by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Again let me stress that I’m a daydreamer. I just like to talk out loud about things and see if I can get any response. So, take that into consideration as you read this.
Anyway, it seems as though right now all the major social media niches are filled. Reddit, Twitter and Facebook all fill a niche and so there’s not much point in designing a news social media platform that challenges any of them. Having said that, I would note that there a lot of people — many of them content providers — who are fed up with Twitter. These very same people are also ardently against Trump’s policies.
So, it makes a lot of sense if you designed a service that was initially designed to help people organize protests against Trump’s Administration, but later could be repurposed to go after Reddit or Twitter, maybe even Facebook down the road.
I have given this concept a lot — a lot — of thought. It seems to me you would need to lean on video conferencing a lot as well as text chat. I would suggest something like this:
The service would be divided into Groups that were only created by Verified account holders. Those groups would be subdivided into Discussions that would be live text chat and threaded discussions. So, you would go into a Group called, say, “D.C. Protest May 2018” and you’d first see text chat on the right third of the screen. You’d have a text chat with someone then have the option of starting a video chat with them that would be done into conjunction with a threaded discussion based on a post.
You would have a brief video chat of up to four people, then once it was done, you could write a blog post beneath it. Now, you would have to figure out how to implement the text feature with threaded discussion. That particular issue might need some additional thought, but I have the general concept down.
Anyway, you would also have any number of features that would aid in organizing a protest in your city. You’d start off with the major urban areas, then roll that aspect of the service out to additional areas as needed. This concept is really powerful and important because we’re in dire times that are only going to get worse, I’m afraid.
As an aside, the Right has their own service, called Gab. It’s batshit insane and maybe we need a counterpart to Gab that was significantly more mainstream and devote to a more Twitter experience than Gab, which is a Facebook clone. It’s all just something to think about at this point.
