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Ask HN: Do you believe there's really an alternative to Twitter?

• imartin2k 4y ago
  I believe there’s no need for a real alternative. Twitter is much less important (collectively) as remaining obsessive Twitter users assume.
• davidkuennen 4y ago
  Currently? No, I don't think there is a legit alternative.
• satya71 4y ago
  For me Twitter does two things. 1. The aspect I enjoy the most is finding useful information about areas of interest from the experts. 2. The aspect that gets my attention the most is the rage-inducing posts from random people. I think Mastodon does 1 well, and doesn't do 2 much. I don't want 2. So it's almost a perfect platform once enough of the experts have a presence there.
  • stop50 4y ago
    Me too
  • nomilk 4y ago
    Can you train yourself to ignore the rage-inducing posts? My eyes scan over them just like with banner ads, and almost entirely subconsciously.
    • synu 4y ago
      Even if you unfollow everyone who occasionally shares outrage posts, there are still a lot of interesting people to follow. That seems to work for me.
      • nomilk 4y ago
        I see the outrage posts as a kind of meta-study on human nature. Like, "oh, that's what attracts people's attention these days, noted, next.." type thing.
        • synu 4y ago
          I think you’re right, little dopamine hits from attention or feeling self righteous. But I doesn’t seem to work on everyone, and that’s the part of tech Twitter I follow.
• gregjor 4y ago
  The alternative to Twitter -- and all social media -- stares us in the face: don't use it at all. I know some people find it hard to believe but abandoning all of those pointless and toxic social media platforms won't leave you less informed or connected. Your question seems like asking for a different kind of sharp stick to poke your eyes out with. Alternatively don't poke your eyes at all.
  • armatav 4y ago
    Exactly - is an hour of your time worth more to you when you use it on your own terms, or when an app takes it from you and donates it to advertisers under the guise of "interesting content"?
  • nathias 4y ago
    twitter, much like most of the internet is as good as you make it
    • garbagetime 4y ago
      Yep, it's never been toxic for me, and certainly isn't useless.
    • gregjor 4y ago
      I don't agree. Twitter (and all social media) involve interacting with all kinds of people, and just a few of them can make it terrible, completely outside of your control. You can stay and fight by blocking or arguing or whatever, or just do something else. Balancing what little value I ever got from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. -- all of which I have used, sometimes for years -- against the waste of time and anger and frustration, the trolls and sociopaths, the nonsense and lies, I decided not participating in those fake town squares and social clubs would reduce my stress and wasted time without any downside. And I don't have to worry about how my personal information or reading habits or social interactions get harvested, aggregated, sold, and ultimately used against me.
      • misnome 4y ago
• rvz 4y ago
  Today, there is no viable worthy alternative to Twitter. The only alternative is to delete all of it, but those that have claimed to leave Twitter have not deleted their accounts. > I think most people will do their rage quit and come back once they've cooled down and the news cycle has moved on. The whole news on this is itself fuelling outrage and extreme emotional reactions for many to 'quit' Twitter in rage on to alternatives without closing their Twitter accounts. They will calm down, and move back onto Twitter after the outrage is over.
  • luxpir 4y ago
    Reducing the percentage of active accounts is an effective form of protest. No comment on merits of alternatives or social media itself.
  • rsj_hn 4y ago
    > Today, there is no viable worthy alternative to Twitter. I'm really curious why you think so. On twitter you can read through the feeds of ~300 million monthly active users. You can read their opinions about current events, jokes, whatever thought popped into their head, etc. So how many monthly active users would be needed in order to get approximately the same level of information/inspiration/entertainment? E.g. Telegram has ~50 million MAU. Is that not enough? Is the range of opinions expressed by the 300 million so much bigger that you would be impoverished moving to a network that had only 50 million? Perhaps if you have extremely esoteric tastes, like Baluchi newlywed cooking recipes, but for most views/interests, 50 million is more than enough. Really 10 million is more than enough. This is my version of Gates' Law: No one needs a social network with more than 10 million users, because no one is that unique in their outlook, temperament, knowledge, or life experience. But if you need huge numbers, there is also Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, wechat, etc. This reminds me of some conversations where a friend insisted that they needed to live in a big city, because they wouldn't be able to find anyone to relate to in a smaller city. And I thought, how many thousands of people need to live in a place before you can find a group to relate to? Do you really need, say, 5 million people in order to find some kindred spirits? 1 million wont do?
