7 ms·

Show HN: Twiverse – Find Twitter users and get more followers

93 points by tcodina 8y ago

morajabi 8y ago
This is awesome I've been telling Twitter to be aware of who they follow, now it's a practical solution I can throw at them.
- tcodina 8y ago
  Glad you find it useful, then again in this aspect the platform would likely be lacking as it does not allow users to analyse the "diversity rate" of the users they followed. It's certainly a future planned feature, when the platform grows past its 600 users.
  - morajabi 8y ago
    So far people who checked the gender ratio of their followings (using one of the existing solutions), were most likely surprised (that it's so biased). Assuming that, I'll tell them to open their following list, unfollow some of the group they're already following a lot, and follow more from Twiverse and its categories, or if the category isn't there, follow intentionally themselves. it'll balance it up. That's the route I went and now I have a relatively good mix. I can iterate again, and do that again, but this time using Twiverse.
seapunk 8y ago
How did you gather these Twitter users?
- tcodina 8y ago
  As to be as compliant as possible, Twitter users have to connect their accounts manually and select multiple data in regards to their interests, gender identity, and much more, which is complemented by the data gathered from the Twitter API (language, verification status, followers, following, tweets, likes...).
- morajabi 8y ago
  Probably also how about the initial users specifically
alexanderisora 8y ago
Hi Toni. What is the tech stack behind Twiverse?
- tcodina 8y ago
  I used PHP/HTML, CSS, Js (with jQuery) and MySQL for the database. The entire platform is hosted in a DigitalOcean droplet and managed using ServerPilot's free plan.
  - zachsnow 8y ago
    I love how “boring” this stack is; great job just shipping the damn thing!
    - tcodina 8y ago
      Thanks! Truth is I am not really a developer myself, I am actually a designer, so my knowledge might be a bit limited in this aspect. I did want to develop the website in ReactJs, but I ended up not doing it because initially it was a 1-week project I made to get accepted at a university (& it worked out), so I went for the "easiest" way possible for me, which is also the quickest.
elvinyung 8y ago
Cool project! One minor question, how much does becoming a patron affect rankings?
- tcodina 8y ago
  Thank you! When you become a patron, your profile is displayed in a category on the right sidebar and sticked on the top of every category. A patron user reported an increase of twice her usual daily followers just today, if that gives some reference of its performance. Unless you mean something else by the rankings?
DeusExMachina 8y ago
To be a place to find users from "different backgrounds" it looks to me to only show the political bias of the author. Correct me if I am wrong, but the only sanctioned different background seems to be "POC" (what does that even mean), "LGBTQ+" and "with disability". The home page sports a "check 1.000 inspiring women" but not a "1.000 inspiring men". I guess only inspiring women are worth following. But actually they don't even need to be inspiring, since they also have a "random women" section. I thought propping up some people based solely on their gender was sexist. I guess it's not when we do it for women. Also, a fairly glaring omission in the topics seems to be religion. And I say it as a non believer. It looks like non-religious people won't be allowed to look for someone with a different background. In the end, the site is yours, and you can of course list, or not list, whomever you please. But the claim of discovering people from "different backgrounds" seems to me disingenuous at best. More accurate, given the current content, would be "a few, politically-sanctioned backgrounds".
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Um. Relative to the mainstream / status quo most of these are different. It might also be relative to what Twitter typically suggests. That is, if Twitter's suggestion are a reflection of the composition of the user base and Twitter isn't composed of a fitting percentage of different, then different will be over looked. You might have a point. But trying framing it as useful and constructive instead of bitter and confused.
- bemmu 8y ago
  Would it be a better solution to let users categorize themselves freely with tags they can type themselves?
  - tcodina 8y ago
    Good idea, I wanted to implement dynamic categories in the beginning, but somehow the idea got lost in the way. I simply feared that without enough users, most dynamically created categories would be broken and this would be a major put off for the initial users. As the platform has been growing quite rapidly, it is certainly a feature planned in my roadmap.
dna_polymerase 8y ago
By default the Bio is collapsed. So I am supposed to follow people because of their gender, sexual orientation or disability, in order to have a more diverse Twitter feed? That is some major virtue signalling right there. If that is how you define diversity for yourself you are mistaken. I can surround myself with 50 POC and 20 LGBTQ+ people and still gain no diversity of thoughts. IMHO it would be far better if you handpicked people, asked them questions (short interview via Twitter) and then portrayed their profile on your website. Of course you should select users by some algorithm that optimally doesn't adhere to your pretty obvious political bias.
