14 ms·

Current thoughts on social media

178 points by mcp_ 3y ago

gfodor 3y ago
It seems like fan out social media will just be in a cycle of consolidation and then a shock event eventually breaks it up a bit. Given that Twitter/X seems to have survived this shock, most likely to me in 5 years or so the next reconsolidation will be people migrating back there to access the network in the usual kinds of feedback loop. There was a window where this wasn’t assured (bluesky had a pretty clear opportunity to disrupt here imo) but that phase seems over and the next cycle seems pretty locked in.
- riffic 3y ago
  I've been around long enough to see X's trajectory. It's headed here (List of defunct social networking services, Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network... side note but Fowler's organization runs an employee Mastodon instance. This is the "correct" model that should have been applied to social networking from the beginning (interoperability, not silos) https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    Did any of these ever have 300 million users?
    - riffic 3y ago
      without doing any further research I assume AOL Instant Messenger got pretty close. Windows Live Messenger, on the list, had 330 million active monthly users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Messenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Messenger India TV claims Orkut was exactly that popular (300 m) https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-orkut-farewell-mail-goes-viral-people-remembers-on-twitter-see-how-they-reacted-631992 https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-orkut-farewell-m...
      - scythe 3y ago
        Orkut didn't really die a natural death, though. It was cannibalized to juice Google+, which subsequently collapsed. "X" is definitely running right into a similar problem that Google+ faced: a good name can't save you but an awful name can sink you. I've never heard even the most ardent Musk fans defending the name change. It's ridiculous.
    - abid786 3y ago
      Google+ had 540 million active users
      - drcongo 3y ago
        Active is very debatable there, I think Google counted anyone who was signed into Google.
        omoikane 3y ago
        Google+ had a lot of active users, which is especially observable if you join the right communities. The demise of Google+ marked the loss of those communities, which I still sorely miss to this day. Those communities, plus stable infrastructure, great integration with photos, publicly viewable profiles without requiring sign-in, transparent moderation that I never knew I missed until I joined Diaspora, and no ads. It was a real shame.
        cma 3y ago
        They removed google chat and replaced it with Hangouts locked behind Google+. A majority of users might have been just using that.
      - dustedcodes 3y ago
        "active"
    - esalman 3y ago
      Per Elon Musk, those are mostly bots.
    - evilduck 3y ago
      Did Twitter? Even Musk was trying to argue it was all bots before he got stuck with the bill.
  - gfodor 3y ago
    Mastodon can't scale and centralizes too much power into the largest home nodes, Bluesky is a much better, more 'correct' approach as you put it. But ultimately it doesn't matter, I don't think your first point is correct - the window of opportunity for this cycle is behind us for a decentralization of social media imo. The network effects of X are too strong, eventually people will come back.
    - mariusor 3y ago
      You're viewing the Mastodon vs. Bluesky problem from very different temporal points of observation, so your conclusions are not really meaningful. Mastodon is installed on hundreds of servers, how many instances of Bluesky are there? Until it's adopted more widely it can't be "more correct".
- esalman 3y ago
  I think the amount of money that was bankrolled into Twitter is sustaining the impression of survival. For me the most useful part of Twitter was real time news trends. I don't even open that tab anymore. Next most useful thing was the network of scientists from my field. It is also non existent now. I saved a lot of tweets about new papers over the years. When I went back to read them during literature review for my dissertation, I found most of them gone and accounts deleted. What has increased drastically is verified accounts spewing either sensationalism without any care for engagement, or outright misinformation, sometimes taken down hilariously by community notes.
  - gfodor 3y ago
    Right so what I'm suggesting is the current situation is not a stable state. If I'm right, what you should expect is that those people will, slowly, return to posting their content on X. If I'm wrong, you should expect more and more people migrating off of X and less and less active users on there. The reason I think I am right is because the size and connectivity of the X social graph.
- lucideer 3y ago
  > There was a window where this wasn’t assured You're living in a fantasy bubble if you think anything in this comment is insightful or representative of the current state of Twitter. The only thing that was in doubt during the various recent Twitter changes was how rapidly it would decline - people have underestimated network inertia, which is why Mastodon and now Bsky have failed to capture sufficient impressions to convince everyone they're the "next Twitter". Which ultimately brings people back to Twitter - noone is going to Twitter because Mastodon/Bsky don't work, they're coming back because with each migration they overestimate the finality & are disappointed. Ultimately though, slow as Twitter's decline is, it is continuing to decline steadily & will inevitably cross the critical threshold where one can consider it first irrelevant (Facebook's currenly approaching this state, a process which has been slow), then eventually "defunct". TL;DR: declines always take longer than everyone predicts, but ultimately still happen. Comebacks generally speaking don't.
  - cma 3y ago
    Mastodon has no algorithm, if one guy posts 30 things you get them sequentially so it is dominated by who types the most until they eventually annoy you enough to unfollow them. No algorithm also means you don't filter out their meal photos etc. based on clicking not interested. Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many times you click not interested on hard right content, street fights, etc. it just forces it on you. They have stop letting you adjust aspects of your feed.
    - mjr00 3y ago
      > Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many times you click not interested on hard right content, street fights, etc. it just forces it on you. I have literally never seen this stuff in my feed. Are you commenting on or reposting far right content or street fights? Even if you're commenting or reposting to say how awful the content is, that still counts as "engagement" and will cause the algorithm to give you more of it.
      - raincole 3y ago
TheRealNGenius 3y ago
[dead]
dustedcodes 3y ago
[flagged]
- gooseus 3y ago
  I can't disagree that there is an upside to watching people expose themselves as unserious, naive, and/or sociopathic.
pipeline_peak 3y ago
I love seeing normal people flock Twitter because of the Muskover but avoid Mastodon because it's nothing but blue haired techies. Guess they'll have to settle for Instagram where they value privacy and personal rights, oh wait...
screamingninja 3y ago
tl;dr > The reason I'm posting on Mastodon is because the future I want is one that's based on interoperability. I want to see an open protocol that isn't dependent on a tech-lord's whim. ActivityPub is currently the one that looks most developed. Bluesky's AT Protocol may become important in the future, so I'm also keeping an eye on that.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  He also continues to post on X because that's where he gets actual engagement.
pphysch 3y ago
Telegram has by far the best UX for me out of these "social media", largely because it is not based on an ad-driven algorithmic feed. I wish X had a proper UI like Telegram. The "Following" feed is pathetic. The problem is, of course, that I would spend 90% less time on X if there was such a feature. Really drives home that You Are The Product.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  Telegram is one of the best software out there. Not just the ux but also the speed and the technical brilliance is superior to anything from Google Twitter Facebook etc.
  - swader999 3y ago
    The only issue is how to find more channels or even the best channels for a particular interest or topic. But yeah TG is by far superior in many ways.
    - whynotminot 3y ago
      Serious question: how do you do discovery of good channels? Downloaded TG over a year ago because I read that a lot of interesting on the ground Ukraine reporting was happening there. But after I downloaded, I quickly realized the discovery experience was non existent. I was googling for good TG channels, which is crazy in my opinion!
