from Hacker News

Twitter is the worst global social network except for all the others

by carlesfe on 11/16/24, 8:30 PM with 46 comments

by unsnap_biceps on 11/16/24, 8:42 PM
I've really been digging blue sky the past few days. Being able to mute keywords has made my experience very close to old twitter, and there's real mature debates going on in places where they don't devolve into trolls screaming at each other.
YMMV, but I am hopeful that blue sky is going to keep improving and its culture of easy muting keywords will prevent the mass reach of trolls that are toxic to the community.
by Baljhin on 11/16/24, 8:51 PM
I read the entire piece; it is well-written, factually, well-balanced. It is your opinion, and readers can take-it-or-leave it your ultimate premise.
For me, I'll leave it. My takeaway: Twitter is indeed the worst global social network - of all time // AND, there are many others that are much better - factually so.
For those who still wish to engage with the service but not feed the beast, remove your tweets and your account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159073
by genezeta on 11/16/24, 9:43 PM
I think there are some interesting points in this. But at the same time I think there's a fatal flaw that invalidates the conclusion.
> Twitter is irreplaceable
The main problem is the author overlooked the distinction between Twitter as a concept for "a communication media channel open to everyone" and specifically Twitter itself.
I can generally agree with the idea of wanting some information source other than "centralized media". I think it is a good thing to want. But there's quite a leap from there to thinking Twitter is so unique in this and so irreplaceable. As if there weren't others before, or after, or currently. As if there was something particular to Twitter.
by snakeyjake on 11/16/24, 9:04 PM
The outsized importance people assign to twitter is one of the greatest mysteries of the last 10 years.
by anigbrowl on 11/16/24, 8:50 PM
2. My parents would rather have me drinking than playing Role-Playing Games At 16, I had to lie to my parents to play RPGs. I'd tell them I was off drinking beer with friends (which, back then, was legal).
Why? Because they got their information from TV and newspapers like everyone else. And what they read was that RPGs were satanic rituals and that "playing RPGs" meant murdering people.
I think it's a bit shallow for the author to blame everything on the media without even mentioning the extremely conservative Catholic church or how Spain was a full on dictatorship until Franco died in 1975. Likewise his prescription to just ignore the trolls ignores a lot of solid research on information warfare, tipping points and the like; the idea of 'Gresham's law of content', where bad drives out good once it rises above a certain portion of the total, has been around a good 15 years.
In the end it feels as if the author is projecting personal feelings onto a preferred platform and declaring an individual expression of demand to be an objective inelasticity. In reality networks cleave all the time, and indeed do in rather predictable ways that can be derived from the pattern of follows or interaction without even paying much attention to the content.
by bastard_op on 11/16/24, 11:52 PM
I stopped social networking before twitter and facebook, never had the pleasure or sorrow. It's a conscious decision, you too can have solace avoiding some/all.
My circle of close friends is small, quality over quantity and such.
by wslh on 11/16/24, 8:54 PM
I sympathize with the author’s perspective, as I have a connection to the Spanish experience (e.g. transition to democracy), not by living there, but through the magazine Cambio 16 [1], which played an insightful role in media at my home. When I was very young, I even read about the leather subculture [2], which opened my eyes to diverse cultural expressions.
My main issue with Twitter is its lack of tools to quickly customize or filter your experience. This limitation can pull users into a world of hate, almost like being drawn into a black hole. I’m not sure if this is intentional or something that will improve in the short term. I don’t use Mastodon often, but I’ve noticed constructive discussions happening there. Similarly, I think Reddit has been an incredible resource—one that its owners and managers often seem not to fully understand.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambio_16
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_subculture
by zeroonetwothree on 11/17/24, 1:57 AM
I never got into using Twitter. I don’t really “get” it. The lack of any organization around topic makes it hard to focus on what I’m interested in.
by fzeroracer on 11/17/24, 2:32 AM
>Twitter is irreplaceable
For someone that writes a lot about existing social media formats, it's amazing how they could come to such a wrong conclusion that invalidates anything else they might say. Twitter will die, the same way that MySpace died or LiveJournal died or any other popular social media platform dies. It breaches the trust thermocline and a mass amount of users leave, never to return.
by carlesfe on 11/16/24, 9:21 PM
Hey HN, what does [flagged] mean? Did I do something wrong when posting this? It's the first time I see it here.
by gmuslera on 11/16/24, 9:02 PM
Not all the others, but all the popular enough others. And the definition of “popular enough” goes around attractive to the groups that want to influence, push agendas, sell or whatever. Closed or small enough communities have the opportunity to escape from that fate (or turn to echo chambers, or their members become isolated from the rest of the world because everyone else became alienated by what happens on the popular ones).
Being social and accepted comes with their own compromises because of the dynamics happening around them, some are of which try to use them as tools.
by jwarden on 11/16/24, 11:44 PM
> Twitter isn't perfect because people aren't perfect. There are trolls, toxicity, and extremists because the world has trolls, toxicity, and extremists.
Well put.
by jrflowers on 11/16/24, 8:52 PM
I like this article about how all the other social networks are worse than Twitter that only mentions other social networks in one sentence.
It is refreshing to see someone make a statement and then proceed to ramble about completely unrelated things with no intent of even revisiting the original thesis let alone defending or explaining it. I haven’t read anything this meandering and empty since I stopped using Twitter
by egberts1 on 11/17/24, 12:12 AM
Meanwhile BlueSky is under heavy onslaught of reporting compared to previous year.
3,000 reports per hour now, contrast that to 340,000 for entire previois year (or 38 report/hr).
https://x.com/Libsofbluesky/status/1857587662711882126
by yapyap on 11/16/24, 8:56 PM
ok so the OP likes twitter because
“But on Twitter, you can read:
Experts Who are independent Recounting events they are experiencing first hand And, on the same Twitter, you can find their opponents:
Disproving or debating them With community notes which are displayed at the same level as the OP Which rely on third party sources This only happens on Twitter. And it infuriates traditional media, because they lose control of the narrative”
I think about wholly different Twitter experiences when I think of Twitter (X) in it’s current state, maybe 2018-ish twitter had the features mentioned but nowadays it’s;
- interaction bait - ragebait (which partly overlaps with interaction bait) - misinformation - the owner throwing a hissy fit over almost nothing - the owner roleplaying as his 3 year old son (this isn’t one you see often but it’s memorable)
by fsflover on 11/16/24, 8:53 PM
If it's not bad enough for you to leave yet, it will be soon, thanks to enshittification without any limits, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484
by TZubiri on 11/17/24, 12:46 AM
"Global"
Sure buddy
by nsonha on 11/16/24, 8:45 PM
Must be nice to be Twitter when the user think it is part of their democracy. Google does way more public services but people dont credit them that much.