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I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic decision to mess with substack lin

I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic decision to mess with substack links on Twitter. The site is clean and simple. I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.

hereme888 3y ago
They were messing with Twitter by downloading massive amounts of data from them. Why wouldn't Elon do what he did? I returned to Twitter recently due to great features like Community Notes. I don't see what people are complaining about.
hersko 3y ago
How is twitter ruined? My personal experience on the site has not changed much.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Same. Except for the new “For You” tab, my feed is almost 100% the same.
- PuppyTailWags 3y ago
  Counter anecdote: my personal experience is that the site is less entertaining. I've encountered technical bugs more, such as replies not loading without refreshing multiple times. The "for you" page doesn't show me anything I want to see. The checkmark thing remains super confusing to me. The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten more skuzzy.
  - LastTrain 3y ago
    > The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten more skuzzy. This is my experience as well, and is the thing the higher ups at Twitter should be really concerned about. Low rent.
- capital_guy 3y ago
  He keeps pushing the ‘for you’ page over the regular following tab that just shows tweets of people you follow The content moderation is basically nil now so tons of racist content is propagated throughout the network. Various technical bugs plaguing things - videos not playing, images not appearing, etc The verification system has been destroyed which has allowed fake accounts to run rampant The API has been wrecked, causing third party apps to stop working and massive amounts of research being done to be halted
  - mlindner 3y ago
    All the data shows that racist content is down significantly following the purchase.
    - aniforprez 3y ago
      That's very much not the case https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/20/antisemitism-higher-than-ever-on-twitter-finds-report https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/20/antisemitism-higher-than...
      - mlindner 3y ago
        Look at the details of that report. They're measuring by _number_ of tweets rather than impressions. Hate speech impressions are down. i.e. if you want hate speech you have to go out of your way to find it using bots. Normal users are seeing them less after the purchase. It's really tiring to counter so much misinformation about this that flies about. It's not just a one-time drop either, the impressions continues to go down. https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1613335965996810241 https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1613335965996810241
        Omatic810 3y ago
        Here's the report, the claim had no misinformation. https://beamdisinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Antisemitism-on-Twitter-Before-and-After-Elon-Musks-Acquisition.pdf https://beamdisinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Antisemit... Hate speech IS up. The claim was "hate speech is up". Impressions being down matters to the impact of the speech, but the claim stands - hate speech is up. You can claim it doesn't matter (and I might agree with you, since impressions are down, people know what to expect now, and the increase is significant but not huge at this point), but you can't honestly say the claim "hate speech is up" is misinformation. Edit: Actually, I had the claim backwards - YOU said it was DOWN, and you were wrong (according to the report). So to correct myself - the person refuting your claim was right, and spread no misinformation.
- inpdx 3y ago
  Many people have left, including myself, due to imperious, chaotic, and plain mean mismanagement. Thus making it vastly less interesting and more trollish.
- Jare 3y ago
  - People I follow have left. Most have moved to Mastodon so I can still follow them there. It's a constant trickle but some day the weight will be higher on Mastodon's side of the balance. - Ads range from obnoxious to downright scams. I know some people used to block ad senders as a matter of routine, but I didn't, most of the time they were valid and I was happy to support the site via their ads. After Musk, most ads vanished and for a while all I saw was Nintendo and SpaceX (!?) ads. Now there's many ads, but I block 95% of them because I REALLY do not want to ever again see the kind of shit they're pushing. - Search, and content outside of my carefully curated list of follows in my chronological timeline, has become complete hell. I used to be happy to search for "stuff that's happening" in Twitter rather than google or news sites, but now the stuff that comes out is not only irrelevant, but often disgusting. I still use the site but in a very specific and controlled manner. In that way, the experience is still good (bugs aside). I suspect at some point Musk will force some algorithmic crap down my throat and that will be the end.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - fintechie 3y ago
    To be fair, many people don't seem to have these issues you mention. For FinTwit and CT (crypto twitter) it's business as usual. Maybe it happens for other niches though.
    - brewdad 3y ago
      If that's what's left on Twitter, I'm glad I no longer visit daily. If that's your thing, have at it.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yeah to me it's less that it's dead and more that it's clearly not sustainable without a new business model. Blue is a total flop, and you can tell from the ads they're running now that their ad revenue must be way down. And they needed to grow revenue significantly after the acquisition because of the debt structuring, but it seems like a certainty they've done the opposite. So it's not that it's dead today, but how long can they make it like this?
- patrickmay 3y ago
  Musk killed the APIs that enabled third party tools like TweetBot. Twitter is close to unusable now.
- Fomite 3y ago
  It's gutted several communities I'm a part of.
jacquesm 3y ago
I hope it doesn't. Because it essentially sets us up for a repeat. If Mastodon was 'just not the thing people were looking for' then at least it solves the problems that both Twitter and Substack have, which is that they are not federated. Better to fix Mastodon than to waste another decade on something that will ultimately blow up and with the way Substack has - in my head at least - been associated negatively with crap content it will probably be sooner rather than later.
- davidw 3y ago