      - pphysch 3y ago
        Some of the channels I follow are moderately active and they do lots of re-posting, which links to the related channel. It's not the best discovery feature, but it does work for me.
  - mikrotikker 3y ago
    Not to mention integrating with its API is a dream
- deleted 3y ago
rvz 3y ago
Well, it has finally been admitted that 1 year later after the layoffs that forecasts of the complete collapse of Twitter/X were somewhat delusional and remains stickier than thought. Unsurprisingly. Twitter/X should have been shut down 6 months ago maximum according to such prophecies like this one [0] by many HNers here. For example, even with predictions of Threads to 'to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion' [1] giving them just months after launch. Not even that happened, let alone the other dramatic changes to the platform. We have given the doom-mongers plenty of time for Twitter/X to shut down or completely collapse and go permanently offline but all we got was the alternatives like T2 shutting down [2] due to Threads crushing and killing off the rest of the smaller competitors (Spill, Post.news, Substack Notes, etc) and some Mastodon instances shutting down to recentralize to Mastodon.social, the most centralized and one of the only viable instances that has enough funding to be sustainable. We are slowly realizing that the completed takeover that happened 1 year ago, lots of emotions and hysteria took over by a small minority begging for the collapse that never happened. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-how-a-twitter-engineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669 [2] https://pebble.is/gabor/status/340649 https://pebble.is/gabor/status/340649
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  You're right, it's been a roaring success, with massively tanking revenue, more fraud/spam, brand destruction, and declining user base! You really showed 'em.
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  To me, Twitter/X is still running purely because Musk and the banks he used to finance the purchase REALLY don't want to admit to a failure. Musk is very high-profile, with many government contracts, Neuralink coming in hot, and Tesla under a lot of fire over the Cybertruck. He really doesn't need the bad press right now that he pissed away $44bn. Reporting a valuation of $19bn even now is him slowly ripping off the bandaid to prevent too many eyes focusing on his other projects. - US web traffic down 19% - Ad portal traffic down 16% - Mobile traffic on iOS/Android down 17.8% - Granted, all social traffic was down around 3-4% globally, but we can see the anomaly that is Twitter's traffic. To me, it's all rubbernecking at a car burning on the side of the road. We'd rather see it burn down while we're there, rather than watch it on the news.
orliesaurus 3y ago
tl;dr: Martin Fowler on why he is getting less retweets
- hasoleju 3y ago
  Yes, I thought the headline would be about more than just talking about the good things of different social media sites. What I noticed is that even with all that happened, it's surprising that the number of people interacting with his posts hasn't really changed. The network effect seems to be holding things together.
huhuli 3y ago
[flagged]
Dudester230602 3y ago
"Some people are critical that I still use X" So, was Musk wrong or not lol. Let's hope Fowler won't get cancelled.
trowawee 3y ago
The Facebook aside was interesting. I've been back on FB periodically this year to try to sell some stuff after years off it and it cannot be overstated how terrible the basic experience of browsing the feed is, at least on mobile. It's a minimum of 3-4 ads per actual post from a human I chose to friend, and the ads are just the stupidest, trashiest stuff imaginable.
- pokstad 3y ago
  How about the fact that most ads have better content than your FB friends? Thats more sad to me.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Are those ads? I think there are 3 things on Facebook: friend posts, short videos from content farms, and actual ads. The first are what I want to see, the third… well, obviously I don’t like them, but they pay the bills, right? The second are, I guess, like things Facebook puts there to hide the fact that nobody posts anything to Facebook anymore.
    - pokstad 3y ago
      The more you accurately describe Facebook, the more their ultimate demise seems inevitable.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        I mean, at this point it has been bad enough for long enough that… how do you predict its demise?
- asah 3y ago
  I use the web interface and it's also surprisingly bad, e.g. basic HTML bugs that interfere with engagement, e.g. text editor selection and editing bugs.
- guiseroom 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
monksy 3y ago
I honestly don't understand why he would want to stay on Twitter/X. It feels like from his writeup his only reason is "well I'm addicted to it" and "I see some people on it". Twitter has shown anti-user behavior over and over again. (From the encouragement of putting conflicting users together, to boosting toxic users, to unbanning the worst of the worst, also throwing people who disagree with their government in the wood chipper [there are ME countries that will follow through with legal and fatal consequences for opposing them in the platform].
- raincole 3y ago
  Because he has 350k followers.
Yhippa 3y ago
Google Reader with sharing content to a "feed" and having friends comment on it was peak social media for me. I'd argue that today's social media is no different from mobile games. Designed to extract as much time, money, and knowledge about you as possible.
- iamdbtoo 3y ago
  Agreed about Google Reader. It's the experience I keep trying to recapture.
- rapind 3y ago
  > Designed to extract as much time, money, and knowledge about you as possible. Potential irony? Wasn’t this model, at least in part, popularized by the Facebook game Farmville?
- taude 3y ago
  Yeup. I wish we all went back to blogs and posting stuff to our own sites. There was a barrier to entry for doing this, naturally, but it kept the riff-raff off. There was also a few years of early Twitter days before the general public came on, and it was pretty amazing and useful I'd rather just have a feed-reader that I manage, and manually subscribe to people's content. Something like how Spokeo or FriendFeed back in the day.... FriendFeed was also awesome. I wish we'd go back to those days.
  - reidjs 3y ago
    Isn’t that what Martin Fowler is sort of doing? Posting on his blog, then advertising on all the platforms.
    - taude 3y ago
      Sounds like it. But I personally don't even bother with the feed thing anymore, and I definitely don't use an aggregator or Twitter or any of that. I go to a couple information sources that I expect the good stuff to bubble up to, and spend my 10 or 15 minutes/day with that content. It doesn't feel like there's critical mass keeping rss feeds up to date. And I had a pretty extensive Feely configured for awhile after the google blog reader went away, too.
howmayiannoyyou 3y ago
Musk has it right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Nf56srwcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Nf56srwcA. Social media is now less town square ("Speakers Corner") and is a information weapon. I think Musk hoped to use blue checkmark attribution as a means of putting posts to the attribution test, and I believe he underestimated the appeal of bias enforcing anonymous posting. The tension between freedom of speech and dog whistling is unresolvable and I would argue different times call for different approaches. Its clear state and state-sponsored actors are abusing social media liberalism to the great detriment of Western values and stability. Its clear these same actors do not permit the freedom of communication they abuse elsewhere. By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors. We live in very interesting times.
- AzzieElbab 3y ago
  "By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors." - Interesting. I never considered network effects role in this "strange bedfellows" phenomenon, thinking this was primarily due to intersectionality i.e. all the "oppressed" unite against all the "oppressors."
  - d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
    "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"
- raincole 3y ago
  > By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors. I don't know what you think network effects do here. There is a very clear reason why LGBT+ community is allied with radical Islamic, and everyone knows it.
superhumanuser 3y ago
[flagged]
- coolbreezetft22 3y ago
  lol
- foderking 3y ago
  [flagged]
- neuronic 3y ago