  • dmje 4y ago
    I moved off Twitter 2+years ago and deleted my account. I moved off Facebook (many years ago) and deleted my account. I moved off WhatsApp and deleted my account. I moved off Instagram and deleted my account. Life is better out here. Less rage, less FOMO, more reality.
• THENATHE 4y ago
  Twitter as a concept really only has a single novel idea: being able to (sometimes) directly speak to people that you would normally never have the status or prestige to contact (the president, a CEO, senators, customer support for a company that has terrible phone lines, etc) If the world just got better about actually letting you talk to the people you want/need to (like a senator actually reading letters from his/her constituents, or a company actually providing quality customer service), twitter would become rapidly obsolete. And for good reason. Social media fills a niche that otherwise lays unfilled. But while something like facebook can act as a "town square", twitter literally just fills in for the laziness of other platforms.
  • zimpenfish 4y ago
    > Twitter as a concept really only has a single novel idea: being able to (sometimes) directly speak to people that you would normally never have the status or prestige to contact What? I've been on Twitter a long time and this is just nonsense. It's about being able to speak to people. > customer support for a company that has terrible phone lines How is this "never have the status or prestige"? It's "don't have the time or energy to sit on hold for hours" at best.
  • vinay427 4y ago
    > like a senator actually reading letters from his/her constituents In the US, at least, I think it’s fairly well-known that politicians or their staff will often read (and handle relevant actionable items) in letters from their constituents. Things like expressing opposition to some legislation or requesting their soft power for some bureaucratic situation (e.g. expediting a passport application) are quite standard. Especially if your constituency isn’t too large *, there’s often an individual response when necessary even if it’s through a staffer. * Smaller than a million people or so? US Representatives and state/local legislators are a better choice in many cases.
• nathias 4y ago
  I don't think so, but I hope web3 can produce something like that. There are some alternatives that are just smaller twitter clones, but this isn't how progress works, the alternative has to be decentralized and also much better to take off.
• Syonyk 4y ago
  > Do you think there's any realistic alternative to Twitter as the world's "town square"? The concept of a "global town square" is entirely at odds with everything we know about how humans work, and I don't believe any sort of algorithm or content moderation or anything of the sort can make such an incredibly infeasible concept workable. The alternative to Twitter should be building local community. Start having fire pit nights. Welcome (limited) alcohol and some pipes or cigars, and simply start talking to people, face to face, again - and then keep doing it on a weekly basis or so. Expand as needed, and when it gets too big, start another firepit. We need to stop intermediating all human interactions through tech companies that are simply mining this data to then manipulate us as we're most susceptible to (which is what advertising is, though plenty of other things also piggyback on the data to try to manipulate us). And turn off cell phones around the fire pit. They're actively harmful in every possible way.
  • zimpenfish 4y ago
    > Start having fire pit nights. Welcome (limited) alcohol and some pipes or cigars, and simply start talking to people, face to face, again I know zero (0) people within a 5 mile radius[1]. And if you started a fire pit around here (local council estate)[2], alcohol or no, I can guarantee the police would need to be involved sooner rather than later. [1] Exceptions: flat mate and one person who stays in London ~2 nights a week [2] Also good luck trying to get a permit for that kind of thing.
    • tmaly 4y ago
      If you need a permit for that, you are living in the wrong place under the wrong leadership.
    • yellowapple 4y ago
      > I know zero (0) people within a 5 mile radius[1]. That's exactly the problem to be solved by the suggestion above. > [2] Also good luck trying to get a permit for that kind of thing. It's a sad state of affairs when "oi bruv you go' a loicense for tha' firepi'?" is an actual concern.
