[HN Gopher] Substack Notes Launched
___________________________________________________________________
Substack Notes Launched
Author : theolivenbaum
Score : 711 points
Date : 2023-04-11 15:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (on.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (on.substack.com)
| [deleted]
| ticviking wrote:
| If this isn't in app I don't see how it has any way to get
| traction.
| guywithahat wrote:
| While cool, this has coincided with Substack not paying the
| twitter API fee and you can no longer embed tweets on new
| articles (at least for now)
| abhayhegde wrote:
| Is that basically like Twitter then? A micro-blogging feature?
|
| Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing
| to Substack.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| > Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links
| containing to Substack.
|
| That seems to have accelerated the shift for some to Substack
| [1] (imagine if Google blocked searches for Bing or Brave!).
| Suppressing Substack makes the Twitter brand look weak and
| nervous.
|
| 1. https://reason.com/2023/04/10/elon-musk-matt-taibbi-
| twitter-...
| LegitShady wrote:
| prediction - substack goes nowhere, like they currently are.
|
| Suppressing substack when substack is trying to advertise for
| a twitter competitor is just common sense. There's no need
| for twitter to advertise for a competitor. That isn't
| censorship, thats just normal business. If substack was
| depending on twitter for free data and free advertising they
| were the ones who were weak and nervous.
| marcinzm wrote:
| As I see it if you have a significantly superior product
| then a competitor advertising on your platform is a
| positive since it just make you look even better in
| comparison. And a social media platform with 200 million
| daily users should be significantly superior to an
| identical clone with probably 1 million on a good day. Of
| course if you think you don't have a better product or that
| people hate your product that much then it's time to build
| moats and prevent people from jumping ship.
| LegitShady wrote:
| none of this has anything to do with substack making a
| business plan off of sucking down twitter data and
| advertising on twitter. There's no reason twitter has to
| put up with that.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Twitter's freedom to do something doesn't prevent other
| people's freedom to react to those actions.
|
| They can block whomever they want and I can say it
| highlights how fragile they view their own business
| position as.
| LegitShady wrote:
| if you want to believe not directly contributing to
| competition that tried to take your data and advertise on
| your platform is fragile, thats of course your choice. To
| everyone else its just common sense. the fragility is the
| business plan that needs to steal its competitors data
| and space for advertising to have a hope in succeeding.
| r053bud wrote:
| Twitter was supposed to be the "public square", even Elon
| said as much. Restricting which goods and services are sold
| or marketed in said square is a shift away from that
| mentality.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| When you're even losing the other billionaires: https://m
| astodon.social/@malwaretech@infosec.exchange/110172...
| pessimizer wrote:
| Twitter's another monopolist media company with a bunch
| of debt that needs to drown a potential competitor. I
| don't see Substack being able to become a direct
| competitor because the newsletter business is too good,
| and having _closed_ twitter-like spaces that don 't allow
| organized harassment is a good way for newsletters to
| build community and conversations. Twitter will remain
| the public version, where constant harassment from the
| ill and the covert has to be filtered out like spam.
|
| That being said, maybe the important things will start
| being said in private spaces and only end up in "public
| squares" via screenshot ten or fifteen minutes later.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| Of course. It's never been about free speech, but
| promoting Musk's personal interests and brand of
| politics.
| rvz wrote:
| Many had already forgotten that before the so-called
| villain of the year called Elon Musk took over the blue
| bird site, there was a social network called Meerkat that
| Twitter actively suppressed and introduced their own
| alternative called periscope.
|
| Twitter is within their right to cut off access to their
| competitors, future or present.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| They blocked any retweet or like of a tweet containing a
| substack link.
|
| E.g. an author writes content, people who are not
| affiliated with substack try to like/share.
|
| That is not advertising, and this from the apparent free
| speech absolutist Elon.
| gwen-shapira wrote:
| Substack also removed the "Also publish to Twitter" checkbox
| from the settings screen before publishing each post.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Is that Substack being evil, or the result of Twitter
| locking almost everyone out of its API recently?
| gwen-shapira wrote:
| I just shared an interesting fact that I learned while
| posting on Substack this morning. I don't know the
| reason, and generally I don't think of product changes in
| terms of good and evil.
| basisword wrote:
| I think that was because Twitter revoked their API access
| including breaking their Sign in with Twitter feature (at
| least that's what I read a few days back).
| rchaud wrote:
| It's admitting that managing infrastructure for email
| newsletters is not a viable business. After all, you can't
| serve people targeted third party ads with just email.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| It depends what you mean by viable. Substack newsletters have
| a paid option, substack can take a cut of that and the infra
| costs of sending emails is tiny.
|
| If you want to bethe next massive aquistion/IPO, then maybe
| not.
| runnerup wrote:
| Why not? Could insert an ad into the email. Personalized for
| each recipient even.
| dilap wrote:
| I think it was a bad move by Elon to ban (and good move to
| reverse, though some damage already done), but I see why he was
| pissed: it's a straight-up Twitter clone.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Big Twitter alternative announced on ... Twitter
| capital_guy wrote:
| Yeah, I think @dang should change this link to the official
| announcement at https://on.substack.com/p/notes
| seydor wrote:
| But the name ... couldnt they name it "Stacks" or something
| therealmarv wrote:
| Dead on arrival. You cannot transfer a crowd to another platform.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Whoever approved that name must be crazy. Googling that is coming
| up with everything else. Looking on the AppStore is the same.
| joegahona wrote:
| That occurred to me too. You want something that has meaning
| but isn't insanely generic. So something between "Notes" and
| "Nostr."
| abledon wrote:
| People may berate twitter as being a 'simple' app, but everyone
| uses it because everyone is already there. Substack can't clone
| that 'first mover' advantage.
| willio58 wrote:
| As someone who consumes twitter posts without even having an
| account, I don't really care if a 'tweet' comes from twitter or
| substack.
| [deleted]
| keiferski wrote:
| Substack has been adding a lot of random features lately and it
| makes me worry that they will lose focus on the email newsletter
| aspect of their platform, which is what I like about it.
| tootie wrote:
| There's a few reasons I'm skeptical. For one they have an
| equally spotty reputation for arbitrary editorial policy while
| claiming to be completely agnostic. And secondly there have
| been a few stories about their distressed fiscal situation.
| They spent a load of VC money from the zero interest era on
| prominent writers. Far more than they'd bring in as revenue in
| the hopes they'd juice the brand. Classic strategy of selling
| dollars for 75 cents to get traction. Only they'd paid
| disproportionate amounts to some controversial writers which
| is, in essence, an editorial policy that speaks in dollars.
| They've also punished critics.
|
| My general belief is that we won't get a better Twitter from VC
| world. I also have zero confidence in the Fediverse because it
| has no business strategy.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/17/23309877/substack-forever...