  Is this a satire account?
  - superhumanuser 3y ago
    Nice retort
- luzojeda 3y ago
  I feel it is not being moderated _at all_ now.
- notpachet 3y ago
  Freedom of speech isn't baked into the fabric of the universe. It's an ideal that we as a society have to continually negotiate for ourselves, and weigh against our other collective values in cases where they are in opposition. Society is ever-evolving so it's understandable that our definition of "free speech" will necessarily need to evolve along with that. Is it freedom of speech to defame people in the press? Is it freedom of speech to mislead people about the results of an election? Is it freedom of speech to use AI to mimic the voice or appearance of others? How do we balance the freedom of speech of individuals versus the freedom of speech of corporations? Especially in cases where the corporation is providing a public utility in all but name? (eg, Cloudflare, Twitter) We are still trying to figure out the right balance between these tensions. I'm definitely not arguing that we've gotten it right so far (far from it, in many cases). And I'm not discounting the risk of, as you put it, "massive societal control" -- we've seen that, too. I just get irritated when I see people acting as if these are easy questions with clear answers. They're absolutely not. That sort of conviction is deeply unattractive because it shows that you're not seeing the world and its complexities in a clear light. I don't understand how anyone can look at the situation and not come away being impressed by the fundamental difficulty of trying to navigate the middle path. As a demonstration of this point, the exact issue you're describing -- whether a company like Twitter has the right to block certain types of posts on their platform, especially when they may be pressured to do so by the government -- is on the Supreme Court docket as we speak. It's far from settled law. The case that I believe you're referencing ("illegal relationship") was appealed, and its ruling put on hold: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23a243_7l48.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23a243_7l48.pdf
azangru 3y ago
I've always used Twitter in read-only mode; but shortly before the Muskover, Twitter, probably in a desperate attempt to increase the number of its active users, became quite hostile to non-logged-in readers like me; and this has only become worse since Musk. A pity. Nitter helps; a bit. In fact, Nitter is like an ideal Twitter; without all the javascript bloat; but because of that, it does not support Twitter's rich media such as spaces; and it also sometimes cannot connect to the api. And it isn't clear how long its api key will last.
- clutchdude 3y ago
  The fact so many government organizations use Twitter as a primary means of communication on alerts/events is frustrating to no end in the post Musk days. The profile/tweet history is downright unusable.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Sometimes I think about evangelizing the Fedi to local government officials since I am sure a lot of them are disgusted with Musk. (I live in one of the most liberal counties)
    - syncbehind 3y ago
      What concerns/thoughts do you have that prevent you from doing so?
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        Mostly other things competing for attention, not being all that personally excited about receiving messages from almost anybody, and not having a clear proposal. (Do I try to get them to run their own server, do I tell them to use somebody else’s, etc.)
    - RF_Savage 3y ago
      The European Union runs their own Mastodon instance. https://social.network.europa.eu/explore https://social.network.europa.eu/explore
motohagiography 3y ago
Is it worth just considering that in 15 years of social media, the whole culture has changed and there isn't enough openness or trust for it to be an effect those values again? (the way it was the first time around)
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  Yes I think this is the answer. Twitter at one point captured a type of user and part of the zeitgeist, when users earnestly wanted to meet others on the then small internet and were open to just having conversations. That internet was mostly nerds. Today's web (yes I changed the word from internet to web, as most people rarely use the internet outside of the web these days) is a very different experience. Today's web has everyone: it has your parents, it has your kids, and it has people from very different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. The brief period when Twitter started was the start of a transition from a nerd-only internet to a general-use web. It was a single moment in time when everyone still felt open to internet socialization. Nowadays, niche interest and groups form insular groups the way they used to in the pre-internet days. The stuff I read on the more social HN threads could be interchangeably posted on IRC channels, Matrix rooms, or Mastodon posts. There's a more definite sense of "FOSS-y tech tribe" than I feel there used to be 15 years ago. In that, it's just a return to form. Nerd groups were often niche groups in the past and now that everyone is on the web, they have returned to being niche groups. It is sad that we lost a brief moment of openness, when groups were interested in cross-pollinating. But it was just a moment in time, a mere blip in the development of social culture, rather than a lasting change.
  - li2uR3ce 3y ago
    Hostility, it turns out is "engagement" which is profitable. We went from people organically paring themselves to algorithms steering people towards "engaging" encounters. Where we used to say "don't feed the trolls" we should now be saying "don't feed the algorithm." I suppose we shouldn't feed either one but right now "the algorithm" is the bigger threat. I mean, I can usually get a troll to work for me with a bit of patience and perseverance... algorithms? They'll only work for me if it's profitable for someone else. It's so soulless.
adolph 3y ago
> For social media now, the main reason I read it is to know about new events from people I'm interested in, especially interesting articles. RIP Google Reader
seydor 3y ago
Feed-based social media were never meant to work with too many users just like usenet before them, but the companies went to great lengths to ban enough users and generate enough mindless clickbait that they kept people around for years. As a reader who has no problem with Musk, i still have lost interest on twitter, or even mastodon anymore. Everyone has an opinion, but opinions are like buttholes. If it's something important it will surface on my lemmy feed. I don't need to learn everything the moment it happens, but i like to be able to search for it. I think we ll end up returning to non-aggregated forums. (Sorry reddit, you ve screwed up beyond repair)
l5870uoo9y 3y ago
Not sure what the author's intention is but I reckon that he will never give up his Twitter account with 350.000+ followers regardless of who owns Twitter. Having this many followers is a vehicle for exercising power and generating money.
- isodev 3y ago
  Used to be the case... not now taking a closer look at one’s followers list shows that a large chunk had ghosted the place or haven’t posted in months.
  - akkartik 3y ago
    Not to mention these sites thumbing the scales on your distribution to your own followers. Follower count is increasingly a vanity metric.
  - MrRolleyes 3y ago
    > not now taking a closer look at one’s followers list shows that a large chunk had ghosted the place or haven’t posted in months. That's pretty much the norm on twitter, idk about other social networks. On some social networks (including twitter) it's quite normal to just lurk and not contribute anything.
- manicennui 3y ago
  He makes it pretty clear that he doesn't rely on Twitter for that sort of thing, and given who he is and how well known his books are, I can't see this being an issue for him.
ranqet 3y ago
When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything. As far as the problems people complain about on X, I don't see them. Twitter was always buggy at times, and that hasn't really changed. After the exodus of those who just can't stand Musk, I see far less political posts than I did in recent years, which is an improvement tbh. When I see something I don't want to see, I mute it or block the account, just like I always have.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything. That's not my experience at all. Who are you following? In my niche, Apple platform software development, the community has almost entirely migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and it's now as active and thriving as ever. IMO the Mastodon experience is even better than the Twitter experience was, because there are a lot fewer random trolls on Mastodon. My little niche was the reason I originally joined Twitter back in 2008, so frankly, I don't really miss the millions of other people. I was never interested in following celebrities.