- tcodina 8y ago
  True, the bio being collapsed was critiqued by several people prior to the launch, and I simply kept it this way to be able to show more users at once, and for aesthetic reasons. You may still search by certain users based on the keywords, which you can insert in the search box. Keep in mind once you check out one of the users listed in Twiverse, you can always read their tweets, bio & other to decide for yourself if they are worth following. Appreciate your feedback though!
- komali2 8y ago
  >I can surround myself with 50 POC and 20 LGBTQ+ people and still gain no diversity of thoughts. If you only ever follow one certain demographic, this tool could be useful to find some other demographics to mix in. You may not get difference of, say, political opinions, but you will absolutely get different perspective on things. Wanting to have gay people on your Twitter, specifically, doesn't nullify the fact that there's diversity amongst white males. Nobody's community is being threatened by this app. It's just a way to mix it up.
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kjjjzzzz7zg 8y ago
Women are the majority of the population, and they are not underprivilegded. It is precisely because they have the privilege to choose from more jobs (including jobs with lower income, but higher life satisfaction, as they usually are not expected to support the family), that fewer of them end up in technology. 40% Of mothers never go back to work ever again. So you can not expect 50% of women in a field like technology - even if they would start out 50:50, eventually women would have babies and not return to work.
- leetrout 8y ago
  That's interesting. My wife had our first child this year and hasn't returned to work yet but wants to. We're both concerned there will be discrimination explaining the resume gap is due to a child. Do you have a handy source for your stats?
- dang 8y ago
  We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle (gender war in this case), which is explicitly against the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and please don't create accounts to do that with. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18521818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18521818 and marked it off-topic.
DeusExMachina 8y ago
> I made the category for women after receiving a suggestion from a partner You are still the one that made the decision to implement a one-sided feature, though, so you considered it worth it. > so I don't think you are so right to call me out on the supposed wrongdoing. The "supposed wrongodoing" is highlighting only women in the home page, which you do. It was not about not having other filters. > Religion & political ideology were 2 filters I wanted to implement prior to launch but I did not fearing controversy I wonder why you thought that providing only the categories that appeal only to a minority of people [1] was going to not be controversial. > the website's core concept is to find diverse users, as in minorities & underprivileged group That is not stated anywhere. The home page says clearly: "Search for Twitter users who share your interests and come from different backgrounds". > men don't happen to be one of those groups That is exactly the ideological bias I was calling out. Men make the majority of * homeless people * suicides * people in prison (and get longer sentences for the same crimes) * work related deaths (and the majority of the workforce in dangerous job) * victims of violence and homicides * deaths in war Women are overrepresented in college degrees, and are the majority in fields like medicine, education, psychology, and the humanities. The "pay gap" is a myth, since the difference in average earning is driven mainly by life choices and not by discrimination. The same is true for the lower percentage of women in tech. The idea that men are a "privileged" category is just ideology, like anything that prescribes a common characteristic to a broad group. And the idea that "POC" think differently that "white people" is, frankly, racist. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...
- tcodina 8y ago
  I'm sorry, I find your comment pretty ridiculous in multiple aspects, and I'm honestly surprised you truly feel this way about the platform. What I understand from it, and the parent comment, is that you're simply stuck in the beliefs of "diversity has ruined men", men have it worse, etc. Unfortunately I might not be able to change your mind, but I hope you understand that the idea of the website was to make groups that were less easy to be found on Twitter (I'll ask, how many women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities and many other groups do you follow? Going to take the risk and say that not as many as men, by a big margin...). If that upsets you that's unfortunate, I am grateful for the people who were happy with the platform and sent me awesome positive comments. If you want to have a men-centric platform, you may make it yourself, go ahead. It's ironic how you seem to be the kind of person who would have benefited from such a website, getting you out of an echo chamber and seeing multiple perspectives.
h43z 8y ago
