Tag: Usenet

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.

My Proposed Twitter Replacement Fixes An Existential Problem With Existing Social Media Platforms

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The key flaw in social media is it’s very “flat” in the sense that the different sides of your life are mashed together into one circle. There have been efforts to manage this in the past — most notably Google’s failed G+ with it’s “Circles” concept, but I’ve come up with a far more simple concept that fixes this problem once and for all.

The solution is what I call Groups. As part of the onboarding process for this proposed service, you create as amy public or personal groups as you like. Using a drag-and-drop feature, you put your Friends within different groups, depending on how you know them. Within these Groups, you would have Posts that were threaded, just like the good old days of Usenet.

Meanwhile, people you didn’t know could join different Public groups that you had created — this would be ideal if you were some sort of public content creator like a journalist or celebrity. You would be given the ability to restrict who could post in the group as necessary.

I guess what I’m trying to say is — I’ve come up with fixes for the existential flaws in the Usenet UX that caused it die in the first place. But all of this is a big lulz. No one cares and I’m wasting my time. I would be far better served to shut up and continue to throw all my energy in finishing my first novel.

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 Power of The ‘Group’ Feature of My Imagined Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Even though I’m very tired of thinking about this idea because it’s just never going to happen for various reasons, I feel like letting off a little steam and writing about it some again. The key element of my proposed Twitter replacement is the Group feature.

This would be a lot easier to understand than G+’s “Circles” because it’s implementation would be pretty much just a more modern, more flexible incarnation of a Usenet newsgroup from 25-odd years ago. The key interesting part of the Group feature would be everyone could create a one for any reason for any subject.

So, imagine there’s a big breaking news story. With Twitter, you generally have to be following the right people — journalists, etc — to know what’s going on moment by moment. And, even then, what you get is a flood of information that is difficult to process because there’s no rhyme or reason to it all.

But with my imagined service, you would have two options in the breaking news use case. One would be, you could follow the user and the other would be you could follow just their Groups you were interested in. As such, you would get notifications whenever a user you followed created a new Group and you could opt-in to joining a group you found interesting. Meanwhile, you could also use a discovery feature to find Groups with a subject of interest to you as well.

And, remember, because of the redundancy involved with the service, it’s a lot less likely that a Group will grow so huge as to be unwieldly. And, if you really wanted to manage the size of any particular Group, you might even give the owner of the Group some basic administrative abilities like controlling who can post.

This brings up one potential flaw in the Group idea — management of groups might grow overwhelming and cumbersome. Most people don’t have the time, interest or energy to use granular administrative tools for a Group if they have dozens of Groups to oversee.

There are two solutions to this.

One would be your more popular accounts would probably already have a social media management team that could handle all of that. The other solution is you could have some sort of universal application feature that would set the permissions of all your groups and you could change it for an individual group as necessary.

Remember, the only reason why I even mention any of this is Twitter is in trouble and, as such, there is a window of opportunity for someone, anyone to swoop in and fill that technological and social space with something new and better.

But, in general, it’s a very limited window and you would have to have a lot of spunk and vision to pull it off because, lulz, all the momentum is in Web3 and AI.

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.

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.

The Secret Sauce Of A Real Twitter Challenger

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Elon Musk really risks driving out the 1% of Twitter users. These would be the center-Left elites that all the MAGA people hate so much and yet crave the validation of.

So, I propose this — if you were to create an app like Twitter that was feature rich and cherry picked a lot of the best design elements of Usenet, a lot of those elites would use it.

If you gave the elites some way to manage their interaction with the Poors in a way that didn’t offend anyone, then, that, too would help jumpstart a new Twitter-like app.

But, lulz, no one listens to me.

A Window Of Opportunity For A Twitter Rival Based on Usenet Principles Exists


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about cherry-picking the principles of Usenet to serve as the core of a Twitter rival is it’s now or never. We have, maybe, three to six months, before things sort themselves out and we learn if the New Normal of post-Elon Musk Twitter won’t be different, or if it will.

