Tag: Twitter Killer

A Neat Element Of My Proposed Twitter Replacement — Inline WYSIWYG Editing Of Webpages Posted To The Platform

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the strongest parts of Usenet was you had an entire page to work with when you wanted to post something to the platform. Essentially, you wrote an email that was copied and distributed across the public UUCP network. This element would ultimately cause the decline and fall of Usenet because, lulz, it just could not scale.

Spam and porn became so bad with Usenet that it just faded away into the oblivion that in now exists in.

But the Twitter replacement I daydream about would harken back to those Usenet days of having a full page Post. What’s so interesting about this is if you update the Usenet post into the Web world on a single dedicated Website instead of a distributed network, you have a huge amount of potential.

One thing that I find fanciating is imagine, say, The New York Times pushing its formatted content into the system and individual users were given the ability to inline edit that content in a threaded discussion. Instead of just seeing the headline of a New York Times article and a blurb, you could see — and edit — the entire article in a threaded discussion.

And, what’s more, you could give the average user the ability to create a mulit-media, formated full-page post themselves that they could post to the system in a Group. I think that’s really cool. And given that you’re dealing with a fullpage post, there is at least the possibility that you could have some sort of Zoom-like video conferencing in that Post as well that people could comment under in real time.

I fear, of course, that I’m getting ahead of myself. I would suggest anyone who might take me up on this concept to probably keep things simple at first before getting to elaborate. You would have to ease people into a whole different way of looking at content creation.

Silicon Valley Is Embarrassing Itself — Of Course We Need An Adult Version Of Tik-Tok To Serve As A ‘Twitter Killer!’

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Silicon Valley, you are pathetic. Tik-Tok is proof of concept, all you need to tweak it a little bit so it can become a Twitter Killer. Why is this so difficult to see?

It’s so simple. So very simple. Now, I’m not saying you would have to do videos on such a service, but the current Twitter implementation of video is piss-poor.

There’s at least a $1 billion market for a native-video discussion service that is essentially Tik-Tok but for news. Why no one has done this, I don’t know. I guess it’s not sexxy.

Could TikTok Disrupt Twitter?

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

As you may know, when Twitter first came into existence, people did not know what to do with it. A lot of people took pictures of their food, for instance. Only gradually did people realize it had the potential to a whole lost of other things, especially breaking news.

I have long thought that there was something missing from Twitter. I want the ability to have intuitive “video tweets” in the sense that I would record a short video and then someone would respond in kind. Twitter has this ability already, in a sense, but I have never seen two people actually talk to each other back and forth using Twitter’s primitive and klugy video message feature. In my imagination, this new service would have it’s video tweets threaded so you could make some sense of it. I have only recently learned that TikTok has the basis for this notion. It wouldn’t take too much to change the interface just a little bit to make whole platform not only a whole lot more useful, but a whole lot more engaging for older people.

The only reason why older people need to get involved is the natural evolution of a social media platform to go from a silly toy of teens to something useful for adults with, like, careers and stuff. But I suspect my vision for TikTok is a ways down the road. And it may not even be TikTok that does it. It may be a similar service that caters to adults from the get-go.

One barrier to this idea, of course, is vanity. Just like the video phone never took off, there’s a chance that a “video Twitter” will never take off because people are so used to tweeting in the bathroom or at night before they go to sleep that they simply will have no interest in the very thing I propose.

I don’t know. Just an observation.

An Observation About TikTok

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The thing about TikTok is has a lot of potential, and yet it doesn’t really have much of a point for older people (which may be the point.) What if you had something like TikTok, but the ability to ping people in conversations similar to Twitter?

Now, of course, this is idea is ripe for abuse. But if you were to manage it some, I think it might take off.

The Vision Thing — A #Startup Codenamed ‘Irredenta’

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Gab is this insane cesspool of hate frequented by alt-Right mouthbreathers. But it does fill a niche. And as, such, I suggest that there are a lot — a lot — of Twitter users who, if they were given a viable option would at least try it out.


I’m old enough to remember the TV show America Held Hostage, which would turn into Nightline. I’m saying we’re in a similar crisis and, as such, have a similar opportunity. But there’s more to the story than just that.

A lot of different things are happening right now and I suggest that a new app could address than all in one fell swoop. People want a viable option to Twitter. A growing number of people, given the opportunity, would be interested in an app that would help facilitate massive protests against the Trump Administration to end it once and for all. And, lastly, the online news business is suffering a historic contraction.

So, the app I propose, which goes under the codename Irredenta, would address all those issues. The app would be designed in such a way that you would, essentially, pay a core group of users to break news using it. But, get this, much like the Usenet of yore, you have inline editing of that content so the comments are actually inside full page posts using groups. Or, put another way, that’s what you work towards. That’s what you grow into.

The basic app would be a lot like Crooked Media’s Vote Save The People but with a news service of sorts attached to it. It really isn’t that hard to imagine. You just need just the basic vision and resources to pull it off.  I have the vision, I just don’t have anything else.

So, unless I get some traction on this, I’m probably going to shut up about it soon enough.


Trump’s Loss Of The Mandate of Heaven & A Radical Resistance #Startup Code-Named ‘Irredenta’

By Shelton bumgarner
@bumgarls

Trump’s defeat at the ends of Nancy Pelosi today jiggles things in more ways that one. In a sense, the jig is finally up for Trump. He’s always been one of those bullshit artists who get way, way, farther than they should because they’re so devoted to, and so good at, “owning the moment.”

Given that Trump could very well face a challenge from the Right on immigration — I’m looking at you Rep. Steve King — our perception of Trump has enter a new phase. Trump’s neo-Reagan mystique has been popped, shattered, ended, however you want to couch it. Trump now enters his Jimmy Carter II phase. But it’s doubtful it’s going to last too long, unless, of course, the “resistance” becomes the Radical Resistance.

