from Hacker News

W3C Leaves Twitter

by gaius_baltar on 12/6/23, 5:49 PM with 189 comments

• by ChrisArchitect on 12/6/23, 6:52 PM

  It's weird that they protected their tweets...I mean, just leave 'em for posterity. Were they even that active?

• by nalekberov on 12/6/23, 7:52 PM

  Seeing these news right after deactivating your Twitter account. :)

  Twitter is not a platform any more it used to be, a lot of fake accounts with blue ticks and ads after ads.

  I just wonder what was Elon's original idea with Twitter, buy big social network, rename it to "X", show to the world that "Yes, I can", then destroy it gradually from inside?

• by ahmedfromtunis on 12/6/23, 7:30 PM

  Twitter was the closest thing we had to a centralized, yet "distributed", one-stop shop for news.

  If you wanted to keep up with what's happening around you, either in general or in a specific topic, it was the place to be.

  It was possible to hear directly from the people who are reporting on the news you care about, but also from the people the news were about. And INTERACT with them directly.

  Unfortunately that didn't last for long.

  What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is despite all the damage. Threads was as if it didn't even exist.

  The thing is, none of the fediverse networks who try to replace Twitter would be able to accomplish that same mission.

• by superkuh on 12/6/23, 6:14 PM

  I clicked hoping the w3c mastodon site would have HTML. But nope, just another mastodon v3+ that only does anything if you run javascript. The w3c should try to do better. It wasn't possible with twitter but it is with mastodon.

• by ChrisArchitect on 12/6/23, 6:49 PM

  Are they running their own instance or is it being run by a third-party hoster?

• by silexia on 12/8/23, 12:30 AM

  Free speech is truly under attack. I am glad Elon has a platform that allows controversial ideas to be heard. Every other platform is in lockstep with the woke and politically correct crowd. You can't have science without truly dissenting opinions. You can't have a democracy without free speech and ideas that are very unpopular. I hope people continue using Twitter just to support free speech.

• by scottyah on 12/6/23, 7:05 PM

  It is sad to see more tech stuff get political.

  I make this assumption because there are plenty of services that can post to multiple social media accounts, and even cross-posting really wouldn't take that much effort- maybe an additional minute per post if you have to log in each time.

  They're purposely limiting their reach, and I see no reasoning listed so I assume not everyone there is proud of their "why".

• by etchalon on 12/6/23, 7:19 PM

  Obviously it's not W3C, but I keep wondering what account leaving Twitter would feel like an absolute nail in the coffin of the platform.

• by falcor84 on 12/6/23, 8:04 PM

  I wonder if the WHATWG will follow suit

• by joshe on 12/6/23, 7:54 PM

  Sorta surprised at how badly people dislike the Cybertruck.

• by andrew_ on 12/6/23, 7:41 PM

  And nothing of value was lost.

• by rsynnott on 12/7/23, 9:40 AM

  Carface will presumably now decry web standards as ‘woke’, migrate Twitter to Gopher.

• by ceeam on 12/6/23, 6:53 PM

  Shouldn't that be "we are no longer active, period"?

• by memish on 12/6/23, 7:04 PM

  Why?

  It's like opting out of the genepool. Twitter/X is still where everything happens and where you get closest to the source.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com

  Even the most vocal Spaceman haters come back whenever something big is happening. This was reaffirmed again recently with the entire OpenAI CEO saga.

  Add to that community notes, the single best social media innovation.