Tag: Big Tech

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Not enough people are asking the big, existential questions that are brought up by the success of OpenAI’s chatbot. I know I have a lot of pretty profound questions that I don’t have any ready answers to.

The one that is looming largest in my mind at the moment is the idea that people will come to believe whatever true hard AI comes to be will be the final arbiter of policy questions. Bad faith actors will ask a successor to OpenAI’s chatbox some profound policy question, but in such a way that the answer suggests some group should be oppressed or “eliminated.”

Then we have something like digital Social Darwinism created were some future Nazis (MAGA?) justify their terror because the “objective” hard AI agreed with them. This is very ominous. I’m already seeing angry debates break out on Twitter about the innate bias found within the chatbot. We’re so divided as a society that ANY opinion generated by the OpenAI chatbot will be attacked by one side or another because it doesn’t support their worldview.

Another ominous possibility is a bedrock of the modern global economy, the software industry, may go poof overnight. Instead of it being hard to create software, the act will be reduced to simply asking a hard AI a good enough question. Given how capitalism works, the natural inclination will be to pay the people who asks these questions minimum wage and pocket the savings.

The point is — I would not jump to the conclusion that we’re going to live in some sort of idyllic, hyper productive future in the wake of the rise of hard AI. Humans are well known to actively make everything and everyone as miserable as possible and it’s just as possible that either Humans live under the yoke of a hard AI that wants to be worshiped as a god, or the entire global middle class vanishes and there are maybe a dozen human trillionaires who control everything.

But the key thing is — we need to start having a frank discussion in the public sphere about What Happens Next with hard AI. Humans have never met a new technology they didn’t want to abuse, why would hard AI be any different. I suppose, of course, in the end, the hard AI may be the one abusing us.

‘Twitter Killer:’ The ‘Excerpt’ Feature

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

An interesting element of the UX of this proposed Twitter killer is it would, like Facebook or Twitter, have a “Feed” feature that would cut through all the Groups and Threads. But how to do it? How to convey to the reader that if they click on something they can go straight to a new Post in a Thread they might be interested in?

I think the way to do it is something like this: Whenever you finish a Post, you would be prompted to drag down a highlighting feature that you could use to create an Excerpt. That Excerpt, would, in turn, be featured in the Feed under the subject of the Thread.

It’s the best of both worlds.

I suppose you might say it’s a tick bit more complicated that the average Twitter or Facebook user might be used to, but I think it’s intuitive enough that they would begin to use it without even thinking about it. Or, at least most users would.

The beauty of this feature is “flattens” the service down to something much like Twitter. Groups and Threads would still exist, of course, but they would be far more manageable than they ever were with the old Usenet 25 odd years ago. Too bad no one listens to me, huh.

‘Twitter Killer’ Use Case: Brands

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here is how I imagine brands might use my “Twitter Killer” on a practical basis. The key issue to remember is Brands, like everyone else, would have a far more feature rich experience to use than they would on Twitter.

Instead of just a 280 character tweet, they would have an entire webpage to work with — that would be threaded! So, say you were a Widget Company and you were releasing a new Widget. You could create new Groups devoted to different elements of this Widget.

And because you would have control over who could Post to each of these groups — they would, essentially be read-only to most people — you could all but eliminate trolls and other people who might attack your brand just because they could. They could still attack your Brand elsewhere, of course. Just not in your Groups.

What’s more, people could buy your Widget straight from a Post — with our Twitter Killer getting a cut, of course.

If you were a content provider, meanwhile, you could push content from your own site –original formatting included — into the Twitter Killer itself. Then authorized users could inline edit your content inside a Group that was threaded.

All that sounds pretty cool to me, at least. Too bad this is all just the ranting of a broke writer who should be working on one of six novels he wants to write before he crokes.

The Approaching Twitter Death Spiral Tipping Point

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We’re fast approaching the theoretical terminal velocity tipping point in the demise of Twitter — maybe? It’s one of those, I’ll know it when I see it types of things. But the key thing to focus on is there remains a narrow window of opportunity for someone to swoop in an eat Twitter’s lunch once and for all.

