9 ms·

I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are. It’s becoming increasingly ob

by dhosek 3y ago

I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen. Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed only and the algorithmic feed on Twitter made a lot of people skeptical of that. Throw in the phone-app-only interface and it’s not where my people want to be. It’s a chicken and egg problem to be sure, and I don’t know where the new writer bar is going to be. It might end up being Threads ultimately, but the big challenge is for whatever new platform to get the movement happening.

dhosek 3y ago
If I had to guess what the indicator of where the new writer bar ends up, it will be wherever Joyce Carol Oates goes. Not because people like her or her tweets necessarily, but that she’s kind of like the black hole at the center of a galaxy, you don’t want to get too close (she’s the queen of the bizarre takes, not to mention her post with a rather disturbing picture of her feet), and yet everything kind of ineluctably ends up orbiting around her anyway.
- numboreal 3y ago
  She once posted a picture of her keyboard that haunts me.
davidw 3y ago
> Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed That was probably a wise decision to seed it with something for people to look at and interact with so they didn't just sign in and see a blank page. The random influencers and other people "go away" pretty quickly if you start following and interacting with people you care more about.
- anonymousab 3y ago
  A common complaint with Threads was that, no after who you blocked or muted, it's near impossible to get away from a feed filled with influencers and common celebrity gossip nonsense. That seems to be part of the ongoing design intent - not just an aspect of how they wanted to bootstrap the service.
  - davidw 3y ago
    A few days ago they introduced a 'following' feed. They seem pretty intent on iterating quickly on it. And even without that, the influencers mostly went away for me when I followed people I found more interesting.
  - spansoa 3y ago
    > a feed filled with influencers and common celebrity gossip And marketers. Remember: marketers ruin everything. They early adopt every up-and-coming platform and fill it with grifty posts.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  The empty timeline problem is a completely different problem of an algorithmic timeline of not people you follow. Hell, it required an Instagram account to sign up. You already have their follow graph.
- snarkyturtle 3y ago
  Agree, they rolled out the "Following" tab and it's a ghost town. Shipping it with the algorithmic feed at least made it look like a lively, if somehwat chaotic place.
gremlinsinc 3y ago
I'd like to see some semi centralized but social benefit Corp create a Twitter that utilizes the h factor score that scientific researchers have. ie something like Reddit karma but it's based off how controversial a users posts and comments generally are, how many times posts are reported or flagged, and use ai to do sentiment analysis as well to verify the reports and scores are accurate. Maybe have the users tweets a shade of blue and the more respected the brighter the blue color.
ghawk1ns 3y ago
> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk Is this hyperbole? Twitter will be fine, Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions. Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. The biggest change has been perception from ideological extremes. I'm sure Twitter will evolve but evolution is for growth, not death. You use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers? Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a source of income?
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. If you don't have a Twitter account, you cannot see threads on Twitter anymore.
  - tedivm 3y ago
    And if you don't pay for twitter blue you can't DM people anymore unless they know to explicitly turn off that new filter. You also are limited in how many tweets you can view in a day, and without paying your reach is also shortened. At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted in my feed are now showing up all the time.
    - mst 3y ago
      If you're using twitter web, the Control Panel for Twitter browser extension takes the 'for you' abomination behind the back of the barn and gives it both barrels. (there's also a userscript version IIRC)
- davidw 3y ago
  > Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions He already has? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-investor-writes-down-stake-threads-elon-musk https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-i... https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-investors-twitters-value-may-have-plunged-by-more-than-60-percent https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-inves... It's big enough and established enough that it's not going to disappear overnight, but so far the results are pretty underwhelming. I, for the life of me, can't figure out why someone who has been successful and earned a decent amount of goodwill in other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal with social media which is just super difficult to manage even in the best of cases.
milsorgen 3y ago
The feed could be somewhat overlooked, at least for the time being, if hashtags and searching were properly implemented. If no interesting conversations appear in my feed then there's no way for me to spend more time on Threads. Open, Look, Close. Repeat that a few times and give up. I gave it a chance but there's just so little to do.
nerdawson 3y ago
> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen. First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't. Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the death knell for Twitter. It wasn't. My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that comes along might show promise at the start, people quickly revert back to their familiar network that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to).
