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Now we are stuck with Facebook, a closed platform. Or Reddit, which masquerades as an open platform, but is really closed shut. There's only Twitter now. And T

Now we are stuck with Facebook, a closed platform. Or Reddit, which masquerades as an open platform, but is really closed shut. There's only Twitter now. And Twitter kind of sucks.

mooreds 7y ago
Hate to say it, but what do you mean by "stuck"? Stuck in what way?
- codesushi42 7y ago
  There are no good, open alternatives that are widely used.
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    "Stuck" is a slight exaggeration. I can still punch whatever I want into my address bar. Why is "widely used" required? Do you search/discover through Tumblr?
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      Before a bunch of artists were driven off tumblr due to the overly strict adult policy (the appeals process etc. was too much of a pain) Tumblr was my go-to for a lot of artists in the niches I followed. Through this, I found a ton of communities- fandoms for the characters created by the artists, collective worldbuilding, etc. Also, within niche fandoms I followed I also found artists that produced wonderful works. There's still an ongoing webcomic (A Tale of Two Rulers) that's a world where Zelda and Gannon choose to marry instead of war on tumblr. It's incredibly awesome and part of what I'm on tumblr for.
  - zanny 7y ago
    There are plenty of Mastodon instances revolving around almost any topic out there to join. Having a successful social space does not necessitate, and I'd argue precludes, having a universal audience of everyone. Also, you are currently on what would qualify as a social network, and between HN, Mastodon, and choice tech subreddits like I find myself well inundated with social forums to talk about stuff on. Thats even precluding how Github and Gitlab have turned into faux social networks around projects, how IRC and Matrix exist as real time chat options, etc.
  - mooreds 7y ago
    Blogs + Disqus?
StavrosK 7y ago
Mastodon is great, and open. I like the community there more than Twitter's.
- lukewrites 7y ago
  Which instance(s) do you like? I'm on fosstodon.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    I'm on @stavros@mastodon.host, but I just follow people from wherever, I don't interact with my instance specifically.
uncletaco 7y ago
Twitter, IMO, is wonderful when you stop following journalists, politicians, and A list celebrities. What that leaves is mostly meme makers and minor influencers who generally wrap all the bad stuff inside of funny jokes and hot takes.
- notatoad 7y ago
  Twitter is also excellent for following journalists, but i keep them sectioned off into their own list and try my best to limit the attention i pay to that. I can see why people say twitter sucks, but really it only sucks if you're following a whole bunch of different "genres" in the same feed. the prolific tweeters like to talk about twitter in sections - "politics twitter", "black twitter", "meme twitter" etc and if that's how you use it, it's pretty good.
  - derefr 7y ago
    It's too bad that Twitter itself doesn't make this into a real abstraction. I'd love to treat my feed as mixed activity from a set of isolated communities, where one community can retweet something from another community into their own community, but where this retweet acts as its own object that doesn't inform anyone from the origin community about the activity on it in the destination community. Sort of like Slack, if there were teams but no channels, only threads, and your view was a unified all-threads-in-all-teams activity stream.
  - basscomm 7y ago
    > I can see why people say twitter sucks, but really it only sucks if you're following a whole bunch of different "genres" in the same feed. the prolific tweeters like to talk about twitter in sections - "politics twitter", "black twitter", "meme twitter" etc and if that's how you use it, it's pretty good. Twitter sucks for lots of reasons, but a big one for me is that it's really tough to follow a 'genre' or topic because so few people stick to tweeting about one genre or related genres. I only really ever used twitter to follow small(ish) tweeters and a few corporate brand accounts that weren't interactive anyway. The brand accounts never responded to anything anyone wrote to them, so twitter is, in effect, just a newsletter delivery service for them so they got filtered off into their own list. I tried following a few prolific tweeters, but I got tired of checking my feed and the prolific tweeters completely drowning out everyone else I followed. The small tweeters were more interactive (they would actually respond to things I would @ them once in a while) but they usually posted in topics all over the place. I might have followed them because someone else I follow retweeted something that I was interested in on a particular topic, video games, say, but after following them for a while, it turned out that they veer off into politics or the economy or mental health issues or racism or some other realm. Not to say that those aren't important things, but they're not the thing I was following them for, and it cluttered up the feed with things that I wasn't interested in looking at that day. Twitter would have been a lot more useful to me if I could somehow follow topics instead of people. Yes, I know about Tweetdeck and lists and hashtags, but that presumes that I want to bother continually setting up those things as the conversations flow and evolve, or that I'm following the correct hashtag or term (e.g. I was following #widget3a and most of the interesting conversations happen with #3awidget so I missed the whole thing), or that people manage to tag their tweets appropriately, et cetera.

