Month: October 2017

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It seems to me that there are two different things going on right now. On one hand, a lot of people have grown dissatisfied with Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook. Meanwhile, a growing number of people are prepared to protest to in real life to bring down the Trump Administration.

So, I am proposing using this window of opportunity to found a new socially conscious social media platform startup that would be designed from the ground up to help people protest across the country on a regular basis. Now, the events that would motivate people to actually do this haven’t happen yet. Right now, people are more content being keyboard jockies than doing anything in real life.

But should Trump fire Bob Mueller or do any number of other things, that will be the spark that will cause a lot of people to hit the street. And it would be great if there was a service designed specifically for facilitating protests already in place, ready to go.

At the same time, a lot of people who the most upset about Trump — your liberal celebrity times — would be really interested in such a service and they might be enticed to leave Twitter and bring their content with them. If the service was designed from the ground up with much better control of trolls and bots, then those type of people would probably flock to such a service.

But, let me stress, I have no money, can’t code and don’t really want to learn. But I am good at the “vision thing” and organizing. So, I think given the opportunity I could at least organize this concept far enough long to get us to crowd funding.

And, yet, I have zero expectations. If I can get one person to help me in a serious manner that would be a shock. As it stands, I will probably grow bored of this concept soon enough simply because I can’t get any traction.

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

We, as a nation, find ourselves at a crossroads.

One path leads to dystopia. The president will continue to run roughshod over the Constitution and democratic norms that we have come to love and enjoy. The other path leads to a return to normalcy. The question is, of course, which one do we want to take.

It is pretty apparent that there is a real risk that Donald Trump, like a caged rat, is going to lash out in a big way in the coming days as things grow more dire. As such, we as citizens need to be prepared to take to the streets in a big way. A massive, historic manner that would put enough pressure on the Vichy Congress to finally force their hand on the Trump matter.

This will not be easy. It will not happen overnight. It will only work if weekend after weekend for months there are massive national protests. Right now, if you wanted to do that you’d probably use some combination of Facebook or Twitter.

I propose that only by designing a social media platform from the ground up that is designed to facilitate organizing protests will any series of massive national protests will take place. There are a whole host of issues associated with such a herculean task and you would have to give a lot of thought to the UX / UI of the site to figure out how to address the many problems that such a concerted national protest effort would have.

I would suggest you start a site as an app that would organize protests in a few major cities, then gradually built out the service so people in even small cities would be able to use the service to plot how to protest. Now, the beauty of this concept is once it’s built, it would be easy to convert the service into a real challenger to Twitter — or even Facebook — once it completed its original purpose.

The issue is, there is a growing amount of energy in The Resistance online, but not a lot of protests in real life. The service would be designed to connect potential leaders with local protests as well as make it intuitive to ensure that protests were legal in the eyes of the law. Only by keeping massive protests legal could you allow them to continue for the weeks and months needed.

Now, one issue is that if you build it, it’s possible no one would actually want to protest. But if history has show us anything about Donald Trump, it’s everything he touches dies. And he is going to do something really horrible, something so bad that there will be a tipping point and people will want to at last, hit the streets. So that’s why I’m proposing this platform now, so it’s ready and waiting when people want to take back their nation from the would-be tinpot dictator who now threatens the Republic.

by Shelton Bumgarner

I think it’s time that members of The Resistance stop being keyboard warriors on Twitter and start to act in real life. It seems as though the United States — a country I love dearly — is quickly hurdling towards a dark and unknown (and potentially dystopian) future.

So, I am proposing 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.

Regardless, we need to strike now, before Trump does.