• throwaway0asd 4y ago
  Twitter felt like screaming into a void… an impersonal broadcast to followers, kind of like gossiping. That never appealed to me so for me anything felt like a superior alternative.
• bigbacaloa 4y ago
  The alternative to Twitter is the absence of Twitter.
• luxpir 4y ago
  Can't dang just moderate Twitter and we can be done with it all?
  • tomcam 4y ago
    That would save the world
• gcau 4y ago
  No. Not Mastodon either. It's like how some say "linux is an alternative to windows", as much as some people wish it was, it's simply not.
  • NayamAmarshe 4y ago
    > "linux is an alternative to windows", as much as some people wish it was, it's simply not. But it is? Simply just saying something isn't, doesn't make it so. If I along with millions of others in 2022, can use Linux for all my needs and not touch the spyware that is Windows, Linux is as much of an alternative as iOS is to Android. I think what you'd want to say is, Linux doesn't have as big of a marketshare as Windows, which is true but how does it not make Linux an alternative? If millions of people can use Linux based Chromebooks and not think about Windows or MacOS, it is already a viable alternative. Maybe not for you, maybe not for someone else, but it is a real alternative whether you like the fact or not.
    • zimpenfish 4y ago
      > But it is? Simply just saying something isn't, doesn't make it so. I think that sometimes when people say "X is/is not an alternative to Y", they're actually meaning "replacement". Such as the current "Is the Fediverse an alternative to Twitter?" Obviously, yes. Is it a replacement? Obviously, no, and it could never be since it doesn't implement a whole bunch of Twitter features! Same with Linux - "Is Linux an alternative to Windows?" Yes. A replacement? Probably not but it would depend on what you're wanting to do, surely.
      • NayamAmarshe 4y ago
        Linux Desktop can be a replacement but like you said, it depends sometimes. Adobe and a few other creative software are not available on Linux, which means the only remaining alternative is MacOS. But I believe for the rest, normal daily usage, Linux Desktop is the perfect and the most pro-consumer software out there.
• onion2k 4y ago
  Do you think there's any realistic alternative to Twitter as the world's "town square"? Elon, and possibly Trump before him, are the only people who actually reached the world on Twitter. For vast majority of people Twitter is a small, local (not necessarily geographically; it can be local to a belief, or an interest) platform, and they never break out of their small bit no matter how hard they try. There isn't an alternative to Twitter in the sense of another platform that replicates everything Twitter does, but for any individual there are loads of ways of replicating the functionality of Twitter that you use. When someone says they're leaving for an alternative they mean the second one.
• langsoul-com 4y ago
  If there was an alternate social media, we would already know and use it. The social network effects is just too powerful. Only a very few number of social media's broke through that and it's usually by being different from existing offerings. Ie, tiktok with super algor feed that only shows 1 thing at a time. Fundamentally different from the rest.
• pontifier 4y ago
  An alternative... It's an interesting question. Twitter seems to be the only place where individuals voices are emphasized. Most other platforms focus discussion around news articles. Twitter doesn't follow that format. It really does feel like one of the only places you can just speak without that speech being attached to another topic.
• revskill 4y ago
  No i think. What i love about Twitter is no ad.
• mnd999 4y ago
  If that’s what you want then there will have to be because it’s not going to be there in two years. At least not in it’s current form.
• hliyan 4y ago
  A solution I envisioned around 2018: Email re-skinned as a social network [1]: consider a social network that uses email as its communications protocol and regular mail servers as the “cloud”. There is no “platform”, but an app which is basically a re-skinned mail client with certain features disabled or abstracted. There is no advertising. https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-c33b175f3a9e https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-netwo...
  • zimpenfish 4y ago
    > Email re-skinned as a social network Am I right in thinking that only allows communication between bi-directionally connected people (because you need someone's public key to send to them)? Because how would that work for, e.g., people with huge followings? Are they supposed to 'friend' everyone that wants to consume their output? (Which is one of the good things about Twitter - it allows uni-directional 'friend's.)