But here’s what I would do.

First, I would look at my “Shelton Bumgarner” Instagram account that has many, many videos about this very concept. It’s the reason why I have like 14,000 posts.

Anyway, after you look at some of those videos, I would figure out what are the best elements of Usenet that you might be able to use for a direct rival to Twitter.

Here are the elements of Usenet that I think would really surprise people that we’ve lost:

Inline Editing
The ability to inline edit posts is really cool. Imagine if the New York Times shot its content into your Twitter clone and people could have a discussion within the text. Each person would have a different color. It would be a lot like Google Doc’s collaborative feature.
Full Size Posts
The ability to have full-page post with native inline editing is something we haven’t had since Usenet. Reddit’s application of fullpage posts is very ham handed.
Robust Threading
In the context of full page posts, the threading you found with Usenet is very, very powerful.

The point is — study Usenet’s features and use the more interesting and innovative ones to start a Twitter rival NOW. A lot of center-Left people are thinking about leaving Twitter altogether and all you have to do is give them something new to use and they’ll at least check it out.

The Vision Thing: Of Elon Musk, Twitter & Usenet


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

My dream.

In honor of Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter, I’m going to talk about my own vision for Twitter. My vision of Twitter is a service that, at its core, revolves around the principles of Usenet. It would not be Usenet, which is long dead and shouldn’t come back.

My dream.

Nor would it be a Reddit clone. Reddit is pretty much as close as you can get to the old Usenet experience in the modern world, but even then it lacks some fundimental elements that don’t make it all that engaging if not a 23-year-old Incel. It’s kind of all of the insular bad parts of Usenet and none of the advanced features that make it so much fun.

My dream

My vision of Twitter would be a social media network that was, at its core, based on the concept of Groups. This is similar to Reddit, yes, but I’ve really thought this through. As part of the onboarding process, you would forced to create Groups that you could any name you liked to. You could create Groups on the fly, in fact, that people could discover.

Usenet

Now, there are a lot of issues with my vision for this new, improved Twitter. First is how granular it would be. People are just too stupid and lazy to use the more complex elements of software, as can be seen by how small a portion of MS Word people use on a regular basis.

But you could come to some sort of compromise.

The point would be that once you setup Groups, you would have Posts like you did in the old Usenet days that allowed you to write not a 280 characters but as long as you liked. And, what’s more, these Posts would allow for inline editing, inline media AND be part of threaded discussions.

Usenet

Of course, this would be such a jarring change of the pretty basic Twitter UX / UI that this is all a daydream. People would freak out if you changed Twitter’s user experience THAT much. And people would complain that Twitter was simply becoming Reddit, not knowing that the principles being used were actually closer to Usenet.

I suppose you could apply the distributed nature of Usenet to Twitter as well, but that’s beyond my knowledge set. It always took time for a Usenet post to circulate around the system, which was a huge flaw and caused spam to destroy it in the end.

Anyway, Twitter has a lot of unlocked potential if you mixed its current UX / UI with that of some of the more fun elements of Usenet from 25 years ago. But no one ever listens to me so, lulz.

Usenet

If Elon Musk Was Really All That Smart, He’d Crib Features Off Of Usenet For Twitter



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It took me a number of years to get into Twitter because I was spoiled by my use of Usenet many moons ago. Listening to Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast about Elon Musk buying 9.2% of Twitter and what he wants to do with it, I’m reminded of Usenet’s feature rich experience.

It would make a lot of sense if Musk cherry picked some of the more interesting elements of Usenet. Making Twitter more like Usenet would allow for things like full page posts and inline editing. Things that we’ve somehow lost over the last twenty five years. But I’ve written at length about how one might do it, and am I’m tired of talking about something that will never happen.

Cherry picking features from Usenet opens up a whole rang of very interesting an innovative possibilities. But I think the moment for doing anything like that is long gone. We are all now just waiting for the Metaverse to get figured out.