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It's pretty common that after a peak of new signups, most do not convert to long term active users. This doesn't even take into account that most "active users"

It's pretty common that after a peak of new signups, most do not convert to long term active users. This doesn't even take into account that most "active users" tend to never post anything, they just leech. They still count as MAU. I'm sure that Meta has plenty of ways to boost that number in the long term but overall I find the entire thing underwhelming. Threads is text-based Instagram. But not even that as you can very well include photos. It has exactly the same shallow culture as Instagram: commercial, flat, vain. Meta has openly expressed that it's disinterested or even hostile to news/journalism making their way to the platform (which comes with a lot of political flame-wars), instead to focus on making it a "fun" platform. Quite obviously because advertisers prefer networks without controversy. Users may self-censor as on Threads the link to your real name is not very far away. Many users may have a real name Insta account linked up which in turn is linked to your Facebook account. Even if not visibility linked to your real name, internally you should assume it's there. So who knows what happens to all those accounts when you step over the line in Threads? Hence, it's not Twitter which is defined by the culture war taking the main stage. Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. It also produces quite a lot of original content, whether they be memes or otherwise. You'll find none of that originating on Meta networks. As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost. There is no longer a "cultural network" where you push a message and get reach. None of the alternatives work for this purpose either. I have no idea what will become of Twitter, but I do know to keep an open mind as we live in wild times. Just because Musk is a chaos monkey does not mean that it will not eventually rebound or even surpass old Twitter.