Following like-minded profiles and hope for a follow back is one way to increase your audience. Another is to let your content speak for you. To make this easier for the little guy I played with the thought of retweet incentivization. This could start as simple as http://peepmore.43z.one http://peepmore.43z.one which I put together in an afternoon. Would be interested to hear what others think if this model.
- tcodina 8y ago
  This is interesting. I'll have a look. It reminds me of my platform to find underrated content, also based on a point system (check out 5 links to submit yours. After 50 clicks, your content is archived). It's https://exposure.cards https://exposure.cards, if you're curious. Not sure if Twitter is against these kinds of platforms though?
mckee1 8y ago
This is a fantastic idea. Ignore the negativity, particularly from the "what about the men" comments. Super cool!
- tcodina 8y ago
  Thank you! I try, but it upsets me people feel this way. I made the platform to help users open their minds more, and it seems the people who should be using it are just hating on it.
  - dang 8y ago
    As someone who has to deal with groups on the internet often (I'm a moderator here), I know how upsetting that can feel. May I offer a tip? Try to remember that the vast majority of the community isn't reacting this way. It's just that most people don't comment. When you post to HN or elsewhere on the internet, you're broadcasting to a large crowd. Somebody somewhere is probably going to get triggered—that's just statistics. But when it's a public forum, those are the ones who show up to vent their spleen. So comment sections are weighted towards these sorts of reactions, not because they represent the community, but because it's a self-selecting, biased sample. This leads to the community seeming a lot more negative than it is, which sucks. The only solution I know of is to give more attention to the other data you have: e.g. the upvotes, and any traffic to your site. That's a challenge, because we're hard-wired to take personal communication more seriously, and comments feel like personal communication (though really aren't).
    - tcodina 8y ago
      Thank you, I shall try to think more like this. Indeed I am focusing on a minority here - I had great success either way with >700 users, >4K views and $420 from supporters in just 1 day. I should be more grateful of that, instead of focusing my energy on closed-minded people.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    I’ve always found that the people who pursue a diversity of skin tones and genders and the like are the most ideologically isolated (“safe spaces” and deplatforming and all that), so perhaps your platform does the opposite. Besides, “diversity” as you define it is mainstream—the people you’re trying to reach are almost certainly inundated with the thoughts and opinions you would try to expose them to.
matte_black 8y ago
How “different” a person is has little to no influence on how good their content is. Being “diverse” doesn’t make you great. Being great makes you great. Instead of showing who people are upfront, show their tweets without their identities attached, and let people follow based off of that. Anything else is just a diversity virtue signal.
- tcodina 8y ago
  Sounds fair. I don't like judging people by their physique and identity indeed, and I think most people would agree with me on this. Taking this into account, your point makes sense - why focus on showing different people based on their identities entirely? There's a couple reasons as to why I believe that it makes sense in the platform. To begin with, the concept that started off this project 6 months ago was simply to make women more present in people's following lists. This was an entirely identity based project from that point, attempting to increase & amplify the voices of a particular group. Needless to say, with a concept set up & validated, I kept going in the same direction. Secondly, while some of the filters of the platform are identity-based (ethnicity, gender, LGBTQ...) I also implemented multiple based on their background (low-income, migrants, language...) as well as based on their interests. I plan on expanding this group further, as I find it extremely valuable to better diversify our feeds. There is much more other than whether someone is a man or a woman, a person of colour, or a person with disabilities. There is a third reason, one which I might not be too fond of, but thing is, in order to achieve diversity, people tend to prefer going about it through people, faces, and real identities. As a rather "private" and ambiguous person online, I've noticed how hard it has been for me to have recognition or validity, since all in all people can just judge me by my work and ideas. Had I gone this path with the platform, it would have likely failed, and I could have not contributed to solving this issue. All in all, your idea is good in an ethical perspective, but when it comes to its implementation, it's absolutely useless, unless you change people's mindsets (very hard, specially because you also have to change some people's mindsets in terms of diversity already...). Then again I will see if I can implement something like this in the future, I think I might be able to figure something out. Thanks for your insight!
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DeusExMachina 8y ago
What if the person that needs to open her mind is you in this case? Did it occur to you that that might be also a possibility?
