[13years]

Every competitor has failed because it prioritized free speech above user experience. Almost all have had terrible UI's, terrible performance, lots of bugs.

BigTech owns the mindshare of how to build these platforms. Musk would actually have the resources to pay for the level of expertise and competence to build such a platform. However, it would be years in the making which might all become irrelevant with web3.

Or Musk could throw support behind web3 tech as ultimately free speech will only exist when controlled by no one including free speech advocates such as Musk.

[jrockway]

I don't think the technical challenge is the blocker here. Lots of people on HN could build a really good version of Twitter in a month and be ready to tweak things as scale increases. (Nothing is an overnight success and you will have time. Twitter didn't even get it right for a couple years, remember the "fail whale"? The idea being right as much more important than choosing the right distributed database or whatever.) The reason people don't do that is because they don't know what they could do better than Twitter. People leave Twitter because nobody wants to read their tweets; you can't build a Twitter clone from people whose tweets nobody wants to read.

One idea that I have is that I noticed a lot of people went from blogging to making YouTube videos. I'm guessing YouTube is the sweet spot that balances monetization potential (they will find ads to put in your videos, and advertisers pay a lot for video ads) with a recommendation engine (that essentially forces people to watch your content; or more charitably, tells people that will like your content that they should take a look). Blogs didn't really have monetization or recommendation, and people were willing to switch media (text to video) just to get those two things! Now we have things like Substack bringing those to text, and people are taking advantage of that.

Maybe that's where the next Twitter wants to be? Paying smart people to write? That sounds a lot more appealing than "free speech" (which is great to have, but I don't really want to read anyone's free speech), which is all we've seen as the differentiation point for Twitter clones.

[KptMarchewa]

>Lots of people on HN could build a really good version of Twitter in a month and be ready to tweak things as scale increases.

Oh, the hubris.

[mrep]

Just throw a bunch of cash at some googlers. They make a new messaging app every month. They are pros at building them, just not getting users.

[jrockway]

Hey, I didn't say me ;)

[procombo]

The next step is a social media company that is (1) private (2) membership based (3) no reliance on huge ad contracts, just promoted content (4) can tell the difference between political opinion and hate speech (5) gets out of the way of legal public discourse.

It doesn't need to be web3. It just needs to be somewhat transparent and minimally auditable. Web3 doesn't know what web3 is yet. Most is just garbage, sorry.

[8note]

Dan olsen has a great video about this, something along the lines of "platforms are not your friends" with the specific case of some YouTube competitor.

The real problem with competing platforms is that they don't offer anything to the main people they need to attract.

[doopy1]

Web3 is niche and I think social media is outside of that niche and will be for a very long time.

[sgjohnson]

> web3

what does it even mean?