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Stop from doing what? Threads is even deader than Mastodon. Twitter faltered but recovered and competitors don't have an opening any more. Between Facebook's (
by blfr 3y ago
Stop from doing what? Threads is even deader than Mastodon. Twitter faltered but recovered and competitors don't have an opening any more.
Between Facebook's (and its users) ageing out, Instagram quickly turning into yestermonth's TikTok, and Threads going nowhere, it has never been this easy to avoid Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg. Happy 2024!
Zuck is not building a common infrastructure for social media. Just like he's not pivoting to owning the metaverse (lol) and we won't be his virtual tenants.
As for the Data Transfer Project or Data Transfer Initiative, we already have a common, portable data format for social media. It's screenshots of tweets. Yeah, it's a crappy format but the users have spoken.
- sabellito 3y agoMeta seems to have 3B monthly active users.
- zer0zzz 3y agoI thought it was closer to 4, if you total up everyone on WhatsApp too.
- juujian 3y agoSorry to break it to you, but your parents are still 100% in on Facebook. Or at least their generation is. And those folks vote like there is no tomorrow (literally).
- malka 3y agoOf course. Tommorow they will be dead, and we will be the one paying the bill Congrats on their generation. They deeply convinced me that democracy is one of the worst systems.
- maxwell 3y agoWhat's a better system?
- worthless-trash 3y agoWait for it...
- kybernetyk 3y ago[flagged]
- malka 3y agoTechnocracy.
- slices 3y agoroman empire
- j4yav 3y agoA council of highly upvoted HN commenters
- toolz 3y agoYou should pick any index/ranking you find modestly convincing and ask yourself which of the bottom 50, i.e. least democratic countries you would rather live in when compared to any one single top 10, most democratic country. Democracy has its problems like any other system with imperfect components, but that doesn't mean it isn't the best system we've discovered.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoGo back 150 years when many of todays western countries were monarchies and ask yourself the same question again.
- toolz 3y agoSure, and the answer is similar - the best system we had is evidenced by the best outcomes. Countries with monarchies had the best outcomes so we can conclude from the data that the best system discovered and utilized at the time was monarchy. If we're not using empirical data to rank these systems, I'm not sure what else we could use to gain any confidence.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoI don't think that's a good argument. "Democracy" has been implemented in various forms, one of which is what the US has, where some people have less representation than others, e.g. senate, house seats, electoral college. What they are expressing is not that we should not have democracy either.
- edgyquant 3y agoThe US was specifically designed as a Republic and those institutions you mention specifically designed to be anti-democratic. Democracies are subject to mob rule and historically unstable, republicanism adds a layer of stability and a check on majority rule.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
- benrutter 3y agoHey, please don't give up on democracy! Assuming you're in the US, that is one version of democracy that favours a two party system, but there are lots of others in the world! Countries with more coalition governments have very different looking democracies to that in the USA. Besides that, the US (and all countries) have a lot going on that isn't just their voting systems. I.e. capitalisism, regulations or lack thereof, other existing power structures etc This world has a bunch of scary problems, but I really feel (and I think the evidence shows) that we need more representation to solve them, not less!
- malka 3y agoI Live in UE, and democraties here sucks too. This is not an US only issue.
- benrutter 3y agoI didn't mean to make out it was! But what democracy means seems to vary place by place so I figured it was helpful to at least make an explicit assumption. I'm not trying to sell anyone on a "everything is rosy" outlook, but I think its important to question whether the problem is democracy itself. I.e.: - Do you think democracy is bad because it's not representative enough? That sounds like you think the problem is that we need our systems to be more democratic? - Do you think democracy is bad because democratic countries have huge political problems? What makes you assume democracy is the cause of those problems? Most democratic countries are also capitalist, religous, have laws, etc. Are those things bad too? Don't get me wrong, its important to point out how our systems aren't working for us. But taking a blanket "democracy is bad" attitude is probably going to lead to the things your disenfranchised with becoming much much worse.
- cassianoleal 3y agoNow it’s time to convince you that “western” representative democracy is not the end-all and be-all of democratic systems. Democracy means the people have the power. The electoral and representative system most countries have in place in more or less the same way is a rough first stab at that.
- malka 3y ago> Democracy means the people have the power. That is the issue. My country is riddled by old person, who do not give a single fuck about the future beyond their own grave.