The Radical Resistance is more focused, more organized and more ideological than the “resistance.” As I keep saying, it seems to me that we could get a core group of people to go all 300 on Trump in defense of the Republic, then we could, on a political level, end this surreal tragic nightmare once and for all.


We design an app, one that I would code name “Irredenta,” that on one level is a Radical Resistance response to Gab, on another a “Twitter Killer,” on another a way of mobilizing and informing the Radical Resistance and on yet another way disrupt the news business online. This is such an obvious solution to a number of problems that is kind of bothers me that nothing will ever be done about it because, well, no one listens to me. Also, I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn.

The irredenta app I’m thinking of would be marked as both a Radical Resistance version of Gab and means to organize and inform the Radical Resistance should the opportunity arise when people are willing to, actually, like, take to the streets on a regular basis to get rid of this tyrant. I honestly don’t believe this would happen for no other reason than it takes time to design an app and if we don’t do it now, we won’t be ready when the opportunity arises.

A lot depends on how long Trump lasts. If he survives into 2021 and beyond, then the protest app becomes very much more possible. Though, as I keep saying, MX (AR / VR) is hurtling towards us so there is a very narrow window of opportunity for the Irredenta app. By the end the next recession MX will reset the media equation online and, well, then we’ll be talking about that.

This is one of this times when I come up with something really cool and interesting and because I’m little more than a rando Internet crank relative to, say, the bluecheck liberals of Crooked Media, no one will listen to me or if they do they’ll steal the idea and not give me any credit.

But fuck those guy. This is a cool, timely idea.

I just wish someone would listen to me.

A Call To Arms: Design An App To Disrupt Politics & Prose

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

As I keep noting, three things are currently happening at the same time and if you simply had a little vision, you could make a lot of money AND disrupt both politics and communication of news online.

Here are the forces at work — 1) Twitter sucks 2) you need a way to mobilize and inform a Radical Resistance to Trump 3) the online news business is in serious contraction because it’s base on a lie.

So, what you do is, think completely out of the box. There is a very narrow window of opportunity for an app to do as I suggest before the end of the next recession when MX (AR / VR) takes over everything and resets the the entire media equation not seen since about 1996.

Really, it would be so easy. The app would initially be marketed to the millions of people who are growing alienated by the spread of Right wing hate speech on Twitter. Tell them it’s a Twitter Killer for liberals. (Or the liberal-progressive answer to Gab.)

Here’s the outside-the-box angle. You use the basic general concepts of Usenet in such a way that seed the service with actual journalists who get paid to break news via the app. (Yes, this sounds a lot like Reddit in its own way, but if you have any idea of how much more robust this vision is, you wouldn’t say that.)

I have talked at great length about this and it’s very well developed in my head. But I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn. But the idea is pretty obvious given the three things I mentioned.

But no one listens to me.

There’s An App For That — How A Radical Resistance Could, In Practical Terms, End The Trump Administration And Accidentally Design A ‘Twitter Killer’

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The macro-level forces at work against an effective Radical Resistance, one with the single-issue goal of impeaching and removing Donald J. Trump, 45 president of the United States, are pretty staggering.

Trump is an avatar for about 37% of the elector that feels historically disenfranchised. Meanwhile, the economy is doing — in relative terms — great, so a lot of people who might otherwise be angry with Trump honestly don’t give a shit. They’re more concerned with Little Johnny’s t-ball match that the fact that the current administration is headed by a treasonous, felonious 72-year-old toddler.

So, if you wanted to politically wargame the situation on a macro level, I have — and have had — at least one suggestion: build an app.

I have proposed building a social media startup designed specifically to facilitate regular massive national protests with the intent of putting pressure on Congress to finally do something about the cancer on the Republic known as the Trump Administration.


Doing such a thing would be very complex and potentially time consuming. But if you designed an app or a site specifically from the ground up to meet the needs of this concept, then I think it would help greatly.

Regular massive protests on a national scale would have to be legal, civil and well organized. I would not want to use Facebook or Twitter because I find them cumbersome and too easily compromised by trolls, bots and MAGA haters who would want to disrupt thing.

Anyway, in my vision of things, the service would be set up like this: You would have Groups that were divided into threaded Discussions. One third of the screen — the right side — would be live text chat. If you wanted to start a threaded discussion with someone in text chat, you just hit a button and invited them into a video chat that could have up to four people in it. This would be done in the context of a Discussion (which would take up the other two thirds of the screen on the left). Below the initial video chat would be a place to write a full page blog post. The whole thing would be threaded and you could have inline editing of someone’s post.

But this is just the basic concept. As time progressed and problems arose that needed to be fixed, the service would evolve to meet these problems. Best of all, after Trump was brought down, the service would be repurposed as something of a “Twitter Killer.”

I suspect the only way to fund this site would be either an angel funder or crowd funding. I doubt you could get a traditional VC to fund it simply because they wouldn’t see how they could make money right away. I believe if you see this site as the core of a potential Twitter Killer, however, it would be a pretty cool investment.

I guess what I’m saying is if the Radical Resistance simply existed in the first place and was organized enough, it could not only maybe bring down the Trump Adminstration via an app, it might also accidently produce a Twitter Killer social media app along the way.

A Feature Rich #UX #UI For A ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Just daydreaming.

A Crude Mockup Of My Dream UX / UI For A ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

No one listens to me. But I have given the topic of how to kill Twitter some thought. Maybe too much thought. And, as such, here’s at least one aspect of the service I believe should exist. This image is of a Group and how you would interact with it.