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > I also have zero confidence in the Fediverse because it has
| no business strategy.
|
| HTTP also has no business strategy. Any number of sites that
| use the protocol can have different strategies, profit-
| oriented or otherwise.
| noirscape wrote:
| Honestly, my confidence in the Fediverse is in part because
| it has no business strategy. The tooling behind it is at the
| moment pretty much universally AGPL (a license which I don't
| think is very good but it seems to keep away big businesses).
| It probably won't reach mass-appeal outside of gradually
| amassing tech nerds, but at the same time... maybe that's for
| the better?
|
| I dunno, I think a lot of the enshittification[0] of social
| media companies comes in part _because_ of their business
| strategies. VCs demand eternal growth or an eventual buyout.
| Fedi doesn 't have that incentive. The worst that can happen
| to it is what happened to e-mail, where you get a few
| nebulously large providers but it's still more than possible
| (although with e-mail, rather aggravating due to an outdated
| tech stack that we've bolted a bunch of asterisks onto to try
| and make it more suited for general use) to live outside that
| bubble and interact with that big provider bubble anyway.
|
| [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-
| doctorow/
| tootie wrote:
| The tech stack of any platform is secondary or even
| tertiary to success. Especially for something relatively
| trivial like microblogging.
| exizt88 wrote:
| Looks very good. I wonder how the product team is thinking about
| user retention. I caught myself thinking "Huh, there's a lot of
| interesting content here -- I hope I don't forget to look at it
| tomorrow". Not sure how to solve that without being annoying,
| TBH.
| xd1936 wrote:
| This would be much more interesting to me if it was a member of
| the Fediverse and supported ActivityPub.
| arrakeen wrote:
| please no. Substack Notes is a self-quarantine zone for the
| kind of self-promoting Twitter users who viewed the site as a
| place for them to engage an audience. despite its many, many
| faults, at least the Fediverse has real people hanging out and
| chatting with each other.
| internetter wrote:
| Agreed. I commented this on the announcement thread, but
| there's so much... Bluesky, T2, Hive, Post, now this. I'm not
| gonna jump to a new microblogging platform when 10% of my
| friends are on one, 10% on another.
|
| If you are making a twitter clone, AP is the only way to go
| Andrex wrote:
| I don't understand why providing and consuming RSS/Atom is so
| problematic the technical headaches couldn't be overcome...
| einpoklum wrote:
| How would this be better than Mastodon? (Really asking, I only
| ever tried Mastodon for a bit.)
| xuancanh wrote:
| Mastodon lacks personalized sorting in its news feed as well
| as account-to-follow recommendations. A news feed that is
| strictly organized in chronological order becomes unusable
| when users follow more than 100 accounts. This can only be
| solved by having a centralized services like Substack.
| s1k3s wrote:
| Does anyone know what software they use to make these short demo
| videos? I see them in lots of app landing pages and I'm curious
| how to make them.
| rasengan wrote:
| On macOS, you can use Quicktime which lets you also select a
| geometric region within the screen. Then, you can edit, crop
| and so forth in iMovie. Finally, you can use ffmpeg to convert
| to gif.
|
| The following command works well:
|
| ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "fps=10" -loop 0 out.gif
|
| To be clear, the loop 0 will make the gif infinitely loop. By
| setting a number n, it will set the gif to loop n times.
| s1k3s wrote:
| Thanks, it seems like Quicktime + iMovie is what I was
| looking for.
| rasengan wrote:
| No problem!
| hbn wrote:
| Worth noting, if all you need to do is trim the video,
| Quicktime can do this quickly out of the box without iMovie
| (Cmd+T to trim)
|
| A lot of the time I find this preferable because iMovie is
| not very flexible with video aspect ratios/resolutions
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > On macOS, you can use Quicktime which lets you also select
| a geometric region within the screen.
|
| Or Command + Shift + 5
| hbn wrote:
| I've done this but I've still never figured out the magic
| sauce to get a gif with a good balance of file size and
| quality. And gifs seem to have some kind of trick I don't
| understand with framerate cause sometimes a 30fps gif I made
| will play in slow motion, and at first I think it's that it's
| just slowly loading, but even after it's fully loaded it
| still plays slowed down.
|
| gifs just constantly remind me that they're not made for what
| we used them for these days
| taylorjadin wrote:
| gifski does a great job at being relatively simple, while
| handling quality stuff for you.
|
| https://gif.ski/
|
| gifski --fps 10 --width 320 -o anim.gif video.mp4
| toddmorey wrote:
| Gif makes sense as an output format but your question may be
| what software to use to capture & edit the screen activity.
|
| Even with all the other options, my favorite is still
| ScreenFlow. It has a lot of editing features... basically
| uMovie for screen recordings.
| DoubleDerper wrote:
| animated gifs. lots of free tools available. substack probably
| has staff designers to make it extra pretty.
| mstade wrote:
| I use gifski, it's perfect: https://gif.ski/
| livinglist wrote:
| this seems really nice.
| drusepth wrote:
| Can gifski handle the initial recording (e.g. selecting an
| area of your monitor and recording)? Or is it just for
| converting other recordings into gif?
| karaterobot wrote:
| Negative. Just a converter.
| tedmiston wrote:
| Minus the background color, the drop shadow is the same as how
| it looks when you do this in QuickTime > New Screen Recording >
| Capture Selected Window.
| Thorentis wrote:
| They should add a paid add-on where writers can have an LLM
| generate snippets from their articles and then post them as notes
| automatically in order to generate a bite sized feed from
| existing content. Gives Substack a foot in the AI door and paves
| the way for timelines and algorithmic feeds, etc.
| papito wrote:
| I can see why Elon is hysterical. An actual long-form publisher,
| with content creators, with proper "blue checks" and a customer
| base paying for more than vanity badges. I spent a few minutes on
| it, and yeah, it IS a Twitter clone, and it's a real threat.
| lpolovets wrote:
| I'm a little unclear on what subscribing means in the context of
| Notes + Newsletters. Does subscribing to someone in the Notes
| product mean I'm also subscribed to emails from the person? If
| so, that's not a great dynamic -- I'd like to follow 100s of
| people in Notes, but that doesn't mean I want to subscribe to
| 100s of newsletters.
| clessg wrote:
| This _appears_ to be correct based on my extremely limited
| experience thus far. It 's pretty confusing. However,
| apparently the emails can be disabled:
| https://substack.com/profile/364398-judd-legum/note/c-144726...
|
| > 1. Go to Settings on the web version of substack.com
|
| > 2. Scroll down to you publications
|
| > 3. Click into any publication you don't want to get emails.
|
| > 4. Deselect "Receive emails for new posts"
|
| Hoping they improve the experience.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| I love Substack. But apart from to mess with Twitter I really
| don't understand the point of this.
|
| https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-1446...
| I'd a good summary. I don't want to subscribe to hundreds of
| newsletters to see tweet (sorry, notes). But if you change that
| setup, it really is a Twitter clone with no upside to writers.
| kritiko wrote:
| The upside to writers would be traffic to their articles. Once
| you get to the article, you can have the usual subscribe
| overlay.
|
| I think it does add some confusion to the product if notes
| become more popular than articles / comment sections on
| articles.
| m_ke wrote:
| They raised a ton of money on a high valuation, spent 25mil to
| make 1 mil last year and are now scrambling to raise a new
| crowd sourced round because they don't want to get wiped out in
| a down round.
|
| This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an
| advertising based business model and I'm guessing they think
| they have "influencers" on their platform to bring in a decent
| audience.
| rchaud wrote:
| Next on the product roadmap:
|
| - Infinite scrolling feed w/ ads
|
| - Video Substacks
|
| - Infinite scrolling video Substacks w/ ads
| kubectl_h wrote:
| Don't forget the chumboxes.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| But teh videoz need be shoorts
| te_chris wrote:
| ZIRP picking off its victims one by one
| [deleted]
| blitzar wrote:
| You are not a victim in any real sense if they cut you a
| fat cheque first then take away the toys.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Only victims are the pension funds and sovereign funds
| and HNIs who fund VCs. Everyone else made money. Founders
| made money at every raise, employees made money with fat
| salaries, users "made" money with fat discounts.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an
| advertising based business model
|
| The announcement for the feature on twitter[1] literally
| emphasizes the lack of ads, pointing out subs are their
| revenue source, so that would be some 4D enshittification
| chess.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/hamishmckenzie/status/164362995302659
| 686...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _announcement for the feature on twitter literally
| emphasizes the lack of ads_
|
| Guessing that's now how they'll pitch it to an acquirer
| once it takes off.