- cassianoleal 3y agoPlease re-read the first sentence in the post you replied to.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoIt's a well known adage that democracy is the worst system of government, but the alternatives are worse. A lot of countries are moving towards autocracy at the moment, using democracy as a means to keep the people quiet - "you voted for this", "sorry your side lost but we live in a democracy and you should accept defeat gracefully", that kinda thing. The illusion of choice is very overt in countries like Russia (where the opposition is removed) and the US (where the choice is often based on populism or the lesser of two evils or the opposition to what is the current status quo). There's also the illusion of voting for a party that represents your interests; in my own country of NL we had voting last year, a lot of people were cynical because in previous elections, the chosen parties quickly compromised on their own party program because they wanted to be part of the coalition.
- cassianoleal 3y ago> It's a well known adage that democracy is the worst system of government, but the alternatives are worse. That doesn't make it true. In any case, I believe democracy is desired. I don't believe it's achieved in very meaningful ways with this model of representative democracy most countries implement.
- zer0zzz 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into flamewar, and please especially don't cross into personal attack. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 3y agoPlease do not post flamewar comments to HN, and especially not generational flamewar, which should be particularly easy to avoid. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- azangru 3y agoDoes the article discuss how to wean the parents' generation off of Facebook? I don't think it does... And if not, then grandparent's question stands - what is it that Meta must be prevented from doing?
- hashtag-til 3y agoYeah, I confirm parents and friends (all involved in their 60s) are full on Facebook, scrolling all day, and finding it absolutely _awesome_ to hear unnecessary updates from lots of people. Unfortunately though, it contributed to convert them from being normal people to get them "out of the closet" with radical right-wing crazy ideas. They don't trust "regular media" because it is best to consume videos from randos recording from their cars, with "the real truth". I gave up really trying to explain... so mostly talk about mild topics. No politics, no contentious issues or anything.
- wildpeaks 3y agoI can't recall the last time I saw an event mention their twitter presence, it's only Tiktok now (and sometimes Instagram).
- test77777g 3y agoYeah I really never got why people were mentioning it. It seems like Elon Musk is just good at hype, because it never had much exposure to me at all even when he bought it and I am very online and advertiser friendly.
- blfr 3y agoFor better or worse (ok, worse), Twitter is the current intellectual trend-setter. You may not be there but many a youtuber/podcaster/academic/politician are scrolling through hot takes as we speak. The cultural power of Twitter vastly outweighs its raw number of users (relatively low).
- emptyfile 3y ago[dead]
- jltsiren 3y agoI'm not sure Twitter is that relevant anymore, as you can't really browse it without logging in. It's more like an echo chamber for influencers now than a platform interesting people could use to reach their audiences directly. I used to be active in a corner of the science Twitter, but it started dying long before the takeover. Algorithmic recommendations killed it. When a platform starts prioritizing recommendations over explicit user choices, it also prioritizes influencers over people with something interesting to say.
- lopis 3y agoAll events I've attended the last months explicitly mentioned having moved away from Twitter, and speakers have dropped twitter as the way to catch up after talks - mostly in favour of LinkedIn, which is tragic.
- ChatGTP 3y agoThey made billions of dollars last year? Edit: Not excited about it, just facts.
- zer0zzz 3y agoSeriously. Op’s post sounds like it came out from under a rock from a year ago.
- mpalmer 3y agoIt's funny that you won't call your favorite social network by its new name. You seem to be conflating your own use of and preference for X with some kind of overall victory for X over its competitors. Why is Threads dead? Because the people you follow don't use it? In the second half of 2023, Threads gained significant users/downloads/traffic and X... went the other way. It's easy for you to ignore Meta, yes. It is even easier for Meta to be ignored by you. You disregard the rather salient fact that Meta has 3 billion daily users of its products, and growing. Its 2023Q3 profit was $11.6 billion, double that of the previous year.
- dale_glass 3y ago> Stop from doing what? Threads is even deader than Mastodon. To me that's kind of the point of Mastodon actually. It's not a 24/7 engagement machine. I scroll down a bit, and I'm already looking at posts from December 5. But what's in between is pretty much that I wanted to see, and it doesn't try to raise my blood pressure in an effort to keep me watching ads and angrily firing off messages at people. Of course it's going to look unimpressive stats-wise compared to Twitter, but to me that's the very point. I don't want infinite crap. I want less, but good.