- afavour 3y ago
  > that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to). I assure you I genuinely do not like what Twitter has become. The lack of viable alternative doesn’t change that fact.
- hooverd 3y ago
  Mastodon isn't going to be /the/ new place. Hopefully it will become part of many new places.
  - nerdawson 3y ago
    Last year Mastodon went through a hype cycle. Everyone was declaring Twitter over. You had people stating they were leaving for good, dual-posting, etc. Funnily enough many of those same people are back on Twitter today with little mention of Mastodon. It peaked in November and then went into decline. As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave. Musk's antics might prop it up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users will be the most avid hardcore fans.
    - burkaman 3y ago
      It did peak in December last year, but then it "declined" and stabilized at more than double the active users it had before Elon bought Twitter: https://mastodon-analytics.com/ https://mastodon-analytics.com/
gloryjulio 3y ago
He didn't kill threads but he definitely killed it's profitability. Let's see how he recovers from that
throwaway-243 3y ago
why not just ignore the "chaos monkeys" and focus on your writers instead? no one is forcing you to interact with anyone you don't like on X.
- medler 3y ago
  One thing that’s impossible to ignore is that Twitter now forces you to read bad replies. Before, it would rank the most popular replies near the top, but now you have to scroll past lots of low-quality replies from people who are boosted just because they pay for the privilege.
  - dmix 3y ago
    I use Twitter daily and unless you're looking at major threads (like an Elon tweet) it's rarely more than a single verified user (if at all). And they are rarely better/worse than the average Tweet normally is in those mega threads. It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Bad replies aren't necessarily the least popular. Any number of people would prefer blue check (basically signed) replies than pseudonymous drivebys whose entire participation in twitter is sharp replies that get massively upvoted. Also, popularity based in upvotes from nobody, unverified accounts is usually inorganic. Scoring upvotes based on how many of them are from verified or likely authentic accounts can only improve user experience (for content providers, not professional reply guys.)
    - mjmsmith 3y ago
      > Any number of people would prefer blue check ... where "any" is the number of people who paid for a blue check.
- dullcrisp 3y ago
  What’s X?
foogazi 3y ago
> Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed only On it’s first fucking day Been using the new follow feed and honestly I appreciate the algo feed sprinkling some randomness here and there
rglullis 3y ago
> I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe. "But you can't respond to people there". Yeah, but I don't care. Since Elon changed the meaning of the blue checkmark and made it effectively pay-to-play, the chances of someone seeing my responses are effectively zero.
- tivert 3y ago
  > For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe. Didn't Musk break Twitter a few weeks back in a hamfisted attempt to deal with scrapers? What that was he was fighting against?
  - rglullis 3y ago
    That was his excuse, there are some alternative theories that say that he put the rate limits only to cut his AWS bills. Anyway, it should be known that fighting against scrapers is a lost cause. Nitter is still going strong, BirdSiteLive (the software that powers bird.makeup) as well, and even if he really blocked these alternative methods, I wouldn't be surprised if the archive.org people came up with some browser extension that could help replicate the content elsewhere.
    - tayo42 3y ago
      Twitter doesn't use aws for anything important... Lol people's just say anything online
      - rglullis 3y ago
        Replace AWS with whatever cloud provider they use...
        tayo42 3y ago
flopriore 3y ago
Yeah, that's exactly the "Cold Start Problem". You must get the "hard side" of the network (drivers for Uber, content creator for social networks) asap and they must be happy to use your platform, otherwise your product is going to be a failure
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
panic 3y ago
It's also possible there will be no successor place.
Tao3300 3y ago
What's a Twitter? We're supposed to be xing and rexing our xs on x now.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > We're supposed to be xing and rexing our xs on x now. Relevant: https://www.xing.com/ https://www.xing.com/ (a site very similar so LinkedIn that rather has its mainstay in the German-speaking market instead of a more international focus like LinkedIn)
sega_sai 3y ago
I think you can now disable algorithmic feed, which was my main gripe as well. But the lack of website is still a show-stopper for me.
- bitsoda 3y ago
  You can switch to a following-only view, but it resets whenever the app is re-launched, which is a real scummy pattern. Agree on the need for a proper website that isn’t read-only. I get that most usage will come from mobile, but for the more interesting and prolific posters, tapping out blurbs and interacting with others on mobile is a second-rate experience that doesn’t feel as rich when compared to using a web app. Meta’s working on it, so hopefully we’ll see if the culture of the service shifts away from that Instagram feel.
renegade-otter 3y ago
People have spent years getting followers and algorithmic advantage based on previous engagement. Social media is not a shopping app - content creators will not just bolt for something better as they are invested. Do they want to? Definitely, but it's not a simple lift and shift. It will only happen once Musk either terminally runs Twitter into the ground (bankruptcy), or makes it completely unbearable.
iamflimflam1 3y ago
Threads now has a “following” tab - and most importantly, so far, it hasn’t randomly switched back to the “for you” tab.

