4 ms·

But will Substack actually manage it? Because to be 100% honest, Twitter has a crap ton of alternatives right now (Mastodon, Hive, Cohost, Post, etc), and none

• turnsout 4y ago
  The future is pluralistic, not monopolistic. There is no "one" Twitter replacement, and that is a very good thing. We need smaller communities that have different approaches to moderation, not One True Global Town Square.
  • newsclues 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
    • turnsout 4y ago
      The network effect also works at a smaller scale. There may not be much user benefit to having one billion random people on a platform vs 10,000 people with their interests.
  • sgc 4y ago
    The problem is discoverability. Social sites will always trend towards fewer major players, because people want to be heard. Tech like Mastodon, which tries to promote plurality, needs to deal with the discoverability mammoth in the room, or it will never seriously take off.
    • turnsout 4y ago
      I think that's fundamentally a centralist mindset… It doesn't matter if Mastodon as a whole never attracts 1B people, as long as your instance is a thriving community. You may not want 100,000 people to "discover" your tight-knit Discord.
      • MichaelZuo 4y ago
        So it's not a Twitter replacement then?
        • turnsout 4y ago
          Right, as I said in my original comment, there is no "one" Twitter replacement.
          • MichaelZuo 4y ago
            So there is no Twitter replacement? Why add the "one"?
            • turnsout 4y ago
              The “one” is to emphasize that Twitter users have left for a variety of other platforms. There is no widely accepted replacement for Twitter. Not sure how many other ways I can rephrase this?
              • MichaelZuo 4y ago
                > The “one” is to emphasize that Twitter users have left for a variety of other platforms. Emphasizing to who? I don't think anyone on HN genuinely believes the entire cohort of users that left migrated to a singular alternative.
      • sgc 4y ago
        That is not the way the history of online social networks has played out. It seems pretty well established that most people want to be where all the action is, and that niche groups will never be the primary form of social interaction, even if they will always have a role to play, that will be bigger or smaller at various times. I am not making a qualitative judgment, just stating what to me is an established social fact. I personally avoid almost all social networks - especially fb, twitter, insta, and tiktok. But most everybody gravitates to them for various reasons, and have always sought out these big sites as far as I have seen.
  • nyolfen 4y ago
    why is this the case? why hasn't it been the case until now? what has changed that would reverse the constant trend toward centralization?
    • rvz 4y ago
      It is because they are very emotional and angry at a person called 'Elon Musk'. Twitter has always been a cesspool before the takeover which many here complaining about Twitter have tolerated for years and the 220M+ daily active users still remain with it. They are having to learn the hard way as to why building a very sticky network effect like Twitter from scratch is extremely difficult. Substack knew they had to bootstrap from Twitter some how, hence the links ban.
    • turnsout 4y ago
      Well, not to get into an entire history of the internet, but centralization is actually a relatively recent phenomenon tied to "Web 2.0" and the rise of smartphones. Email and Usenet are more similar to Mastodon than Twitter. Centralization is a short term win-win, because it's easier for users, and it creates a critical mass of users to monetize. However, as we're seeing, centralization has its limits. The drive for ever-increasing profits and the impossibility of content moderation at scale is driving more and more people away from the monoliths. Sometimes people just jump ship to another centralized platform (Friendster > MySpace > Facebook > Instagram), but a lot of people seem to be peacing out of this cycle in favor of smaller communities (Mastodon, Discord, private Slacks, etc).
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • nyolfen 4y ago
        ah, vibes-based reasoning
        • turnsout 4y ago
          aka the entirety of tech punditry
• fluidcruft 4y ago
  To be honest I only use twitter to be notified about meetings and conferences and new publications from societies and people or organizations that interest me because email is such a pain in the ass that I've stopped reading it. My use if twitter could 100% be replaced by RSS feeds.
• btown 4y ago
  One of the things that will be very difficult to replicate is the ability for Twitter to function as the town square for breaking news from the masses specifically. One single platform, incentivizing non-writers to communicate single-sentence live updates (and commentary based on their lived experiences) on events unfolding in real time, providing on-the-ground information to remote reporters in quote-ready formats, democratizing journalism in a way that hadn't been truly possible before. Substack's inherent lean towards only those creators able and willing to write long-form content won't capture the same dynamics, and that's a shame. Of course, Twitter's way of "incentivizing non-writers" meant showing people's engagement, which meant replies, which meant toxicity and bullying. Letting people release their pain, fear, and trauma at each other, 140 characters at a time, was always going to be a double-edged sword: surfacing truths that never would have otherwise seen the light, but also allowing disinformation and hate to propagate. I'm truly not sure whether Twitter will be seen as a net positive to societal progress by future generations - or whether we should want to replace its role wholesale. But either way, there's definitely good parts that many will miss, and however/whether or not it deserved to die, it didn't deserve to die like this.