  • loa_in_ 4y ago
    This would be pretty much Usenet/mailing lists. An improvement would be user profiles that aren't a predefined set of fields to fill out.
• marak830 4y ago
  I think it's irrelevant, it's just a messaging platform. Nothing lost.
• pacifika 4y ago
  Similar to how every change is not a full replacement. Your timeline will be gradually redistributed. Many people have already moved on or never started on Twitter.
• irusensei 4y ago
  What people are looking for right now are echo chambers. They’ll get bored after a while and return to Twitter. A more effective solution is to opt out.
• dmje 4y ago
  We could choose to not have Twitter.
• pacifika 4y ago
  Twitter is not a global town square. You can’t scroll two screens without logging in. The town is not in charge. The town square is unique for each of its users. This is the mistake media and politicians make: you can’t poll Twitter or read your timeline to know what people generally think unless you statistically represent a global audience.
• grumbel 4y ago
  The only real alternative would be an open protocol that allows free message broadcasting and redistribution, such that the server becomes a dumb relay, not the arbiter of truth. Kind of like email, but everybody can look at your mailbox. Some form of cryptographic identities would be required, so that multiple servers can host and distribute messages and it's the user that controls the keys. Mastodon to me goes in the completely wrong direction, as it still keeps user identities locked to a server and gives the server admins way too much control. It's a bad copy of Twitter with even more censorship. That said, I have little hope in this ever happening. All the money is made in controlling the user, so any protocol that actively works against that is pretty much doomed to fail.
  • rikroots 4y ago
    Do you mean something like Deja News (before its mad pivot in 1999)? Maybe somebody could build a service that offers users an interface to create/consume content shared over a dedicated NNTP-based Usenet discussion group, archiving all those messages (respecting the 'X-No_Archive' message header!) and adding in some sort of 'blue tick' crypto id to messages from validated humans. Build in some message character limits, alongside # and @ functionality - not forgetting image/audio/video capabilities - to mimic current Twitter behaviours and this mythical somebody might have a "twitter clone" on their hands? Of course moderation would remain a nightmare...
    • grumbel 4y ago
      > Do you mean something like Deja News (before its mad pivot in 1999)? Yep, the nice thing about Usenet was that you could refer to any message by a unique message-id. So the where and how you downloaded those messages was of no importance, the Usenet groups were held together by their message-id and a few other headers. The rest was just federated servers mirroring the content among each other. There was however a lack of security, so nothing would stop you from generating duplicate message-id, faking identities and such. > Of course moderation would remain a nightmare... What I would like to see is moderation made optional and transparent. Just give me a list of message-ids that a moderator deemed filter worthy, but leave it to me if I want to use that filter list or not. Such an approach would also allow third parties to do the filtering.
• Falkon1313 4y ago
  Feature set? That's trivial. A high school student could write it in a weekend. A text area where you can enter a very limited soundbite-sized snippet of text, and a page where you can see what snippets of text other twits have entered. Then add in follow, @-replies, hashtags, and image/video embedding. All of those features are trivial. They're mostly just references and basic HTML. What's not trivial are the scaling and moderation and support personnel to handle millions of users. And of course, building the user-base itself for those network effects. And those are the things that are currently being lost. But the whole thing was never good. It was just what was there. So yes, there could certainly be a (much better) alternative, a blog network for instance, or just about any other social media site. And the idea of it as "the world's town square" is just laughable to anyone that isn't a long-term twit addict. It's never been that, and never would be.
• smrtinsert 4y ago
  I find even Nextdoor is more valuable to me than Twitter.
• bjohnson225 4y ago
  The idea of Twitter as the world's town square always seems odd to me because the level of discourse there is consistently horrible. Twitter is a digital theatre, not a town square. The alternatives would depend upon what you’re trying to get from the platform, but they would include anything from other social media (for the more fun use cases) to traditional news websites (following political events) to HN/newsletters (tech news) to whatever else. Or just keep using it since the product matters more than the owner.