ghaff 3y ago
It’s hard to say. What I see is a lot of people in my network really scaling back or dropping Twitter and maybe playing with the alternatives but not really embracing them. I suspect that for many it will be a case of “Social media was nice while it lasted.”
- strangattractor 3y ago
  Sounds like Musk did them a favor.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Lots of people used Twitter to keep in touch with professional peers and other non-outrage communities of interest. So that’s a cheap lazy take. But I do think there’s some regret that is similar in nature to the Eternal September. Things were “fine” before the plebes and political interests found the platform.
    - strangattractor 3y ago
      I'll never deny being both cheap and lazy however the number of people injured each year walking across the street while looking at their phones suggests that social media like Twitter might actually be detrimental to one's health.
- dahwolf 3y ago
  I think that's an excellent point. Social media fatigue seems at its peak in this time of transition, further accelerated by the COVID era. People are becoming aware of their over-usage and the largely minimal or even negative benefits that come from social media altogether. Or just bored and indifferent about it. The fatigue is further strengthened when they soon learn that the alternatives are worse or at best just moving the problem. I'd advocate for people to stop rather than cheer for any new potential winner. Just uninstall the app and walk away. It was all a lie anyway. You're not in a "community". You do not actually have followers. You did not learn anything new that you couldn't learn elsewhere. They are lies we tell ourselves as we play the slot machine. Throw it in the trash.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    I’m so unable to relate to perspectives like this on social media. I have Insta and my connections on there are almost entirely my real friends, we all post stuff we’re actually doing in our lives, and send messages to each other, etc… as in, we actually use it for socialising. I follow a small handful of celebrity accounts, and browse reels occasionally, but the main reason I like using it is to interact with my friends.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      That isn't 'social media', that is a friend network utilizing a social media network already in place as a communications device.
      - AmericanChopper 3y ago
        This seems like a very peculiar attempt at gate keeping to me. It’s a social network application that we use to share the content that we’ve created with each other. That’s what social media is, and the use case I’m describing is basically what it was initially created for.
        aydyn 3y ago
- anyfoo 3y ago
  My impression as well. Though I'm biased, because it's also the case for me specifically, so I tend to see the world through that same lens. In my case, I didn't give up social media entirely, but mostly shifted back to "web forums", which also seem to be experiencing some sort of renaissance (another data point). They have more of a local/semi-closed community feeling, as opposed to the "wide open sea" of major social media. I consider HN to be one of those "forums", although it's more a bit of a hybrid between the two worlds, and of course it has been existing all along.
- jacooper 3y ago
  100%, once Twitter falls, I would probably just leave it all. Maybe LinkedIn for the professional stuff.
  - water9 3y ago
    That’s called growing up, but there’s a new one of you born every minute
    - jacooper 3y ago
      How? It's not like Twitter Userbase is particularly young, neither is HN.
    - weregiraffe 3y ago
      >there’s a new one of you born every minute And soon my army of clones will be ready!!!
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  > for many it will be a case of “Social media was nice while it lasted.” Good for them. Social media is a miasma of addiction and time-wasting. ~~They~~ we should `touch grass.social`
madeofpalk 3y ago
> Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. Yeah, for the "chronically online". But twitter is also celebs and brands, and the "normals" following them. I think for those Threads will find an audience. It will be... Twitter, but for Instagram. Twitter has always had an outside impact compared to it's actual userbase, mainly due to nailing the news media + politics segment. Threads could fail to pick up the same cultural impact, but still be a thriving business/website, especially if brands and advertisers prefer it over Twitter.
- pornel 3y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if it was a deliberate strategy to lure only "normals" away from Twitter, so that the remaining faithful X users will be the loudest, edgiest, most politically polarized ones, speeding up the vicious cycle of X becoming nothing more than a toxic culture war battleground.
  - kelipso 3y ago
    Hopefully a battleground that no one will care about because the normies got lured away. Twitter not being a cultural network is probably much better for society because these always online losers currently seem to have much higher influence on society than they should.
klyrs 3y ago
> they just leech Isn't that Threads's whole thing? Everybody gets the same feed, no matter what you post?
canadianfella 3y ago
[dead]
AviationAtom 3y ago
