Coder Carl's Comparison Table: Informative and Amusing

Stephen J. Douglass on Jan 25 15:47:41

Subscribers may notice that Fnora has a good bit of Coder Carl's wry and subtle wit sprinkled all over its static page written content. What has always amazed me is, for a guy who considers himself a nerdy mathematician, physicist, and coder, his writing style is unpretentious and always humorous; oftentimes when elaborating on normally dry subjects.

I am usually so acclimated to it as to be nearly immune, but I ran across an oldie-goodie post he did a while back and it was all I could do not to spit out my drink while re-reading.

Carl's Social Media Comparison Post

Why do we need yet another social network? Let us count the ways.

Let's start with a couple social networks which are designed for personal contacts.

Feature	Fnora	Main Competitor	Lame Competitor
Multiple paragraphs in a comment	Easy: blank lines.	Doable: hold down that control key	Easy
Bold	Easy: .b	Impossible on a desktop. Maybe on a phone	Yes using popup menu
Italics and Underlines	.i and .u Duh	No except perhaps with phone	Yes using popup menu
Highlighting	Yes	No	No
Lists	Yes	Manually, with control key	Manually
Tables	You are looking at one	No	No
Equations	$x = \frac{- b \pm \sqrt{b^{2} - 4 a c}}{2 a}$	No	No
Code	`Yes`	No	No
Pictures	Yes, where you want them	Yes, at the end of your comment/post	Yes, at the end of your comment/post
Picture Editor	Yes	No	No
Your Newsfeed	You Control	Evil Robots Control	Not Much News
Privacy of Posts	Permissions set for every post	Changing target	???
Contacts	Dignified negotions	Awkward friending	Awkward friending
Links	You control link text	Scrapes Headlines	Scrapes Headlines
Video	Not yet	Scrapes and local	Scrapes and ??

But how about those social networks designed for preaching to the public?

Feature	Fnora	Network for Twits	Network for Republican Talking Points
Quality of Posts	You can write borderline blog posts, complete with equations and whatnot.	Zingers only	Multiple paragraphs
Quality of people	People willing to pay for real service	Twits, robots, foreign spies,...	You decide
Newsfeed	Grouped by poster. Infrequent posters don't get swamped by those who post in mass quantity	Grouped by robots. Is that a comment or a post you subscribed to? The science isn't settled.	Grouped by time. Newsfeed gets easily swamped by Conservatism, Inc.
Change Minds?	Designed for a wide variety of viewpoints, with in depth discussion	Designed for zingers	Designed as an Establishment Republican ghetto
Tone	Light hearted, but able to tackle serious issues	Ugly as @(#$@^*&	Echo chamber

Developer Notes

Notes on the underlying philosophy of Conntects, and the challenges of making it work.

Coder Carl's Comparison Table: Informative and Amusing

Carl's Social Media Comparison Post