by dhosek 3y ago

dhosek 3y ago

If I had to guess what the indicator of where the new writer bar ends up, it will be wherever Joyce Carol Oates goes. Not because people like her or her tweets necessarily, but that she’s kind of like the black hole at the center of a galaxy, you don’t want to get too close (she’s the queen of the bizarre takes, not to mention her post with a rather disturbing picture of her feet), and yet everything kind of ineluctably ends up orbiting around her anyway.

numboreal 3y ago
She once posted a picture of her keyboard that haunts me.

davidw 3y ago

> Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed That was probably a wise decision to seed it with something for people to look at and interact with so they didn't just sign in and see a blank page. The random influencers and other people "go away" pretty quickly if you start following and interacting with people you care more about.

anonymousab 3y ago
A common complaint with Threads was that, no after who you blocked or muted, it's near impossible to get away from a feed filled with influencers and common celebrity gossip nonsense. That seems to be part of the ongoing design intent - not just an aspect of how they wanted to bootstrap the service.
- davidw 3y ago
  A few days ago they introduced a 'following' feed. They seem pretty intent on iterating quickly on it. And even without that, the influencers mostly went away for me when I followed people I found more interesting.
- spansoa 3y ago
  > a feed filled with influencers and common celebrity gossip And marketers. Remember: marketers ruin everything. They early adopt every up-and-coming platform and fill it with grifty posts.
jonathankoren 3y ago
The empty timeline problem is a completely different problem of an algorithmic timeline of not people you follow. Hell, it required an Instagram account to sign up. You already have their follow graph.
snarkyturtle 3y ago
Agree, they rolled out the "Following" tab and it's a ghost town. Shipping it with the algorithmic feed at least made it look like a lively, if somehwat chaotic place.

gremlinsinc 3y ago

I'd like to see some semi centralized but social benefit Corp create a Twitter that utilizes the h factor score that scientific researchers have. ie something like Reddit karma but it's based off how controversial a users posts and comments generally are, how many times posts are reported or flagged, and use ai to do sentiment analysis as well to verify the reports and scores are accurate. Maybe have the users tweets a shade of blue and the more respected the brighter the blue color.

ghawk1ns 3y ago

> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk Is this hyperbole? Twitter will be fine, Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions. Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. The biggest change has been perception from ideological extremes. I'm sure Twitter will evolve but evolution is for growth, not death. You use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers? Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a source of income?

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. If you don't have a Twitter account, you cannot see threads on Twitter anymore.
- tedivm 3y ago
  And if you don't pay for twitter blue you can't DM people anymore unless they know to explicitly turn off that new filter. You also are limited in how many tweets you can view in a day, and without paying your reach is also shortened. At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted in my feed are now showing up all the time.
  - mst 3y ago
    If you're using twitter web, the Control Panel for Twitter browser extension takes the 'for you' abomination behind the back of the barn and gives it both barrels. (there's also a userscript version IIRC)
davidw 3y ago
> Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions He already has? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-investor-writes-down-stake-threads-elon-musk https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-i... https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-investors-twitters-value-may-have-plunged-by-more-than-60-percent https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-inves... It's big enough and established enough that it's not going to disappear overnight, but so far the results are pretty underwhelming. I, for the life of me, can't figure out why someone who has been successful and earned a decent amount of goodwill in other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal with social media which is just super difficult to manage even in the best of cases.

milsorgen 3y ago

The feed could be somewhat overlooked, at least for the time being, if hashtags and searching were properly implemented. If no interesting conversations appear in my feed then there's no way for me to spend more time on Threads. Open, Look, Close. Repeat that a few times and give up. I gave it a chance but there's just so little to do.

nerdawson 3y ago

> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen. First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't. Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the death knell for Twitter. It wasn't. My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that comes along might show promise at the start, people quickly revert back to their familiar network that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to).

