Bipartisan media startup looking for CTO to build the anti-Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Bipartisan media startup looking for CTO to build the anti-Twitter

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11 pointsawahed5 comments

I feel like we need to go back to print media. The hyper cycle of constant news on all the time is draining, polarizing, misinforming, and unhealthy.

Only reason I, and I assume most other people ever get on twitter was to read DJT's dumbass tweets and have a laugh.

Twitter knew DJT was the main driver of users on their platform and enjoyed reaping the benefits of his idiocracy for years, until they wanted to take the higher moral ground like other social media sites.

I wish twitter and all social media would just burn to the ground. It's a cancer on our society. It fucks up our brains and psychology.

Even LinkedIn turned into a facebook feed with crazy uncles commenting racist things.

/endrant

I generally agree, but imho there is no way to put the genie back to the bottle. Unless we all want it, or becomes mandatory.

The Flip Side is on a mission to help bridge the gap between liberals and conservatives. Our newsletter reaches over 250,000 people each morning and curates the best op-eds from liberal and conservative media in a 5-minute digest.

We’re looking for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) who is ready to roll up their sleeves and work with us, our readers, and thought leaders to build a roadmap for the future, find product-market fit, and ultimately design and build a platform where users can engage with our content and each other in a manner that’s respectful and creates greater understanding. We’re looking to be the anti-Twitter, a platform for people to gain a deeper understanding of political topics and the other side (‘the flip side’), rather than look at inflammatory memes or rack up a thousand ‘likes’. Although we hope to hire more engineers in the future, initially you'll be the sole developer and architect, responsible for setting our course, tech stack, and platform architecture.

This role is a good fit for an entrepreneurial leader who is excited to build a company from the ground up. But unlike a typical founder, this role offers the best of both worlds: you’re joining a startup with significant traction and credibility, but with all the fun challenges and learning that come with a greenfield project.

Please send your resume and 1-2 paragraphs introducing yourself to annafi@theflipside.io if you’re interested in joining the good fight! We can’t wait to meet you.

Hello The Flip Side,

I deeply empathize with the goals of bridging the gap between the incredibly vocal minority opinion holders at both ends of the curve. I’ve been thinking about how to solve this problem and working on my own take, knophy [1], for a couple years now in my free time. Knophy is a content aggregation platform that creates an innovative new economic model whereby voting power is earned by first reading, watching, or listening to the content on which one desires to comment or “upvote” themselves. After consuming a piece of content, a user can then answer community moderated evidence-based questions to earn said voting power. Whenever questions are answered correctly, the creator, moderators of the question bank (the community) and the answerer all earn relative amounts of points with which to vote on content. Should a user develop a surplus of points, they may “burn” those points in exchange for a fungible, cryptocurrency token that they can either sell or speculate against.

This model has implications in solving the problem of content monetization, copyright, siloed walled gardens who rely on riling up their users to increase usage, moderation, and many more major problems which I would love to discuss in further detail if you find them intriguing.

I realize I haven’t done a great job introducing myself in the above paragraphs, but feel that the ideas we have in regards to solving this problem are more important than me blabbing about myself. I’m a full stack engineer specializing in React / React Native and am very excited about using the GRANDStack (GraphQL, React, Apollo, Neo4j Database) to create highly connected and innovative new applications at scale.

I'm currently very happily employed but would love to help innovate in this space in any capacity that would be welcome!

My contact info and some relevant works are linked here: [GitHub - technoplato/portfolio: A portfolio of my work](https://github.com/technoplato/portfolio)

I’ve also sent this via email to the specified address. If any HackerNews people are interested in critiquing or helping with this idea, I’m all ears!

[1] [GitHub - technoplato/knophy: WIP Knophy is a content aggregation platform where voting power is regulated and earned by demonstrating what you know about the content you follow.](https://github.com/technoplato/knophy)

I'm an email subscriber to the Flip Side newsletter and I'm a happy with the content I read. From my anecdata, in the USA we live in a world of spin and it is so easy to get caught up in one narrative or another and be manipulated into a state of moral panic. Reading the flip side emails helps me empathize with the narratives. Seemingly, everyone sees themselves as the good guys under siege from the bad guys.

Selfishly, the emails help me release pent up cognitive dissonance/frustration by seeing the work of people try to produce nuanced and empathetic content. Being in a state of 24/7 moral panic is exhausting for me and the people around me.

Best of luck to the Flip Side. Keep it up!

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