• bastard_op 4y ago
  As someone that as never has a facebook or twitter, this is funny.
• recuter 4y ago
  > But what do you think? Do you think there's any realistic alternative to Twitter as the world's "town square"? Nope. So long as celebrities and politicians are on it the journalists will keep mining it for cheap clicks - it has replaced 'man on the street says' type of low quality reporting. Whether at the BBC, Fox or CNN people sitting around doom scrolling in those offices are ordinary neophytes for whom FB/Twitter/Reddit essentially are the entire internet - regardless of political leanings every single news outlet weaves whatever narrative they want from it as there's always a Joe Schmoe (real or bot) with 4 followers to quote into 'people on twitter are saying X'. It really doesn't matter if somebody builds a better twitter with more intelligent and useful discussions as that won't be useful fodder for media.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jtthe13 4y ago
  I don't, nor do I think there needs to be an alternative. In the same sense, there were no alternatives to Myspace. Other, different things emerged instead.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bell-cot 4y ago
  Old geezer quip: Sounds like the kids want to re-invent Usenet News.
• yellowapple 4y ago
  Twitter was never the "town square". No single website, no matter how popular, has any realistic hope of being a "town square" short of maybe something owned by the UN or something. A website is, at best, a corkboard on the wall of some private business or domicile - and while some of those corkboards might be big and relatively lax in who can post what on them, at the end of the day someone owns it and will use that ownership to control what's conveyed on it. The actual "town square" is the Internet itself, and every effort should be made to ensure it stays that way.
• dave333 4y ago
  Well I pretty much ignored twitter until the current brouhaha and consumed news via RSS feeds using inoreader. I expect I will go back to that once the novelty of watching Elon at work wears off. I would like some kind of filter of twitter that just shows the good stuff - "top" shows too much for my taste. Maybe AI will soon fix that.
• dave333 4y ago
  Twitter is popular because it solves TL;DR: (at least temporarily) and it gained a following amongst the movers and shakers. Reddit is superior in some ways, but getting a critical mass of blue badge twits over there won't happen.
• sshine 4y ago
  I quit Twitter long ago because it seemed like a place you’d get verbally assaulted and there wouldn’t be a button to defend yourself. But now I signed up again, just because.
• timeon 4y ago
  I'm not sure about this "town square" metaphor. Imagine walking in the town with all these craze people screaming.
• laserDinosaur 4y ago
  I do game development on the side, just fun small indie games. I like using twitter to follow other game devs and see what they are working on. It's fun tracking down new devs and seeing new and interesting projects, and it's fun sharing progress on my games and getting some positive comments from them. What's not fun is the sheer amount of topics on twitter I have zero interest in invading my timeline. I don't like how much marketing spam there is, since every post is secretly hoping to 'go viral', which even for the indie devs I follow makes it fairly bland sometimes. Twitter is just so huge that it's not possible to have any small communities. For all its warts, there's a fantastic twitter community around the FGC (fighting game community) - members in the community regularly post really interesting questions or statements on fighting games and/or their design, and it usually kicks of dozens of videos from other people I follow on that topic. The FCG's usage of Twitter is probably the best I've seen. Personally, what I would like is something more akin to a mailing list or RSS feed I suppose, but with the ability to reply to threads, a bit like a forum. I want to be able to follow people I find interesting manually, with zero discovery in the app itself. I want to hear updates from them, and without any 'retweet' functionality there's less incentive for small players to spam the ever living hell out of their account in the hope of getting lucky. I think that would be my dream app - something that works like an RSS feed, but without the technical overhead of actually setting up and publishing to your own RSS feed, with the ability to respond with comments on the posts without having to repost it to a site which does allow it (like HN or Reddit) with one shared identity. That would be cool. Does Mastodon fill that role? Does anything? If so I'd certainly use it.
