by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I only keep writing about my proposed “Twitter Killer” because it seems like every day on Twitter now, its new owner Elon Musk flings off yet more chaos. As such, I find myself thinking — what are we going to do if Twitter implodes? What then?
Then I remember the Twitter Killer idea that I’ve been noodling on for years now and think up yet another angle I might write about. But I am well aware that all of this is pointless in the end. It’s not like anyone is going to take me up on this idea — I would have to fund and build it myself it was ever to become a reality.
As it is, I’m just a broke ass writer in the middle of nowhere, struggling to finish my first novel. So, lulz.
But here, again, is a basic feature set of my daydream.
Groups
Everyone would have to create Groups, both Public and Private just to use the service. Everything would be found in Groups that individual users would create in an ad hoc manner for whatever they wanted to talk about. Groups would be attached to an individual User’s ID, so you could have multiple, redundant Groups about the same subject. This aids in scalability.
Managed Participation
One key element of a Group would be not everyone could contribute. Whenever you created a Group, you would be prompted to set participating requirements, like, say “Only Verified Users” or whatever. This also helps with scalability because even most popular Group, the ones viewed by potentially millions of people, would not become unmanageable
Threads
Inside of each Group, there would be Threads. These would be laid out like a blog. Subthreads would be a clickaway and set up in a similar fashion. This does away with the clunky threading of Usenet, which just isn’t practical anymore.
Posts
The Post would be the central component of the service. You would have a whole Webpage to work with. You could throw in anything you might otherwise put in a Webpage using a WYSIWYG editor.
Inline, Collaborative Editing
What’s interesting is, once a Post was published, there would be collaborative inline editing of that post by other Users — until, of course, you ran out of colors and a new Post was spawned in the Thread.
Absolutely no one cares or is listening to me. So, unless I win the PowerBall, all of this is a huge waste of time. But, as I keep saying, it is relaxing to keep solving different problems in this hypothetical service, even if it will never come into being.