I'd say I'm surprised by the persistent pessimism regarding Twitter, but I'm not. I don't think a sizable portion of people are even willing to entertain the idea that it might still having a place in the Internet ecosystem. Maybe not in exactly the same form as pre-Elon Twitter, but still a place.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Musk is using the For You feature to promote propaganda he approves of. My For You feed is full of paid climate change deniers, racists, mainstream far-right troll "journalists", and other people of questionable social value. It's absolutely an example of political editorialising and narrative control. And Musk now has a history of enabling criminal behaviour. https://gizmodo.com/twitter-dom-lucre-ban-elon-musk-child-exploitation-pics-1850681992 https://gizmodo.com/twitter-dom-lucre-ban-elon-musk-child-ex... So - yes, maybe it will continue in some form. But when progressive content is being deboosted it's not going to be the platform it used to be.
  - AviationAtom 3y ago
    I would argue that it was the other way around before. It was also people with non-progessive views actually being entirely banned from the site. What is worthy of banning can quickly turn subjective, when really there are limited things both sides should agree are not permissible on a platform.
jasmer 3y ago
[dead]
gigglesupstairs 3y ago
> Quite obviously because advertisers prefer networks without controversy. This + less moderation headaches for Meta as political discussions invite the most toxic users
2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
Elon is trying to turn Twitter/X into the wests WeChat. So at least he’s doing something interesting? I’m back in the Elon corner. Is he goes down, it’ll be doing something interesting at least. Meta might have a head start with WhatsApp, but I don’t see them doing anything interesting or well.
- fassssst 3y ago
  But the west already has iOS and Android. A super app is just a wannabe OS.
  - valianteffort 3y ago
    Google and Apple don't offer social media, the former has a video/streaming platform but doesn't seem concerned about losing it's dominant position.
    - fassssst 3y ago
      Group messaging is social media.
  - wizofaus 3y ago
    A super app presumably has a dedicated product manager with some sort of vision and control of what goes into what features are available. You could hardly say the same of iOS+AppStore or Android+Playstore. Note that I'm not the least bit convinced we would benefit from a super app, but WeChat seems to fill a need for however many millions of users it has.
    - pohl 3y ago
      Could you elaborate on that? It sounds like you’re saying that Google and Apple have no product management and they’re just shipping random features every year, but that sounds bonkers so I must be misunderstanding.
      - 3y ago
pohl 3y ago
they just leech We prefer the verb “lurk”. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lurker https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lurker
- robgibbons 3y ago
  Yep. Leeching is mostly used in the context of torrents. Generally, while you're downloading, you're "leeching." But also, if you don't seed a file after you download it, you can call that leeching. Lurking is when you frequent a forum but never post.
  - wilsynet 3y ago
    To leech, leeching and to be a leecher has been around since people used to download warez. It far predates torrents. I remember a local sysop in the 80s who ran an Apple II ASCII Express download site with two 5.25” floppy drives. You’d write him a text message and save it as a file. He was a cab driver and he’d come back home once in awhile and check the messages. If you were lucky he’d put your requested software in the second drive and maybe you’d check back in time before he fulfilled someone else’s request.
    - evandale 3y ago
      That sounds like such an awesome experience. As inconvenient as it sounds sometimes I wish I grew up in the beginnings of computers. My uncle told me a story of when he was at his first programming job carrying a box of at least 500 punch cards across a factory floor on his 2nd or 3rd day. Someone opened a garage door somewhere and a gust of wind came and blew every single punch card across the factory. They were everywhere he said. My uncle was terrified of losing his first job meanwhile these factory guys are pissing themselves laughing and almost literally rofl. Turns out it's a prank they pull on everyone. There's only been a few that held onto the box and the cards are complete trash. It sounds fun.
      - pohl 3y ago
        I've saw a prank like that on a small scale when I was a kid who liked to go play some old Trek game on a line-paper-printer-terminal — in a computer lab in a state college — that was dialed into a machine in a bigger city. Around me, meanwhile, were college students typing their programs into punch cards. I remember someone pretending to trip, spilling a stack, but then confessing that they were garbage.
14 3y ago
You make a good point and exactly why I would never in a million years sign into reddit with my Gmail account. I fear a cross platform ban somehow even if that is not how it works. My last account was banned for merely expressing my opinion and not doing so in an combative or nasty way just didn’t agree with the narrative and next thing I know I was permabanned.
- pohl 3y ago
  …my last account was banned for merely expressing my opinion… Nebulous anecdotes such as this always made him curious: opinion regarding what, precisely? “David Lane’s 14 words and 88 precepts, perhaps?” — he wondered to himself, unable to divert his eyes from their username.
macinjosh 3y ago
journalists leaving twitter is an improvement.
- dessimus 3y ago
  Care to expound on that? Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics. Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.
  - Mordisquitos 3y ago