afavour 3y ago
> that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to). I assure you I genuinely do not like what Twitter has become. The lack of viable alternative doesn’t change that fact.
hooverd 3y ago
Mastodon isn't going to be /the/ new place. Hopefully it will become part of many new places.
- nerdawson 3y ago
  Last year Mastodon went through a hype cycle. Everyone was declaring Twitter over. You had people stating they were leaving for good, dual-posting, etc. Funnily enough many of those same people are back on Twitter today with little mention of Mastodon. It peaked in November and then went into decline. As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave. Musk's antics might prop it up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users will be the most avid hardcore fans.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    It did peak in December last year, but then it "declined" and stabilized at more than double the active users it had before Elon bought Twitter: https://mastodon-analytics.com/ https://mastodon-analytics.com/

gloryjulio 3y ago

He didn't kill threads but he definitely killed it's profitability. Let's see how he recovers from that

throwaway-243 3y ago

why not just ignore the "chaos monkeys" and focus on your writers instead? no one is forcing you to interact with anyone you don't like on X.

medler 3y ago
One thing that’s impossible to ignore is that Twitter now forces you to read bad replies. Before, it would rank the most popular replies near the top, but now you have to scroll past lots of low-quality replies from people who are boosted just because they pay for the privilege.
- dmix 3y ago
  I use Twitter daily and unless you're looking at major threads (like an Elon tweet) it's rarely more than a single verified user (if at all). And they are rarely better/worse than the average Tweet normally is in those mega threads. It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Bad replies aren't necessarily the least popular. Any number of people would prefer blue check (basically signed) replies than pseudonymous drivebys whose entire participation in twitter is sharp replies that get massively upvoted. Also, popularity based in upvotes from nobody, unverified accounts is usually inorganic. Scoring upvotes based on how many of them are from verified or likely authentic accounts can only improve user experience (for content providers, not professional reply guys.)
  - mjmsmith 3y ago
    > Any number of people would prefer blue check ... where "any" is the number of people who paid for a blue check.
dullcrisp 3y ago
What’s X?

foogazi 3y ago

> Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed only On it’s first fucking day Been using the new follow feed and honestly I appreciate the algo feed sprinkling some randomness here and there

rglullis 3y ago

> I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe. "But you can't respond to people there". Yeah, but I don't care. Since Elon changed the meaning of the blue checkmark and made it effectively pay-to-play, the chances of someone seeing my responses are effectively zero.

tivert 3y ago
> For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe. Didn't Musk break Twitter a few weeks back in a hamfisted attempt to deal with scrapers? What that was he was fighting against?
- rglullis 3y ago
  That was his excuse, there are some alternative theories that say that he put the rate limits only to cut his AWS bills. Anyway, it should be known that fighting against scrapers is a lost cause. Nitter is still going strong, BirdSiteLive (the software that powers bird.makeup) as well, and even if he really blocked these alternative methods, I wouldn't be surprised if the archive.org people came up with some browser extension that could help replicate the content elsewhere.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    Twitter doesn't use aws for anything important... Lol people's just say anything online
    - rglullis 3y ago
      Replace AWS with whatever cloud provider they use...
      - tayo42 3y ago

flopriore 3y ago

Yeah, that's exactly the "Cold Start Problem". You must get the "hard side" of the network (drivers for Uber, content creator for social networks) asap and they must be happy to use your platform, otherwise your product is going to be a failure

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

panic 3y ago

It's also possible there will be no successor place.

Tao3300 3y ago

What's a Twitter? We're supposed to be xing and rexing our xs on x now.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> We're supposed to be xing and rexing our xs on x now. Relevant: https://www.xing.com/ https://www.xing.com/ (a site very similar so LinkedIn that rather has its mainstay in the German-speaking market instead of a more international focus like LinkedIn)

sega_sai 3y ago

I think you can now disable algorithmic feed, which was my main gripe as well. But the lack of website is still a show-stopper for me.

bitsoda 3y ago
You can switch to a following-only view, but it resets whenever the app is re-launched, which is a real scummy pattern. Agree on the need for a proper website that isn’t read-only. I get that most usage will come from mobile, but for the more interesting and prolific posters, tapping out blurbs and interacting with others on mobile is a second-rate experience that doesn’t feel as rich when compared to using a web app. Meta’s working on it, so hopefully we’ll see if the culture of the service shifts away from that Instagram feel.

renegade-otter 3y ago

People have spent years getting followers and algorithmic advantage based on previous engagement. Social media is not a shopping app - content creators will not just bolt for something better as they are invested. Do they want to? Definitely, but it's not a simple lift and shift. It will only happen once Musk either terminally runs Twitter into the ground (bankruptcy), or makes it completely unbearable.

iamflimflam1 3y ago

Threads now has a “following” tab - and most importantly, so far, it hasn’t randomly switched back to the “for you” tab.