — while the transition from Twitter to my hypothetical service would be a bit bumpy, it wouldn’t be impossible. People would eventually get used to the idea and, if you played your cards right, Twitter would become just another forgotten social media service like Friendster and MySpace.
