markjgsmith

There's a lot of interesting talk recently about blockchains optimised for high frequency. The ability to handle high volumes of transactions. Solana for instance has the ability to process thousands of times more transactions per second than Bitcoin or Etherium. It's clear that there are many use cases, especially with the AI boom, where this could be useful, but I don't get how any of these coins will ever be worth anything.

If they ever do get popular, that makes them less good at their main purpose, because the price of the blockspace is literally increasing. It feels like these type of coins can't be funded via token trading. They are much more like AWS compute than a store of value. So I look at all these memecoins that are super interesting from a technical point of view, but as tradable commodities are not that interesting because there are no apps using them yet.

Who pays for the high frequency blockchains?

A lot of people complain about Twitter these days, and some of their points are valid. Personally I find the worst thing is that the advertizers are kind of weird. My timeline is always full of scantilly clad woman with large breasts selling one thing or another. It's kind of gross. But this post isn't about that. What this post is about is offline, and my experience with the Twitter app offline is actually rather good.

The first thing is that the app actually opens while offline, and displays a timeline with posts. A lot of other social media apps don't even do that. Instead they just show an emtpy app shell stuck trying to load content from their servers. What's more the posts on the timeline are clickable, and expand to the full post if they were shortened in the main feed. So you can actually scroll through your timeline even when offline and get a reasonable view of what's going on. Or at least what was going on last time you were online.

Now it's not perfect. The post pages don't show any replies, and any media like video, audio or image files don't showup. So there are gaps, which is a little annoying, but understandable for large files. It still would be better, I think, if at least some text replies were stored locally. Oh you can also get post urls and even re-post, I guess the app syncs next time you are online.

I think offline is a really underated feature, and though some improvements would be good, the Twitter app gets a lot of it right. It's much better than other social media apps that don't even bother.

If you make a social media app, consider making offline a priority, it's a real sign that you respect, value and care about users and their experience.