| lapcat wrote:
| > This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an
| advertising based business model
|
| It's not. Substack is very clear about that.
| https://on.substack.com/p/notes-faq
|
| "The ultimate goal on Substack is to convert casual readers
| into paying subscribers. Because the Substack network runs on
| paid subscriptions, writers are rewarded for respecting the
| trust and attention of their audiences, not exploiting it
| like with ad-based social media."
|
| "While Notes may look similar to social media feeds, the key
| difference is in what you don't see. The Substack network
| runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. It's social media with a
| heart transplant."
| Incipient wrote:
| Because no company would ever lie about their intentions,
| or at the very least pivot to the exact opposite of their
| original point without a second thought.
|
| Would they?
| k_pres wrote:
| Clearly not. No company would ever betray their original
| principles for the opportunity to make more money in the
| short term
| [deleted]
| shanebellone wrote:
| "Because no company would ever lie about their
| intentions, or at the very least pivot to the exact
| opposite of their original point without a second
| thought."
|
| No business would pivot to a dying monetization model
| unless it was their last option.
|
| Advertising is not a solution for Substack; but rather a
| Trojan Horse.
| rchaud wrote:
| Dying monetization model? Is that why Microsoft, Amazon
| and Apple App Store are splattering their properties with
| them like a Jackson Pollock painting?
| v0idzer0 wrote:
| As much as I wish this were to true, it's objectively
| false. Digital advertising is a healthy industry that
| powers many profitable companies. Substack is not
| profitable and torching money even with a 10% claim on
| wroters' subscription revenue
| gimme_treefiddy wrote:
| > They raised a ton of money on a high valuation, spent 25mil
| to make 1 mil last year and are now scrambling to raise a new
| crowd sourced round because they don't want to get wiped out
| in a down round.
|
| Sorry to get off-topic, but is there a read/book to
| understand funding, VCs, etc., from a holistic POV. I totally
| didn't expect that consequence of having to raise a crowd
| sourced round due to initial high valuation.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| Venture Deals by Bred Feld is the best book on the matter
| mikpanko wrote:
| "Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer And VC" is
| pretty good. Used it when raising a round of funding.
|
| "The Power Law: Venture Capital And The Making Of The New
| Future" is also good. It tells the story of the evolution
| of VC over the last 70 years. It is interesting that
| funding terms seem to be becoming more and more founder-
| friendly over decades.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| - Their valuation is high because they raised during the
| recent bubble
|
| - If you raise more money at a lower valuation than your
| last fundraise, it's highly dilutive. Investors paid $10
| for 10% of a $100 valued company last round during the
| bubble. Vs. given current market conditions, new investors
| would only pay $10 for 20% of a $50 valued company this
| round. This second round would dilute existing investors,
| except...
|
| - If you crowd source the funding, now you can raise at a
| $100 valuation again (less dilution), because these
| crowdsourcing investors don't know what they're doing
| drusepth wrote:
| I don't have a resource for you (and will probably read
| whatever you get linked), but one intuitive way to think
| about it is that VCs/investors (and most of the startup
| ecosystem) are generally focused on "growth", not
| "performance".
|
| You can be a stable, profitable, money-making machine with
| 90+% margins and amazing reviews, but unless you're
| doubling something (users, engagement, profits, etc) every
| single year, you go to the back of the potential-investment
| line.
|
| A high initial valuation might be great for performance
| relative to other companies (or whatever reasonable metric
| you want to insert here), but it also makes it way more
| difficult to show "growth" YOY compared to a lower initial
| valuation.
| brewdad wrote:
| Why would a company like that want VC money? They can go
| to a bank if their numbers are that good and keep their
| equity for themselves.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| Having been in/around the game for a good few years, I can
| assure you it's not nearly as complicated as they try to
| make it sound.
|
| The game works like this: the VCs want 100% of your
| company, and you want to give away 0% of your company. (Of
| course, 90%+ of companies will fail, so it doesn't really
| matter. But let's pretend we're all in that special 10%.)
|
| If you do end up choosing to play that particular game,
| then you'll find some common numerical rules of thumb. They
| usually go like this: Each round should raise 12-18 months
| of runway, and each round's investors usually get about
| 20-30% of your company.
|
| On one side of the game, you have the VCs, who basically
| play this negotiation full-time -- and whose comp structure
| depends on extracting as much equity from you as possible.
| This is why we get the constant stream of "thought
| leadership" from VC bloggers, because they're trying to
| distinguish themselves as offering something more than
| capital. (And, having distinguished themselves, they can
| extract more % from you for less $.)
|
| After decades of practice, VCs have plenty of hustles they
| can run. Some of the classics are the old "participating
| preferred" play, as well as the usual sound bite about how
| "it doesn't matter what the exact numbers are."
|
| On the other side of the game, you have the founders, who
| basically want the maximum amount of money in exchange for
| the least amount of equity -- but also for the least amount
| of _time._ Fundraising is a massive distraction, and VCs
| know it -- which is why time always gets used against the
| founder, with long and drawn-out "fundraising processes"
| that (by total coincidence, of course) also happen to
| exhaust the founder and push them towards signing.
|
| The twist is that this game isn't only for 1 round. Once
| you take your company into this game, you're stuck in it --
| you'll have to keep fundraising to keep fueling the growth
| that you've kickstarted using external capital. With the
| average IPO timeline being 7-10 years, combined with
| fundraising every 12-18 months, you can expect to play this
| game 5+ times on the way to IPO.
|
| Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, the founder raises
| _too much_ $ for _too little_ %. You 'd think this is a
| good move -- but, since this is an iterated game, it's not
| all upside. Decisions in this round set the stage for the
| next round. If you can't live up to the growth expectations
| implied by the high valuation, then you're in for a "down
| round."
|
| VCs have a standard "down round" playbook, too. They'll
| have their way with the cap table, of course -- and it's
| also not uncommon to see some/all of the founding team
| shown the door. The press piles on as soon as they hear of
| it, which drags on employee morale as well as the talent
| pipeline, both of which then destroy product velocity and
| market positioning... it's _very_ easy to have a single
| "down round" be the kiss of death for a company.
|
| So that brings us all the way back around to your question.
| For this particular company -- as well as for many others
| that raised during the "cheap money" era of the pandemic
| and pre-pandemic years -- it sounds like they're facing
| this conundrum. Crowdsourcing the next round is a somewhat
| new way to tackle this situation -- new regulations came
| out a few years ago, and founders sometimes go this route
| instead of risking the "down round" game with VCs.
|
| You usually only see B2C companies making the crowd-funding
| play in the first place, since you need the name
| recognition and customer base to even _try_ to raise money
| in this way. Because founders can essentially "divide and
| conquer" their investor base in a scenario where everyone's
| investing only four or five figures, the common scenario
| here is that the founder sets the terms to avoid the down
| round -- and _then_ they begin the fundraising. Since they
| 're fundraising from hundreds/thousands of people instead
| of 5-10 people, it ends up being more of a marketing
| campaign rather than high-touch sales, which can also play
| to some founders' strengths.
|
| Anyway, I could keep riffing for a while (and I'm sure
| others here could do even better). I'll let the other
| commenters chime in with book recommendations -- I'm sure
| someone's written about these market dynamics in much more
| detail.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > The twist is that this game isn't only for 1 round.
| Once you take your company into this game, you're stuck
| in it -- you'll have to keep fundraising to keep fueling
| the growth that you've kickstarted using external
| capital.
