19 ms·
It wasn't like Twitter's business had a large technical barrier-to-entry. And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as har
by jpmattia 4y ago
It wasn't like Twitter's business had a large technical barrier-to-entry. And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can.
Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch!
Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.
- Cardinal7167 4y agoThe great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.
- jimsimmons 4y agoYou should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent
- dmix 4y agoPeople like to be predictors of doom before the hard evidence comes out.
- cfeduke 4y ago> There’s no dent By the time there is a dent, it's too late.
- andy_ppp 4y agoSounds great but you’ll have to provide some logic because I don’t automatically follow your extremely confident opinion…
- lenkite 4y agoPeople here are praying very hard for Twitter to fail. Nearly any social media post nowadays has 50-100 comments predicting Twitter's failure and ranting about Musk. He is living rent-free in many heads now. Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.
- laratiede 4y ago[dead]
- gessha 4y agoAny publicity is good publicity it seems like. People don’t get that hating is not the opposite of love, it’s indifference. Mute and forget.
- andy_ppp 4y agoI just sent the second part of this to my friend WRT his ex-wife…
- theturtletalks 4y agoHate is just confused admiration
- ekianjo 4y agoBy the time someone makes a bad argument its too late. We are beyond reason.
- markstos 4y agoI used Bing today. I’m denting.
- alfor 4y agoI tried Edge and bing, God awful. You just feel their desire to take control of your experience of the web. On the flip site, made me see how much Google own us all.
- raytube 4y agoI use ddg everyday and I hate it. I resort to Google shortly after. Not personalised so I guess I am missing out on decent returns.
- K5EiS 4y agoI tried ddg, but i found myself adding !g a lot, so i just switched back.
- propogandist 4y agotry Brave’s search service
- manmal 4y agoHave you tried kagi? I‘m finding it better than ddg and often on paar with G.
- andyjohnson0 4y ago+1 for Kagi. It's been my default search engine since Jan '22 and I'm very happy with it. On the rare occasions when I use Bing or Google I'm reminded all over again why I'm happy to pay for search.
- manmal 4y ago
- pantalaimon 4y agoIf AI assisted search gets larger it might be to Google what Google was to AltaVista
- mrkramer 4y agoGoogle controls distribution on Web through Google Chrome. How would AI assisted search even reach casual web users? Word of mouth is not enough.
- gremlinsinc 4y agoI switched to edge on all my devices (in hopes of getting early access to Bing Chat), and honestly there's a lot more features and it performs better, so they won't get anything from me except whatever they can milk from gmail. I haven't searched using them in over a year, used to use Brave Search, and You.com for awhile.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> You should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent. "You should look up global search volumes and Yahoo's share of it. There’s no dent" was once a valid statement. Same for Altavista, MySpace, etc. You can go from on top to the bottom very fast in this realm.
- geraneum 4y agoSame could be said when iPhone came out. Now look where Android is. The fact that something happened to others means nothing. Could go either way. edit: typo
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wpietri 4y agoWell, it means it could go either way. Which with respect to Google and search is quite a novelty, as Google has been on top for 20 years, without a serious competitor for most of that time.
- nr2x 4y agoKey difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be default search provider. The US Department of Justice is going after this. Once Google can’t pay-to-play in Safari and iOS they are in very deep shit. This is the classic thing with monopolies: eventually the “innovation” is just leveraging market power to deepen the moat by burning cash. This is what happens when the CFO runs the damn company. Sundar has no vision, at all, and Ruth’s vision is the same boring Wall Street play book that put a hundred tech companies in the ground.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> Key difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be default search provider. Yahoo used to pay for that, and to package the Yahoo Toolbar pretty much everywhere. I remember when it used to try to install itself with MySQL. I'm sure it helps, for a while, until it suddenly doesn't.
- redmaverick 4y agoyou should look at all the blockbuster stores and Netflix's share of it. There's no dent. ~ Someone in 1997.
- jonathankoren 4y agoYou should look at all CD sales and minidisk’s share of it. There’s no dent.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nr2x 4y agoKodak had pretty strong film sales when the first digital cameras hit the market as well.
- thrashh 4y agoYeah but that doesn’t mean anything. Kodak saw a train coming, did a study that told them that they had to do something, but then sat on the tracks. Fuji, who was also big in the chemical film business, came out just fine.
- nr2x 4y agoI take it you don’t work at Google?