  - alexsereno 3y ago
    Yea mastodon has been totally incredible in my experience following mostly Swift developers. I’d also argue that the slightly higher barrier to entry is more of a feature than a bug since it inherently keeps low effort users out. Lastly I am old enough to remember early Reddit where it was very “technical and confusing” for a lot of people.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  It depends who you follow and how. The "explore" feed on mastodon.social is absolutely toxic because it shows the most boosted and favorited posts and unfortunately this is people angry at politics, people who get a thrill out of dehumanizing people, etc. There's a story that "two sides" drive each other crazy on Twitter but my take is that "one side" can conjure the presence of the other side and drive themselves every bit as crazy and there is that subculture on Mastodon. I block the names of most Republican politicians and certain words used by people who aren't comfortable in their own skin and don't want me to be comfortable in mine. If I ever see angry words in an image (screenshot, image meme, whatever) I block the poster immediately. Thus I get to meet the "silent majority" of nice and mature people on Mastodon. I've found my flower photos get a lot of engagement, though I wish there was more enthusiasm for my sports photos that I put more effort into. Here is my profile https://mastodon.social/@UP8 https://mastodon.social/@UP8
ulrischa 3y ago
As he said for me the diversivication of social networks is also really too much. Where should I read? Where should I post? Also WhatsApp started Channels now ... and so on. There will be a critical mass for the splitting then it will roll backwards (to what ever social network that evolved). Because without many people in one network it is not working and ads do not reach enough people.
- seydor 3y ago
  That s good to hear. The internet was built as a decentralized thing, not the centralized firehoses of social media. We are not meant to discover all of it, and it is meant to be vast, just like the real world.
karaterobot 3y ago
> I first started using social media (in some form) in the late 1980's with Usenet. I wonder what the definition of social media is which includes Usenet, but not email or BBSs, which presumably Fowler used to some extent as well. To me, social media by definition has some level of participation by users who are not posters or responders—i.e. an upvoting mechanism, a sharing mechanism, or an algorithm based on usage—which changes the prominence of the content in some way. Maybe that's just the definition I've cobbled together in my head.
wnevets 3y ago
Martin is forgetting that by next year twitter will not just be a social media website. Twitter will be the everything app, it will do banking, dating and everything else you can think of! Buy a blue checkmark now to get on the ground floor!
- seydor 3y ago
  banking and having followers is a deadly combination though. Imagine Buterin impersonators, with real payment buttons. "Everything app" goes well with a chat app
- manicennui 3y ago
  Hilarious.
adverbly 3y ago
> avoid any feed that involves the platform trying to figure out what I might like. Instead I pick selected feeds to follow and organize them into a handful of lists to read according to my current context. This is such a great litmus test for responsible internet use. Who picks the content? Is it you? Is it curated by one individual? Is it determined by a voting system? Is it determined by an engagement algorithm? Is it determined by a content corporation? Realistically, the healthiest way to consume content would probably be to feed it to yourself. And the unhealthiest diet would involve being fed by engagement algorithms. I might start thinking about more things this way.
- pxoe 3y ago
  that's just creating your own curated little bubble.
  - ruszki 3y ago
    Yes, but unfortunately, the past 10 years the alternative became way worse. Propaganda, rage baits, AI generated content, pointless click baits, ads. There is no value anymore on the general internet. If you want value, if you want it to worth your time, you need that bubble. 90s and early 2000s ideals are dead.
phendrenad2 3y ago
"Social media" as a concept is pretty much dead. Nobody is posting life updates on Facebook. People still post, but it's mostly memes and mini-blog-posts ("how about them Eagles?"). Instagram likewise is 50% memes and reposts. The internet today is like one big web forum, we all use our real names, but nobody knows us.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  I liked when everyone knew me, but didn't know my real name or who I was.
theknocker 3y ago
[dead]
davidw 3y ago
I've pretty much landed on Threads. It's not as good as Twitter, but after some of the really awful things the owner of X said, I just can't anymore. I'd rather be on an inferior platform that's growing than see some of the garbage on X at this point.
nunez 3y ago
It sucks that these platforms have made creating a single tool or site for interacting with each other increasingly impossible. I miss quite a few things about the Old Internet, and one of them is how easy Pidgin, Trillian, and the like made talking to people on Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, or whatever. I think I even used a social media aggregator at one point so I could stay current on Facebook and Twitter at the same time. I don't think that's possible anymore. Talking to people cross-platform is definitely not possible without something like Beeper (which is buggy, but not because of Beeper)
- hellotheretoday 3y ago
  Because god forbid you not be inundated with ads and have every movement online tracked and catalogued
- gintleman 3y ago
  Daily user of Beeper -- iMessage, Signal, Whatsapp, Matrix, Slack, and Facebook Messenger. The last thing I'd consider "buggy" was not being able to create text groups, but that was solved within the last few months, and itself was just a missing feature. It's incredibly stable, in fact I've disabled the built in iMessage app on my iPhone and Mac for the last year with not one issue. Would highly recommend!
  - sgu999 3y ago
    Oh, very nice. I had no idea this was possible. I would be concerned about privacy though...
  - cavemanklaus 3y ago
    Just looked into this and signed up, I'm 127,000 in queue for access, any chance you would be willing to help with a referral code?
  - nunez 3y ago
    I had Beeper. It was a cool concept but also underscored my issue with today's chat platforms. For WhatsApp, Beeper needs to have an active session token on their servers that you approve via QR code. This is needed because WhatsApp doesn't have a public API and the only way they can grab messages is by scraping web.whatsapp.com. It's very similar to the approach that Spark (iOS Mail App) takes for connecting to Gmail (they hold refresh tokens server side). Will someone from Spark or Beeper read your messages on the sly? Probably not. But if their servers get compromised, someone else might, and that's a problem! In the Old Days, everything was username/password Basic Auth, and all of the chat platforms exposed some kind of an API. No need for an intermediate server to hold tokens on your behalf.
incomingpain 3y ago
>I'm seeing a platform diversification. People haven't gone to one service, but have split up among many: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram.... I saw many journalists/political activists who made lots of doom predictions on twitter creating an urge for people to perhaps try other options but these aren't competitors to twitter. This is not a either/or type situation. You can be on twitter and Linkedin at the same time. The way I see it, Twitter has no competitor. Mastodon could have been a competitor but before elon bought twitter they made public decisions which has basically made mastodon impossible to compete against twitter. What a huge shame.
jlpcsl 3y ago
"The reason I'm posting on Mastodon is because the future I want is one that's based on interoperability. I want to see an open protocol that isn't dependent on a tech-lord's whim. ActivityPub is currently the one that looks most developed." This. so much. And also it is not repeating the same corporate for-profit business model that FB/X/Twitter and other also have and has led to nothing but enshittification. Let's not repeat the same mistake and go to something really different this time and Mastodon/ActivityPub is it.
lakomen 3y ago
Silicon Valley is the largest cause and perpetrator of censorship on the internet. Be it Hackernews, Facebook, Valve's Steam Forums, Instagram, EU Chatcontrol, Google Reviews, YouTube comments. Silicon Valley companies are making sure you can't speak freely.

