[HN Gopher] Text-Only Social Network
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Text-Only Social Network
Author : lcnmrn
Score : 111 points
Date : 2020-07-12 20:32 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (subreply.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (subreply.com)
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Bringing back social isn't about getting rid of images and
| focusing on ASCII text, it's about getting rid of URLs and
| article snippets, and refocusing solely on user created content.
| Remember when streams were only filled with updates from old
| friends and family with things like birthday parties, vacations,
| graduations, concerts, restaurant meals, etc., and _nothing_
| else? (Sort of like Instagram still is, but with text allowed,
| two-way authorization only and without the "influencers".)
|
| Now you log in (FB, Twitter, etc.) only to find out which of your
| casual acquaintances are the most gullible, racist, sexist,
| homophobic, sociopathic or worse by the news items they're
| spewing into their increasingly extreme echo chamber. Sure, the
| same thing could be conveyed by a selfie wearing a MAGA hat, but
| it would happen much, much less often.
|
| All these services would have to do to get back to their social
| roots is provide a default filter for news items. But they
| refuse, and in fact are increasingly manipulating your feed
| instead to increase "engagement" (read: anger and hate).
|
| I'm amazed that a social- _only_ network hasn 't taken off yet
| that provides this basic functionality. It feels like the time is
| right for something like this.
| cosmotic wrote:
| Basically half the messages have an emoji in it, so I would not
| describe it as "text only"
| stickac wrote:
| Emojis are used as avatars, they are not part of the posts
| [deleted]
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| I would argue that emojis would fit within a technical
| definition of "text". They fit inside the text/* mimetype.
| reaperducer wrote:
| So do uuencoded and base64-encoded images.
|
| ...and we're right back where we started from.
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| True, but my terminal, web browser, phone, and text editor
| don't render base64-encoded images in-line, nor is base64
| encoding part of the Unicode spec. Emojis behave much more
| like text than like images.
| carrolldunham wrote:
| As seen on twitch, letting people put emojis in their name on a
| black and white site sets up a system where scanning eyes just
| see those eye-candies and skip over the rest. This is useful on
| twitch as it highlights the streamer's paying subscribers but
| here it's just whoever is more obnoxious.
| Willamin wrote:
| One solution to this issue is to use an emoji font that is
| designed to be color-free, like one of the variants of
| OpenEmoji.
| pippy wrote:
| Putting a filter: grayscale(); over the title makes the emojis
| melt more into the text. it makes it a bit more readable.
| carrolldunham wrote:
| At that point why not just filter images from twitter?
| MR4D wrote:
| Loads fast at least.
| latchkey wrote:
| "English only"
| jtvjan wrote:
| How about adding a `latest top level posts' page? Many posts that
| you see on the search page don't make sense without seeing the
| post they're in reply to.
| ewired wrote:
| Oops! I made an account and logged out from within Settings so I
| could read over more of the about page, but I got stuck with
| Internal Server Error on the whole site. I deleted the "identity"
| cookie from site storage, which was an empty string after logging
| out. I logged back in and it seems to be working as normal. Other
| than that, I really like the vibe of Subreply, nice work.
| swagonomixxx wrote:
| Pages load quite fast, I'm assuming not a lot of JavaScript being
| used (haven't checked the Network tab to see what was
| downloaded).
|
| I have no use for social networks of any kind, but I guess if you
| want a non-cancerous Twitter, this looks like one.
| dorianmariefr wrote:
| nicely done, maybe searching for hashtags should only return
| hashtags used and not a generic search for the keyword
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| "About -> Limitations: ASCII only because it works everywhere"
|
| This should be in the features. It is the strongest selling point
| of the site as I see it.
| doomrobo wrote:
| I was surprised by this since it excludes billions of people,
| but then I saw it's explicitly an English-only forum
| uallo wrote:
| English with a limitation to ASCII. There are many words in
| written English or topics that are not in ASCII, though.
| Subreply also disallows non-ASCII names with "First name
| should use English alphabet".
|
| Unicode should also work (close to) everywhere.
| [deleted]
| crazygringo wrote:
| So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a
| price in PS or EUR or Y=? Or that it's 90degF out? I can't talk
| about my fiancee? I can't even use "proper quotes"?
|
| Yikes.
|
| These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like
| talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the
| benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband.
|
| No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical
| reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are
| functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII,
| with about the same complexity.
|
| In 2020, why are you going _out of your way_ to prevent people
| from typing the honest-to-goodness useful characters they want
| to communicate with? _In English?!_ Where exactly does UTF-8
| _not_ work, that this site does?
| blondin wrote:
| totally agree with you. i went back and saw that the author
| wanted a english-only forum. so yes, the service is english
| only and ascii works well in that case.
| samatman wrote:
| English is one of the easier languages to shoehorn into
| ASCII; this is what ASCII was designed for, after all.
|
| It's by no means a perfect fit; some of us need to resume
| work on our resume, from time to time.
| tomxor wrote:
| I agree with the overall sentiment of your comment but..
|
| > It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For
| every reasonable programming language, there are functions to
| do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about
| the same complexity.
|
| At minimum, unicode does come with a lot of complexity in
| implementation, and a lot of potential vulnerabilities due to
| that complexity.
|
| Not saying that excuses all websites, modern DBs handle
| unicode just fine after all, and the browser takes care of
| the rendering - (although some might crash your computer),
| and there are usually builtins for serverside web languages
| to help you sanitise strings... still, things would be way
| simpler with any fixed word <8bit encoding without glyph
| manipulation builtin. So yeah, it's complex, but it's usually
| worth it.