  > Better to fix Mastodon Is that possible? Seems kind of difficult due to its nature, but I admit I'm just a very casual user of it and don't know much. Signed up for the Substack thing. Seems worth a look - it's very similar to Twitter.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    What do you consider difficult about it?
    - Gareth321 3y ago
      Mastodon is never going to take off. I’ve been building SaaS applications for 15 years. I don’t think you understand the very low level of complexity required for mass adoption. Let’s just look at the signup process for a few minutes, using the UX convention of actions. Twitter: 1. Search for Twitter. 2. Click on the first link. 3. Click sign up. Mastodon: 1. Search for Mastodon. 2. Click the first link: mastodon.social. 3. Click create account. 4. Message modal pops up alerting the user that it is currently impossible to sign up to mastodon.social. But don’t worry, you can sign up on another server by clicking “Find another server.” At this point I’m confused. Why are there different servers? Will my friends be on the other server? Do we need to sign up on the same server? No explanation. I click the link. 5. Long page of options. No indication of quality or why I should choose one server over another. Now I am in choice paralysis. I click the first option (which has an anime figure on it). Surely - surely - the first option is the best option. The suggested option by whoever is running this application. 6. I land on a Korean language portal and I am done. I’m never coming back. Mastodon is dead to me. Forever. You might think this is hyperbole, but I promise you it is not. I’ve been in charge of A/B testing and UX centric development for web applications just like this for a very long time. Mastodon’s sign up process is easily one of the worst I have ever seen. Not a single UX person has been involved in the creation of this protocol.
Eji1700 3y ago
>... essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms I think it's a good thing in the long run. Twitter was a gimmick in many ways. Here, throw a few words out into the ether and see who notices. That simplicity attracted tons of people. Then it became THE place to reach a ton of people, even though it's format for such things is AWFUL for it. It's a TERRIBLE platform for meaningful information dispersal, but it's THE place to be, so you see a bunch of evidence of that. Twitlonger, people chaining twitter posts, just about any conversation, etc. Worse it eliminated a lot of things that probably shouldn't have died. My personal pet peeve is the death of forums, most specifically for games. Pre twitter you could find old forum posts that were pinned about just about anything you wanted to get into seriously. Dustloop had character guides with a level of info that would justify a thesis on characters in games that were 8 years old and hardly ever played. That level of information is still found now, but instead it's tied to a hashtag, and then vomited out...never consolidated. Right now i'm looking to mess with a new character in strive, and while the GGST_BE tag is nice for "oh that's neat" kind of tech discoveries, it's fucking awful for actually understanding how to play the character or what's useful from it. To be fair, that's always the case with a brand new character, but in the old days it was somewhat easier to keep a running tally of what works and what doesn't in a forum discussion, while twitter just doesn't promote that, so picking someone up waaaay after the fact is miserable. Discord is the other spot these things are now heavily discussed (with similar issues to twitter, although the forum feature of discord has helped a bit) and the wiki's are in theory where the data is consolidated but it's just a much higher barrier to entry and thus often you have half completed pages with outdated information. In short, i'm hoping the slow death of twitter (IF it dies. The number of people saying twitter is abhorrent...on twitter...is a sign to me it's not going anywhere) will finally lead to people realizing that we want a way to quickly spread information among those who want it, but we don't need it to be in this shallow, vapid, character limited style. Sure that works for "oh hey look at where I am today" but it drives me nuts every time i see some essay broken into 45 twitter posts. RSS feeds are an alternative tech that's honestly quite close to being what most people want, but it lacks the discovery/aggregation effect of things like twitter in most cases (inoreader kind of has something like that), and thus mostly still relies on twitter for content (at least it did until they nuked the API).
m3kw9 3y ago
I’ve seen “Elon ruined twitter”, but everyday I’m getting what I signed up for years back it hasn’t been ruined in any noticeable way. Fine they added the stupid views but who cares
figassis 3y ago
I've been looking at Substack with the eyes of someone who has lived through the enshitment of Quora, Medium et al, and realized there are never guarantees with any such service. Apparently I owe them money and attention, and they owe me nothing. I will never get long term what I joined a service for, so today I simply do not commit. I never committed to Twitter, and I'm glad. I want to share content, I setup a ghost site. I want to read content, I use RSS and also read what I can for free. That's it.
prepend 3y ago
> I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. I’m happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it’s a net negative for the world and we’ll be better off without it. This might be the only tech I’ve ever felt like this about (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates hate and division. It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it was a gawker-style takedown with the intent to purposely destroy something in a lasting and permanent way as described in Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel’s purposeful execution of strategy to destroy gawker, https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holiday https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holida... PS- are there any other business/tech “case study” type books out there. I also liked Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg, John Brooks’ Business Adventures, Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift, and David Kaplan’s Silicon Boys. Looking for more of what I suspect is more common than I can find.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  I really like those "case study" books about our industry, too. Off the top of my head, two more: - "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton (published in 2014, about the early days of Twitter) - "Super Pumped" by Mike Isaac (published in 2019, about the early days of Uber) Neither of them go into great detail or nuance — they're made for popular consumption, so they simplify things and gloss over details. You won't find any extensive discussion of microservice architecture and organizational design. But they were still interesting reads.