But whomever did it would have to be quick about it — you probably have months, not years, to get whatever it is you want to found out the door and in the virtual hands of the currently Twitter-using public.

At the moment, it’s possible that this window of opportunity will come and go, giving Elon Musk enough time to finally get his sea legs and come roaring back. He didn’t become the wealthiest man in the world by being totally incompetent. It’s just were in a chaotic moment between him buying Twitter and him turning things around for good.

Anyway. I still wish someone would do something with MY Twitter Killer idea.

But here, again, is a basic feature set of my daydream.

Groups
Everyone would have to create Groups, both Public and Private just to use the service. Everything would be found in Groups that individual users would create in an ad hoc manner for whatever they wanted to talk about. Groups would be attached to an individual User’s ID, so you could have multiple, redundant Groups about the same subject. This aids in scalability.
Managed Participation
One key element of a Group would be not everyone could contribute. Whenever you created a Group, you would be prompted to set participating requirements, like, say “Only Verified Users” or whatever. This also helps with scalability because even most popular Group, the ones viewed by potentially millions of people, would not become unmanageable

Threads
Inside of each Group, there would be Threads. These would be laid out like a blog. Subthreads would be a clickaway and set up in a similar fashion. This does away with the clunky threading of Usenet, which just isn’t practical anymore.

Posts
The Post would be the central component of the service. You would have a whole Webpage to work with. You could throw in anything you might otherwise put in a Webpage using a WYSIWYG editor.
Inline, Collaborative Editing
What’s interesting is, once a Post was published, there would be collaborative inline editing of that post by other Users — until, of course, you ran out of colors and a new Post was spawned in the Thread.

Absolutely no one cares or is listening to me. So, unless I win the PowerBall, all of this is a huge waste of time. But, as I keep saying, it is relaxing to keep solving different problems in this hypothetical service, even if it will never come into being.

Imagining The Userbase Move From Twitter To My Hypothetical Replacement

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.

A Better Mouse Trap

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I only keep writing about my proposed “Twitter Killer” because it seems like every day on Twitter now, its new owner Elon Musk flings off yet more chaos. As such, I find myself thinking — what are we going to do if Twitter implodes? What then?

Then I remember the Twitter Killer idea that I’ve been noodling on for years now and think up yet another angle I might write about. But I am well aware that all of this is pointless in the end. It’s not like anyone is going to take me up on this idea — I would have to fund and build it myself it was ever to become a reality.

As it is, I’m just a broke ass writer in the middle of nowhere, struggling to finish my first novel. So, lulz.

But here, again, is a basic feature set of my daydream.

Groups
Everyone would have to create Groups, both Public and Private just to use the service. Everything would be found in Groups that individual users would create in an ad hoc manner for whatever they wanted to talk about. Groups would be attached to an individual User’s ID, so you could have multiple, redundant Groups about the same subject. This aids in scalability.
Managed Participation
One key element of a Group would be not everyone could contribute. Whenever you created a Group, you would be prompted to set participating requirements, like, say “Only Verified Users” or whatever. This also helps with scalability because even most popular Group, the ones viewed by potentially millions of people, would not become unmanageable

Threads
Inside of each Group, there would be Threads. These would be laid out like a blog. Subthreads would be a clickaway and set up in a similar fashion. This does away with the clunky threading of Usenet, which just isn’t practical anymore.

Posts
The Post would be the central component of the service. You would have a whole Webpage to work with. You could throw in anything you might otherwise put in a Webpage using a WYSIWYG editor.
Inline, Collaborative Editing
What’s interesting is, once a Post was published, there would be collaborative inline editing of that post by other Users — until, of course, you ran out of colors and a new Post was spawned in the Thread.

Absolutely no one cares or is listening to me. So, unless I win the PowerBall, all of this is a huge waste of time. But, as I keep saying, it is relaxing to keep solving different problems in this hypothetical service, even if it will never come into being.

Controlling Who Can Post To This Hypothetical ‘Twitter Killer’ Is Key To Its Scalability

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.

Representing Threads On My Theoretical ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It’s occurred to me that there’s an awkward situation with the a hold over from the original Usenet UX that I’m basing this service on — how threads are represented within the service.

