3 ms·
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 differe
by 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 agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
- turnsout 4y agoThe 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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 agoSo it's not a Twitter replacement then?
- turnsout 4y agoRight, as I said in my original comment, there is no "one" Twitter replacement.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoSo there is no Twitter replacement? Why add the "one"?
- turnsout 4y agoThe “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 agoThat 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 agowhy 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 agoIt 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 agoWell, 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).