- mgfist 4y ago> Kodak saw a train coming, did a study that told them that they had to do something, but then sat on the tracks. Replace "Kodak" with "Google" and that's the exact impression I get from friends who work there
- nr2x 4y agoI just resigned from Google. There’s no future with current leadership. I was a at high level (6), with an incredibly broad scope of responsibility, making an absurd amount of money. But life is too short to spend my days propping up a dying monopoly when there’s bigger game to chase. It’s also institutionally arrogant, they really think they are the best, Jeff Dean and Urs are Gods, and no other company can do what Google does. OpenAI just destroyed that myth, yet on the inside they haven’t woken up to the change.
- gremlinsinc 4y agoHey, myself and an ex-microsoft dev (like 2007-2008, not recent), with some VP experience have teamed up. We're working on memory solutions for AI, as well as creating better agents, workflows, etc... In the early days it'll mostly be a GUI over langchain/autogpt/babyAGI, eventually it might morph to creating our own in-house brain-like database, something beyond vectors (or built on top of them w/ a better ranking/indexing based on frequency/recency). Hit me up, if you'd consider partnering up.
- QuantumYeti 4y agoI actually just switched all our default search engines to Bing yesterday. Google is showing "Sponsors" that link directly to a full screen page with tons of warnings telling you to call some 800 number so you can get scammed. And that's after nearly downloading a fake Blender install a few weeks ago. I'm done with it.
- jononomo 4y agoI just switched to Bing about three months ago -- I haven't noticed any difference, to be honest.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago1. ChatGPT is very, very new, and habits change slowly 2. For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts 3. All of this will eventually change There is no more major growth for Google, which is all that matters to Wall Street. It will go down slowly, but it will go down.
- drexlspivey 4y ago> For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts There are tons of free custom UIs to chatGPT by now, all vastly superior to OpenAI’s. No captchas or login screens, just paste your API token once and it gets stored in local storage.
- sundarurfriend 4y agoThanks for mentioning this. I'd assumed this was the case, but I'd been wary of using them because I wasn't sure which of them would be reliable and non-sketchy. Your comment made me take a second look, this time specifically for FOSS custom UIs, and https://chatwithgpt.netlify.app/ https://chatwithgpt.netlify.app/ seems pretty decent (and is FOSS).
- drexlspivey 4y agoYou can also put a hard dollar limit on OpenAI just to be safe.
- mrkramer 4y agoGoogle wanted to be an Answer Machine before ChatGPT hence "I'm Feeling Lucky" button but road to there is long and hard. I think the biggest Google's problems are SEO spam often coupled with scams and fraud and last but not least, lack of transparency on how exactly they rank their search results.
- gonzo41 4y agoI don't think we should pretend that google doesn't have the power to crush spam today if it wanted to. They have chosen to let scrappers have top spots in their search results and their reputation is dying as a result.
- doublerabbit 4y agoDiscord attacking Twitch too
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tracker1 4y agoRelatively happy to see it... though I do tend to lean towards the free speech side of the coin, and kind of miss the relative wild west that was IRC in the 90's. I feel like centralized social media is a blessing and a curse. What's old is new again.
- emodendroket 4y ago“Free speech” is a term that’s been completely abused and used in bad faith.
- tracker1 4y agoIs your assertion that I'm using it in bad faith?
- emodendroket 4y agoNo, but rather that Musk has been using it in bad faith (I’m assuming “I support free speech” was meant to qualify the criticism of Twitter under Musk’s leadership).
- tracker1 4y agoYeah, Musk's definition of supporting free speech wasn't much to speak of... better than the old guard, but really weird in ways too. For me, short of threats or calls for violence I'm pretty open to whatever... As long as you're able to as an individual block/filter. Though the NSFW content on Twitter can be pretty bad and wouldn't mind being able to selectively filter that as a user too.
- emodendroket 4y agoI don’t think it is better than “the old guard” at all. I would agree with this piece (which contains examples to make the point), that all he’s done is boost ideas he likes hearing and suppress ones he doesn’t in nakedly partisan fashion: https://apple.news/ANuPT612pRca2DdolgCyu1g https://apple.news/ANuPT612pRca2DdolgCyu1g And it does neatly summarize what I meant about the term “free speech” being abused: “ For them, free speech is when they can say what they want, and when you can say what they want.”
- chipgap98 4y agoI don't think Facebook really belongs in this conversation. As much as the VR stuff is silly their core business is still doing very well
- jabradoodle 4y agoAnd so is googles, Facebook are spending more than $10B a year on VR. For context that is more than Nvidia's quite large R&D budget, which they have ramped up on consistently over years. Facebook has gone from 0 to 10B real fast.
- wordpad25 4y agopeople treat facebook as if it were like their myspace, something dumb they did in their youth that's not longer relevant and is dying reality is pretty different, fb business is doing great despite all their missteps
- wvenable 4y agoI use Facebook more than ever these days but oddly for none of things I used to use it for. It's now got some obscure technical community groups that are too niche and too small for reddit or discord. Facebook Marketplace has replaced craigslist. My friend feed is totally incidental to my use of Facebook.