|
| Why? What stops you from raising a $15m series A and only
| burning it conservatively until you hit neutral
| profitability. Investors only have 15-25% of your cap
| table and can't strong-arm you.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| You would have had to mislead them right? Why would they
| give $15m to use slowly when they can give $15m to a
| company that will use it quick, assuming both companies
| are using it in a +EV way?
| mikpanko wrote:
| In my experience the reality is much more nuanced:
|
| - VCs don't want founders to own 0% of their company
| because founders need to be motivated to work hard to
| make it a success
|
| - % of dilution usually goes down very significantly over
| funding rounds
|
| - there is significant competition between VCs to fund
| good startups these days, which can translate to founder
| leverage
|
| - there are early-stage VCs these days, which don't
| pressure founders for quick growth
|
| - founders talk to each other and a large portion of
| founders are serial entrepreneurs. Reputation among
| founders matters to VCs
|
| - looking over the longer term of decades, typical
| funding terms are getting much more founder-friendly
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > there are early-stage VCs these days, which don't
| pressure founders for quick growth
|
| That's really interesting. Do you know how they make that
| work, exactly?
|
| I feel like that's naturally opposed to the standard
| incentive structures that VCs have with their LPs. They
| need to show results in O(years) so they can raise their
| next fund and keep the overall VC firm going over
| O(decades). That maps down straightforwardly to the day-
| to-day pressure VCs put on all their portfolio companies
| to grow as fast as possible.
|
| Unless early-stage VCs are doing something new with the
| terms they give their LPs, how _could_ they prioritize
| anything other than growth?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Down the grapevine at least, a couple Micro VCs ik
| provide a pipeline for CorpDev teams at larger companies
| and early stage VCs (Series A-C check signers like
| Unusual Ventures) to choose pre-vetted companies. Mind
| you this seems to be more Enterprise/B2B Micro VC
| oriented.
|
| If the startup is showing good growth metrics, they'd
| point them to friends at later stage funds. If they
| aren't, they'd give intros and help get the startup
| aquihired.
| alephnerd wrote:
| "Secrets of Sand Hill Road" by Scott Kupor (Managing
| Partner @ A16Z).
|
| Was recommended to read this by VC friends to prep for
| Investment Associate interviews a couple years ago
| quaintdev wrote:
| I remember there was a time when people were excited about
| medium. Then medium needed some money so they started
| blocking readers behind login dialog boxes. Then come
| substack and everyone got excited about it. Sooner or later
| it will be on same path that medium took.
|
| When will we realise that blogging websites (not personal
| blogs) are not sustainable in long run.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Then come substack and everyone got excited about it.
| Sooner or later it will be on same path that medium took.
|
| Substack is already far, far more paywalled than Medium
| ever was. Subscriptions are the business model.
| nkozyra wrote:
| Yeah, it appears their growth strategy is the inverse of
| Medium's.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Imo, a blogging software company really does not need to be
| valued in the billions or make a ton of money. The tech can
| be maintained by a relatively small team of people - see
| all the independent blogging platforms and open source
| tools.
|
| This is a classic case of VCs corrupting an industry with
| money that's really not needed at valuations that really
| can't be supported.
| nkozyra wrote:
| One could argue that social media is technically all
| "blogging websites"
|
| Advertising works there because of the numbers. People will
| quickly consume enough bite sized content to drive
| traditional numbers.
|
| Medium broke the things that made them appealing in an
| attempt to sweeten the advertising sell, but this made the
| platform unappealing. It was a self inflicted wound.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Medium broke things (by making people login) precisely
| because they wanted to charge money, because they did not
| want to use advertising (and AFAIK they still don't).
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Advertising works there because of the numbers. People
| will quickly consume enough bite sized content to drive
| traditional numbers.
|
| To be more specific, advertising works there because of
| the feed algorithms. The platforms gather data about user
| interests and use that to tune what they choose to show
| the users, favoring things the algorithms suggest will
| get more "engagement". In turn, they sell ads on those
| favored items. On top of that, they charge both users and
| advertisers a premium to be featured on the favored
| topics.
|
| Take away the algorithms that determine what content and
| ads to feature, and you get back to the basics of
| blogging websites. You get happier users, but no
| advertising money.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| People will realize that once there's some easy-to-self-
| host blogging software with support for comments and
| newsletters.
| rchaud wrote:
| Easy to self host? We live in a world where Mastodon had
| to change their signup screen to de-emphasize "pick a
| server" because people had no idea what that meant.
| neural_thing wrote:
| Their 2021 revenue is $12M. We don't know their 2022 revenue.
| Your numbers are just wrong.
|
| Source:
|
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783191/000167025423.
| ..
| chrisbolt wrote:
| From your source, their 2021 net profit was -$6.5M and
| their 2020 net profit was $1M. They seem to be mixing the
| $24.6M in negative cash flow for 2021 with the $1M in net
| profit in 2020? Doesn't make any sense.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Valuations in tech haven't been based on profit for 25
| years now. It's all revenue and user growth.
| m_ke wrote:
| Yeah sorry about that, I was just repeating something I
| heard on a podcast and it looks like they assumed that was
| top line revenue and took 10% of it.
|
| I'd edit the post but it's too late to do so.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35534035
| [deleted]
| ghiculescu wrote:
| Where is the 1M number from? They take 10% of subscriptions
| and https://sellcoursesonline.com/substack-statistics says
| that just the top writers made 20M in 2021. I bet there's a
| long tail.
|
| (I don't think you're wrong by a factor of 10, just curious
| where you got your number from.)
| bolanyo wrote:
| A lot of the top writers have large guaranteed incomes and
| related incentive structures. The 20M is not all revenue,
| some of it is a cost for Substack.
| m_ke wrote:
| I couldn't reply sooner because I have noprocast on but my
| numbers were a bit off, I was repeating what I heard on a
| tech podcast. According to the numbers they had to release
| it was a bit higher
| https://www.axios.com/2023/04/07/substack-gets-writers-to-
| in...
| pornel wrote:
| Losing only 24 million sounds like a bargain. Imagine
| spending 40 billion to pay 1 billion more in interest each
| year.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| They haven't lost it. They paid advanced to writers but
| they will gather their share in a few years.
| HillRat wrote:
| The economics on those deals look worse over time --
| they're spending over $3 in guaranteed payments per $1
| collected on those partner subscriptions, which meant
| partner subs went from being mildly profitable (gross) in
| 2020 to a $10mm cash sink in 2021. The good news is that
| overall the subsidized writers should be making enough
| for Substack to shut down the incentive payments (~$40mm
| in subscription revenue to writers vs $16mm in subsidies
| in 2021), so there's a good chance they can stop the
| bleeding. Still overvalued by at least 25x, though, and
| their OPEX is concerning; even if you ignore the $16mm in
| partner payments, they're still $6mm underwater on $10mm
| in revenue.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Not when he had 200 billion to begin with
| yifanl wrote:
| I mean consider also: Imagine being in a position where you
| can spend 40 billion and it doesn't wipe you out.
| BulgarianIdiot wrote:
| It's wiping him out in slow motion.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| Imagine spending only 30% of your net worth and getting
| to experiment with buying and growing one of the most
| used and talked about sites on the internet.
|
| If I spent 30% of my net worth I could buy a condo in the
| bay, possibly. Although odds are it would be worth close
| to that if I needed to sell it.
|
| But many people spend 30% of their net worth trying to
| start businesses with almost no traction. Musk spent 30%
| to buy something known internationally.
| [deleted]
| nacs wrote:
| The condo you buy with 30% of your net is going to be
| worth 30% or more later. That's a good investment.
|
| Musk spent 30% of his net worth on it then immediatly
| burned 90% of the already questionable value it had.
