Tag: Elon Musk

Is It Time For Blues to ‘Secede’ From Twitter?

By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The uncertainty surrounding Elon Musk owning Twitter has generated a massive about of Twitter liberal angst in the days since the acquisition closed. I’m not prepared to go so far as to say Blues should leave the service, but I do think it’s something to keep at the forefront of our minds going forward.

Being an “edge lord” is all fun and games when you don’t own the service that, at the moment, is at the center of national discourse in the United States. By definition, is public profile is significantly more potent. He’s so wealthy, of course, that he is rather oblivious to this change of state.

So he continues to be his usual provocative self, filling the media space previously inhabited by dingus Trump.

The risk is, of course, that the very prospective changes to Twitter that is going to give MAGA cocksuckers a boner will also be the very thing that drives that 10% of the user base that makes Twitter useful in the first place. And, really, at the moment, the missing ingredient is a Twitter-like platform for Blues to decamp to.

Jack Dorsey is developing an open source protocol that would allow for a number of different Twitter-like companies to access it at the same time. But that’s still in the development stages.

If I win the $1 billion Powerball lottery, I’m going to use that money to make my dream of starting a Twitter Killer using an updated Usenet UX. The usual caveats about that being delusional and not happening apply, of course.

But the point remains — if someone could found a fleet footed startup that did what Twitter does, only better…I think Twitter would be doomed. But the window to do such a thing is very, very narrow. It can probably be counted in months, not years.

Twitter Is Woefully Underdeveloped

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the many reasons why there seems a narrow window of opportunity for someone to swoop in with a new Twitter-like service is how low people’s expectations are when it comes to that space. It’s my impression that on a corporate level, Twitter has always been seen as a loosely controlled, very lucky shitshow that stumbled into its current importance.

Now that we have some sense of what people want, if you had a few million lying around, you could scoop up my “updated Usenet UX” concept and people would be so in awe that they could post a full webpage in the context of threaded discussion in a Group that you might have a real hit on your hands.

Or not, who knows.

But there is, if nothing else, Jack Dorsey’s “Bluesky” startup floating around, which apparently is going to be an opensource protocol that would allow for multiple Twitters to share the same feed — I think.

There is just a lot of potential untapped innovation within the Twitter-like space that would not require that much thought to develop. Or, I could win the lottery soon and do all of this myself. Wish me luck!

An Intriguing Theory About ‘Bluesky’ & The Future of Twitter

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I saw a stray tweet tonight that suggests that Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey are going to transition Twitter to Dorsey’s “Bluesky” distributed infrastructure protocol.

This makes a lot of sense.

I mean, obviously “Bluesky” is a placeholder name and it would make a lot of sense if, in the end, Musk simply plopped Twitter onto the chassis of Bluesky and they changed the name…to Twitter.

This is all very, very speculative, but given Musk’s track record, I’m reluctant to bet against him.

The Built In Redundancy Of My Proposed Twitter Replacement Would Allow It To Scale

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now, I’m well aware of the failed Google social media platform G+ and its concept of Circles. While it was a strong idea, it was really difficult for the average person to understand what the fuck a Circle was and how to practically use it. Meanwhile, there are also Reddit “reddits” and “subreddits” which are pretty much a ham-handed application of the Usenet newsgroup concept of yore.

But my Group concept is pretty easy to understand and it’s also feature rich and flexible. One thing that makes the Group concept really scalable is its redundancy. Each user could great as many public or private Groups as they wished about any subject with any name. They would also be able to manage who posted to any individual Group, which would also mitigate the risk that any specific group would grow too huge and unmanageable.

So, if there was some breaking news, there might be a dozen or more really good Groups devoted to the event where well known content creators from journalism would post full page posts on the subject that would create threads that people with the right posting rights could comment on via inline editing. Many more people could simply read these discussions without being able to post.

All these features would fix some of the horrific flaws in Twitter at the moment. You wouldn’t be limited to just 280 characters. You wouldn’t struggle to find good content and you wouldn’t feel like you were being overwhelmed with a torrent of content.

I think this is a far better mouse trap than Twitter at the moment. And I only bring this up because Elon Musk is so mercurial that he could very well kill the goose the lays the golden egg and there will be a window of opportunity for some spunky, aggressive startup to swoop in and eat Musk’s lunch. But it’s a very narrow window — it’s not like there’s any interest in social media anymore in Silicon Valley.

You would have to have some vision, some willingness to throw money at a problem that most people believe has already been solved. But, of course, it hasn’t — at least not very well. Twitter was just lucky. And it, seems, it’s luck may be about to run out.

My Proposed Twitter Replacement Is Very Flexible

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Again, I have to stress that I just want to use this idea I’ve come up with — I have no skin in the game otherwise besides wanting credit for thinking it up. I can’t code and don’t have any money. So, lulz, have at it. But with that out of the way, I will note that there is more than one way to look at this Twitter replacement concept.

Instead of a direct Twitter replacement, you might use the concept to go after newspapers as an app. You would have the main domain name and then a subdomain for individual cities that you were going to cover. Each of the your editors would have a number of Groups under their control and their writers would post to the Groups and there could be discussions about whatever it is they posted.

So, instead of the passive user base of a print newspaper, you would have a very active audience that felt engaged in what the “virtual newspaper” was putting out during the course of the day. This is very Blue Sky and just something I’ve thought would be an interesting application.

Also, if you really wanted to be ambitious, this cherry picking of Usenet UX concepts could be used to go after Facebook. You do it this way — start the service as a Twitter replacement then gradually add features so it’s a direct Facebook replacement. Doing so, of course, would mean Facebook would either want to buy you or crush you before it was all over with. Or, if nothing else, clone all your features.