178 points by mcp_ 3y ago

It seems like fan out social media will just be in a cycle of consolidation and then a shock event eventually breaks it up a bit. Given that Twitter/X seems to have survived this shock, most likely to me in 5 years or so the next reconsolidation will be people migrating back there to access the network in the usual kinds of feedback loop. There was a window where this wasn’t assured (bluesky had a pretty clear opportunity to disrupt here imo) but that phase seems over and the next cycle seems pretty locked in.

riffic 3y ago
I've been around long enough to see X's trajectory. It's headed here (List of defunct social networking services, Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network... side note but Fowler's organization runs an employee Mastodon instance. This is the "correct" model that should have been applied to social networking from the beginning (interoperability, not silos) https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Did any of these ever have 300 million users?
  - riffic 3y ago
    without doing any further research I assume AOL Instant Messenger got pretty close. Windows Live Messenger, on the list, had 330 million active monthly users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Messenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Messenger India TV claims Orkut was exactly that popular (300 m) https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-orkut-farewell-mail-goes-viral-people-remembers-on-twitter-see-how-they-reacted-631992 https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-orkut-farewell-m...
    - scythe 3y ago
      Orkut didn't really die a natural death, though. It was cannibalized to juice Google+, which subsequently collapsed. "X" is definitely running right into a similar problem that Google+ faced: a good name can't save you but an awful name can sink you. I've never heard even the most ardent Musk fans defending the name change. It's ridiculous.
  - abid786 3y ago
    Google+ had 540 million active users
    - drcongo 3y ago
      Active is very debatable there, I think Google counted anyone who was signed into Google.
      - omoikane 3y ago
        Google+ had a lot of active users, which is especially observable if you join the right communities. The demise of Google+ marked the loss of those communities, which I still sorely miss to this day. Those communities, plus stable infrastructure, great integration with photos, publicly viewable profiles without requiring sign-in, transparent moderation that I never knew I missed until I joined Diaspora, and no ads. It was a real shame.
        cma 3y ago
        They removed google chat and replaced it with Hangouts locked behind Google+. A majority of users might have been just using that.
    - dustedcodes 3y ago
      "active"
  - esalman 3y ago
    Per Elon Musk, those are mostly bots.
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Did Twitter? Even Musk was trying to argue it was all bots before he got stuck with the bill.
- gfodor 3y ago
  Mastodon can't scale and centralizes too much power into the largest home nodes, Bluesky is a much better, more 'correct' approach as you put it. But ultimately it doesn't matter, I don't think your first point is correct - the window of opportunity for this cycle is behind us for a decentralization of social media imo. The network effects of X are too strong, eventually people will come back.
  - mariusor 3y ago
    You're viewing the Mastodon vs. Bluesky problem from very different temporal points of observation, so your conclusions are not really meaningful. Mastodon is installed on hundreds of servers, how many instances of Bluesky are there? Until it's adopted more widely it can't be "more correct".
esalman 3y ago
I think the amount of money that was bankrolled into Twitter is sustaining the impression of survival. For me the most useful part of Twitter was real time news trends. I don't even open that tab anymore. Next most useful thing was the network of scientists from my field. It is also non existent now. I saved a lot of tweets about new papers over the years. When I went back to read them during literature review for my dissertation, I found most of them gone and accounts deleted. What has increased drastically is verified accounts spewing either sensationalism without any care for engagement, or outright misinformation, sometimes taken down hilariously by community notes.
- gfodor 3y ago
  Right so what I'm suggesting is the current situation is not a stable state. If I'm right, what you should expect is that those people will, slowly, return to posting their content on X. If I'm wrong, you should expect more and more people migrating off of X and less and less active users on there. The reason I think I am right is because the size and connectivity of the X social graph.
lucideer 3y ago
> There was a window where this wasn’t assured You're living in a fantasy bubble if you think anything in this comment is insightful or representative of the current state of Twitter. The only thing that was in doubt during the various recent Twitter changes was how rapidly it would decline - people have underestimated network inertia, which is why Mastodon and now Bsky have failed to capture sufficient impressions to convince everyone they're the "next Twitter". Which ultimately brings people back to Twitter - noone is going to Twitter because Mastodon/Bsky don't work, they're coming back because with each migration they overestimate the finality & are disappointed. Ultimately though, slow as Twitter's decline is, it is continuing to decline steadily & will inevitably cross the critical threshold where one can consider it first irrelevant (Facebook's currenly approaching this state, a process which has been slow), then eventually "defunct". TL;DR: declines always take longer than everyone predicts, but ultimately still happen. Comebacks generally speaking don't.
- cma 3y ago
  Mastodon has no algorithm, if one guy posts 30 things you get them sequentially so it is dominated by who types the most until they eventually annoy you enough to unfollow them. No algorithm also means you don't filter out their meal photos etc. based on clicking not interested. Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many times you click not interested on hard right content, street fights, etc. it just forces it on you. They have stop letting you adjust aspects of your feed.
  - mjr00 3y ago
    > Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many times you click not interested on hard right content, street fights, etc. it just forces it on you. I have literally never seen this stuff in my feed. Are you commenting on or reposting far right content or street fights? Even if you're commenting or reposting to say how awful the content is, that still counts as "engagement" and will cause the algorithm to give you more of it.
    - raincole 3y ago

TheRealNGenius 3y ago

[dead]

dustedcodes 3y ago

[flagged]

gooseus 3y ago
I can't disagree that there is an upside to watching people expose themselves as unserious, naive, and/or sociopathic.

pipeline_peak 3y ago

I love seeing normal people flock Twitter because of the Muskover but avoid Mastodon because it's nothing but blue haired techies. Guess they'll have to settle for Instagram where they value privacy and personal rights, oh wait...

screamingninja 3y ago

tl;dr > The reason I'm posting on Mastodon is because the future I want is one that's based on interoperability. I want to see an open protocol that isn't dependent on a tech-lord's whim. ActivityPub is currently the one that looks most developed. Bluesky's AT Protocol may become important in the future, so I'm also keeping an eye on that.

mvdtnz 3y ago
He also continues to post on X because that's where he gets actual engagement.