- bigger_cheese 4y agoPersonally in my circle I still use Facebook messenger service - my extended family has a group chat and some of my friend groups still use messenger chats (I'd say post pandemic discord is used more then messenger now) my parents use messenger to video chat with their grandkids. It's essentially become skype. The actual facebook.com friend feed etc. is essentially dead for me at least.
- ninth_ant 4y agoGoogle’s core businesses are doing just fine too. Twitter has suffered financially but I’ve seen little evidence that they’ve lost substantial numbers of users — Twitter posts are still in news articles and sites like HN as if it’s still serving it’s original purpose despite the noise.
- greyman 4y agoBut is twitter really dying? The fields I watch (AI, software engineering, writers), all thought leaders are still there, still posting regularly.
- sleepybrett 4y agoIn my communities most people are double posting on mastodon and twitter. So much so that I only check twitter every few days for the stragglers.
- AJ007 4y agoI have multiple communities I follow on Twitter and the ones that don't care about the elon stuff, they do now.
- jdminhbg 4y agoMastodon only has about 1.2M active users, so if most of your community is on there, it’s an unusual community. https://mastodon-analytics.com/ https://mastodon-analytics.com/
- sleepybrett 4y agoI mean sure, my mom doesn't have a masto account, she does have a twitter account. It's down to posters vs reply guys vs rubberneckers. If those 1.2M active users are posters and higher quality reply guys, great.
- lapcat 4y agoMost of the iOS developer community has moved to Mastodon. They're the reason I joined Twitter originally. The community is what I care about, not the social media platform.
- bee_rider 4y agoMy post will sound like a stupid gotcha but… what’s a thought leader, how do you measure them? Is it possible that the twitter crew skews more toward talking than doing?
- evo_9 4y agoAnd patient Apple waiting it all out to see whose lunch to eat next.
- slowmovintarget 4y agoWhat do you think those 16-core Neural Processing Units that ship in every Mac are for? They're not waiting to see, they're waiting for everyone to discover their lunch has already been eaten. How do you get around privacy concerns for using the big AI models? Run your own. How do you get around the compute requirements for training? Push to the leaf nodes. How do you solve for personalizing AIs? Have personal AI models running locally... And wouldn't it be nice if there was some dedicated hardware those AI models could inhabit...
- abathur 4y agoWith umptillion gigs of shared memory, too. Really the only reason I'm entertaining moving up from an mba to an mbp, but I haven't convinced myself it's worth the splurge yet.
- okdood64 4y agoSo are you going to take large short positions on Google and Facebook?
- Cardinal7167 4y agoI won’t be predictive or prescriptive about the markets. But it’s clear that tech giants will soon have to fall or evolve.
- czbond 4y agoTwitter's barrier wasn't that it was technically hard - it was that it was free and had critical mass. There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views
- sundaeofshock 4y agoYou are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the only platform where users could have interactions with prominent people in a variety of fields and know the interaction was legitimate. That mattered! Killing the verification system chased away many blue checks, who happened to generate a huge amount of traffic for the site. Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.
- memish 4y agoDon't confuse tolerance for free speech with the dubious concept of hate speech and its selective application.
- hobs 4y agoAh yes, that's why he banned all those journalists who spent time reporting on the lawsuits against him, because he's all for free speech. Nah, the dude is for his brand of free speech, which is you can hate the people he hates and you can do what he likes and you can stay on his website.
- robby_w_g 4y agoInteresting how you provided a direct counter example and your comment got flagged for it. I thought the free speech absolutist crowd wouldn’t mind someone disagreeing with them
- crazygringo 4y agoWow. This is a totally legitimate, reasonable comment and you got flagged for it. I've actually never seen that on HN before -- every flagged comment I've ever looked at turned out to be full of abusive language and attacks. It makes me sad that multiple HN'ers flagged this. :(
- g42gregory 4y agoWell, he is definitely upsetting some (many) people. But, at the same time, he is getting the new set of people as users. In the last few years, I would not touch Twitter with a ten-foot pole. Mostly because, I could no longer assess the provenance of the posts and the authenticity of their rankings. Is this post popular/important or is this post was put into my stream by Twitter/other entities in order to influence me? I don't like being manipulated so brazenly. Now, with the new management, I find myself going to Twitter more and more often. I disagree with many posts and I do not like many posts, but now, I could have some assurance that I am getting an authentic information.
- foogazi 4y ago> but now, I could have some assurance that I am getting an authentic information How ? And how is this different than before ?