But I really do like the idea that the fundimental problem of how currently the various elements of your life are all smashed together in a very weird and awkward situation. The Group concept fixes this problem because everything about the service would be based on Groups. By definition, to use the service would be to have different interests, subjects, elements of your life all in a different Group devoted to them.

Anyway, lulz. This is really fun to write about, even if it’s completely pointless and no one cares.

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.

The ‘Feed’ of My Imagined Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Again, I only write about this pointless mental exercise because there is, in fact, a window of opportunity for a tech startup to swoop in and replace Twitter if Elon Musk manages to force his new acquisition’s implosion. I have six novels to work on and I should throw myself into that instead of daydreaming about shit like this. It’s finally really gotten into my thick skull that no one is going to listen to me about this idea if I can’t code or have the resources to pay someone to make this a reality.

But my hope is that someone, somewhere might read this and run with the idea. I’d prefer to simply get some credit for having thought up the idea, but other than than that, lulz. I know how the real world works.

Anyway, let’s talk about how the “Feed” of this Twitter replacement would work, given that instead of Tweets you would have full page, graphic rich Webpages you would interact with instead. This would take even the Facebook concept of the status up date to the next level.

Here’s my solution to this situation — you would “subscribe” to individual Threads within Groups that you’ve subscribed to and whenever there was a new Post that Thread you would see in it in your timeline, like you might otherwise see a new tweet. But you wouldn’t see the whole post, but rather just its subject and the first 100 words or whatever. Something manageable.

When you click on the subject of the Post, you see the whole thing in the context of the overall Thread and Group that it’s in. This solves one issue with the Group feature that is a hold over from Usenet newsgroups — newsgroups were notoriously parochial and unwieldy. That’s why back in the day, any popular Usenet newsgroup had to have a FAQ to stop people from asking the same questions over and over again when they joined the group for the first time.

One tricky problem is how to solve the “Hello” issue. Inevitably, new people to any service will want to say “hello” just to make sure someone can see what they’re tweeting. This was a real problem with Usenet newsgroups — especially during after AOL gave the broader public access to Usenet in I think 1993. It got so bad that there was a specific group devoted to people simply saying “Hello” — alt.hello.

I think the solution would be to address this issue through a combination of the onboarding process and maybe giving people a productive way to say hello in a Group set to Personal that only their friends would see. Or something.

I’m well aware that all of this a lot more complicated than the average Twitter user might be accustomed to AND if this proposed service grew popular enough that Facebook would either want to buy it or crush it because it would be easy, through mission creep, to turn this proposed service into something more akin to Facebook than Twitter.

Anyway, absolutely no one listens to me. But it feels good to get this off my chest.

The Vision Thing: My Personal Pitch For A Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Predicting The 2030s

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems pretty clear that we have a sense of what the next few years will be like. Starting around 2024 — 2025, the United States, and the globe, will go through some sort of massive political transformation. There’s either a civil war in the United States which will cause WW3, or there’s a MAGA autocracy….which will cause WW3.

But what happens after that? What happens to the globe once the dust settles.

I think the 2030s will be a lot like the 1950s. A lot of technological innovation that was either held back because of WW2 or started in WW2 came to the fore during that decade. And I think the same thing will happen in the 2030s. A lot of the things that Elon Musk is working on now will take off in a big way in the 2030s.

The key thing I think we have to keep an eye on is AI and automation. There are about 3 million high paying blue collar jobs in transportation that could go “poof!” if Musk’s dream of AI-powered self-driving cars become a reality. Meanwhile, on the other end other end of the spectrum, there is the possibility that much of lower-end fast food preperation will be done by androids.

All that could cause a massive shift in the economics and politics of either war torn America or a MAGA autocracy. The rise of neo-Luddites could be a real possibility in the 2030s.

No one listens to me and I’m always wrong, so lulz.

Elon Music, Twitter Is Useless

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The key problem with Twitter is it’s just a gusher of information. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with a cacophony of disjoined, unconnected information that blasts towards you. Yes, there are “Twitter Lists” that you can use to try to control things but few people use or understand them.

So, for the average user, a lot depends on who you follow to the point that it’s almost better to create specific accounts for specific interests you might have. As such, I have long thought about how Usenet, 25 years ago, was, in its own way far more feature rich than Twitter is today.

Now, obviously, Reddit pretty much fills the space that Usenet did a long time ago. And there are some serious problems with Usenet / Reddit paradigm that you have to overcome. It’s easy one for a “group / reddit” to grow too large to be usable and two there is the problem of a very, very specific culture developing within any specific group / reddit to the point that you have to create a FAQ to answer all the questions that newbies to a group may have.

And that is probably the biggest advantage of that Twitter has. The average person can just jump into Twitter and start using it, no FAQ required.

I have given this particular problem way, way, way too much thought and I think I have a solution.

What you do is, if you wanted the best of both worlds — Twitter and Usenet — what you do is you force every user of your service to create groups as part of their on boarding. As such, EVERY user would create Groups devoted to the personal and the public.

If everyone can create, in essence, an endless number of reddits for whatever happens to be going on in their lives, then that opens up a lot of opportunities that simply don’t exist at the moment.

In my imagination, instead of having a Twitter timeline, the user would see a stream of individual Posts to different Groups they were subscribed to that people they were interested in had created. You see a Post in your timeline or newsfeed and you click on it and respond. Then you could see that Post in the context of a Group, rather than just being yet another tweet in a flood of tweets.

Now, I’m very well aware that all of this is very moot. We’re all talking about AR and VR as opposed to social media and so, lulz. But it is my impression that Elon Musk is interested in turning the X.com domain name that he owns into a rival to Twitter and, as such…maybe he might think about using the general principles of Usenet for a social media service that would sort of be a combination of Twitter and Reddit?

But no one listens to me, so luz.