I got no beef with Reddit. Live long and prosper, you Usenet knock off. But I do think it’s telling that if both Twitter and Reddit implode that my personal vision for a service that uses updated Usenet UX / UI concepts becomes something more viable.
If I was smart enough — which I’m not — I would somehow figure out a way to use AI to design my dream platform that is based on Groups and allows for pull page posts and robust threading.
And…yet…that moment has passed. It’s just not viable anymore. We’re now in the age of XR, crypto and AI. Lulz. No one gives a shit about something as quaint and prosaic as a social media platform…based on a 30 year old concept no one cares about anymore.
Anyway. I do wish there was something a bit more like Usenet out there to use. I think by the time Reddit came around I was just too old to be willing to wade into its many subcultures. And I was so weened on Usenet back in the day that neither Twitter nor Reddit really appealed to me.
I’m old and I hate it.
Godspeed, Reddit. I hope you figure out all your API bullshit.
I’ve given it some reflection and it definitely seems as though Space Karen could surprise us all and do something pretty amazing with Twitter. At its heart, Twitter is a text-based system with a prompt. It seems obvious that you could somehow rig up a chatbot natively and organically to the service’s existing UX and do something astonishing.
I’m not smart enough to figure out the specifics just yet — like, how you would make money . But imagine you sit down in front of Twitter 2.0 and instead of turning to Google to answer a question, you ask a Twitter LLM whatever it is you want. Just a back-of-the-envelope imagining of this concept suggests that the possibilities are endless.
If you could make a Twitter LLM compelling enough, people might even be willing to pay for it. Or something. I still am very dubious about the idea that you’ll be able to turn LLMs into subscription services. That seems like a daydream of the elite who don’t want to have to put up with something as pedestrian as ads.
But if you could fuse the existing Twitter userbase with a LLM, it’s a very intriguing idea. For no other reason than Twitter would be adding to its existing service, rather than having to eat its own, like, say Google. All of this is fast moving target, so it could all go a lot of different ways.
One of the mysteries of the tech world at the moment is what, exactly, Space Karen is up to with Twitter. While sometimes it feels like Space Karen might just pull the plug on the whole operation out of pique, more likely he would turn around and sell Twitter at a massive loss.
But, as I’ve said before, there is definitely a window of opportunity for someone to come up with a better mouse trap in the near-realtime discussion space. But it’s extremely narrow. You would have to strike almost immediately — things like AI and AR / VR are about to dramatically revolutionize everything.
I still think that if you cherrypicked the best UX elements of the old Usenet discussion service, you could really rock the world in a very quick manner. But, alas, it’s dawned on me that I should just shut up and work on my novel when it comes to shit like that.
It could be that even if Twitter “dies” it will all be moot because we’ll be wearing Apple VR / AR headsets that replace how we interact with media altogether. Or, hell, we might even be wearing mindcaps as far as I know.
There’s just no juice in social media. There’s definitely a need for a Twitter-like service without the baggage of Space Karen, but it could be that, like most things in life, we’ll just muddle through. But I do think that we’re in the process of lurching forward into a new, uncertain technological future that will change the everyday life of the average person in ways we can only barely begin to imagine.
There are, at last count, now two viable Twitter clones vying for the attention the many people fed up with Elon Musk’s shenanigans. Both Post and Spoutable seem to believe that the path to success is to lean into being a “safe space” for center-Left people.
From what I can tell, however, both services are kind of missing the point. It seems what people want is not a “woke” version of Twitter, but Twitter without Elon Musk. They have certain end-user experience expectations and if they don’t get that, they complain — even if they’re center-Left.
For instance, Spoutable, which is, in my opinion, the Twitter clone that clones Twitter the best, is apparently having a big problem with well-meaning people wanting to post things the service considers “porn.” So, you the squeaky wheels of sex workers and erotica writers screaming at the top of their lungs about how much Spoutable sucks….just as Spoutable is trying to pounce on fleeing Twitter users.
The solution is to give people what they want when it comes to Twitter — an almost no holds barred freeforall where you just come to expect that you’re going to have to block half a dozen people before dawn for being totally, completely insane and malicious.
