Ask HN: Features you'd want in a Twitter Competitor?

[viralparmarme]

I'm building Sage - The platform that Twitter was supposed to be.

Twitter has accumulated a lot of unnecessary features and bloat over recent years.

Sage is my brainchild which aims to be a stripped-down version of Twitter focusing more on the community platform side of things, without all the bells and whistles.

There will be the highest level of privacy and security with a promise of having no ads on the platform ever.

There is a huge market gap in the community and social landscape for Sage.

What are the features that you would want in such a platform?

[hresvelgr]

The features I'd want in a twitter competitor are a chronological timeline and potentially a paid subscription option to support people I follow. But the feature I want the most by far is people I care about to use it.

For better or worse, you need a gimmick that people find amusing and delightful, because most people will not want a new Twitter that is objectively less capable, even if slimming down the experience is a net positive. At the end of the day, you still need to offer something new and interesting, and I would be spending my time figuring out what that is.

[anigbrowl]

Leverage lists. Lists on Twitter are quite powerful but they're woefully underused for a few reasons:

- shit UI that demotes them in favor of the following

- users net notified when they are put on lists and sometimes use it as an excuse to block

- you can subscribe to other people's lists (good) or have private lists (also good) but you can't search for lists, which is fucking stupid

Curated or open-source lists are a good way to take the information already in Twitter's social graph and turbocharge it, creating real value for others. If you look at CSPAN, you cna find lists for members of the House, Senate, etc. Now imagine that generalized to every state, organized by party and so on. Imagine lists of all broadcast journalists in a particular media market, or all employees of a particular broadcasting company. Etc etc. In many respects it's like verification on Twitter, but with significantly greater transparency.

Could lists be abused? For sure, kiwifarms types would try to create 'lolcows' lists and add people they disliked to troll them. You might want to think hard about whether all lists lists should be left up to individual curators or some should be public and shared ownership. But they're a tool where you can build off what already exists and deliver significant added value to early adopters, which is what helped Twitter get off the ground.

Also, consider not sharing following/followers (lists or #s) publicly, which turn into a vanity contest. Replies/retweets are where the real interesting social graph action is anyway.

Show me something about a person's analytics on their profile. If they're an abject self-promoter who posts 1000x a day, make that obvious. Don't just reward preferential attachments so that people are incentivized to build up massive followings and then service them with obligatory vapid content. I want to see something about how much a person really interacts or if they're just a billboard in human form.

[ksaj]

If you have embedded video, please do it in a way that doesn't make the videos stutter. I don't know if it is the tracking, or if they are acting as a proxy or relay, but some days longer Twitter videos are impossible to watch.

I don't have that problem on any other site, so it's really specific to something they are doing at Twitter.

[Hamuko]

What I want is an anti-feature: character limits.

Discovering that Mastodon instances can just raise their character limits to the sky and there's no way to automatically block them killed the service for me.

[barathr]

Fediverse interoperability.

[graderjs]

Don't they say never ask users what features they'd want--just ask them what problems they face?