Now we are stuck with Facebook, a closed platform. Or Reddit, which masquerades as an open platform, but is really closed shut. There's only Twitter now. And Twitter kind of sucks.

mooreds 7y ago

Hate to say it, but what do you mean by "stuck"? Stuck in what way?

codesushi42 7y ago
There are no good, open alternatives that are widely used.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  "Stuck" is a slight exaggeration. I can still punch whatever I want into my address bar. Why is "widely used" required? Do you search/discover through Tumblr?
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    Before a bunch of artists were driven off tumblr due to the overly strict adult policy (the appeals process etc. was too much of a pain) Tumblr was my go-to for a lot of artists in the niches I followed. Through this, I found a ton of communities- fandoms for the characters created by the artists, collective worldbuilding, etc. Also, within niche fandoms I followed I also found artists that produced wonderful works. There's still an ongoing webcomic (A Tale of Two Rulers) that's a world where Zelda and Gannon choose to marry instead of war on tumblr. It's incredibly awesome and part of what I'm on tumblr for.
- zanny 7y ago
  There are plenty of Mastodon instances revolving around almost any topic out there to join. Having a successful social space does not necessitate, and I'd argue precludes, having a universal audience of everyone. Also, you are currently on what would qualify as a social network, and between HN, Mastodon, and choice tech subreddits like I find myself well inundated with social forums to talk about stuff on. Thats even precluding how Github and Gitlab have turned into faux social networks around projects, how IRC and Matrix exist as real time chat options, etc.
- mooreds 7y ago
  Blogs + Disqus?

StavrosK 7y ago

Mastodon is great, and open. I like the community there more than Twitter's.

lukewrites 7y ago
Which instance(s) do you like? I'm on fosstodon.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  I'm on @stavros@mastodon.host, but I just follow people from wherever, I don't interact with my instance specifically.

uncletaco 7y ago

Twitter, IMO, is wonderful when you stop following journalists, politicians, and A list celebrities. What that leaves is mostly meme makers and minor influencers who generally wrap all the bad stuff inside of funny jokes and hot takes.

notatoad 7y ago
Twitter is also excellent for following journalists, but i keep them sectioned off into their own list and try my best to limit the attention i pay to that. I can see why people say twitter sucks, but really it only sucks if you're following a whole bunch of different "genres" in the same feed. the prolific tweeters like to talk about twitter in sections - "politics twitter", "black twitter", "meme twitter" etc and if that's how you use it, it's pretty good.
- derefr 7y ago
  It's too bad that Twitter itself doesn't make this into a real abstraction. I'd love to treat my feed as mixed activity from a set of isolated communities, where one community can retweet something from another community into their own community, but where this retweet acts as its own object that doesn't inform anyone from the origin community about the activity on it in the destination community. Sort of like Slack, if there were teams but no channels, only threads, and your view was a unified all-threads-in-all-teams activity stream.
- basscomm 7y ago
  > I can see why people say twitter sucks, but really it only sucks if you're following a whole bunch of different "genres" in the same feed. the prolific tweeters like to talk about twitter in sections - "politics twitter", "black twitter", "meme twitter" etc and if that's how you use it, it's pretty good. Twitter sucks for lots of reasons, but a big one for me is that it's really tough to follow a 'genre' or topic because so few people stick to tweeting about one genre or related genres. I only really ever used twitter to follow small(ish) tweeters and a few corporate brand accounts that weren't interactive anyway. The brand accounts never responded to anything anyone wrote to them, so twitter is, in effect, just a newsletter delivery service for them so they got filtered off into their own list. I tried following a few prolific tweeters, but I got tired of checking my feed and the prolific tweeters completely drowning out everyone else I followed. The small tweeters were more interactive (they would actually respond to things I would @ them once in a while) but they usually posted in topics all over the place. I might have followed them because someone else I follow retweeted something that I was interested in on a particular topic, video games, say, but after following them for a while, it turned out that they veer off into politics or the economy or mental health issues or racism or some other realm. Not to say that those aren't important things, but they're not the thing I was following them for, and it cluttered up the feed with things that I wasn't interested in looking at that day. Twitter would have been a lot more useful to me if I could somehow follow topics instead of people. Yes, I know about Tweetdeck and lists and hashtags, but that presumes that I want to bother continually setting up those things as the conversations flow and evolve, or that I'm following the correct hashtag or term (e.g. I was following #widget3a and most of the interesting conversations happen with #3awidget so I missed the whole thing), or that people manage to tag their tweets appropriately, et cetera.