pphysch 3y ago

Telegram has by far the best UX for me out of these "social media", largely because it is not based on an ad-driven algorithmic feed. I wish X had a proper UI like Telegram. The "Following" feed is pathetic. The problem is, of course, that I would spend 90% less time on X if there was such a feature. Really drives home that You Are The Product.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Telegram is one of the best software out there. Not just the ux but also the speed and the technical brilliance is superior to anything from Google Twitter Facebook etc.
- swader999 3y ago
  The only issue is how to find more channels or even the best channels for a particular interest or topic. But yeah TG is by far superior in many ways.
  - whynotminot 3y ago
    Serious question: how do you do discovery of good channels? Downloaded TG over a year ago because I read that a lot of interesting on the ground Ukraine reporting was happening there. But after I downloaded, I quickly realized the discovery experience was non existent. I was googling for good TG channels, which is crazy in my opinion!
    - pphysch 3y ago
      Some of the channels I follow are moderately active and they do lots of re-posting, which links to the related channel. It's not the best discovery feature, but it does work for me.
- mikrotikker 3y ago
  Not to mention integrating with its API is a dream
deleted 3y ago

rvz 3y ago

Well, it has finally been admitted that 1 year later after the layoffs that forecasts of the complete collapse of Twitter/X were somewhat delusional and remains stickier than thought. Unsurprisingly. Twitter/X should have been shut down 6 months ago maximum according to such prophecies like this one [0] by many HNers here. For example, even with predictions of Threads to 'to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion' [1] giving them just months after launch. Not even that happened, let alone the other dramatic changes to the platform. We have given the doom-mongers plenty of time for Twitter/X to shut down or completely collapse and go permanently offline but all we got was the alternatives like T2 shutting down [2] due to Threads crushing and killing off the rest of the smaller competitors (Spill, Post.news, Substack Notes, etc) and some Mastodon instances shutting down to recentralize to Mastodon.social, the most centralized and one of the only viable instances that has enough funding to be sustainable. We are slowly realizing that the completed takeover that happened 1 year ago, lots of emotions and hysteria took over by a small minority begging for the collapse that never happened. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-how-a-twitter-engineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669 [2] https://pebble.is/gabor/status/340649 https://pebble.is/gabor/status/340649

JohnMakin 3y ago
You're right, it's been a roaring success, with massively tanking revenue, more fraud/spam, brand destruction, and declining user base! You really showed 'em.
notaustinpowers 3y ago
To me, Twitter/X is still running purely because Musk and the banks he used to finance the purchase REALLY don't want to admit to a failure. Musk is very high-profile, with many government contracts, Neuralink coming in hot, and Tesla under a lot of fire over the Cybertruck. He really doesn't need the bad press right now that he pissed away $44bn. Reporting a valuation of $19bn even now is him slowly ripping off the bandaid to prevent too many eyes focusing on his other projects. - US web traffic down 19% - Ad portal traffic down 16% - Mobile traffic on iOS/Android down 17.8% - Granted, all social traffic was down around 3-4% globally, but we can see the anomaly that is Twitter's traffic. To me, it's all rubbernecking at a car burning on the side of the road. We'd rather see it burn down while we're there, rather than watch it on the news.

orliesaurus 3y ago

tl;dr: Martin Fowler on why he is getting less retweets

hasoleju 3y ago
Yes, I thought the headline would be about more than just talking about the good things of different social media sites. What I noticed is that even with all that happened, it's surprising that the number of people interacting with his posts hasn't really changed. The network effect seems to be holding things together.

huhuli 3y ago

[flagged]

Dudester230602 3y ago

"Some people are critical that I still use X" So, was Musk wrong or not lol. Let's hope Fowler won't get cancelled.

trowawee 3y ago

The Facebook aside was interesting. I've been back on FB periodically this year to try to sell some stuff after years off it and it cannot be overstated how terrible the basic experience of browsing the feed is, at least on mobile. It's a minimum of 3-4 ads per actual post from a human I chose to friend, and the ads are just the stupidest, trashiest stuff imaginable.

pokstad 3y ago
How about the fact that most ads have better content than your FB friends? Thats more sad to me.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Are those ads? I think there are 3 things on Facebook: friend posts, short videos from content farms, and actual ads. The first are what I want to see, the third… well, obviously I don’t like them, but they pay the bills, right? The second are, I guess, like things Facebook puts there to hide the fact that nobody posts anything to Facebook anymore.
  - pokstad 3y ago
    The more you accurately describe Facebook, the more their ultimate demise seems inevitable.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I mean, at this point it has been bad enough for long enough that… how do you predict its demise?
asah 3y ago
I use the web interface and it's also surprisingly bad, e.g. basic HTML bugs that interfere with engagement, e.g. text editor selection and editing bugs.
guiseroom 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

monksy 3y ago

I honestly don't understand why he would want to stay on Twitter/X. It feels like from his writeup his only reason is "well I'm addicted to it" and "I see some people on it". Twitter has shown anti-user behavior over and over again. (From the encouragement of putting conflicting users together, to boosting toxic users, to unbanning the worst of the worst, also throwing people who disagree with their government in the wood chipper [there are ME countries that will follow through with legal and fatal consequences for opposing them in the platform].

raincole 3y ago
Because he has 350k followers.

Yhippa 3y ago

Google Reader with sharing content to a "feed" and having friends comment on it was peak social media for me. I'd argue that today's social media is no different from mobile games. Designed to extract as much time, money, and knowledge about you as possible.

iamdbtoo 3y ago
Agreed about Google Reader. It's the experience I keep trying to recapture.
rapind 3y ago
> Designed to extract as much time, money, and knowledge about you as possible. Potential irony? Wasn’t this model, at least in part, popularized by the Facebook game Farmville?
taude 3y ago
Yeup. I wish we all went back to blogs and posting stuff to our own sites. There was a barrier to entry for doing this, naturally, but it kept the riff-raff off. There was also a few years of early Twitter days before the general public came on, and it was pretty amazing and useful I'd rather just have a feed-reader that I manage, and manually subscribe to people's content. Something like how Spokeo or FriendFeed back in the day.... FriendFeed was also awesome. I wish we'd go back to those days.
- reidjs 3y ago
  Isn’t that what Martin Fowler is sort of doing? Posting on his blog, then advertising on all the platforms.
  - taude 3y ago
    Sounds like it. But I personally don't even bother with the feed thing anymore, and I definitely don't use an aggregator or Twitter or any of that. I go to a couple information sources that I expect the good stuff to bubble up to, and spend my 10 or 15 minutes/day with that content. It doesn't feel like there's critical mass keeping rss feeds up to date. And I had a pretty extensive Feely configured for awhile after the google blog reader went away, too.

howmayiannoyyou 3y ago

Musk has it right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Nf56srwcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Nf56srwcA. Social media is now less town square ("Speakers Corner") and is a information weapon. I think Musk hoped to use blue checkmark attribution as a means of putting posts to the attribution test, and I believe he underestimated the appeal of bias enforcing anonymous posting. The tension between freedom of speech and dog whistling is unresolvable and I would argue different times call for different approaches. Its clear state and state-sponsored actors are abusing social media liberalism to the great detriment of Western values and stability. Its clear these same actors do not permit the freedom of communication they abuse elsewhere. By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors. We live in very interesting times.