| csande17 wrote:
| Unicode includes a lot of features that aren't universally
| desirable in applications that handle text. "Zalgo" text
| (many stacked combining subscript and superscript
| characters) can break out of the box it's contained in.
| Emoji characters render as distracting full-color icons
| that are easily confused for UI. Directional overrides let
| you plop an "everything after this should be printed
| backwards" control character into any string you control,
| providing endless opportunities to break UI and confuse
| other users, as in
| https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2014/01/the-rtlo-
| me...
|
| IMO websites like this that challenge the assumption that
| all modern software is obligated to support all of Unicode
| are a valuable contribution to the world, if only because
| they might inspire the creation of a better, more well-
| scoped character set.
| spiffytech wrote:
| I don't think it was a technical decision. It sounds like a
| stylistic choice, I suspect in the sentiment of "everyone on
| the platform should be able to understand each other, no one
| should be locked off from interesting conversations due to a
| language barrier", and from there they selected the lowest
| common denominator language.
|
| To play devil's advocate, I don't think your exampled
| limitations are meaningful handicaps. Money can be discussed
| as GBP or EUR. With context it's easy to understand 90F as
| temperature, and unicode quotes are hardly a compelling
| restriction.
| rhizome wrote:
| What makes technical reasons so special? Why are they the
| only valid reasons to restrict the character set?
| leephillips wrote:
| Stay tuned for my uppercase-only social network. Also, we
| don't allow the letter Z nor semicolons, as they are rarely
| used.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Those are all in the 8 bit "extended" ASCII table, aren't
| they?
| flir wrote:
| > It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason
|
| There might be a good social reason, though.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| So this is not just a text-only social network, it is also an
| English-only social network.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Really, as long as other people make text-only social
| networks for other languages, maybe that's a good thing. I'm
| not sure that having all languages on one social network
| really buys the user anything (esp. since they can switch to
| other social networks for other conversations).
|
| It buys the company running the social network something, if
| they're trying to have literally billions of users. But I'm
| not sure that's a good thing for the users, either.
| rhizome wrote:
| There's something to be said for greatly simplifying
| moderation.
| DarkContinent wrote:
| How are you handling content moderation?
| newman8r wrote:
| I've been trying to make something along those lines at
| podaero.com, and I'm actually trying to get HN users to join some
| of the small groups... see here if interested
| https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod
| ekr wrote:
| I did try signing up. The second I ran into the activity
| requirement quota I quickly got out of there. That's a huge red
| flag for me, why is there a quota imposed on me? Are you paying
| users or something? Why expect free work to be done?
| newman8r wrote:
| I'm experimenting with it and I might get rid of it. It's
| mostly just to try to keep the group active, because it's a
| small group and if the activity level dies out, the group
| dies out.
|
| But thanks for the feedback, I'm making a note of it.
| Wistar wrote:
| I signed up, too and didn't see an activity quota level
| mentioned anywhere.
| newman8r wrote:
| The activity requirements are located at the top of the
| group, the activity requirement for this one is just one
| post every 25 days.
|
| We'll send a single warning email before removing people
| from the group, to give them a chance to post again to stay
| active.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Like it. No logging out ?
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| If you mean to ask how to log out -- click on your username and
| it will show you link to sign out. I had similar trouble and
| took a bit to figure.
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| Gains popularity. Suddenly a new thing that may become a better
| social network! Then, bought by Facebook for $2B.
|
| The End.
| benbristow wrote:
| So it's Twitter but with no features? Why?
| efreak wrote:
| These "features" are why I hate Twitter. If Twitter was a
| personal 90s/2000s shoutbox, I might actually use it.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Without media it could be run at scale cheaper
| benbristow wrote:
| What will happen is that people will just post links to
| imgur/giphy etc like they used to when Twitter came out.
|
| Eventually for convenience they'd start getting embedded on
| the page.
|
| The tracking implications with embedding media would occur.
| The media would either be proxied (same/more? bandwidth
| usage, less storage needed though) or just self hosted and
| then we're back to Twitter again.
|
| Twitter added features for a reason
| moxplod wrote:
| I thought that was what HN was.
| abductee_hg wrote:
| "irc"? :)
| tomrod wrote:
| Or HN!
| edu wrote:
| Really nice, the big question is who to follow and how to find
| them. Twitter solved that masterfully on their on-boarding
| experience.
| gverrilla wrote:
| yes because social networks are intended to follow
| webcelebrities, tv celebrities, brands, and government leaders,
| alright! great job twitter
| 1f60c wrote:
| At first I thought this would be a literal text-only social
| network, a la txti.
| 65536 wrote:
| I prefer image boards and posting anonymously.
|
| For example, see this mobile friendly image board:
|
| http://minichan.org/
|
| I'd like to see more of the HN crowd come there. It might raise
| the quality of the content on Minichan.
| smhmd wrote:
| > It might raise the quality of the content on Minichan.
|
| Coming from an imageboard myself, I think about this often. The
| "serious" users keep comparing themselves to Reddit when they
| should strive to be more like HN, instead. Now HN is home --
| literally; it's my homepage.
| thrownaway65535 wrote:
| Formerly known as "Sublevel":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111691
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(page generated 2020-07-12 23:00 UTC)