- tcodina 8y ago
  I just think you misunderstood the purpose of the platform entirely, and tried to connect it to some completely different issues. I do know that men go through issues, I believe in equality, and I am aware of the areas where they have it worse. That said, it is factual that most Twitter user's following lists are made up by a majority of white men, and I believe that if they had more variety, we could see and understand the world from multiple perspectives. That is the only issue I tackled in the platform.
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- dang 8y ago
  You already made your point at length and with considerable energy, I would even say aggression, elsewhere in the thread. Now you're hounding someone. That's not cool. Please stop now. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18522177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18522177 and marked it off-topic.
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iamdave 8y ago
I can easily see myself using this, going through twitter recently to prune and replace some of the accounts I follow. One suggestion if I might? I noticed some of the imagery didn't seem to immediately 'grok' with their topics. For example "Sports" shows a photo of a bicycle propped against a wall in what looks like someone's flat, while "Arts" shows a photo of a basketball court, "Animation" showed a photography studio and the "Comedy" topic has a group shot of business suit types (albeit in a 'silly' pose). It was a little odd, definitely nothing that breaks the platform but it may help 'discovery' to make images a bit less...ambiguous given the topic they're related to? I think sports and my mind goes to team sports and not necessarily riding a bike to work (the image looks like an average commuter bicycle versus a racing bike) so maybe that's on me to make the mental adjustment when assuming the connectedness of topics. Otherwise, neat idea and service!
- tcodina 8y ago
  Happy you see it being useful. That's a valid suggestion. I pulled the images from Unsplash (free to use), and needless to say, there's not really an endless assortment of pictures there, so I did with what I found, sadly. It is definitely something to improve upon, maybe I will get someone to do the photography for some of the topics, or alternatively go for a design. In reality I am not exactly fond of the execution of the categories - in the end they're sort of a filter, so I could have simply created a "super-page" where you could have those interests listed as filters, and could have found users sharing more than 1 category. On top of that, currently the platform has a fixed amount of categories, and it does not allow users to add themselves to any other interest, which is a bit limiting and unfortunate. Because of that, in the future I might redo this section entirely, which could help fix the issue you raised at the same time. Thanks for the feedback!
  - iamdave 8y ago
    Ahh thank you for that bit of insight, I was wondering if you had gone through the additional trouble of maybe pulling images from each respective topic via hashtag and applied some sort of ML to decide what picture is displayed with what category. Definitely nothing wrong with the approach you've taken though (and if nothing else, consider the above an idea if you do decide to rewrite that functionality) if it helped ship the product more quickly, like I said-it doesn't break functionality, just a passive observation that may help the user experience later down the line. Cheers :)
karmakaze 8y ago
Why is specifying gender, non-optional? I don't follow, or expect to be followed based on gender but rather by content.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  Some people might want to get perspectives of women working in a certain field that's usually male-dominated.
- tcodina 8y ago
  You can put "Other" if you don't want to disclose it, but I understand the sentiment. It could be understood as NB / Trans for example, and it could be misleading. I'll keep that in mind for a future revision.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
This is really interesting and I hope it does well! Are you considering refining the domains at all, like say splitting development and technology into machine learning, devops, webdev, etc?
- tcodina 8y ago
  Thanks! It's something I have planned for when the platform is bigger in terms of users. Currently it has 900 (close to 1K, insane for just 2 days!), so if I split the categories more, many would be empty, making it difficult to find users in general. On top of that, more categories means more work for the users to select their desired categories. Overall it doesn't seem worth it for me currently. What are my future plans in this regard though? When the site gets past 1K users, I will start brainstorming and developing a new way for users to select their categories. Likely through a textbox vs multiple checkboxes, where people could type the areas they are into and they would autocomplete. I'd like to also let users suggest categories, eventually maybe even let them create their own interests. Could be exciting!
jhampac 8y ago
Absolutely great idea. I saw this on Indie Hackers too. I have also played with your Product Hunt previewer. Your work ethic and output has inspired me to step my game up. Keep up the good work.