• rsynnott 4y ago
  I'm not sure there's a general replacement for Twitter. _For the stuff I use Twitter for_, Mastodon is increasingly looking like it'll do; a large portion of the people whose stuff I like have moved. And it appears that soon Twitter won't be Twitter, it will be a poorly thought out advertising platform (well, you could argue that it's already that, but moreso); see https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721 https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721 . I have no interest in seeing loads of stuff posted by people gullible enough to pay Twitter $8 a month; I can't see many of the people whose stuff I like doing that.
• tomjen3 4y ago
  For this answer, we first have to ask what do people get out of Twitter? This answer is likely going to be different for different people. Some come there for hot-takes on the latest news, some to find like-minded people and communities and some, maybe most, go there to hit on the other side. I think the answer would likely be different for each person and group. Anybody looking for a community is much, much, much better of on Reddit, but Reddit's discovery system is worse than their search. I will also say that if you poll a random Twitter user, they are not likely to have powerful feelings about the Musk takeover. This is being blown out of proportion by a few blue checkmarks. Blow out of proportion by a few blue checkmarks is, incidentally, peak Twitter.
• vidanay 4y ago
  Nothing is a better alternative than Twitter. I mean that literally: "Nothing" is a better alternative than Twitter.
• ydnaclementine 4y ago
  I think the "unbundling of craigslist" is going to happen to twitter, where alternatives for niche communities will be created with functionality specific for that niche (for ex: stocktwits and linking to stock symbols, etc)
• DesiLurker 4y ago
  IMO real value of twitter is in the network it holds currently & not necessarily specific features. even if somebody were to come up with a platform with half the features as twitter but somehow convinces a big percentage of current users to switch that would be enough to initiate a mass migration. Mastodon would provide a good infra to create a platform like that but it need somewhat deep pockets (and trust on the founders) to keep it alive for the transition period. the only un-maligned patron I can think of of is craigslist guy. maybe if they can create a barebones 'chipper' that looks like CL and charges minimal fee to keep it ad free it might take off.
• dysoco 4y ago
  Everyone here saying that the alternative to Twitter is just not using social media at all because it's toxic and useless... have you considered that maybe you're just using it wrong or following the wrong people? Why is my experience so different? I've gone to meetups, made new friends, gone to dates, found job offers, etc. all thanks to Twitter, Twitter has probably been the biggest kickstarter to my social life since I moved to the city.
  • tennisflyi 4y ago
    People (including HN) are just bad at using SM.
• cbeach 4y ago
  When Twitter started overtly censoring conservatives a few years ago I tried to break my addiction to the platform. Lefties said “if you don’t like Twitter, start your own platform.” Gab and Parler popped up. Predictably, they picked up some unpleasant fringe elements of the Right (just as Twitter hosts unpleasant far-Left accounts). And then the Left went on the attack against Gab, Parler etc, cancel culture activism against advertisers, cloud hosting, payments, app store listings etc. Aside from the obvious problem of Twitter’s network effect, it seemed futile for right-of-centre people to create their own networks due to insidious attacks on those networks by the Left. I had high hopes for decentralised social networks like Mastadon — in principle — but the user experience was 5-10 years behind Twitter, and the Mastadon founder also had some questionable leftwing/pro-censorship ideas too. I didn’t spend long there before begrudgingly returning to Twitter. I asked my wife to password-protect app limits on my iPhone to prevent me spending more than half an hour per day on Twitter. Why waste my time in a place where people with my political leanings are systematically suppressed? Then Elon came along and I feel there are brighter days ahead. He wants to make the far left and far right equally unhappy. And he wants the limits of free speech to be dictated by law (created by democratically elected governments) rather than by opaque private companies with inevitable corporate/political bias. Good luck to him.
• mejutoco 4y ago
  IMO Twitter was unique before smartphones, when one could use SMS (140 characters) to post from a press event or when just witnessing an event. Then you would be the first one to break the news (is this why is it popular with journalists? idk). The term then was real-time internet or streaming internet or something like that. Now, again IMHO, Twitter is valuable only because of popularity (network effects), and any other app could take its place, since most people have smartphones and can share a thought immediately.