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.
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 | 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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