- hobs 4y agoThat would make sense, if you had your pants and shirt on backward. Musk has introduced several high profile changes to corrupt "the authenticity of their rankings" - what on earth are you talking about regarding "authentic information" given the person running the place is a known and repeated liar, whose lied directly about his management decisions regarding the property you've mostly recently started liking? Seriously, what?
- Freedom2 4y agoPlease refrain from directly attacking other HN users - it does not contribute to discussion. The guidelines can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html As for the content of your post, users who have subscribed to Twitter Blue are more likely to be engaged with and invested in the platform, leading to wanting it to succeed. The additional verification markers for businesses also helps.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> users who have subscribed to Twitter Blue are more likely to be engaged with and invested in the platform, leading to wanting it to succeed Superfans are less credible/trustworthy, not more.
- Pxtl 4y agoI'm loving Mastodon myself (@pxtl@mastodon.social) but I worry that the UI stumbling blocks caused by the multi-server system and the far-poorer discoverability than what we're used to from Twitter will keep it from growing well -- twitter's algorithmic feed and relevant-to-the-user trending topics and features like that help make twitter feel lively even for a new user even with just a handful of follows. I don't know that Twitter would be as successful today as it is now without those features.
- wpietri 4y agoI think "is X the next Twitter" is the wrong question to ask. When I started working at Twitter (now years ago) my relatives asked me if they should join. And after thinking about it, my honest answer was "no". The only person who needs to be on Twitter is somebody who wants to feel like they're part of a global conversation. Most people just don't and won't. Twitter is only successful because it started in an era where that was a novel and appealing idea, and because it developed a critical mass of users. Both traditional participants in that conversation (journalists, politicians, media personalities, etc) and new ones (like dril) came on board. It is now gradually losing that critical mass. These days there are just too many options tuned to too many sets of needs. Mastodon will get a chunk of those people, as will existing social media properties. But I don't think we'll ever again see a global groupchat at the scale of Twitter. Assuming Musk persists in running it into the ground, I think in a decade's time Twitter will be in that bucket with MySpace or SixDegrees, one of those early-internet things that people remember with varying degrees of fondness but would never go back to using.
- tracker1 4y agoTBH, I really like Facebook's groups in terms of UX and maintainer level. I don't like FB themselves though, and their warnings are sometimes just at a level of insane. Keep thinking I'd like to create an easy button for FB groups like self-hosted community setups. Then you can control/host your own interest group... add in live group chats (that FB used to have for groups) and just have a centralized auth and search that are opt-in.
- ISL 4y ago
- rodgerd 4y ago> And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can. He's completely pissed it away. The skills at finessing the demands of different regulatory regimes were some of the first he got rid of, no doubt deriding it as "wokism". Now he's got fines racking up for publishing Nazi shit in Germany, privacy breaches in the EU, and is globally censoring anything that Hindu extremists don't like. Turns out that the main problem in social media is the social bit, not whether you can convince a man-child that your code works.
- greyman 4y agoBut if we look at the "mainstream" usage, like English-language thought leaders, they are still there, still posting regularly. Like for example in the AI field, all relevant people are on twitter.
- sleepybrett 4y agoIn my communities, niche though they are, most people have shifted to masto and have been crossposting to twitter. The replies on masto in general seem more engaged and thoughtful. Discoverability there is, of course, harder. At least initially, but just like twitter once I see someone making interesting replies, or someone in my follows boosts them, I tend to follow them faster (and drop them faster if their smart reply was a fluke).
- UncleOxidant 4y agoI see plenty of AI thought leaders posting on LinkedIn.
- akitzmiller 4y agoIt's true that they are still there, but I think loyalty is really soft. Musk seems to make some antagonizing change at least once a month that results in defections, the whole Substack thing being the latest. I follow Rex Chapman who seems to be one of those people that just does not want to have to rebuild his following somewhere else. He just recently signed up at Spoutible.
- 4y ago
- tr1ggerwarn 4y ago[flagged]
- dan-robertson 4y agoIn what sense do you think Twitter‘s business doesn’t have a large technical barrier to entry? Perhaps having a low-volume version makes it a lot easier and skipping all the ads stuff reduces the work.