hereme888 3y ago

They were messing with Twitter by downloading massive amounts of data from them. Why wouldn't Elon do what he did? I returned to Twitter recently due to great features like Community Notes. I don't see what people are complaining about.

hersko 3y ago

How is twitter ruined? My personal experience on the site has not changed much.

spaceman_2020 3y ago
Same. Except for the new “For You” tab, my feed is almost 100% the same.
PuppyTailWags 3y ago
Counter anecdote: my personal experience is that the site is less entertaining. I've encountered technical bugs more, such as replies not loading without refreshing multiple times. The "for you" page doesn't show me anything I want to see. The checkmark thing remains super confusing to me. The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten more skuzzy.
- LastTrain 3y ago
  > The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten more skuzzy. This is my experience as well, and is the thing the higher ups at Twitter should be really concerned about. Low rent.
capital_guy 3y ago
He keeps pushing the ‘for you’ page over the regular following tab that just shows tweets of people you follow The content moderation is basically nil now so tons of racist content is propagated throughout the network. Various technical bugs plaguing things - videos not playing, images not appearing, etc The verification system has been destroyed which has allowed fake accounts to run rampant The API has been wrecked, causing third party apps to stop working and massive amounts of research being done to be halted
- mlindner 3y ago
  All the data shows that racist content is down significantly following the purchase.
  - aniforprez 3y ago
    That's very much not the case https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/20/antisemitism-higher-than-ever-on-twitter-finds-report https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/20/antisemitism-higher-than...
    - mlindner 3y ago
      Look at the details of that report. They're measuring by _number_ of tweets rather than impressions. Hate speech impressions are down. i.e. if you want hate speech you have to go out of your way to find it using bots. Normal users are seeing them less after the purchase. It's really tiring to counter so much misinformation about this that flies about. It's not just a one-time drop either, the impressions continues to go down. https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1613335965996810241 https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1613335965996810241
      - Omatic810 3y ago
        Here's the report, the claim had no misinformation. https://beamdisinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Antisemitism-on-Twitter-Before-and-After-Elon-Musks-Acquisition.pdf https://beamdisinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Antisemit... Hate speech IS up. The claim was "hate speech is up". Impressions being down matters to the impact of the speech, but the claim stands - hate speech is up. You can claim it doesn't matter (and I might agree with you, since impressions are down, people know what to expect now, and the increase is significant but not huge at this point), but you can't honestly say the claim "hate speech is up" is misinformation. Edit: Actually, I had the claim backwards - YOU said it was DOWN, and you were wrong (according to the report). So to correct myself - the person refuting your claim was right, and spread no misinformation.
inpdx 3y ago
Many people have left, including myself, due to imperious, chaotic, and plain mean mismanagement. Thus making it vastly less interesting and more trollish.
Jare 3y ago