|
| What Musk did was just bad business.
| wfme wrote:
| > then immediatly burned 90% of the already questionable
| value it had
|
| citation needed
| onion2k wrote:
| _Imagine spending only 30% of your net worth and getting
| to experiment with buying and growing one of the most
| used and talked about sites on the internet._
|
| That sounds like one of the least interesting things I
| could do with $44bn.
|
| With that sort of money I could fund 1000 Twitter rivals,
| and after a couple of years combine the successful and
| interesting ones into a single rival that would actually
| do something better than Twitter.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| I think most of us would do that, but I don't think musk
| has the desire or time to start a VC studio.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _That sounds like one of the least interesting things
| I could do with $44bn._ "
|
| You could fund _The Manhattan Project_ ($21Bn).
|
| And the Panama Canal ($13Bn).
|
| And the Concorde project ($2.5Bn).
|
| And the Hoover Dam ($0.8Bn).
|
| And an Eiffel Tower, a Statue of Liberty, and a statue of
| Christ the Redeemer. ($100s of M)
|
| Buy yourself a B52 Stealth Bomber (~$2Bn).
|
| And a Hindenburg ($100M), and a Titanic ($400M).
|
| And still have a couple of _billion_ left over.
| nr2x wrote:
| I mean I could buy a very expensive Mercedes and drive it
| straight into the Bay at high speed.
|
| That doesn't make it a good idea.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| Definitely doesn't make it a good idea. But it's still
| interesting that he's playing with one of the most talked
| about sites on the internet without really affecting his
| finances at all. Of all the random things to do with your
| money, it's not even that bad of an experiment.
| nr2x wrote:
| He's just a rich kid pulling the legs off an ant.
|
| I actually find it perverse.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| He's not a kid using his parents money. He's using his
| own and his personal name/reputation to secure money.
| He's not hurting an ant. He fired people and let them go
| find other jobs which seems pretty fair instead of for
| example reducing their pay drastically and forcing them
| to quit, or paying them minimum wage and profit sharing.
| Which still would have been pretty fair IMO. Not every
| ceo or company owners needs to be operating a charity
| like the previous Twitter CEO was.
| yangikan wrote:
| It can be done without being an asshole (for example
| without insulting a handicapped person)
| https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-gets-
| involved-...
| mlindner wrote:
| Note: he did not insult a handicapped person. At no point
| did he attack his disability. That was a cruel twisting
| of facts by the media.
|
| Further he was misled by someone feeding him incorrect
| information and promptly apologized for the confusion.
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633253950198624257
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| He found out Twitter would need to pay him 100M. That is
| a big incentive to backpedal.
| mlindner wrote:
| There's no evidence to support that statement.
|
| Given he continues to talk with the man at times (he
| replied to one of his tweets the a few days ago) and
| there's no evidence to support the idea that he did it
| for monetary reasons, other explanations are much more
| reasonable. Namely that it was a simple mistake.
| nr2x wrote:
| Honest question: why do you see it as your job to defend
| Elon Musk online? I see a lot of people doing it and I
| find it strange. Why do you care?
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| Some of us like sticking up for people of similar
| temperament to us. I'd stick up for the average person
| that gutted a company he bought and kept it running just
| like I would Musk.
|
| I like Musk because he doesn't appear to be a woke tool.
| Is he a tool of a different kind? Probably. But I don't
| like woke, so I stick up for the non-woke. Is he perfect?
| No. None of us are.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| What did they spend their $25 million on? What's the tech
| they have that costs this much to build? Their hard problems
| are a building a CMS or are otherwise solved by using fastly
| and sendgrid?
| yoran wrote:
| For most startups that raise money, tech is hardly a big
| cost. Most of the money goes towards fueling growth through
| paid marketing and so on.
| j45 wrote:
| People and office space are traditionally two major
| contributors
| Fomite wrote:
| They threw money at some big name early adopters.
| dnissley wrote:
| Just to mention one thing that isn't user facing (and
| therefore not so obvious): Social media companies dealing
| with user-generated content have to build their own
| enforcement mechanisms (abuse, copyright infringement,
| etc.), which is at least an order of magnitude harder than
| the user facing content engine itself.
| v0idzer0 wrote:
| It still blows my mind they can't run this tiny operation
| profitably taking 10% of many multimillion dollar writers'
| revenue. Is it a requirement that YC companies raise way too
| much money and then proceed to torch it any way possible?
| jononomo wrote:
| What if Substack just eats Twitter's lunch? Would you see the
| point then?
| ghiculescu wrote:
| Sure. But it won't happen.
| notatoad wrote:
| >I really don't understand the point of this.
|
| it certainly seemed to me like there was a good portion of
| twitter that was just people promoting their substack
| newsletters, and most of the people they interact with are
| doing the same. it makes perfect sense for substack to try to
| bring that under their roof.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| The point for me is that, at this moment, it has people that
| interest me without rage-baiting emotionally manipulative
| engagement farming bullshit.
|
| That's all I want out of these platforms. I don't care about
| decentralization or who owns it. I just want to read
| interesting stuff and not get pissed off in the process.
| rodgerd wrote:
| If you follow any artists or writers or similar on Twitter
| you'll note that the biggest reason most of them cite for being
| there is because they have a conversational community that
| feeds into support for their art.
|
| Substack has a perfectly good mechanism for publishing (paid
| and unpaid) to support people, but that conversation is
| missing. It's a pretty obvious move if you are engaged with the
| overlapping users of Twitter and Substack, and has potential to
| peel a lot of people out of Twitter if they're primarily there
| to follow their favorite authors, showrunners, etc.
| msabalau wrote:
| Being a place for people to land as they leave Twitter seems a
| reasonable thing to pursue.
|
| One can post a note without having a newletter, and you can
| "see notes" from a user without subscribing.
| shanebellone wrote:
| "a Twitter clone with no upside to writers"
|
| Notes linking to Substack Newsletters should _convert better_.
| Notes are networked "post summaries" that represent an
| improvement over the traditional blog homepage format. I see a
| play that could improve what they're cloning while also
| benefiting their core offering.
|
| It has potential but the likeness of the clone is a bit off-
| putting for me.
| sf_rob wrote:
| Your post clarified my thinking on this. If I think of Notes
| as a Twitter clone then I'm upset because, like the parent
| poster, I want a much narrower subscription-base for long
| form content than I do short form content. However, if I
| think of this as merely a short form update from accounts I
| follow then it's fine.
|
| That said, Substack showing writers adjacent to your
| subscriptions in Notes makes if feel more Twitter-like in a
| way that I'm not sure I like.
| shanebellone wrote:
| "However, if I think of this as merely a short form update
| from accounts I follow then it's fine."
|
| Substack will need to decide if they view Notes as a search
| engine with an RSS feed or a standalone social network.
|
| Edit: I don't think their positioning is obvious yet.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I kind of see this as the whole "Substack is trying to become
| Twitter before Twitter becomes Substack" kind of race. Twitter
| added long tweets and subscriptions, if you could do markdown
| formatting and inline images in your long tweets - why would
| Substack authors stay on Substack when they could post
| basically the same thing to Twitter and have more audience (or
| potential audience) exposure.
|
| If Substack sees the above as an existential risk - which it
| might be if Twitter executes well, then Substack is replying by
| trying to do the reverse to Twitter.
| soneca wrote:
| > _"why would Substack authors stay on Substack when they
| could post basically the same thing to Twitter and have more
| audience (or potential audience) exposure."_
|
| Because they wouldn't have the followers' email addresses,
| which is a big advantage to Substack.