    I'm not the previous commenter, but I certainly agree with it provided a small clarification: journalists leaving Twitter is an improvement for journalism.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    > Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics. Not at all. "Journalists" are as biased as they come. They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them. That hand is most often advertisers but may also be governments. Chances are the articles they produce are actually hidden advertisements or propaganda. How could anyone with such massive conflicts of interest bring credibility to literally anything? I want access to real information posted by real people, not agenda-pushing "credible authorities". > Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes. What makes you think these "journalists" aren't just randoms themselves? They're not really any better than any person on this site. Their particular brand of hot take is not automatically more valid than anyone else's. As far as I'm concerned their only purpose is to generate material for us to comment on. There is exactly one site in the entire internet I have enough respect for to call them true journalists: LWN. It's just excellent in every way and they don't need to posture as authorities for everyone else to believe it. Everything else ranks lower than HN's comment sections to me.
    - linza 3y ago
      I think a lot has to do with provenance. For journalists this is their day job, they post with their real name and usually under some larger entities name. They are perhaps as biased as everyone else, but it's easier to figure out the biases.
m3kw9 3y ago
I just see a beat down not wild times. Meta is trying to clone twitter and the only win they have is the signup process and people seeing what the fuss is about.
- distortionfield 3y ago
  Idk, the way I see it, they built a solid seed fan-base to eat more of twitter’s lunch.
  - m3kw9 3y ago
    Meta informing users of text based social platform may drive those users to Twitter seeing how it is superior in information content
djtango 3y ago
The live news is unreal. It's not unique to Twitter but seeing multiple accounts of any event anywhere in the world within seconds is kind of insane. I remember when the Beirut explosion happened so quickly you had footage of what had happened. This kind of latency is unachievable by traditional news
- freeopinion 3y ago
  It is achievable, but not always desirable. See, for example the ABC report of an ongoing firefight in Syria that turned out to be a gun range in Kentucky. Random footage of some explosion is not useful news without accurate explanations of what you are seeing. It often takes time to sort out the facts of a story. Moving breathlessly ahead without facts is usually called gossip.
bruce511 3y ago
There are a lot of news articles about Twitter because journalists use twitter, and have come to depend on it to boost their readership. Just this week there was an article on HN front page about journalism school requiring twitter accounts, and pushing journalists to build "their own brand" by getting lots of followers. These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related. Most people of course are not on twitter at all (and could care less). Some use it as a group-chat service. Some use it as joke-of-the-day. But the biggest user base by far is journalists who have invested in it big time.
- bombolo 3y ago
  journalists use twitter and love to pretend that everybody else does too, and pass a few tweets as "the people have spoken" all the time.
  - eertami 3y ago
    Yep, also comms/marketing people. I once had to explain to someone that nobody outside of Twitter has ever cared about anything that has ever happened on Twitter. It is a pure bubble of unimportant drivel. The only people who would even know are other Twitter users, most real people in real life don't use it and they are not interested or affected at all.
  - whstl 3y ago
    And loudmouths with outrageous opinions love Twitter because they know their precious tweets will eventually get caught by some semi-popular website one day.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    In the eyes of NHK (the Japanese broadcaster), Twitter is internet and internet is Twitter. Every single time they say "Let's see what people on the internet are saying.", the scene always changes over to tweets and tweets and tweets. Journalism is beyond redemption.
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
Lurking and not leeching.
heresie-dabord 3y ago
> I have no idea what will become of Twitter X
technotarek 3y ago
As someone who first created an IG account in 2010, then deleted it in 2019 after watching it decline, I like how simply this summed up my reasoning : « commercial, flat, vain «
xbmcuser 3y ago
Twitter might not be as important to the US as it is to a lot of other countries. A lot of content that is censored or blocked in countries by restrictive regimes rises on twitter organically. I think it plays a big role in dissemination of information from reporters etc. Take Pakistan for instance currently all the private channels are completely controlled by government it under quasi martial law. But because of twitter people are aware of 1000s of political prisoners including women and children, disappearances of reporters, harassment and threats by law enforcement to protestor families and relatives to control the protestors.
joenot443 3y ago
> As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost People keep saying this, but I've been a daily Twitter user since long before the Musk timeline and if anything the platform's never felt more engaged. Perhaps particularly vocal complainers like Taylor Lorenz leaving the platform makes the exodus seem greater than it is, but in general it seems high-follower users are just as engaged as they were before. The only exception seem to be characters like Lorenz whose conduct has been so poorly received by the community that they seemed to be looking for any good reason to leave while still saving face.