- tptacek 3y agoI scrolled down to the bottom of my new-posts column in Ivory, pulling to make it load more posts, and then down again and I'm on tomorrow. And I follow less than half as many people as I follow on Twitter. For the kinds of technical discussions I follow, it clearly isn't dead. Maybe security and networking and cryptography is just distinctively on Mastodon?
- erellsworth 3y ago> Twitter faltered but recovered and competitors don't have an opening any more.F Hate to break it to you but Twitter hasn't recovered. It's still a financial dumpster fire and the dumpster is rolling down a steep hill toward bankruptcy.
- PaulHoule 3y agoTo Facebook's credit, Facebook really is investing in developing a new platform, which is more than you can say about Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. The reality is that Horizon Worlds is a joke (maximum 20 players in a world and you trade players for geometry, a 20 player world is much smaller than an 8 player world.) Horizon Worlds doesn't let you import images, video or sound. A VR world has to fit everything you can see in a headset. A really big game like Asgard's Wrath 2 (absolutely amazing) is like an open world game which is full of hidden loading screens and it's quite expensive to develop if you want it to feel open. By not letting you load those kind of resources HW keeps the size of the world under control, plus it disappears pornography, copyright violations and a whole lot of trouble. It kills HW for me because I want to make content based on photography and visual art, and kills it for commercial users because McDonald's just has to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of the cup. The MQ3 is basically an Android phone you wear on your face and the mainstream way to deliver apps for it is the same as a mobile phone. Unlike Apple, you can sideload, in fact you can sideload many ordinary phone apps, such as the Tailscale client or the Denon HEOS client and they usually work. It's not less any open an environment than mobile. On top of that you can create webpages with WebXR that appear in VR at the touch of the button and this framework https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/ you can make worlds that are browsable on phone, tablet and desktop but that you can enter with a VR headset. (Makes me think of a few kids TV shows where the characters can jump into books) These are compatible across a range of devices such as the Hololens 2, PCVR headsets, and even the Apple Vision Pro. Google and Microsoft provide plenty of models for half-baked efforts that end in failure (every time a B2B startup gets bought by Google the competitors have a meeting of their salespeople the next day and say... "YOU'RE ON COMMISSION, YOU'RE GOING TO GET RICH!") Facebook is the one big tech company that is seriously investing in a new platform and they deserve some credit for it, whereas all the rest of them are so wrapped up in "business theater" and "technology theater" that nobody realizes Google hasn't made anything since they bought YouTube.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoSomewhat agree. In physical infrastructure, they're spending ~$40 billion over 2 years on hardware without a specific goal or product in mind. On the product front, maybe Threads will be something different from Twitter/X and Instagram. I still fail to see how it's not an and-me-too, undifferentiated product. I agree that H.W. is a joke. VR is an unconquered category for 50+ years, like flying cars, probably because there is no "there" there and it's not useful or better to enough people on its own. It could be useful for limited, tailored solutions like virtual building walkthroughs, construction, architecture, engineering, air traffic control, and occasional gaming but I don't see everyone wanting non-AR VR. Rich AR with some VR aspects would be much more useful, such as glasses or contacts that can provide overlays of information while moving in the physical world. Virtually visiting the physical or virtual worlds is an add-on but not a useful category by itself. Oculus allows for running a VR game like Fallout 4 VR on a PC with GPU acceleration, but then presenting it on a device like a Oculus Quest Pro over WiFi. The linking is a PITA and failure-prone. Honestly, most of the Oculus software feels like an incomplete, alpha-stage product with a shiny UI over it. Even the Oculus Quest Pro hardware reeked of nasty VOCs straight out of the box. The other things are capable VR headsets are expensive, bulky, battery limited, and insufficiently multipurpose. Overarching problems with Meta, Google, and Apple is they suffer from the pathologies and encumbrances of publicly-traded businesses with corporate red-tape, certain they want to stay relevant, profit today, kill off good products arbitrarily, risk-aversion, imagination calcification, and cluelessness about what will be The Next Big Thing™. Their loss is the gain of cleverer teams to bring the future by executing on what big companies will not or cannot do.
- msluyter 3y ago> Twitter faltered but recovered and competitors don't have an opening any more. Really? I dropped Twitter and have been on Threads since it opened, and afaict, it's gaining momentum, while Twitter becomes the new Truth Social. Threads does have a different set of problems (instagram influencers showing up in your feed, for example), but mostly I just read people I'm directly following so it's not much of an issue. Perhaps eternal September hasn't arrived for it yet, but thus far I greatly prefer it.