AzzieElbab 3y ago
"By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors." - Interesting. I never considered network effects role in this "strange bedfellows" phenomenon, thinking this was primarily due to intersectionality i.e. all the "oppressed" unite against all the "oppressors."
- d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
  "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"
raincole 3y ago
> By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors. I don't know what you think network effects do here. There is a very clear reason why LGBT+ community is allied with radical Islamic, and everyone knows it.

superhumanuser 3y ago

[flagged]

coolbreezetft22 3y ago
lol
foderking 3y ago
[flagged]
neuronic 3y ago
Is this a satire account?
- superhumanuser 3y ago
  Nice retort
luzojeda 3y ago
I feel it is not being moderated _at all_ now.
notpachet 3y ago
Freedom of speech isn't baked into the fabric of the universe. It's an ideal that we as a society have to continually negotiate for ourselves, and weigh against our other collective values in cases where they are in opposition. Society is ever-evolving so it's understandable that our definition of "free speech" will necessarily need to evolve along with that. Is it freedom of speech to defame people in the press? Is it freedom of speech to mislead people about the results of an election? Is it freedom of speech to use AI to mimic the voice or appearance of others? How do we balance the freedom of speech of individuals versus the freedom of speech of corporations? Especially in cases where the corporation is providing a public utility in all but name? (eg, Cloudflare, Twitter) We are still trying to figure out the right balance between these tensions. I'm definitely not arguing that we've gotten it right so far (far from it, in many cases). And I'm not discounting the risk of, as you put it, "massive societal control" -- we've seen that, too. I just get irritated when I see people acting as if these are easy questions with clear answers. They're absolutely not. That sort of conviction is deeply unattractive because it shows that you're not seeing the world and its complexities in a clear light. I don't understand how anyone can look at the situation and not come away being impressed by the fundamental difficulty of trying to navigate the middle path. As a demonstration of this point, the exact issue you're describing -- whether a company like Twitter has the right to block certain types of posts on their platform, especially when they may be pressured to do so by the government -- is on the Supreme Court docket as we speak. It's far from settled law. The case that I believe you're referencing ("illegal relationship") was appealed, and its ruling put on hold: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23a243_7l48.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23a243_7l48.pdf

azangru 3y ago

I've always used Twitter in read-only mode; but shortly before the Muskover, Twitter, probably in a desperate attempt to increase the number of its active users, became quite hostile to non-logged-in readers like me; and this has only become worse since Musk. A pity. Nitter helps; a bit. In fact, Nitter is like an ideal Twitter; without all the javascript bloat; but because of that, it does not support Twitter's rich media such as spaces; and it also sometimes cannot connect to the api. And it isn't clear how long its api key will last.

clutchdude 3y ago
The fact so many government organizations use Twitter as a primary means of communication on alerts/events is frustrating to no end in the post Musk days. The profile/tweet history is downright unusable.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Sometimes I think about evangelizing the Fedi to local government officials since I am sure a lot of them are disgusted with Musk. (I live in one of the most liberal counties)
  - syncbehind 3y ago
    What concerns/thoughts do you have that prevent you from doing so?
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      Mostly other things competing for attention, not being all that personally excited about receiving messages from almost anybody, and not having a clear proposal. (Do I try to get them to run their own server, do I tell them to use somebody else’s, etc.)
  - RF_Savage 3y ago
    The European Union runs their own Mastodon instance. https://social.network.europa.eu/explore https://social.network.europa.eu/explore

motohagiography 3y ago

Is it worth just considering that in 15 years of social media, the whole culture has changed and there isn't enough openness or trust for it to be an effect those values again? (the way it was the first time around)

Karrot_Kream 3y ago
Yes I think this is the answer. Twitter at one point captured a type of user and part of the zeitgeist, when users earnestly wanted to meet others on the then small internet and were open to just having conversations. That internet was mostly nerds. Today's web (yes I changed the word from internet to web, as most people rarely use the internet outside of the web these days) is a very different experience. Today's web has everyone: it has your parents, it has your kids, and it has people from very different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. The brief period when Twitter started was the start of a transition from a nerd-only internet to a general-use web. It was a single moment in time when everyone still felt open to internet socialization. Nowadays, niche interest and groups form insular groups the way they used to in the pre-internet days. The stuff I read on the more social HN threads could be interchangeably posted on IRC channels, Matrix rooms, or Mastodon posts. There's a more definite sense of "FOSS-y tech tribe" than I feel there used to be 15 years ago. In that, it's just a return to form. Nerd groups were often niche groups in the past and now that everyone is on the web, they have returned to being niche groups. It is sad that we lost a brief moment of openness, when groups were interested in cross-pollinating. But it was just a moment in time, a mere blip in the development of social culture, rather than a lasting change.
- li2uR3ce 3y ago
  Hostility, it turns out is "engagement" which is profitable. We went from people organically paring themselves to algorithms steering people towards "engaging" encounters. Where we used to say "don't feed the trolls" we should now be saying "don't feed the algorithm." I suppose we shouldn't feed either one but right now "the algorithm" is the bigger threat. I mean, I can usually get a troll to work for me with a bit of patience and perseverance... algorithms? They'll only work for me if it's profitable for someone else. It's so soulless.

adolph 3y ago

> For social media now, the main reason I read it is to know about new events from people I'm interested in, especially interesting articles. RIP Google Reader

seydor 3y ago

Feed-based social media were never meant to work with too many users just like usenet before them, but the companies went to great lengths to ban enough users and generate enough mindless clickbait that they kept people around for years. As a reader who has no problem with Musk, i still have lost interest on twitter, or even mastodon anymore. Everyone has an opinion, but opinions are like buttholes. If it's something important it will surface on my lemmy feed. I don't need to learn everything the moment it happens, but i like to be able to search for it. I think we ll end up returning to non-aggregated forums. (Sorry reddit, you ve screwed up beyond repair)

l5870uoo9y 3y ago

Not sure what the author's intention is but I reckon that he will never give up his Twitter account with 350.000+ followers regardless of who owns Twitter. Having this many followers is a vehicle for exercising power and generating money.

isodev 3y ago
Used to be the case... not now taking a closer look at one’s followers list shows that a large chunk had ghosted the place or haven’t posted in months.
- akkartik 3y ago
  Not to mention these sites thumbing the scales on your distribution to your own followers. Follower count is increasingly a vanity metric.
- MrRolleyes 3y ago
  > not now taking a closer look at one’s followers list shows that a large chunk had ghosted the place or haven’t posted in months. That's pretty much the norm on twitter, idk about other social networks. On some social networks (including twitter) it's quite normal to just lurk and not contribute anything.
manicennui 3y ago
He makes it pretty clear that he doesn't rely on Twitter for that sort of thing, and given who he is and how well known his books are, I can't see this being an issue for him.

ranqet 3y ago

When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything. As far as the problems people complain about on X, I don't see them. Twitter was always buggy at times, and that hasn't really changed. After the exodus of those who just can't stand Musk, I see far less political posts than I did in recent years, which is an improvement tbh. When I see something I don't want to see, I mute it or block the account, just like I always have.