- heylook 4y agoMany many senses. First, it's already been built. Now people now how to build it. In fact, many of the people that actually built it have left the company and could presumably help to build it again. Second, the toolchain has matured in absolutely huge ways. AWS exists. Twitter had to build their own cloud to meet scaling needs. Languages have matured or been purpose-written to enable building/scaling these types of systems. A huge portion of the N+1s and hidden footguns have been cleaned out of the thousands and thousands of open source libraries that you can glue together to get the system up and running. Third, Silicon Valley engineers as a whole have spent the last decade-plus building all sorts of Twitter-adjacent Web 2.0 projects, so there's an incredibly deep pool of people that have extremely relevant experience, even if they never stepped foot inside the Twitter building. Fourth, Twitter (and companies very similar) have been publishing literal engineering designs and post-mortems for public consumption on their engineering blogs. Even if you have no idea what HTML is, your path to self-education and building your own Twitter clone has never been shorter or better paved. They've even published huge chunks of their own work as open source projects. And on and on and on and on. And here's the thing about growing to Twitter-scale: it doesn't happen all at once. You can build the low-volume version and just follow approximately the same technical scaling path that Twitter itself followed, except you'll be able to skip a whole bunch of mistakes.
- dan-robertson 4y agoTwitter used to go down a lot. In some sense, struggling under load is a nice problem to have (as you want the users) though. I find I’m not super convinced that ‘aws exists’ or whatever solves the problems Twitter had. Though I guess a bunch of the problems with eg distributing a notification to millions of followers or super-deep reply chains or football games or new years or whatever can be punted on until you have significant numbers of users which fits ‘low barrier to entry’.
- Mizoguchi 4y ago500M humans are not in Twitter looking to have pleasant, cordial, thoughtful interactions and consume high quality content in a highly moderated environment. Actually that's exactly what we don't want. So Substack will be successful in its own niche, doesn't need to eat Twitter's lunch for that. The problem is at the current valuation of $650M and bleeding $25M per year, they will have to come up with a plan to generate revenue pretty soon, most likely in the form of ads and generally that's incompatible with high quality content. Now if Substack's fan base put their wallets where their mouth is and pay say $30 per month, then maybe Substack wouldn't need ads, but we know that's not going to happen, not even at $5 per month.
- m3kw9 4y agoNetwork effects are real and good luck reaching to the point where I’d need to switch when most of my follows had switched and abandon the network
- vishnugupta 4y agoTwitter's moat was and is network effect and having a critical mass of humans interacting through them. It was never about tech as such. But Musk seems, knowingly or unknowingly, to be systematically pissing off Twitter's users. The blue tick shenanigans and conflating it with paid membership, pissing off advertisers, the bots problem that was never addressed, promoting himself at the cost of business, his covert/overt approval of extreme right wing tweets, so on and so forth. There's only so much crap users can tolerate. A bunch of users have left for Mastodon, and a few more are doing so after he banned Substack links. Once a good chunk of core and influential content creators leave Twitter it'll get overwhelmed with bots and advertisers and will set of a negative spiral.
- barbariangrunge 4y agoNewsfeed based systems like this lead to lousy consequences. Trolling, toxicity, witch hunts, tribalism, racism. Distraction. Disconnection between people and having to be a slave to some algorithm to get noticed. I’m really sad to see substack do this
- Abishek_Muthian 4y agoJust by not showing random posts which the algorithm decides I should see on my timeline itself makes Mastodon leagues better than Twitter. I've been interacting with only couple of people whom I follow and vice versa for past several months I've been on Mastodon and I feel great about it. I'm convinced that federated instances are the solution to the social media problems just by strong focus on the theme and inherent limit to scaling without any pressure from VCs. P.S. Please consider donating to your Mastodon instance.
- rewtraw 4y agowithout a UX that abstracts away the siloed nature of federated instances, it really is a massive hindrance to network effects and will prevent Mastodon from ever growing beyond a small niche
- Abishek_Muthian 4y ago>without a UX that abstracts away the siloed nature of federated instances Can you be more specific? Only thing I found missing was "Quote Posts" and almost everyone seems to agree that it was the right decision to make. > will prevent Mastodon from ever growing beyond a small niche And its not a good thing? "There's an instance for everything" is fast becoming an reality, Let those instances be small as its managed by volunteers; There's no need for everything to grow into a democracy destroying scale, Especially Social Media platforms.
- rewtraw 4y agothat posters cannot reach an audience beyond their own server. the point of a microblogging platform is to create and consume content, but who wants to publish to a platform that doesn’t have the largest potential reach? and if the best content creators aren’t on the platform, why would the consumers be?
- Abishek_Muthian 4y agoHave you considered that not everyone wants to be an influencer on Social Media? Some might just want to have a social interaction with like minded people, I'm one of them and Mastodon has been perfect for it. I have a 14 year old Twitter account, Apart from the first few years when Twitter was actually like Mastodon with friends fooling around I never felt happy browsing Twitter; It has become an algorithm enforced narcissism universe with everyone trying to sell something or themselves.