- paganel 3y agoThe news and videos about the recent airplane accident in Tokyo can be found on Twitter, people posted Twitter links, no such thing for Threads.
- j4yav 3y agoI'm seeing the same airplane incident text and video on Threads, Reddit, and every news website though. I'm not getting hot takes from Twitter luminaries, but I don't really mind.
- haunter 3y agoWhat they mean the first hand videos with 50m and 13m views were posted on Twitter and not on Mastodon and Threads https://twitter.com/alto_maple/status/1742115893285412984 https://twitter.com/alto_maple/status/1742115893285412984 https://twitter.com/ricole0704/status/1742125829818335613 https://twitter.com/ricole0704/status/1742125829818335613
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago> > Facebook's (and its users) ageing out Facebook is more alive than ever. If you need to do something in the real world it's the only game in town. It's like a mix of Linkedin, Indeed, eBay and Magzter with the added convenience that there are billions of groups pertaining to the thing that you want to do. I love it because it's actionable, nonpolitical and nonthoughtleader-ish, just a bunch of people doing stuff together. I like Facebook now much better compared to when it came out, my social media diet is Facebook + reddit + HN
- j4yav 3y agoWhat does this mean specifically? I’m not on Facebook and seem to be interfacing successfully with the real world, at least as best I can tell. > If you need to do something in the real world it's the only game in town
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoAll sorts of groups about all sorts of vehicles where people give each others tips on what to buy, what to sell, how to repair, where to buy parts (straight to FB marketplace). Sort by geographical areas to see people near you, so that if you are thinking about buying/selling a vehicle you can hit them directly in their profile. All sorts of groups about garage sales, garage bands, garage everything really , and again from there straight to FB marketplace All sorts of groups for help wanted where you can find babysitters in your area, people who'd cut your grass in exchange for cash, independent plumbers, independent everything really. Gym equipement, sparring partners for combat sports, buddies to go biking/mountainbiking/climbing/kitesurfing together for company and higher safety. And on and on and on.
- j4yav 3y agoAh ok, interesting. I think my own version of all those is to ask around amongst friends.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoThe the article expresses underlying sentiments that appear as sociological dysfunctions of looking for a one weird thing "way out" and the expectation of action by someone else. 1. Once upon a time™, everyone was subject to the same mainstream broadcast of information by news, TV, and radio and the equivalent of church gossip and stoop chatter from their immediate neighborhood. That's no longer the case. Instead, there is endless bifurcation of perspectives leading to disconnected anomie by hyper-connectedness and information overload. As such, there is no desirable simple solution to online solidarity, community, connectedness, and suppression of bots other than by an undesirable totalitarian state doing away with technology or eliminating all other platforms except a single one, then only permitting real identities that can be verified. The larger solution for humanity is public, semi-private, and private commons free from the yoke of megacorp pseudo-"free" privacy exploitation, placing a thumb on the scale of issues, influence peddling, censorship, selective hate and outrage magnification, and digital mass persuasion causing tectonic shifts in sentiment (beyond manufactured consent, it's engineered consent for mostly profit reasons). The means of this is by a well-run, usable, non-addictive-but-useful nonprofit funded by micropayments pushing aside commercial social networks by optimize beneficial, decent interactions, solidarity, local community connections, and discovery of the real world. (Yes, semi-utopian as a laudable goal to strive for without being the only consideration.) 2. With the rise and evolution of the internet, there was a silent shift of the burdens of intellectual and moral courage, risk-taking, and effort onto a few influencers and creators that belies the prevalence of learned helplessness, isolation, and feelings of powerlessness (increased anomie). Commenting on works, even this, is by its nature, pseudo participation that isn't creation beyond a squeak into the maelstrom. Creation and effort means action in the physical world of humans and material, and works beyond commenting. One modern sociological barrier to this is the expectation of credit or approval for work. Instead, it requires individual discipline and attitude for collective betterment regardless of approbation or complaint lacking constructive feedback: a. "Be the change you seek [by assuming no one else will be the first]." and b. "Just do it™", create art, or writing one's thoughts independent of approval or disapproval.
- mikepurvis 3y ago"It's screenshots of tweets. Yeah, it's a crappy format but the users have spoken." Like every sane person, I hate this reality, but I'm also fascinated by the pragmatic work that has still gone into alleviating the worst aspects of it— specifically platform-level support in iOS for recognizing text in images and making that text selectable and searchable.