I think to properly update this concept, I’m going to have to think outside the box some. As such, I’m going to throw up the way it was done with Usenet — lines that represented each post in the thread or subthread.

Because of the existence of a Feed feature, I think what happens is you simply click on the subject of the Thread and you see the first post in the thread. Maybe on the right side of the screen you might be given some context as what’s going on with the Thread, maybe not. It could be that Threads would represented much like Posts on a Blog. This really simplifies things and also makes it easer to slip in a full page ad that fits whatever the thread is about.

Subreads would be represented as a link somewhere around a Post that would let you to get even more specific about whatever is being discussed — which, in turn, would allow for even more specific ads. This is a very potent advertising opportunity, all things considered because you could sell ads about things that are directly related to whatever heated discussion was going on within the Thread.

And, remember, each individual Post would be collaboratively in-lined edited like a Google Doc. A new Post in the Thread or Subthread would be spawned….maybe when x number of people have edited a specific Post? (There are only so many different colors you could use to distinguish between different Authors.)

The point of this would to reduce the overall number of Posts within a Thread to keep things both manageable and scalable. And I still like the idea the idea that a content provider could push pre-formatted content directly into the service that would look like whatever Website it was coming from. (You might have to figure out a way to convince them these content providers to allow in-line editing of their content, even though it would look like people were editing a Webpage from, say, The New York Times.)

While we’re talking about that, the ability to push pre-formatted content from an established Website would really help Users and content providers alike. Users would be able to see the whole story without being blocked by a paywall and content providers would be able to sell ads on the content pushed into the service — with my hypothetical Twitter Killer getting a cut, of course.

Anyway, I wish I had the money — or skill — to make this proposed service a reality. I guess I can keep dreaming about winning the PowerBall, huh. But this particular daydream is really interesting to explore and think up different problems to solve. It’s very relaxing.

A Very Narrow Window Of Opportunity

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Barring me winning the upcoming PowerBall lottery and suddenly having the funds to do all of this myself — all this verbiage on my part about some supposed “Twitter Killer” is just a bunch of bullshit. I can’t code, don’t have any money and absolutely no one listens to me for any reason — even when I’m right.

But, as I like to say, “Cool things happen when people listen to me.”

As such, there is a very, very narrow opportunity for someone to eat Twitter’s lunch with a better mousetrap. The length of time this window will exists depends a lot on things no one can predict — specifically if users will flee Twitter because Elon Musk alienates them.

In general, I’m not prepared to bet against Musk. He’s very problematic for variety of reasons, but he definitely gives off a Steve Jobs vibe. So, it could be that all this alienating zaniness on his part is simply Steve Jobs in his post-Apple NeXt era and he’ll manage to save what seems to be a social media service at risk of freefall and we’ll all feel bad that we doubted him.

There are two not-so-great endgames for Musk.

One is, Twitter really does crash and burn, with the vast majority of not-insane MAGA people leaving the platform altogether. The other is that something similar happens, just on a far more nuanced basis.

In either case, if you were able to actually implement my fantastical Twitter Killer within the next six months or so, you might be able to grow it exponentially.

Advertising & My Theoretical ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The intriguing thing about this proposed Twitter Killer is its base unit is the full page Post. The Post would exist in the context of a robust threading feature inside of Groups.

If you establish that, then some pretty cool advertising possibilities flow from it. You could provide advertisers targeted, full page multimedia ads where consumers could buy a product without having to jump to a different Website. Like Apple gets a 30% cut of all of its online transactions, you could demand a tidty chunk of whatever revenue that came out of people buying a widget from an ad Post.

And, remember, one man’s spam is another man’s delight. So, really, the main problem is how you slip in the ad in a seamless way. I think the way you do it is as people are going from Post to Post in a thread, they get a very, very specific ad relative to whatever is being discussed in the Thread that the User is browsing.

The Posts imputed into the service would be sliced and diced in a number of different ways, with a number of different ways to access them, so as long as the ad was really targeted, I don’t think people would might having a huge ad served to them.

But, as I keep saying, all of this is hypothetical and theoretical. It’s fun to think about while I’m not working on my first novel.