ghaff 3y ago

It’s hard to say. What I see is a lot of people in my network really scaling back or dropping Twitter and maybe playing with the alternatives but not really embracing them. I suspect that for many it will be a case of “Social media was nice while it lasted.”

strangattractor 3y ago
Sounds like Musk did them a favor.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Lots of people used Twitter to keep in touch with professional peers and other non-outrage communities of interest. So that’s a cheap lazy take. But I do think there’s some regret that is similar in nature to the Eternal September. Things were “fine” before the plebes and political interests found the platform.
  - strangattractor 3y ago
    I'll never deny being both cheap and lazy however the number of people injured each year walking across the street while looking at their phones suggests that social media like Twitter might actually be detrimental to one's health.
dahwolf 3y ago
I think that's an excellent point. Social media fatigue seems at its peak in this time of transition, further accelerated by the COVID era. People are becoming aware of their over-usage and the largely minimal or even negative benefits that come from social media altogether. Or just bored and indifferent about it. The fatigue is further strengthened when they soon learn that the alternatives are worse or at best just moving the problem. I'd advocate for people to stop rather than cheer for any new potential winner. Just uninstall the app and walk away. It was all a lie anyway. You're not in a "community". You do not actually have followers. You did not learn anything new that you couldn't learn elsewhere. They are lies we tell ourselves as we play the slot machine. Throw it in the trash.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  I’m so unable to relate to perspectives like this on social media. I have Insta and my connections on there are almost entirely my real friends, we all post stuff we’re actually doing in our lives, and send messages to each other, etc… as in, we actually use it for socialising. I follow a small handful of celebrity accounts, and browse reels occasionally, but the main reason I like using it is to interact with my friends.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    That isn't 'social media', that is a friend network utilizing a social media network already in place as a communications device.
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      This seems like a very peculiar attempt at gate keeping to me. It’s a social network application that we use to share the content that we’ve created with each other. That’s what social media is, and the use case I’m describing is basically what it was initially created for.
      - aydyn 3y ago
anyfoo 3y ago
My impression as well. Though I'm biased, because it's also the case for me specifically, so I tend to see the world through that same lens. In my case, I didn't give up social media entirely, but mostly shifted back to "web forums", which also seem to be experiencing some sort of renaissance (another data point). They have more of a local/semi-closed community feeling, as opposed to the "wide open sea" of major social media. I consider HN to be one of those "forums", although it's more a bit of a hybrid between the two worlds, and of course it has been existing all along.
jacooper 3y ago
100%, once Twitter falls, I would probably just leave it all. Maybe LinkedIn for the professional stuff.
- water9 3y ago
  That’s called growing up, but there’s a new one of you born every minute
  - jacooper 3y ago
    How? It's not like Twitter Userbase is particularly young, neither is HN.
  - weregiraffe 3y ago
    >there’s a new one of you born every minute And soon my army of clones will be ready!!!
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
> for many it will be a case of “Social media was nice while it lasted.” Good for them. Social media is a miasma of addiction and time-wasting. ~~They~~ we should `touch grass.social`

madeofpalk 3y ago

> Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. Yeah, for the "chronically online". But twitter is also celebs and brands, and the "normals" following them. I think for those Threads will find an audience. It will be... Twitter, but for Instagram. Twitter has always had an outside impact compared to it's actual userbase, mainly due to nailing the news media + politics segment. Threads could fail to pick up the same cultural impact, but still be a thriving business/website, especially if brands and advertisers prefer it over Twitter.

pornel 3y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a deliberate strategy to lure only "normals" away from Twitter, so that the remaining faithful X users will be the loudest, edgiest, most politically polarized ones, speeding up the vicious cycle of X becoming nothing more than a toxic culture war battleground.
- kelipso 3y ago
  Hopefully a battleground that no one will care about because the normies got lured away. Twitter not being a cultural network is probably much better for society because these always online losers currently seem to have much higher influence on society than they should.

klyrs 3y ago

> they just leech Isn't that Threads's whole thing? Everybody gets the same feed, no matter what you post?

canadianfella 3y ago

[dead]

AviationAtom 3y ago

I'd say I'm surprised by the persistent pessimism regarding Twitter, but I'm not. I don't think a sizable portion of people are even willing to entertain the idea that it might still having a place in the Internet ecosystem. Maybe not in exactly the same form as pre-Elon Twitter, but still a place.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Musk is using the For You feature to promote propaganda he approves of. My For You feed is full of paid climate change deniers, racists, mainstream far-right troll "journalists", and other people of questionable social value. It's absolutely an example of political editorialising and narrative control. And Musk now has a history of enabling criminal behaviour. https://gizmodo.com/twitter-dom-lucre-ban-elon-musk-child-exploitation-pics-1850681992 https://gizmodo.com/twitter-dom-lucre-ban-elon-musk-child-ex... So - yes, maybe it will continue in some form. But when progressive content is being deboosted it's not going to be the platform it used to be.
- AviationAtom 3y ago
  I would argue that it was the other way around before. It was also people with non-progessive views actually being entirely banned from the site. What is worthy of banning can quickly turn subjective, when really there are limited things both sides should agree are not permissible on a platform.

jasmer 3y ago

[dead]

gigglesupstairs 3y ago

> Quite obviously because advertisers prefer networks without controversy. This + less moderation headaches for Meta as political discussions invite the most toxic users

