by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
With the crazy, fucked up things going on with Twitter at the moment, I find myself still daydreaming about my startup idea that cherrypicks some of the UX elements of the long-dead Usenet.
The key issue is, of course, the idea of Groups. I am well aware of the strengths and weaknesses of both Google+ and Reddit. But I have really thought through how to use this service. Here’s the basic elements of the service as I imagine it
Groups
Anyone would be able to create a Group about anything you liked. It would be attached to your account ID, which would allow for redundancy, which would allow for scalability. This is a very flexible nature of the service — at least in this specific aspect. You would have to have a robust discovery feature for that to work, of course.
Threads
These would be presented much like a traditional blog inside of a Group. This would allow for huge page-sized advertisement. There would also be a subthread feature which would be pretty cool.
Posts
What would be interesting about this would be you would have inline, collaborative editing like you might find with a Google Doc. You would have, say, six people able to inline edit a Post before a new Post in the Thread is spawned because you would run out of colors.
Of course, there is the problem — but very necessary — issue of controlling who can Post. Having a lot of the service Read Only for most people is the only way that any sort of service based on Groups can scale and be successful.
The fact that absolutely no one cares about this very well thought out concept despite the chaos surrounding Twitter at the moment is enough for me to realize that maybe….it’s time for me to give up and put all my attention on the six novel project that I’m working on.
And, yet, occasionally I get drunk and need to vent about something OTHER than all these novels I’m working on. All this talk about Twitter ending once and for all makes me think — then what? And if Elon Musk pulled the plug on Twitter, which I don’t think he will, then there’s a greater-than-zero sum chance that someone might take me up on all my rantings about a startup based on Usenet’s best bits.