So, I’m really enjoying Spoutable, but I’m a bit concerned that it will ultimately be just another social media flash in the pan.
There is some chatter about some former Twitter employees working on their own Twitter clone that I have a lot of hope for. If anyone can get a Twitter clone right, it should be them.
I will note in passing, of course, that I still think one could cherry pick the UX principles of the old Usenet News to create a service that would be a lot better than Twitter and would, in fact, explode with popularity if you just were able to implement it.
But I fear that particular delusional daydream of mine is just not going to happen.
I just saw on Twitter an interesting use case for OpenAI ChatGPT — native integration into Twitter itself. I say this because people are already used to the Twitter prompt so the ability to ask ChatGPT questions directly from Twitter would be a very smooth addition to the Twitter UX.
It would make a lot of sense for Musk to add ChatGPT to Twitter.
Given that Elon Musk has a connection to both Twitter and OpenAI, this is a gimmie. It’s something that once ChatGPT is far more scalable could happen pretty much with the flip of a switch.
As an aside, it’s interesting how similar people’s speculation surrounding ChatGPT is identical to what people talked about with the late, great Blab. Everyone assumes that it will be pay-to-play soon enough. In fact, some people are pretty much begging it to be that way.
This raises a very interesting issue — what if, just like with the Internet, the actual service itself is free and the money is made from the things you can do with it. This is what caused the death of the online services of the 1990s — the Internet was open and it was, unto itself, the “killer app” that everyone seemed to believe was going to happen at some point in the future.
There is a lot I still don’t know about what is going to happen with chatbot technology. At the moment, it definitely seems like it’s going to be very disruptive — the only question is the degree. But I also don’t know if there will be ONE AGI or a multitude.
So, let’s go through how an advertiser might use this Twitter killer that I’ve come up with. To me, the main appeal of this hypothetical service is you have a lot more freedom in what type of ads you push into the platform because they can pretty much be the same size as a Webpage. AND you have the option of using traditional banner ad sizes within Posts in the system as well.
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.
So, here’s how an advertiser might use my Twitter Killer.
Remember, using their account, they can create as many different Groups as they like about whatever aspect of the service or widget that they’re selling. AND, what’s more, they can control who can Post into the Groups they’ve created.
So, if you were a major advertiser, you could have a variety of Groups devoted to discussion about any number of not just a widget, but an element of a widget that you felt people might really want to talk about. And also remember there would be an Excerpt feature that would work with a Feed feature like you might see with Facebook or Twitter, which would cut through the service to allow people to know when a new Thread or Post was created in Groups they might be monitoring that were run by people they might be monitoring.
This is a far more powerful brand tool than either Reddit or Usenet — or even Facebook, for that matter.
There is a lot of talk these days that Elon Musk is going to drive Twitter into a ditch, declare bankruptcy and then walk away. While that may happen, I’m not yet prepared to write his chances of success off entirely.
Elon Musk
He has a track record of (turbulent) success to the point that it’s possible he’s going to pull this off — maybe. We’ll wake up a year from now and all these fanciful things that Musk wants to do with Twitter will be taken for granted as a part of life.
I say all this because the more I see how Musk operates, the more I see myself. I would do the exact same thing if I was Musk thrown into such a situation. I would make a lot of mistakes at first, but once I got my sealegs, I would shock everyone with how well I did.
But, then, I’m just a loser in the middle of nowhere, so I don’t know if anyone should take the above as any sort of ringing endorsement of Musk. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how all of this works out. It could be that social media is a whole different bird than SpaceX or Tesla. It could be that being an eccentric is so off putting to the userbase of Twitter that it’s inevitable that someone will swoop in with a better mousetrap.
And, yet, I’m just not prepared to assume this is the case. I’m taking a wait and see approach.
I only bring this up because it definitely seems as though Twitter is going to crash and burn pretty soon, now that we have learned that Elon Musk wants to cut 75% of its staff.
I’ll try to be as brief as possible, I’ve wasted too much energy on this fantasm already.
The point of this Twitter replacement would be to bring back, to modernize the best bits of the old Usenet newsgroups. Now, I’m WELL AWARE that Reddit serves the function of Usenet in the modern age. Ok, I get it. But the idea that I have would be to be a far more feature rich and nuanced interpretation of Usenet.
