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Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

At least for me, I've spent the last ~3 years designing new feature ideas for twitter and twitter-like products as a hobby and been involved in various communities working on these issues. Ways to improve quality of comments, reduce conflict, improve context, build media literacy, etc. I need to get around to publishing these ideas but have definitely put real work in. This is the only one I've published in blog form [1], tho I've put bits of others out on twitter itself over the years. Fwiw I used to run product/design for a social media co and have on and off run communities all the way back to bbses.

As far as I'm concerned the innovation just isn't there in the core loops and UX of twitter-likes, it's all circa 2008 stuff.

[1]: https://nickpunt.com/blog/deescalating-social-media/

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> designing new feature ideas for twitter and twitter-like products

Which is not the same as "innovating with UX" in any way that is incompatible with the status quo.

Going by your blog post, do you agree that it is not something that (by itself) a feature so innovative that would make people drop twitter to favor a new social network that implemented it?

No this feature by itself isn't something to attract people to a brand new social network, I hope I didn't represent it that way.

My perspective on the problem is that the way twitter's medium is designed doesn't produce a wonderful signal:noise ratio. Some people might revel in the noise, and some amount of noise certainly generates MAUs and ad dollars, but ultimately it's not living up to its potential as a medium and social network. 'A clown car that fell into a gold mine' still applies.

My theory of change is that in general, features that improve SNR are going to provide a sustaining MAU advantage to products that implement them, because the vast majority of users want better SNR. They want quality discourse, funny memes, kind interactions, etc. Drama and conflict also produce MAUs, but ultimately they're net negative because of the people they scare off.

If you accept that premise, then the question is more when than if features focused on improving the SNR of interactions should be built. Do they meaningfully differentiate and help with the cold start problem? Or are they to be built after some amount of audience has arrived?

From what I've seen on the clones, as they grow they're all running into the same SNR ceiling. I think that ceiling is preventing them from being breakout successes, because whatever differentiator they started with (decentralized, free speech, etc) will fade in relevance as they get bigger and their core experience reverts to the mean. They're just twitter, but smaller.

Would a product that focused more on improving SNR be able to breakout? I don't know, I'm just disappointed nobody seems to have tried very hard.

> If you accept that premise

Personally, I don't. I think the flaw in this reasoning is to think that people join social networks with the sole purpose of exchanging information effectively, but I could probably make a list of 50 reasons that make people participate more than that.

There is also the aspect that SNR is frankly a bad metric. We are quite able to filter things ourselves, which means that in the end we will flock to the places where the total signal is what matters, regardless of how much noise comes along with it.

I think you might be interpreting my point about SNR narrowly and literally, when I meant it in the broadest sense. Obviously social networks are not solely about exchanging information (which I never said...), they serve all sorts of other purposes, connecting and forming bonds being a major one.

I think you're also not being particularly charitable in your interpretations of what I'm saying, or opening yourself up to the possibility for other ways things can operate. If you were to be, you'd find we have quite a bit of agreement about this. Total signal also matters, good point I can see how you read it that way. I'd put that in the umbrella of SNR, as my intent is to advocate for better signal - both in quantity and quality.

Where I think we may disagree is that existing filtering capabilities are sufficient and broadly used. I mean, if you can imagine a world where it takes users less effort in setting up their twitter account to get the same quality output, then we're in agreement that there's work to be done on signal and noise. Currently it's a hell of a lot of effort, and you still run into a lot of unnecessary strife and bullshit. I'd push you to consider that twitter's current feature set around discourse is also not the end all be all of online communication, and there is room for improvement. If you can accept that there is room for improvement in these domains, then we're on the same page here.

In fact I think this very conversation is a decent example of how the design of a medium can cause some unnecessary strife and result in the rather silly situation of being in violent agreement. Food for thought.

> if you can imagine a world where it takes users less effort in setting up their twitter account to get the same quality output

What I am failing to understand is idea that "quality output" is a measurable metric in any meaningful way. The dimensionality of this metric would be almost as big as the number of people you have in your network, so in the end you are just trying to solve an infinite customization problem.

> can cause some unnecessary strife and result in the rather silly situation of being in violent agreement.

Or perhaps it is a good way to illustrate that the strife is actually necessary and should be embraced and seen as a natural consequence of any group of people who are trying to make sense of their internal worldview and how it fits with the real world?

There is no place in the real world where people "connect and form bonds" by following a strict protocol and have all their interaction methods designed. Every attempt at crating those end up with a system that feels forced and boring, like speed dating, town hall meetings or those ridiculous college assemblies where they need to have a mediator to constantly remind everyone what they should and should not do.

Conflict and strife is not a problem to be removed away. If you succeed at doing that, you'll end up removing an important part of what makes us human. What we need is to have better mechanisms to deal with conflict and strife, and I really don't believe that the way to go is by throwing tech designs around.

> Or perhaps it is a good way to illustrate that the strife is actually necessary and should be embraced and seen as a natural consequence of any group of people who are trying to make sense of their internal worldview and how it fits with the real world? ... Conflict and strife is not a problem to be removed away.

I specifically said 'unnecessary conflict' to mean the part of conflict that is induced by the limitations of the medium, the topic of this thread. I too believe that some conflict is absolutely necessary and our communication mediums must be able to hold space for that conflict. We agree!

Again, I encourage you to interpret more charitably and to make fewer assumptions. This is the second time you've put words in my mouth and defended a position I'm not attacking and I'm trying to be polite but it's kinda tedious (can you see this?).

The time could have been better spent in exploration; I still don't know if you see any room for improvement anywhere, you don't seem to be engaging on that. A good design discussion doesn't consist of 'no no no'.

> 'unnecessary conflict' to mean the part of conflict that is induced by the limitations of the medium.

How would you expect to do this without changing the medium itself?

> I still don't know if you see any room for improvement anywhere

I don't see it, no. At least not by adding "features" or by tweaking on the software implementation of the system.

In regards of "social media", I am more and more convinced that the only winning move is not to play, but unfortunately we will never do it. The only option that I see left is to work on "damage reduction", which is why I've spent so much time, energy and money to see if we can get "corporate-free social media" as a viable alternative for the masses.

I very much agree with your sentiment. Glad to see someone else recognize the problem with trying to find interesting content nowadays. I have noticed a negative relationship between sizes(after a certain threshold) of communities/platforms and the ability to find interesting content that is also suited to my preferences.

It seems like a ranking problem, you would think having upvotes/likes/points/etc. would be a good metric. But you just get an outsized influence of posts that have huge critical mass, and the content just becomes generic and clickbaity(i.e. Mr. Beast).

I think it is an optimization problem that has to balance competing needs and bring the best solutions under a wide set of criteria. This has been my experience trying to solve this problem, I already have a system that ingests huge amount of reddit posts from preferred and top subreddits. What I want to do is filter out the best content, then apply that generally to all content sources(YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, etc). Moving away from content that gives a short term dopamine hit to content that is an experience that changes structures in your brain. Ideally sustaining pleasure, intrigue, curiosity for longer periods of time.

There are sites with great UX like Scrolller[1] trying to solve the issue, but its only images/gifs.

[1] https://scrolller.com/

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