2muchcoffeeman 3y ago

Elon is trying to turn Twitter/X into the wests WeChat. So at least he’s doing something interesting? I’m back in the Elon corner. Is he goes down, it’ll be doing something interesting at least. Meta might have a head start with WhatsApp, but I don’t see them doing anything interesting or well.

fassssst 3y ago
But the west already has iOS and Android. A super app is just a wannabe OS.
- valianteffort 3y ago
  Google and Apple don't offer social media, the former has a video/streaming platform but doesn't seem concerned about losing it's dominant position.
  - fassssst 3y ago
    Group messaging is social media.
- wizofaus 3y ago
  A super app presumably has a dedicated product manager with some sort of vision and control of what goes into what features are available. You could hardly say the same of iOS+AppStore or Android+Playstore. Note that I'm not the least bit convinced we would benefit from a super app, but WeChat seems to fill a need for however many millions of users it has.
  - pohl 3y ago
    Could you elaborate on that? It sounds like you’re saying that Google and Apple have no product management and they’re just shipping random features every year, but that sounds bonkers so I must be misunderstanding.
    - 3y ago

pohl 3y ago

they just leech We prefer the verb “lurk”. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lurker https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lurker

robgibbons 3y ago
Yep. Leeching is mostly used in the context of torrents. Generally, while you're downloading, you're "leeching." But also, if you don't seed a file after you download it, you can call that leeching. Lurking is when you frequent a forum but never post.
- wilsynet 3y ago
  To leech, leeching and to be a leecher has been around since people used to download warez. It far predates torrents. I remember a local sysop in the 80s who ran an Apple II ASCII Express download site with two 5.25” floppy drives. You’d write him a text message and save it as a file. He was a cab driver and he’d come back home once in awhile and check the messages. If you were lucky he’d put your requested software in the second drive and maybe you’d check back in time before he fulfilled someone else’s request.
  - evandale 3y ago
    That sounds like such an awesome experience. As inconvenient as it sounds sometimes I wish I grew up in the beginnings of computers. My uncle told me a story of when he was at his first programming job carrying a box of at least 500 punch cards across a factory floor on his 2nd or 3rd day. Someone opened a garage door somewhere and a gust of wind came and blew every single punch card across the factory. They were everywhere he said. My uncle was terrified of losing his first job meanwhile these factory guys are pissing themselves laughing and almost literally rofl. Turns out it's a prank they pull on everyone. There's only been a few that held onto the box and the cards are complete trash. It sounds fun.
    - pohl 3y ago
      I've saw a prank like that on a small scale when I was a kid who liked to go play some old Trek game on a line-paper-printer-terminal — in a computer lab in a state college — that was dialed into a machine in a bigger city. Around me, meanwhile, were college students typing their programs into punch cards. I remember someone pretending to trip, spilling a stack, but then confessing that they were garbage.

14 3y ago

You make a good point and exactly why I would never in a million years sign into reddit with my Gmail account. I fear a cross platform ban somehow even if that is not how it works. My last account was banned for merely expressing my opinion and not doing so in an combative or nasty way just didn’t agree with the narrative and next thing I know I was permabanned.

pohl 3y ago
…my last account was banned for merely expressing my opinion… Nebulous anecdotes such as this always made him curious: opinion regarding what, precisely? “David Lane’s 14 words and 88 precepts, perhaps?” — he wondered to himself, unable to divert his eyes from their username.

macinjosh 3y ago

journalists leaving twitter is an improvement.