93 points by tcodina 8y ago

This is awesome I've been telling Twitter to be aware of who they follow, now it's a practical solution I can throw at them.

tcodina 8y ago
Glad you find it useful, then again in this aspect the platform would likely be lacking as it does not allow users to analyse the "diversity rate" of the users they followed. It's certainly a future planned feature, when the platform grows past its 600 users.
- morajabi 8y ago
  So far people who checked the gender ratio of their followings (using one of the existing solutions), were most likely surprised (that it's so biased). Assuming that, I'll tell them to open their following list, unfollow some of the group they're already following a lot, and follow more from Twiverse and its categories, or if the category isn't there, follow intentionally themselves. it'll balance it up. That's the route I went and now I have a relatively good mix. I can iterate again, and do that again, but this time using Twiverse.

seapunk 8y ago

How did you gather these Twitter users?

tcodina 8y ago
As to be as compliant as possible, Twitter users have to connect their accounts manually and select multiple data in regards to their interests, gender identity, and much more, which is complemented by the data gathered from the Twitter API (language, verification status, followers, following, tweets, likes...).
morajabi 8y ago
Probably also how about the initial users specifically

alexanderisora 8y ago

Hi Toni. What is the tech stack behind Twiverse?

tcodina 8y ago
I used PHP/HTML, CSS, Js (with jQuery) and MySQL for the database. The entire platform is hosted in a DigitalOcean droplet and managed using ServerPilot's free plan.
- zachsnow 8y ago
  I love how “boring” this stack is; great job just shipping the damn thing!
  - tcodina 8y ago
    Thanks! Truth is I am not really a developer myself, I am actually a designer, so my knowledge might be a bit limited in this aspect. I did want to develop the website in ReactJs, but I ended up not doing it because initially it was a 1-week project I made to get accepted at a university (& it worked out), so I went for the "easiest" way possible for me, which is also the quickest.

elvinyung 8y ago

Cool project! One minor question, how much does becoming a patron affect rankings?

tcodina 8y ago
Thank you! When you become a patron, your profile is displayed in a category on the right sidebar and sticked on the top of every category. A patron user reported an increase of twice her usual daily followers just today, if that gives some reference of its performance. Unless you mean something else by the rankings?

DeusExMachina 8y ago

To be a place to find users from "different backgrounds" it looks to me to only show the political bias of the author. Correct me if I am wrong, but the only sanctioned different background seems to be "POC" (what does that even mean), "LGBTQ+" and "with disability". The home page sports a "check 1.000 inspiring women" but not a "1.000 inspiring men". I guess only inspiring women are worth following. But actually they don't even need to be inspiring, since they also have a "random women" section. I thought propping up some people based solely on their gender was sexist. I guess it's not when we do it for women. Also, a fairly glaring omission in the topics seems to be religion. And I say it as a non believer. It looks like non-religious people won't be allowed to look for someone with a different background. In the end, the site is yours, and you can of course list, or not list, whomever you please. But the claim of discovering people from "different backgrounds" seems to me disingenuous at best. More accurate, given the current content, would be "a few, politically-sanctioned backgrounds".

chiefalchemist 8y ago
Um. Relative to the mainstream / status quo most of these are different. It might also be relative to what Twitter typically suggests. That is, if Twitter's suggestion are a reflection of the composition of the user base and Twitter isn't composed of a fitting percentage of different, then different will be over looked. You might have a point. But trying framing it as useful and constructive instead of bitter and confused.
bemmu 8y ago
Would it be a better solution to let users categorize themselves freely with tags they can type themselves?
- tcodina 8y ago
  Good idea, I wanted to implement dynamic categories in the beginning, but somehow the idea got lost in the way. I simply feared that without enough users, most dynamically created categories would be broken and this would be a major put off for the initial users. As the platform has been growing quite rapidly, it is certainly a feature planned in my roadmap.