| rcarr wrote:
| They really needed this to exist about 6 months ago or whenever
| it was that Musk bought Twitter. There was a mass exodus then
| to Mastodon, and if they'd have brought this out then I reckon
| they would have done a good job of immediately dethroning
| Twitter as I reckon lots of journalists and writers would have
| jumped on board. Now they're going to have to do it the long
| hard way and try and build the audience organically. I reckon
| they might be able to do it, but it'll take them at least a few
| years because they missed the golden goose.
| nashashmi wrote:
| This kind of feeling almost always turns out wrong. No one
| can predict when the big moment happens or if it already
| happened. Substack has benefited from the the Streisand
| effect. Also known as what ticked off Elon musk.
|
| And there will be many moments in the future, when Elon musk
| will have upset more of its users. And substock will be there
| to benefit just like Mastodon is benefiting every day.
| epups wrote:
| This project was probably started at that time, if I had to
| guess.
| papito wrote:
| While it would have helped jumpstart Notes, I disagree. A lot
| of content creators have their feet in both puddles, waiting
| it out - and with this and the non-stop Musk antics and
| tantrums, we are looking at an actual stampede away from that
| hellhole.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| _was_ there a "mass exodus"? What percentage of people
| actually left twitter forever to another system and stayed
| there? What percentage of audience or "influencers"?
|
| Disclaimer - I'm not on Twitter, but my impression is that a
| few folks made a large amount of noise for leaving but most
| people shrugged. Other networks mat have seen a temporary
| large percentage Increase, but a) how much of that stuck and
| b) a large percentage increase of tiny absolute. Umber can be
| misleading.
|
| Basically, every 4 years, half of America threatens to move
| to Canada, but here I am in Toronto and I ain't seeing it :->
| nemo44x wrote:
| [flagged]
| riffraff wrote:
| Why would mastodon growth be pedo related?
|
| Why would anyone in any illegal content space want to
| have their content _federated outside of it_?
| nemo44x wrote:
| https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| That's the first I heard about this, but I don't really
| follow the space (neither Mastodon nor CSAM). Is
| "SecJuice" a reputable source / how legit is the report?
|
| The one instance I have any prior awareness of, the
| mastodon creator saying search is not desired due to
| negative social dynamics, everywhere else it was
| presented as a privacy and anonymity behaviour -
| crucially, both from those who agreed and disagreed
| (which makes intuitive sense; on one hand I dislike e.g.
| Facebook not being publicly searchable some of the time,
| at the same time I don't want my content crawled by
| randos all the time either). This is the first place I've
| seen that frames it as explicitly CSAM related.
| commoner wrote:
| Here's the HN discussion for that article that puts it
| into context:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33651693
|
| The author is only speculating about Mastodon's search
| feature, and I see no actual evidence that the search
| feature is intentionally limited due to child sexual
| abuse material.
| rvz wrote:
| He's right you know. Don't forget the noncery and loli
| culture that is going on some of the largest Mastodon
| instances such as pawoo.net, baraag.net, mstdn.jp.
|
| Totally illegal explicit content in the majority of
| countries, only found on Mastodon.
| commoner wrote:
| Twitter is the only mainstream social network that is
| absolutely inundated with hardcore pornography. Also,
| Twitter has no shortage of child sexual abuse material:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/technology/twitter-
| child-...
|
| On Mastodon, each instance is able to restrict other
| instances based on their own policies. Unless you
| specifically choose to join a Mastodon instance that does
| not restrict pornography, your instance will not
| synchronize content from the porn-focused instances.
| drusepth wrote:
| With so many sites designed to track activity (and per-user
| activity) on Twitter, I'd lean towards "no mass exodus"
| simply from the fact that I haven't seen any gotcha
| graphs/charts/data literally showing it.
|
| However, anecdotally, my relatively static "following"
| count dropped from ~1k to ~600 over the course of the back-
| to-back Elon/Mastodon/Trump/etc events that were supposed
| to prompt mass exoduses. That could be 40% of the accounts
| I follow blocking me or getting banned, but deleting their
| accounts seems more likely in this instance.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I mean I kept my twitter account, I just don't use it
| nearly as much. When he killed the API it killed the only
| way I could use twitter and stay sane (tweetbot). Now I
| can go days without opening twitter dot com. Mostly only
| visiting it through links referencing specific tweets. So
| follower/following count might not mean much. I'm still
| following everyone I followed it's just that if they post
| I'm not actually seeing it.
| rcarr wrote:
| Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman created
| mastodon accounts so I think there definitely was the
| potential for something else to take over if that something
| else was user friendly enough. Mastodon was never going to
| be it but there were no other real options.
| rvz wrote:
| > Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman
|
| Who?
|
| I have to say, that doesn't sound remotely convincing to
| the 220M+ daily users of Twitter who continue to use the
| platform since there was no 'mass exodus'.
|
| It was more like a leaf falling out of a tree.
| riffraff wrote:
| Neil Gaiman had 3M+ followers on Twitter, it is a pretty
| high profile account.
|
| Anyway, I think it's more relevant that many accounts are
| now also syndicating to Mastodon, which makes it a viable
| alternative for consuming users.
|
| It's far from being an exodus, but they are averaging
| 200k new users per week, which seems pretty good.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Right, but that's where absolute and relative come into
| play.
|
| 200k new users per week is... what, 0.05% - 0.1% of
| Twitter active user base?
|
| Not saying one day it might not snowball, but it's been 6
| months and I wouldn't call Mastodon an existential threat
| to Twitter just yet. I am tremendously enjoying and
| schadenfreuding the twitter melodrama, but even most
| people making fun of twitter/musk/socialnetworks, seem to
| be doing it on twitter.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| My mastodon timeline has been growing pretty rapidly over
| the last year. With obvious ratcheting up happening
| whenever elon steps on yet another rake. 'Let that sink
| in' nearly doubled the amount of posts per day, 'hardcore
| mode' another, 'api shutdown' another...
| lenkite wrote:
| Still seems to be tweeting on Twitter:
| https://twitter.com/neilhimself
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Many people double-post right now. Though since twitter
| effectively killed it's API that basically gutted a bunch
| of tools that would automate that for you. Though maybe
| you could post to twitter and have a tool that is just
| plain webscraping your home timeline and reposting....
|
| It looks like neil does quite a bit of boosting
| (retweeting) on masto:
| https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself
| linuxftw wrote:
| There was no mass exodus. The sports and celebrity people are
| still on twitter. Nobody cares about rando journalists and
| techies, who are a vanishingly small part of the platform.
| observd wrote:
| On the other hand, it shows they still have some level of
| influence that people think there was as mass exodus.
| naravara wrote:
| I don't follow that much of the sports world, but the
| celebrities are definitely shifting more towards Instagram.
| I feel like Twitter is rapidly distilling down to LinkedIn
| type hustle-culture influencers.
| rcarr wrote:
| Hard disagree with this. The majority don't care about
| twitter, the only people who absolutely adore it are
| journalists and techies which is why it was such a big deal
| in the news and on forums and everyone in the real world
| just went about their business. The celebrities are only
| there for marketing and connecting with the journalists.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Which Mastodon does LeBron James use again?
| brewdad wrote:
| I wouldn't know. I haven't watched an NBA game in over a
| decade.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| >>xThe majority don't care about twitter
|
| Exactly. Exactly.
|
| Good luck to Substack, though. I'm rooting for them in
| this scenario.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Substack has attracted so many shrill rightwing kooks
| (Greenwald being the canary in that particular coalmine)
| that when I see someone has a substack I roll my eyes.
|
| So here's to them being a more pretentious
| rumble/truth/parler/etc...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I follow mostly techies, very few went to mastodon, and
| among them were none of the ones I cared about.
