Tag: Twitter Killer

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.

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.

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.

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.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I continue to roll idea of a theoretical “Twitter Killer” around in my mind, there are a few more nuanced issues that I struggle with. One is, if the base unit of your service is the Post, how do you present that in your Feed feature? At the moment, I think you would serve just an excerpt of the Post that has been updated in your Feed.

But if you also work on the assumption that you would have a collaborative inline editing of a Post, how do you show that in your Feed?

This is a good question.

I think one way would be that you would only show in your Feed only when a new Post was spawned. Meanwhile, you would get a more nuanced Notification of inline editing updates in your Control Panel.

Another issue is — on mobile, how to do you present Posts in the Feed? Specifically, if there’s too much going on, the font size would have to be pretty small. So, that’s something you would have to finesse some.

These are obviously more nuanced problems, but if you were going to make this service a reality, they would have to be addressed.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I find myself thinking up a lot of different ways to make my fanciful “Twitter Killer” based on updated Usenet UX design more scalable. One solution I just came up with is using Google Docs-like collaboration when any particular user in-line edits a Post.

But this obviously raises the question of — when does someone get to spawn a new Post within a threaded discussion?

If you don’t allow that to happen, then each Thread would have just one Post that was completely torn apart by various people. Here is my solution — not only would you limit who could contribute to a Group’s Thread, but you also limit who can spawn a new Post within that Thread.

So, you would have a situation where, say, a New York Times reporter writes a 500 word post that is quickly inline edited by a few dozen people, all using different colors so as to not to cause confusion. But some Users would have the ability to spawn a new Post within the Thread or Subthread.

This newly spawned Post might have some conditions, like it can’t just be the old Post, you would have to use subset of the content from the original Post in your new Post in the Thread or Subthread.

Something like that. Something manageable.

And you might get a Notification in your Control Panel when someone you followed either edited a Post or spawned a new Post. Or maybe you could follow individual Threads in a Group to monitor that sort of thing as well. There are a lot of different ways you might go.