Developer Notes

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

Current Post

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=b±b24ac2a 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

See the original post and the comments HERE.

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