dessimus 3y ago
Care to expound on that? Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics. Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.
- Mordisquitos 3y ago
  I'm not the previous commenter, but I certainly agree with it provided a small clarification: journalists leaving Twitter is an improvement for journalism.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics. Not at all. "Journalists" are as biased as they come. They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them. That hand is most often advertisers but may also be governments. Chances are the articles they produce are actually hidden advertisements or propaganda. How could anyone with such massive conflicts of interest bring credibility to literally anything? I want access to real information posted by real people, not agenda-pushing "credible authorities". > Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes. What makes you think these "journalists" aren't just randoms themselves? They're not really any better than any person on this site. Their particular brand of hot take is not automatically more valid than anyone else's. As far as I'm concerned their only purpose is to generate material for us to comment on. There is exactly one site in the entire internet I have enough respect for to call them true journalists: LWN. It's just excellent in every way and they don't need to posture as authorities for everyone else to believe it. Everything else ranks lower than HN's comment sections to me.
  - linza 3y ago
    I think a lot has to do with provenance. For journalists this is their day job, they post with their real name and usually under some larger entities name. They are perhaps as biased as everyone else, but it's easier to figure out the biases.

m3kw9 3y ago

I just see a beat down not wild times. Meta is trying to clone twitter and the only win they have is the signup process and people seeing what the fuss is about.

distortionfield 3y ago
Idk, the way I see it, they built a solid seed fan-base to eat more of twitter’s lunch.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  Meta informing users of text based social platform may drive those users to Twitter seeing how it is superior in information content

djtango 3y ago

The live news is unreal. It's not unique to Twitter but seeing multiple accounts of any event anywhere in the world within seconds is kind of insane. I remember when the Beirut explosion happened so quickly you had footage of what had happened. This kind of latency is unachievable by traditional news

freeopinion 3y ago
It is achievable, but not always desirable. See, for example the ABC report of an ongoing firefight in Syria that turned out to be a gun range in Kentucky. Random footage of some explosion is not useful news without accurate explanations of what you are seeing. It often takes time to sort out the facts of a story. Moving breathlessly ahead without facts is usually called gossip.

bruce511 3y ago

There are a lot of news articles about Twitter because journalists use twitter, and have come to depend on it to boost their readership. Just this week there was an article on HN front page about journalism school requiring twitter accounts, and pushing journalists to build "their own brand" by getting lots of followers. These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related. Most people of course are not on twitter at all (and could care less). Some use it as a group-chat service. Some use it as joke-of-the-day. But the biggest user base by far is journalists who have invested in it big time.

bombolo 3y ago
journalists use twitter and love to pretend that everybody else does too, and pass a few tweets as "the people have spoken" all the time.
- eertami 3y ago
  Yep, also comms/marketing people. I once had to explain to someone that nobody outside of Twitter has ever cared about anything that has ever happened on Twitter. It is a pure bubble of unimportant drivel. The only people who would even know are other Twitter users, most real people in real life don't use it and they are not interested or affected at all.
- whstl 3y ago
  And loudmouths with outrageous opinions love Twitter because they know their precious tweets will eventually get caught by some semi-popular website one day.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  In the eyes of NHK (the Japanese broadcaster), Twitter is internet and internet is Twitter. Every single time they say "Let's see what people on the internet are saying.", the scene always changes over to tweets and tweets and tweets. Journalism is beyond redemption.

2Gkashmiri 3y ago

Lurking and not leeching.

heresie-dabord 3y ago

> I have no idea what will become of Twitter X

technotarek 3y ago

As someone who first created an IG account in 2010, then deleted it in 2019 after watching it decline, I like how simply this summed up my reasoning : « commercial, flat, vain «

xbmcuser 3y ago

Twitter might not be as important to the US as it is to a lot of other countries. A lot of content that is censored or blocked in countries by restrictive regimes rises on twitter organically. I think it plays a big role in dissemination of information from reporters etc. Take Pakistan for instance currently all the private channels are completely controlled by government it under quasi martial law. But because of twitter people are aware of 1000s of political prisoners including women and children, disappearances of reporters, harassment and threats by law enforcement to protestor families and relatives to control the protestors.

joenot443 3y ago

> As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost People keep saying this, but I've been a daily Twitter user since long before the Musk timeline and if anything the platform's never felt more engaged. Perhaps particularly vocal complainers like Taylor Lorenz leaving the platform makes the exodus seem greater than it is, but in general it seems high-follower users are just as engaged as they were before. The only exception seem to be characters like Lorenz whose conduct has been so poorly received by the community that they seemed to be looking for any good reason to leave while still saving face.