Since then I have been mentally snacking on this: This used to be fun but now it's all about policing and extortion, and thus I have been working on something. The idea is: “I want the things I post to be safe from abuse, be ephemeral, be anonymous."
I cannot elaborate in 2000 word limit, but this observation, without letting it turn into a something-chan, leads to a set of rules:
• All users must be verified with a strict measures
• Users should be able to make any number of usernames
• Everything a user puts out must have an expiration date upon which the content will be deleted.
• The only data that the engine needs is that which verifies their identity — every other piece of data is at most ephemeral.
• Under no circumstances is a user allowed to take a screenshots
Rules like these and others, are what I am trying to build this engine around. I don't want privacy and anonymity to be an afterthought. I want to allow people, and myself, to be wrong and be forgotten and be forgiven.
There are a lot of dimensions to this and I am thinking of expanding this. I am gauging interest to see if people are willing to join the platform as users (or to join me in future development(non-binding of course)). If this sounds interesting to you and you would like to give it a spin when its out, please leave your email with me at this Google Form:
https://forms.gle/VrLCNzrikSdzGEYq7
Cheers!
But the type of problem you pick is very important.
Picking problems with "too many dimensions" is a bad idea for many reasons.
1. Chance of failure is high and if you fail you don't just feel jobless but also useless. So it can be a double whammy at the end of 2-3 months of hard work.
2. Any solution to such open ended complex problems will have holes. And you know people will fixate on them and easily dismiss the solution instead of appreciating you for whatever hard work you have done.
The better approach is to pick something with a clear and achievable goal that someone else has already defined.
Like on their bug tracker or feature tracker. That way at the end of a few months of hard work someone somewhere is satisfied with that hard work and can vouch for your abilities helping your job hunt.
Why is it important to verify a persons identity? What benifit would having multiple usernames if all could be identified anyways?
I guess you could have some sort of a unique hidden watermark to identify users that break the screen shot rule (if they reposted on another site) but I'm not sure it would prevent someone taking a picture with an older camera.
Have you considered building a community using an existing forum backend that you can admin? As a test run? It is my understanding that administrating social media can be a very stressful thing. It would be a shame to develop a whole new social ecosystem only to be overwhelmed by the pressures and stress.
Anyways
Good luck with Your project, I hope You are successful.