What makes Twitter so engaging? That’s the key issue when thinking about how you might build a better version of it. One element of its success is how simple it is — there’s no onboarding to the service and you can really just jump right in without having to read any additional documentation like a FAQ. The service’s simplicity combined with having zero learning curve is what has given it whatever success it’s found to date.
The idea I have is a far more simplistic version of the “circles” concept that G+ had back in the day. Instead of a Circle, you would have a Group. And these Groups would be setup in such a way that the concept would be a lot easier to understand than G+’s Circles. They would be setup a lot more like Usenet Newsgroups with discussions and threads. You would have Threads inside of a Group made up of full pages posts.
This concept is exactly what we had back in the day with Usenet newsgroups and very similar — but not exactly — like Reddit. I haven’t used Reddit in a long time, but it’s my impression that you have one post and then threaded discussions below that central post — but it’s more of a comment section instead of a full page Post like we had back in the day with Usenet.
Anyway, the point is, as part of the onboarding process, you would have to setup your own Groups — with whatever names you liked — and you would have the option of joining other people’s Groups as well. And, remember, you could create as many Groups as you like about whatever subject you liked, no matter how specific or personal.
This redundancy would allow the service to scale in ways that neither Usenet nor Reddit can. This redundancy would would, in essence, give you a sense of a “super Twitter account” in the sense that you could have ad hoc Groups by different reporters and writers devoted to the same news event — breaking or otherwise.
I could go on and on — and I have on my Instagram account (SheltonBumgarner.) You can see me, over the course of way, way too many Instagram videos flesh out this concept pretty well. I’m embarrassed by how many videos I did on this subject over the years.
No one is ever going to take me up on this idea, of course. That’s just not how things work. But I really love the concept.
10. Graphic Porn I retweet pictures of hot chicks all the time, but even I sometimes see really graphic porn tweets and blanch. There’s no need to go THAT far. Calm down, people. Use PornHub.
9. People Begging For Money I just don’t care if you need money. *I* need money. We all need money. Shut up.
8. Joke Quote Re-Tweets Sometimes, you’ll see a series of quoted re-tweets that go nowhere. It was funny in 2012 when the world wasn’t collapsing in on us.
7. Preening Writing Community Tweets Anytime someone preens about this or that thing they’ve done — or not done — as a writer I want to vomit. I talk about writing all the time on Twitter and do a lot of videos, too. But I actively avoid self-conscious preening. No one wants to read that.
6. Dumb Question The Dumb Question type of tweet is so grating on the nerves that it makes you want to stop using the service altogether. Shut up with the stupid questions, you fucking idiots.
5. Old People Crowing About Their Birthday I do not care how old you are. Shut up.
4. Passive Aggressive Tweets Whenever someone says, “Woe is me, no one ever interacts with my tweets” I get very angry. Shut up, you idiot.
3. Injured Animals No one wants to see that. Why do I want to see a cat or dog that is horrible mutilated?
2. Too Woke For Your Own Good These people act like college sophomores and blame everything on CIS straight males even when they have nothing to do with whatever the problem is.
1. Begging For Followers This is the absolute worst tweet imaginable. Shut up. If you want more followers, produce better content.
First, let me stress that I am only idly mentioning this. I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn. But eventually, I believe, someone is going to realize that not only does The Resistance need an app, but that same app could help kill Twitter. All you need to do is use the app initially to mobilize and organize The Resistance and then leverage it into an actual Twitter killer.
Among the things I could see this app doing are: 1) helping people register to vote 2) being a one-stop-shop for various GOTV efforts and general mobilization 3) general helping with organization of The Resistance 4) having several urgently needed features that Twitter currently doesn’t have.
If you made the on-boarding of the app really intuitive and made it so people felt connected to The Resistance on a personal, individual level, I think that would be very helpful. It’s just matter of someone doing it. I doubt it would cost all that much to develop to begin with. If you can get $50,000 together to help there being daily protests in front of the White House, you can at least get that much to develop a basic app to help The Resistance.
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