dna_polymerase 8y ago

By default the Bio is collapsed. So I am supposed to follow people because of their gender, sexual orientation or disability, in order to have a more diverse Twitter feed? That is some major virtue signalling right there. If that is how you define diversity for yourself you are mistaken. I can surround myself with 50 POC and 20 LGBTQ+ people and still gain no diversity of thoughts. IMHO it would be far better if you handpicked people, asked them questions (short interview via Twitter) and then portrayed their profile on your website. Of course you should select users by some algorithm that optimally doesn't adhere to your pretty obvious political bias.

tcodina 8y ago
True, the bio being collapsed was critiqued by several people prior to the launch, and I simply kept it this way to be able to show more users at once, and for aesthetic reasons. You may still search by certain users based on the keywords, which you can insert in the search box. Keep in mind once you check out one of the users listed in Twiverse, you can always read their tweets, bio & other to decide for yourself if they are worth following. Appreciate your feedback though!
komali2 8y ago
>I can surround myself with 50 POC and 20 LGBTQ+ people and still gain no diversity of thoughts. If you only ever follow one certain demographic, this tool could be useful to find some other demographics to mix in. You may not get difference of, say, political opinions, but you will absolutely get different perspective on things. Wanting to have gay people on your Twitter, specifically, doesn't nullify the fact that there's diversity amongst white males. Nobody's community is being threatened by this app. It's just a way to mix it up.
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kjjjzzzz7zg 8y ago

Women are the majority of the population, and they are not underprivilegded. It is precisely because they have the privilege to choose from more jobs (including jobs with lower income, but higher life satisfaction, as they usually are not expected to support the family), that fewer of them end up in technology. 40% Of mothers never go back to work ever again. So you can not expect 50% of women in a field like technology - even if they would start out 50:50, eventually women would have babies and not return to work.

leetrout 8y ago
That's interesting. My wife had our first child this year and hasn't returned to work yet but wants to. We're both concerned there will be discrimination explaining the resume gap is due to a child. Do you have a handy source for your stats?
dang 8y ago
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle (gender war in this case), which is explicitly against the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and please don't create accounts to do that with. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18521818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18521818 and marked it off-topic.

DeusExMachina 8y ago

> I made the category for women after receiving a suggestion from a partner You are still the one that made the decision to implement a one-sided feature, though, so you considered it worth it. > so I don't think you are so right to call me out on the supposed wrongdoing. The "supposed wrongodoing" is highlighting only women in the home page, which you do. It was not about not having other filters. > Religion & political ideology were 2 filters I wanted to implement prior to launch but I did not fearing controversy I wonder why you thought that providing only the categories that appeal only to a minority of people [1] was going to not be controversial. > the website's core concept is to find diverse users, as in minorities & underprivileged group That is not stated anywhere. The home page says clearly: "Search for Twitter users who share your interests and come from different backgrounds". > men don't happen to be one of those groups That is exactly the ideological bias I was calling out. Men make the majority of * homeless people * suicides * people in prison (and get longer sentences for the same crimes) * work related deaths (and the majority of the workforce in dangerous job) * victims of violence and homicides * deaths in war Women are overrepresented in college degrees, and are the majority in fields like medicine, education, psychology, and the humanities. The "pay gap" is a myth, since the difference in average earning is driven mainly by life choices and not by discrimination. The same is true for the lower percentage of women in tech. The idea that men are a "privileged" category is just ideology, like anything that prescribes a common characteristic to a broad group. And the idea that "POC" think differently that "white people" is, frankly, racist. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...

tcodina 8y ago
I'm sorry, I find your comment pretty ridiculous in multiple aspects, and I'm honestly surprised you truly feel this way about the platform. What I understand from it, and the parent comment, is that you're simply stuck in the beliefs of "diversity has ruined men", men have it worse, etc. Unfortunately I might not be able to change your mind, but I hope you understand that the idea of the website was to make groups that were less easy to be found on Twitter (I'll ask, how many women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities and many other groups do you follow? Going to take the risk and say that not as many as men, by a big margin...). If that upsets you that's unfortunate, I am grateful for the people who were happy with the platform and sent me awesome positive comments. If you want to have a men-centric platform, you may make it yourself, go ahead. It's ironic how you seem to be the kind of person who would have benefited from such a website, getting you out of an echo chamber and seeing multiple perspectives.

