4 ms·
Twitter seems like a great tool for organizations and people to make announcements to me, but a terrible format for providing actual content or conversation. I
by mecha_ghidorah 4y ago
Twitter seems like a great tool for organizations and people to make announcements to me, but a terrible format for providing actual content or conversation.
If I were to design something that would replace twitter what I would design would ultimately be way less popular, but I think it'd be a much better place, and if nothing too similar to original twitter could ever be created would lead to a better world (from my point of view) than one with twitter in it.
The short answer would be: I would as much as possible design it to not function as a place for discussion. It would exist, entirely, for people to share content they found interesting.
So if not conversation what would this platform be good for? Making announcements and linking to interesting content that is hosted on places that aren't twitter.
Step one in achieving this would be to eliminate the concept of "threads". If I never see another 30 tweet long thread that should have been a fucking blog post somewhere it will be too soon. (I'd be perfectly happy to build in long form content tools that this platform would host and could be linked to in "!tweets", just that they wouldn't show up in "!tweet" feeds).
Step two would be to as much as possible limit or discourage things like commenting. You could "retweet" something you found interesting with a comment on it, but you can't comment on anyone else's tweet directly. They will not be shown your "retweet" unless they follow you.
So that'd be my version. Basically the people you follow can "tweet" links to content that exists elsewhere, along with a short amount of text describing why you care. Alternatively they can do a (single, not a thread of) "tweet" which is just text in order to enable things like small status updates, "Just letting everyone who follows me know I survived the earthquake", or "We have sold out of the cinnamon biscuits" type of things.