- People I follow have left. Most have moved to Mastodon so I can still follow them there. It's a constant trickle but some day the weight will be higher on Mastodon's side of the balance. - Ads range from obnoxious to downright scams. I know some people used to block ad senders as a matter of routine, but I didn't, most of the time they were valid and I was happy to support the site via their ads. After Musk, most ads vanished and for a while all I saw was Nintendo and SpaceX (!?) ads. Now there's many ads, but I block 95% of them because I REALLY do not want to ever again see the kind of shit they're pushing. - Search, and content outside of my carefully curated list of follows in my chronological timeline, has become complete hell. I used to be happy to search for "stuff that's happening" in Twitter rather than google or news sites, but now the stuff that comes out is not only irrelevant, but often disgusting. I still use the site but in a very specific and controlled manner. In that way, the experience is still good (bugs aside). I suspect at some point Musk will force some algorithmic crap down my throat and that will be the end.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fintechie 3y ago
  To be fair, many people don't seem to have these issues you mention. For FinTwit and CT (crypto twitter) it's business as usual. Maybe it happens for other niches though.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    If that's what's left on Twitter, I'm glad I no longer visit daily. If that's your thing, have at it.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yeah to me it's less that it's dead and more that it's clearly not sustainable without a new business model. Blue is a total flop, and you can tell from the ads they're running now that their ad revenue must be way down. And they needed to grow revenue significantly after the acquisition because of the debt structuring, but it seems like a certainty they've done the opposite. So it's not that it's dead today, but how long can they make it like this?
patrickmay 3y ago
Musk killed the APIs that enabled third party tools like TweetBot. Twitter is close to unusable now.
Fomite 3y ago
It's gutted several communities I'm a part of.

jacquesm 3y ago

I hope it doesn't. Because it essentially sets us up for a repeat. If Mastodon was 'just not the thing people were looking for' then at least it solves the problems that both Twitter and Substack have, which is that they are not federated. Better to fix Mastodon than to waste another decade on something that will ultimately blow up and with the way Substack has - in my head at least - been associated negatively with crap content it will probably be sooner rather than later.

davidw 3y ago
> Better to fix Mastodon Is that possible? Seems kind of difficult due to its nature, but I admit I'm just a very casual user of it and don't know much. Signed up for the Substack thing. Seems worth a look - it's very similar to Twitter.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  What do you consider difficult about it?
  - Gareth321 3y ago
    Mastodon is never going to take off. I’ve been building SaaS applications for 15 years. I don’t think you understand the very low level of complexity required for mass adoption. Let’s just look at the signup process for a few minutes, using the UX convention of actions. Twitter: 1. Search for Twitter. 2. Click on the first link. 3. Click sign up. Mastodon: 1. Search for Mastodon. 2. Click the first link: mastodon.social. 3. Click create account. 4. Message modal pops up alerting the user that it is currently impossible to sign up to mastodon.social. But don’t worry, you can sign up on another server by clicking “Find another server.” At this point I’m confused. Why are there different servers? Will my friends be on the other server? Do we need to sign up on the same server? No explanation. I click the link. 5. Long page of options. No indication of quality or why I should choose one server over another. Now I am in choice paralysis. I click the first option (which has an anime figure on it). Surely - surely - the first option is the best option. The suggested option by whoever is running this application. 6. I land on a Korean language portal and I am done. I’m never coming back. Mastodon is dead to me. Forever. You might think this is hyperbole, but I promise you it is not. I’ve been in charge of A/B testing and UX centric development for web applications just like this for a very long time. Mastodon’s sign up process is easily one of the worst I have ever seen. Not a single UX person has been involved in the creation of this protocol.