h43z 8y ago

Following like-minded profiles and hope for a follow back is one way to increase your audience. Another is to let your content speak for you. To make this easier for the little guy I played with the thought of retweet incentivization. This could start as simple as http://peepmore.43z.one http://peepmore.43z.one which I put together in an afternoon. Would be interested to hear what others think if this model.

tcodina 8y ago
This is interesting. I'll have a look. It reminds me of my platform to find underrated content, also based on a point system (check out 5 links to submit yours. After 50 clicks, your content is archived). It's https://exposure.cards https://exposure.cards, if you're curious. Not sure if Twitter is against these kinds of platforms though?

mckee1 8y ago

This is a fantastic idea. Ignore the negativity, particularly from the "what about the men" comments. Super cool!

tcodina 8y ago
Thank you! I try, but it upsets me people feel this way. I made the platform to help users open their minds more, and it seems the people who should be using it are just hating on it.
- dang 8y ago
  As someone who has to deal with groups on the internet often (I'm a moderator here), I know how upsetting that can feel. May I offer a tip? Try to remember that the vast majority of the community isn't reacting this way. It's just that most people don't comment. When you post to HN or elsewhere on the internet, you're broadcasting to a large crowd. Somebody somewhere is probably going to get triggered—that's just statistics. But when it's a public forum, those are the ones who show up to vent their spleen. So comment sections are weighted towards these sorts of reactions, not because they represent the community, but because it's a self-selecting, biased sample. This leads to the community seeming a lot more negative than it is, which sucks. The only solution I know of is to give more attention to the other data you have: e.g. the upvotes, and any traffic to your site. That's a challenge, because we're hard-wired to take personal communication more seriously, and comments feel like personal communication (though really aren't).
  - tcodina 8y ago
    Thank you, I shall try to think more like this. Indeed I am focusing on a minority here - I had great success either way with >700 users, >4K views and $420 from supporters in just 1 day. I should be more grateful of that, instead of focusing my energy on closed-minded people.
- weberc2 8y ago
  I’ve always found that the people who pursue a diversity of skin tones and genders and the like are the most ideologically isolated (“safe spaces” and deplatforming and all that), so perhaps your platform does the opposite. Besides, “diversity” as you define it is mainstream—the people you’re trying to reach are almost certainly inundated with the thoughts and opinions you would try to expose them to.

matte_black 8y ago

How “different” a person is has little to no influence on how good their content is. Being “diverse” doesn’t make you great. Being great makes you great. Instead of showing who people are upfront, show their tweets without their identities attached, and let people follow based off of that. Anything else is just a diversity virtue signal.

tcodina 8y ago
Sounds fair. I don't like judging people by their physique and identity indeed, and I think most people would agree with me on this. Taking this into account, your point makes sense - why focus on showing different people based on their identities entirely? There's a couple reasons as to why I believe that it makes sense in the platform. To begin with, the concept that started off this project 6 months ago was simply to make women more present in people's following lists. This was an entirely identity based project from that point, attempting to increase & amplify the voices of a particular group. Needless to say, with a concept set up & validated, I kept going in the same direction. Secondly, while some of the filters of the platform are identity-based (ethnicity, gender, LGBTQ...) I also implemented multiple based on their background (low-income, migrants, language...) as well as based on their interests. I plan on expanding this group further, as I find it extremely valuable to better diversify our feeds. There is much more other than whether someone is a man or a woman, a person of colour, or a person with disabilities. There is a third reason, one which I might not be too fond of, but thing is, in order to achieve diversity, people tend to prefer going about it through people, faces, and real identities. As a rather "private" and ambiguous person online, I've noticed how hard it has been for me to have recognition or validity, since all in all people can just judge me by my work and ideas. Had I gone this path with the platform, it would have likely failed, and I could have not contributed to solving this issue. All in all, your idea is good in an ethical perspective, but when it comes to its implementation, it's absolutely useless, unless you change people's mindsets (very hard, specially because you also have to change some people's mindsets in terms of diversity already...). Then again I will see if I can implement something like this in the future, I think I might be able to figure something out. Thanks for your insight!
- 8y ago