|
| Seems like the people doing the most things in my field
| have no time for drama and are busy doing stuff, while
| the ones that actually accomplish little have the time
| and energy for this.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Counterpoint: most of the Cloud Native crowd I follow
| moved to Hachyderm.
|
| > Seems like the people doing the most things in my field
| have no time for drama and are busy doing stuff,
|
| Standing up for ethics isn't performative drama. I made
| my exit very quietly because I didn't have time for the
| drama of a petulant tyrant. I care that the tech I
| consume is open source or at the very least is guided by
| _some principal_ of any good kind.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| Same thing with iOS devs, everyone I followed on Twitter
| is now on Mastodon.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Sure.
|
| People spent months and a tremendous amount of energy
| discussing the state of a site that is a glorified
| animated wall of text, but it's not drama.
|
| Sometimes I wish I could teleport this community to were
| I lived in Mali and force you to stay there for 6 months
| to re-calibrate your sense of what's important.
| Ygor wrote:
| Most people didn't. Some small group of people spent
| tremendous amount of energy. I think both of you agree on
| that point.
| danjac wrote:
| Most of the Python developers I followed are on Mastodon.
| "Techies" has lots of sub-cultures, so it could be C# or
| React developers are stuck on Twitter, for example, so if
| you are in those groups it might seem nobody has left.
| bmarquez wrote:
| I don't like it either. I use Substack (and previously Medium)
| when I want to read long-form content instead of tweets. If I
| wanted tweets, I'd use Twitter.
|
| But Substack Notes allows for greater potential monetization
| (ick): TikTok style content, algorithmic recommendations, and
| ads. Especially ads.
| soneca wrote:
| As a reader, I like it. It might nudge me to subscribe to a few
| more newsletters even if I don't plan to read all emails, just
| to see Notes from that author.
|
| Sure, I won't subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, but a few
| dozen might create a good feed.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >I don't want to subscribe to hundreds of newsletters to see
| tweet (sorry, notes).
|
| There's an option to just subscribe to notes and not
| newsletters on desktop, apparently, under the three-dots menu:
|
| https://substack.com/profile/34072171-katie-substack/note/c-...
|
| That UX is awful, but I'm sure they'll work it out in the
| coming weeks.
| Nezteb wrote:
| I wondered the same. This support page kind of answers the
| question: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/1474365194203...
|
| The phrasing is weird though: "You'll then start seeing more of
| their notes in the Home tab."
|
| More? Not all? Odd.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Elon showing the number of impressions a tweet or reply
| actually got was an eye-opener for me. Probably about 1-2% of
| "Followers" -- not just mine but most people's.
|
| Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my
| Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up
| in the top five referers.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It is as if people have lives
| galdor wrote:
| I'm curious, what works better than Twitter for this kind of
| use case? Mastodon is better than Twitter for me, but it
| still is very slow.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm not on Mastodon. So that works?
|
| Actually, _this_ site is usually the best, and Facebook
| (the latter might reflect my audience).
|
| Reddit subs tend to censor any attempt at self-promotion,
| which you can't blame them for, I guess. And StackExchange
| is the absolute worst. The level of asshole-ness there has
| to be seen to be believed.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is it really asshole-ness?
|
| YC/Reddit/SE being good/bad/worse for self-promotion
| seems to be 100% in line with the intended use of these
| sites.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm hardly the first person to single out SE / SO for
| trashing.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Same.
|
| Most of my readers come from HN, reddit or substack itself.
| Now it's mostly Python so it makes sense a tech oriented
| medias will be reading more about it.
|
| Still, the ban on substack by twitter means that, while a
| #python tweet gets some view, the same with an article to
| substack tanks bit time.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm curious how you're dealing with Reddit: some of the
| mods don't even respond to a direct message; they just say
| "read the guidelines." And then their auto-mod deletes your
| post.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| If you post the entirety of the content to Reddit itself
| and just leave the link in your profile, you can often
| get away with it
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I have a very old account that has been mostly posting
| quality content. I also take great care of writing
| content that I wish I would I read myself.
|
| So when I post it, it's congruent.
|
| Basically, either you find a way to cheat, or you climb
| the ladder. I'm terrible at cheating.
| boplicity wrote:
| > Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting
| my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show
| up in the top five referers.
|
| It's always been very difficult to get people to leave
| Twitter. This is why their ad business is worth so little.
| Advertisers pay for clicks, and Twitter just doesn't deliver
| them very well.
| [deleted]
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Maybe they should people purchase things within twitter.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| We've had the same experience, Twitter has led to almost no
| incremental readers. Even our most popular posts don't get
| much of an audience there.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Maybe I'm just "good at tweeting" but my average top-level
| tweets have _at least_ as many views as I have followers. The
| "bad" ones are maybe around 15-25%.
|
| However, if I link to an external article or something, the
| percentage of people who actually click on it is relatively
| tiny.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You _must_ be good, TBD, but when I look at other people 's
| tweets, they also have way fewer views than followers.
| praisewhitey wrote:
| defaulting to a "Home" feed that includes posts from people I've
| never heard of is a bad start
|
| https://substack.com/notes
| Laaas wrote:
| How would you know people are using it otherwise? Better than
| an empty feed.
| rchaud wrote:
| Just a few days back, I was downvoted for guessing that this
| would be their "algorithmic recommendation" moment, because I
| was seemingly assuming malice about the developers' intentions.
|
| Uh, no, I was observing how every other "social media" company
| has done this, and was guessing that Substack, having already
| told its users to write more frequently, would jump in with
| both feet.
| Sirikon wrote:
| > Sub stack dot com / notes
|
| Elon's regexp for matching Substack links just got defeated.
| japhyr wrote:
| I'm looking forward to trying this, but the app crashed after
| posting my first reply to someone. Busy day for Substack
| engineers, I imagine!
| wdb wrote:
| Looks like you can't explore Notes without signing up? Bummer
| bostonvaulter2 wrote:
| I'm surprised no one seems to have commented on the lack of
| usernames, I think the lack of usernames may hinder adoption
| since it's much harder to follow someone just from seeing a
| tweet, err note, displayed. With Substack Notes you'll need to
| know the user's id, or search by their non-unique name.
| capital_guy wrote:
| I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone
| than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic
| decision to mess with substack links on Twitter. The site is
| clean and simple.
|
| I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the
| world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the
| thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I hope it doesn't. Because it essentially sets us up for a
| repeat. If Mastodon was 'just not the thing people were looking
| for' then at least it solves the problems that both Twitter and
| Substack have, which is that they are not federated. Better to
| fix Mastodon than to waste another decade on something that
| will ultimately blow up and with the way Substack has - in my
| head at least - been associated negatively with crap content it
| will probably be sooner rather than later.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Unfortunately, this perspective seems very head-in-a-bubble
| to me. It's a tiny tiny number of people who think the
| problem with Twitter and Substack is that they aren't
| federated. Federation isn't a feature people broadly care
| about. If it makes the platform work better, great! But I
| don't think that's the case for Mastodon or any other
| federated platform I've come across. It's the opposite, they
| make concessions on the experience in order to support
| federation. That would be ok if those sacrifices were for
| functionality people really want, but federation just ...
| isn't that.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I disagree. Federation is a feature people want, but they
| don't know about the concept.
|
| When I show people that I can talk to Signal, WhatsApp, and
| Signal through a single app, they're pretty impressed. I
| wouldn't expect most people to set up a Matrix bridging
| system like I did, same with most Mastodon servers, but
| it's a feature people do generally want.