lapcat 3y ago
> When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything. That's not my experience at all. Who are you following? In my niche, Apple platform software development, the community has almost entirely migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and it's now as active and thriving as ever. IMO the Mastodon experience is even better than the Twitter experience was, because there are a lot fewer random trolls on Mastodon. My little niche was the reason I originally joined Twitter back in 2008, so frankly, I don't really miss the millions of other people. I was never interested in following celebrities.
- alexsereno 3y ago
  Yea mastodon has been totally incredible in my experience following mostly Swift developers. I’d also argue that the slightly higher barrier to entry is more of a feature than a bug since it inherently keeps low effort users out. Lastly I am old enough to remember early Reddit where it was very “technical and confusing” for a lot of people.
PaulHoule 3y ago
It depends who you follow and how. The "explore" feed on mastodon.social is absolutely toxic because it shows the most boosted and favorited posts and unfortunately this is people angry at politics, people who get a thrill out of dehumanizing people, etc. There's a story that "two sides" drive each other crazy on Twitter but my take is that "one side" can conjure the presence of the other side and drive themselves every bit as crazy and there is that subculture on Mastodon. I block the names of most Republican politicians and certain words used by people who aren't comfortable in their own skin and don't want me to be comfortable in mine. If I ever see angry words in an image (screenshot, image meme, whatever) I block the poster immediately. Thus I get to meet the "silent majority" of nice and mature people on Mastodon. I've found my flower photos get a lot of engagement, though I wish there was more enthusiasm for my sports photos that I put more effort into. Here is my profile https://mastodon.social/@UP8 https://mastodon.social/@UP8

ulrischa 3y ago

As he said for me the diversivication of social networks is also really too much. Where should I read? Where should I post? Also WhatsApp started Channels now ... and so on. There will be a critical mass for the splitting then it will roll backwards (to what ever social network that evolved). Because without many people in one network it is not working and ads do not reach enough people.

seydor 3y ago
That s good to hear. The internet was built as a decentralized thing, not the centralized firehoses of social media. We are not meant to discover all of it, and it is meant to be vast, just like the real world.

karaterobot 3y ago

> I first started using social media (in some form) in the late 1980's with Usenet. I wonder what the definition of social media is which includes Usenet, but not email or BBSs, which presumably Fowler used to some extent as well. To me, social media by definition has some level of participation by users who are not posters or responders—i.e. an upvoting mechanism, a sharing mechanism, or an algorithm based on usage—which changes the prominence of the content in some way. Maybe that's just the definition I've cobbled together in my head.

wnevets 3y ago

Martin is forgetting that by next year twitter will not just be a social media website. Twitter will be the everything app, it will do banking, dating and everything else you can think of! Buy a blue checkmark now to get on the ground floor!

seydor 3y ago
banking and having followers is a deadly combination though. Imagine Buterin impersonators, with real payment buttons. "Everything app" goes well with a chat app
manicennui 3y ago
Hilarious.

adverbly 3y ago

> avoid any feed that involves the platform trying to figure out what I might like. Instead I pick selected feeds to follow and organize them into a handful of lists to read according to my current context. This is such a great litmus test for responsible internet use. Who picks the content? Is it you? Is it curated by one individual? Is it determined by a voting system? Is it determined by an engagement algorithm? Is it determined by a content corporation? Realistically, the healthiest way to consume content would probably be to feed it to yourself. And the unhealthiest diet would involve being fed by engagement algorithms. I might start thinking about more things this way.

pxoe 3y ago
that's just creating your own curated little bubble.
- ruszki 3y ago
  Yes, but unfortunately, the past 10 years the alternative became way worse. Propaganda, rage baits, AI generated content, pointless click baits, ads. There is no value anymore on the general internet. If you want value, if you want it to worth your time, you need that bubble. 90s and early 2000s ideals are dead.

phendrenad2 3y ago

"Social media" as a concept is pretty much dead. Nobody is posting life updates on Facebook. People still post, but it's mostly memes and mini-blog-posts ("how about them Eagles?"). Instagram likewise is 50% memes and reposts. The internet today is like one big web forum, we all use our real names, but nobody knows us.

theshrike79 3y ago
I liked when everyone knew me, but didn't know my real name or who I was.

theknocker 3y ago

[dead]

davidw 3y ago

I've pretty much landed on Threads. It's not as good as Twitter, but after some of the really awful things the owner of X said, I just can't anymore. I'd rather be on an inferior platform that's growing than see some of the garbage on X at this point.

nunez 3y ago

It sucks that these platforms have made creating a single tool or site for interacting with each other increasingly impossible. I miss quite a few things about the Old Internet, and one of them is how easy Pidgin, Trillian, and the like made talking to people on Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, or whatever. I think I even used a social media aggregator at one point so I could stay current on Facebook and Twitter at the same time. I don't think that's possible anymore. Talking to people cross-platform is definitely not possible without something like Beeper (which is buggy, but not because of Beeper)

hellotheretoday 3y ago
Because god forbid you not be inundated with ads and have every movement online tracked and catalogued
gintleman 3y ago
Daily user of Beeper -- iMessage, Signal, Whatsapp, Matrix, Slack, and Facebook Messenger. The last thing I'd consider "buggy" was not being able to create text groups, but that was solved within the last few months, and itself was just a missing feature. It's incredibly stable, in fact I've disabled the built in iMessage app on my iPhone and Mac for the last year with not one issue. Would highly recommend!
- sgu999 3y ago
  Oh, very nice. I had no idea this was possible. I would be concerned about privacy though...
- cavemanklaus 3y ago
  Just looked into this and signed up, I'm 127,000 in queue for access, any chance you would be willing to help with a referral code?
- nunez 3y ago
  I had Beeper. It was a cool concept but also underscored my issue with today's chat platforms. For WhatsApp, Beeper needs to have an active session token on their servers that you approve via QR code. This is needed because WhatsApp doesn't have a public API and the only way they can grab messages is by scraping web.whatsapp.com. It's very similar to the approach that Spark (iOS Mail App) takes for connecting to Gmail (they hold refresh tokens server side). Will someone from Spark or Beeper read your messages on the sly? Probably not. But if their servers get compromised, someone else might, and that's a problem! In the Old Days, everything was username/password Basic Auth, and all of the chat platforms exposed some kind of an API. No need for an intermediate server to hold tokens on your behalf.

incomingpain 3y ago

>I'm seeing a platform diversification. People haven't gone to one service, but have split up among many: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram.... I saw many journalists/political activists who made lots of doom predictions on twitter creating an urge for people to perhaps try other options but these aren't competitors to twitter. This is not a either/or type situation. You can be on twitter and Linkedin at the same time. The way I see it, Twitter has no competitor. Mastodon could have been a competitor but before elon bought twitter they made public decisions which has basically made mastodon impossible to compete against twitter. What a huge shame.

jlpcsl 3y ago

"The reason I'm posting on Mastodon is because the future I want is one that's based on interoperability. I want to see an open protocol that isn't dependent on a tech-lord's whim. ActivityPub is currently the one that looks most developed." This. so much. And also it is not repeating the same corporate for-profit business model that FB/X/Twitter and other also have and has led to nothing but enshittification. Let's not repeat the same mistake and go to something really different this time and Mastodon/ActivityPub is it.

lakomen 3y ago

Silicon Valley is the largest cause and perpetrator of censorship on the internet. Be it Hackernews, Facebook, Valve's Steam Forums, Instagram, EU Chatcontrol, Google Reviews, YouTube comments. Silicon Valley companies are making sure you can't speak freely.