DeusExMachina 8y ago

What if the person that needs to open her mind is you in this case? Did it occur to you that that might be also a possibility?

tcodina 8y ago
I just think you misunderstood the purpose of the platform entirely, and tried to connect it to some completely different issues. I do know that men go through issues, I believe in equality, and I am aware of the areas where they have it worse. That said, it is factual that most Twitter user's following lists are made up by a majority of white men, and I believe that if they had more variety, we could see and understand the world from multiple perspectives. That is the only issue I tackled in the platform.
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dang 8y ago
You already made your point at length and with considerable energy, I would even say aggression, elsewhere in the thread. Now you're hounding someone. That's not cool. Please stop now. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18522177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18522177 and marked it off-topic.
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iamdave 8y ago

I can easily see myself using this, going through twitter recently to prune and replace some of the accounts I follow. One suggestion if I might? I noticed some of the imagery didn't seem to immediately 'grok' with their topics. For example "Sports" shows a photo of a bicycle propped against a wall in what looks like someone's flat, while "Arts" shows a photo of a basketball court, "Animation" showed a photography studio and the "Comedy" topic has a group shot of business suit types (albeit in a 'silly' pose). It was a little odd, definitely nothing that breaks the platform but it may help 'discovery' to make images a bit less...ambiguous given the topic they're related to? I think sports and my mind goes to team sports and not necessarily riding a bike to work (the image looks like an average commuter bicycle versus a racing bike) so maybe that's on me to make the mental adjustment when assuming the connectedness of topics. Otherwise, neat idea and service!

tcodina 8y ago
Happy you see it being useful. That's a valid suggestion. I pulled the images from Unsplash (free to use), and needless to say, there's not really an endless assortment of pictures there, so I did with what I found, sadly. It is definitely something to improve upon, maybe I will get someone to do the photography for some of the topics, or alternatively go for a design. In reality I am not exactly fond of the execution of the categories - in the end they're sort of a filter, so I could have simply created a "super-page" where you could have those interests listed as filters, and could have found users sharing more than 1 category. On top of that, currently the platform has a fixed amount of categories, and it does not allow users to add themselves to any other interest, which is a bit limiting and unfortunate. Because of that, in the future I might redo this section entirely, which could help fix the issue you raised at the same time. Thanks for the feedback!
- iamdave 8y ago
  Ahh thank you for that bit of insight, I was wondering if you had gone through the additional trouble of maybe pulling images from each respective topic via hashtag and applied some sort of ML to decide what picture is displayed with what category. Definitely nothing wrong with the approach you've taken though (and if nothing else, consider the above an idea if you do decide to rewrite that functionality) if it helped ship the product more quickly, like I said-it doesn't break functionality, just a passive observation that may help the user experience later down the line. Cheers :)

karmakaze 8y ago

Why is specifying gender, non-optional? I don't follow, or expect to be followed based on gender but rather by content.

PascLeRasc 8y ago
Some people might want to get perspectives of women working in a certain field that's usually male-dominated.
tcodina 8y ago
You can put "Other" if you don't want to disclose it, but I understand the sentiment. It could be understood as NB / Trans for example, and it could be misleading. I'll keep that in mind for a future revision.

PascLeRasc 8y ago

This is really interesting and I hope it does well! Are you considering refining the domains at all, like say splitting development and technology into machine learning, devops, webdev, etc?

tcodina 8y ago
Thanks! It's something I have planned for when the platform is bigger in terms of users. Currently it has 900 (close to 1K, insane for just 2 days!), so if I split the categories more, many would be empty, making it difficult to find users in general. On top of that, more categories means more work for the users to select their desired categories. Overall it doesn't seem worth it for me currently. What are my future plans in this regard though? When the site gets past 1K users, I will start brainstorming and developing a new way for users to select their categories. Likely through a textbox vs multiple checkboxes, where people could type the areas they are into and they would autocomplete. I'd like to also let users suggest categories, eventually maybe even let them create their own interests. Could be exciting!

jhampac 8y ago

Absolutely great idea. I saw this on Indie Hackers too. I have also played with your Product Hunt previewer. Your work ethic and output has inspired me to step my game up. Keep up the good work.