Eji1700 3y ago

>... essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms I think it's a good thing in the long run. Twitter was a gimmick in many ways. Here, throw a few words out into the ether and see who notices. That simplicity attracted tons of people. Then it became THE place to reach a ton of people, even though it's format for such things is AWFUL for it. It's a TERRIBLE platform for meaningful information dispersal, but it's THE place to be, so you see a bunch of evidence of that. Twitlonger, people chaining twitter posts, just about any conversation, etc. Worse it eliminated a lot of things that probably shouldn't have died. My personal pet peeve is the death of forums, most specifically for games. Pre twitter you could find old forum posts that were pinned about just about anything you wanted to get into seriously. Dustloop had character guides with a level of info that would justify a thesis on characters in games that were 8 years old and hardly ever played. That level of information is still found now, but instead it's tied to a hashtag, and then vomited out...never consolidated. Right now i'm looking to mess with a new character in strive, and while the GGST_BE tag is nice for "oh that's neat" kind of tech discoveries, it's fucking awful for actually understanding how to play the character or what's useful from it. To be fair, that's always the case with a brand new character, but in the old days it was somewhat easier to keep a running tally of what works and what doesn't in a forum discussion, while twitter just doesn't promote that, so picking someone up waaaay after the fact is miserable. Discord is the other spot these things are now heavily discussed (with similar issues to twitter, although the forum feature of discord has helped a bit) and the wiki's are in theory where the data is consolidated but it's just a much higher barrier to entry and thus often you have half completed pages with outdated information. In short, i'm hoping the slow death of twitter (IF it dies. The number of people saying twitter is abhorrent...on twitter...is a sign to me it's not going anywhere) will finally lead to people realizing that we want a way to quickly spread information among those who want it, but we don't need it to be in this shallow, vapid, character limited style. Sure that works for "oh hey look at where I am today" but it drives me nuts every time i see some essay broken into 45 twitter posts. RSS feeds are an alternative tech that's honestly quite close to being what most people want, but it lacks the discovery/aggregation effect of things like twitter in most cases (inoreader kind of has something like that), and thus mostly still relies on twitter for content (at least it did until they nuked the API).

m3kw9 3y ago

I’ve seen “Elon ruined twitter”, but everyday I’m getting what I signed up for years back it hasn’t been ruined in any noticeable way. Fine they added the stupid views but who cares

figassis 3y ago

I've been looking at Substack with the eyes of someone who has lived through the enshitment of Quora, Medium et al, and realized there are never guarantees with any such service. Apparently I owe them money and attention, and they owe me nothing. I will never get long term what I joined a service for, so today I simply do not commit. I never committed to Twitter, and I'm glad. I want to share content, I setup a ghost site. I want to read content, I use RSS and also read what I can for free. That's it.

prepend 3y ago

> I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. I’m happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it’s a net negative for the world and we’ll be better off without it. This might be the only tech I’ve ever felt like this about (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates hate and division. It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it was a gawker-style takedown with the intent to purposely destroy something in a lasting and permanent way as described in Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel’s purposeful execution of strategy to destroy gawker, https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holiday https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holida... PS- are there any other business/tech “case study” type books out there. I also liked Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg, John Brooks’ Business Adventures, Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift, and David Kaplan’s Silicon Boys. Looking for more of what I suspect is more common than I can find.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
I really like those "case study" books about our industry, too. Off the top of my head, two more: - "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton (published in 2014, about the early days of Twitter) - "Super Pumped" by Mike Isaac (published in 2019, about the early days of Uber) Neither of them go into great detail or nuance — they're made for popular consumption, so they simplify things and gloss over details. You won't find any extensive discussion of microservice architecture and organizational design. But they were still interesting reads.