The Twitter fiasco timing seems to be worth the repost, and looking at the new accounts on Subreply, it seems that it was gaining quite a bit of traction https://subreply.com/people There's even a Derek Sivers account.
Would it be possible to un-dupe it?
(I don't care about the karma, if you can re-assign it.)
The problem is that these things follow predictable chains of association and the core idea of HN requires not being predictable in that way. When the post was made a few months ago, it had that quality; but now it doesn't.
I don't mean to disparage either the submission or the product. The submission was a fine one and I'm sure the product is too. The problem is that frontpsge space is the scarcest resource on HN* and we don't want the stories occupying those slots to be too correlated with each other or with the hottest topics.
If there hadn't already been a big thread about it recently, I'd have let it through, even though "Twitter alternative" has been generating tons of HN submissions lately and counts as one of those correlations I just mentioned. But the combination of correlation and it being a recent repost is, I think, too much repetition. Admittedly these are judgment calls and others would decide them differently.
In case people are looking for a new social media platform during the Twitter fiasco. It's been around for a while, and first made its appearance on Hacker News about 9 years ago under its old name, Sublevel.
Does Subreply provide API access? Could not find it from a cursory glance but would be awesome to be able to scrape the "Trending" feed and integrate it with knowledge curation tools. Even a simple RSS feed would be great. Lots of potential here.
As soon as I loaded this, it was mostly extremely biased political hackery. I'm sure there's a market for that, but the thing about Twitter is the views are diverse. That's why all the Right wing Twitter alts are not attractive either. The first account I saw was BrooklynDad who is a known left-wing troll account on Twitter, it's like loading up an alt and seeing MTG at first. Not a good impression.
I think it's hugely problematic that we are making even more siloed off partisan filter bubbles. I'd prefer not to be a part of that.
Also Parler started from a bubble, and also Parler was open to all. It matters more what the platforms become, because if the entire alt-right Twitter decides to move to Tribel, that bubble will surely be quickly busted.
