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Comment by molodec | Hacker News Reader

There is too much trolling on Twitter as the character limit does not allow for any serious argument. An ambiguous one-liner from a popular individual triggers thousands of replies and retweets. I've been thinking that we need a Twitter alternative, but with a minimum limit on the number of characters and no images or gifs. Setting a minimum limit to perhaps 300 - 500 characters will eliminate much of the trolling and the noise.

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You could start a Mastodon instance that ticks all those boxes and federate only with instances that follow these guidelines.

The minimum length may work for good-faith actors, but how would you prevent trolls from pasting in 500 characters of lorem ipsum or other generated text and then adding their one-liner at the beginning or end?

Moderation, no?

Sure, it is possible to find hols and abuse any platform. I am not good at writing, and I always hated the minimum pages limit on essays at schools, but now I think these limits are necessary to enforce thinking and providing more details into your argument. Twitter discourages that. High profile individuals can easily manipulate people and markets by saying a few words and leaving a lot of room for interpretation like Elon Musk recently suggesting that everyone should be using Signal without giving any context and specifying what that Signal was and caused an unrelated to the Signal chat app stock to jump 1000%.

I was wondering what the effect of imposing a "minimum time to reply" would be. For instance, if I wanted to reply to your post - I would need to indicate my intent to reply, then after X minutes (at least 15, but ideally more) I would be able to respond.

The idea is to stop people posting the first thing that pops into their head: hopefully taking more time to formulate a response (or reconsidering if it was valuable to say anything at all).

Relevant: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fixing-social-media

My current working hypothesis is that all efforts to "fix" social media are doomed to failure, because the thing that causes social media to become toxic isn't the "medium" part, it's the "social" part. Altering the medium will just add some color to the particulars of how it becomes toxic.

My plan to fix social media was something like Captcha mixed with an IQ test.

So if we can detect you said something about climate change, you see a little popup asking you if water boils at 100 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit? If you don't get it right, you are no longer allowed to post or reply to climate change topics.

Did you just say Trump was the BEST or WORST President in History? I'd like to see if you can name 5 Presidents before 1980? If not, I don't think we need your opinions on historical ranking.

The tests wouldn't be hard. And they would easily be Googleable, but there would be 10 second time limit for them to be completed.

It would probably be the least popular social media company ever created. This is also a terrible idea, because the users that are entitled to post, probably would not be humble and might be jerks.

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