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.

Some Of The More Nuanced Issues With My Proposed ‘Twitter Killer’

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.

Discovery & My Proposed ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

In my imagination, the Discovery feature of my proposed Twitter Killer would allow you to find any Public Group that might have been created by another User. I vacillate between letting everyone create Public Groups and letting only Verified Users create Groups.

But I think letting everyone create a Public Group is probably the way to go because that way everyone feels equal, even though in reality they aren’t — especially when it comes to who can post in a Public Group.

Back to Discovery, though.

When you searched for a Keyword or Phrase, you would find a multitude of Groups devoted to the subject in question, with varying degrees of popularity. I suppose you might have Sponsored Groups or Leader Board Groups that are featured in some way.

There is a lot you could do with the Group concept because it’s so flexible and powerful. There might be some clutter if everyone is creating a Group in an ad hoc manner with little or no regard for how to properly name one so people understood what the heck they were about.

But that would also be some of the appeal of this element of the service. And, remember, each Group would be associated with the account of a User, so that would really help narrow down how interested someone might be in the Public Group.

There are a lot of ways the Public Group concept could go wrong, of course, but I’m really enjoying thinking up different use cases and trying to bounce up and down on this platform concept to see where I can find and fix weaknesses.

Making My Proposed ‘Twitter Killer’ Scalable

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.

An Interesting Feature Proposal For My ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It just occurred to me how to fix a problem with my proposed Twitter Killer based on updated Usenet UX — instead of reposting each post when you post it in a group, you might allow people to inline edit through collaboration like you find with Google Docs.

This would allow the service to scale a lot easier and also reduce the risk of a zillion posts that were just people re-posting with the words “I agree” somewhere on the Post. This really fixes a huge issue with the service. My natural inclination is to make things way more complicated and nuanced than necessary, so maybe there would have to be a reason why you posted a new Post in a Thread instead of using the collaboration feature.

Maybe, essentially, you would have to “opt-in” to spawning a new Post in a Thread. The default would be just inline editing via a collaboration feature. Though, remember, you wouldn’t be able to edit someone else’s edits to a post. That’s the only way to prevent shenanigans.

A Unique Feature Of My ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I keep saying, unless I win the $1 billion Powerball, what I’m writing about here just isn’t going to happen. Not only does no one listen to me, but I can’t code and definitely don’t have any money. But this is an entertaining thought experiment, a way of letting off some steam in between novel copy writing sessions.

It has occured to me there is a crucial feature of the old Usenet that we just don’t have available anymore — inline editing. The last time I checked, with Reddit — which is the closest we have to Usenet these days — you can’t go into the main post and inline edit its text. You have to quote the copy in the comments below the main post.

Back in the day with Usenet, you had a full page to work with and within that full page you could have some pretty interesting discussions as various people inline edited the Post’s text. Think of it as a very primitive, public form of Google Doc’s collaboration feature.

So, this was an interesting way to add value to the conversation about something of interest, over and above the robust threading that Usenet had way back when. This is a feature that modern users simply do not have access to and if you gave it to them as part of a Twitter Killer based on updated, more modern Usenet UX concepts, they probably would love it.

But remember, Jack Dorsey is developing an open protocol for Twitter-like services that might upend everything. And, like I said, absolutely no one listens to me. So, lulz.

Well, It’s Now Or Never For a’Twitter Killer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I don’t know what to make of Twitter at the moment. It could really go either way, depending on if Musk pulls it out of its current nosedive or if his mercurial nature proves to be too much.

As such, if you’re interested in building a “Twitter Killer” now is your moment. I would do it — I have the idea — but I can’t code and have no money. And the only way I would ever have the money to found a startup is if I won the $1 billion Powerball drawing coming up.

And that, I’m afraid, is rather doubtful — to say the least.

But the idea I’ve come up with, whereby everything one did in the service would be done in the context of Groups, is pretty cool. It’s a lot easier to understand the concept of a Group than it is a Circle like was found with G+. And, besides, what would be found in the Group is a lot cooler — full page multimedia Posts in threaded discussions.

The service would have all the other accoutrements of a modern day social media platform. I keep trying to find new angles on my social media start up and I find it a real struggle because the entire concept is so strong that I don’t really need to explore it anymore.

I know in my mind exactly how it would work, what it would look like and its strengths and weaknesses. It doesn’t help that I’ve talked about and written about this idea in the past to an embarrassing degree.

Anyway, it will definitely be interesting to see which direction Twitter goes — if it explodes in popularity or if it implodes and turns into another failed social media platform that was once popular.

Only time will tell.