|
| With Mastodon, most people first ask "but how do I follow
| people on Twitter", which often leads to pointing at
| bridges that may stop working at any point and have no
| official status, and often get blocked on small servers
| because of the overwhelming wave of moderation spam they
| cause.
|
| Phone manufacturers back in the day used to have quite
| commonly used "social hub" apps that would combine various
| social media sources into a single UI, but they were all
| tied to their own brand that either got too difficult to
| maintain or lost the phone wars (HTC and Blackberry had
| quite well-received integrations if I recall).
|
| The past years we've been stuck with a locked in ecosystem
| for so long that the mere idea of two different apps
| interoperating has become inconceivable to the mainstream.
|
| I hope the DMA, which will force messenger apps to
| interoperate, will bring back the knowledge that it's
| possible to do so at the very least.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| > I disagree. Federation is a feature people want, but
| they don't know about the concept.
|
| I think they want it, but by an order of magnitude more,
| they want simple UX. Everything else is a distant second.
| UX is the foundation upon which everything else is built.
| Without an excellent UX, the audience will forever remain
| niche. I tried to just sign up to Mastodon, and it was a
| clusterfuck of proportions so unbelievable that I can't
| believe it has as many users as it does - and it only has
| a couple million users.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| Federation is someone doing a cool card trick at a
| cocktail party. Does it look cool? Yes. Is anyone going
| to go out and buy a deck of cards the next morning and
| learn how to do it? No.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Federation is the core of the internet and that has taken
| off, so sure they do. Email and phone numbers took off,
| isolated ISPs all died out.
|
| We're getting some form of federation of messengers and
| other technology companies deemed "gatekeepers" by the
| EU. Companies serving large user bases won't have a
| choice, so there's no need to go out am buy anything.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think this has "because" and "despite" flipped. The
| internet took off despite federation, because it let
| people do things they couldn't otherwise do.
|
| But reinventing something that everyone can already do
| (eg. tweeting) with federation is not a winning game.
| bmikaili wrote:
| I mean texts.com does what matrix does without the
| overhead
| jeroenhd wrote:
| So do Beeper and Pidgin. The exact mechanism isn't
| relevant of course.
| Zetice wrote:
| Bluesky is building AT, what mastodon should have been. That
| will kill Twitter in a way that's at least new.
|
| Not sure how to solve the HOA problem though...
| hackernewds wrote:
| Do not trust any Jack Dorsey product anymore as the next
| alternative again
| Zetice wrote:
| It's a protocol, not a product.
| davidw wrote:
| > Better to fix Mastodon
|
| Is that possible? Seems kind of difficult due to its nature,
| but I admit I'm just a very casual user of it and don't know
| much.
|
| Signed up for the Substack thing. Seems worth a look - it's
| very similar to Twitter.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| What do you consider difficult about it?
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Mastodon is never going to take off. I've been building
| SaaS applications for 15 years. I don't think you
| understand the very low level of complexity required for
| mass adoption. Let's just look at the signup process for
| a few minutes, using the UX convention of actions.
|
| Twitter:
|
| 1. Search for Twitter.
|
| 2. Click on the first link.
|
| 3. Click sign up.
|
| Mastodon:
|
| 1. Search for Mastodon.
|
| 2. Click the first link: mastodon.social.
|
| 3. Click create account.
|
| 4. Message modal pops up alerting the user that it is
| currently impossible to sign up to mastodon.social. But
| don't worry, you can sign up on another server by
| clicking "Find another server." At this point I'm
| confused. Why are there different servers? Will my
| friends be on the other server? Do we need to sign up on
| the same server? No explanation. I click the link.
|
| 5. Long page of options. No indication of quality or why
| I should choose one server over another. Now I am in
| choice paralysis. I click the first option (which has an
| anime figure on it). Surely - surely - the first option
| is the best option. The suggested option by whoever is
| running this application.
|
| 6. I land on a Korean language portal and I am done. I'm
| never coming back. Mastodon is dead to me. Forever.
|
| You might think this is hyperbole, but I promise you it
| is not. I've been in charge of A/B testing and UX centric
| development for web applications just like this for a
| very long time. Mastodon's sign up process is easily one
| of the worst I have ever seen. Not a single UX person has
| been involved in the creation of this protocol.
| rybar wrote:
| Excellent illustration of the awful onboarding
| experience.
|
| No one wants to waste their time connecting a
| constellation, they want to get to content as fast as
| possible.
| Andrex wrote:
| The fact Mastodon sites don't even load without JS is absurd,
| a huge not-talked-about barrier to entry (globally), and a
| betrayal of its "protocol-first" talking points.
|
| Until that changes Mastodon isn't trying to be a serious
| player.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Does Twitter load without JavaScript? I do not think the
| tiny number of uber-nerds who disable JavaScript have any
| effect on Mastadon.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I disable Javascript on occasion to save power.
|
| Twitter definitely does not load without loading several
| megabytes of Javascript. Nitter.net is a quick and easy
| substitute that loads instantly without it, though some
| video playback still requires Javascript (HLS video).
| rybar wrote:
| How much power have you quantified saving by disabling
| JavaScript over the course of a week?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I can't do any objective measurements but there's a clear
| impact in battery life while browsing with Javascript
| disabled. The entire web becomes snappier and loading
| times instantly drop.
|
| Doing so also breaks all web applications (and web
| applications posing as websites, i.e. React rendering) so
| it's not something I turn on permanently. I usually only
| disable JS when my phone is running low and I'm not near
| a charger, or when I'm trying to read something and the
| terrible website hijacks scrolls/taps/somehow makes my
| phone run hot doing stuff in the background.
| commoner wrote:
| Brutaldon is an alternative FOSS client for Mastodon that
| does not use JavaScript:
|
| - Brutaldon: https://brutaldon.org
|
| - Source: https://gitlab.com/brutaldon/brutaldon
|
| Because Mastodon has an open API, you don't need to use the
| official Mastodon web client. Twitter upset a lot of users
| when it limited access to its API because many alternative
| Twitter clients were rendered useless.
| tiagod wrote:
| Huge? Globally? How many poeple do you reckon have JS
| disabled?
| Eji1700 wrote:
| >... essentially ruining one of the world's great information
| platforms
|
| I think it's a good thing in the long run.
|
| Twitter was a gimmick in many ways. Here, throw a few words out
| into the ether and see who notices.
|
| That simplicity attracted tons of people. Then it became THE
| place to reach a ton of people, even though it's format for
| such things is AWFUL for it. It's a TERRIBLE platform for
| meaningful information dispersal, but it's THE place to be, so
| you see a bunch of evidence of that.
|
| Twitlonger, people chaining twitter posts, just about any
| conversation, etc. Worse it eliminated a lot of things that
| probably shouldn't have died. My personal pet peeve is the
| death of forums, most specifically for games. Pre twitter you
| could find old forum posts that were pinned about just about
| anything you wanted to get into seriously. Dustloop had
| character guides with a level of info that would justify a
| thesis on characters in games that were 8 years old and hardly
| ever played.
|
| That level of information is still found now, but instead it's
| tied to a hashtag, and then vomited out...never consolidated.
| Right now i'm looking to mess with a new character in strive,
| and while the GGST_BE tag is nice for "oh that's neat" kind of
| tech discoveries, it's fucking awful for actually understanding
| how to play the character or what's useful from it.
|
| To be fair, that's always the case with a brand new character,
| but in the old days it was somewhat easier to keep a running
| tally of what works and what doesn't in a forum discussion,
| while twitter just doesn't promote that, so picking someone up
| waaaay after the fact is miserable. Discord is the other spot
| these things are now heavily discussed (with similar issues to
| twitter, although the forum feature of discord has helped a
| bit) and the wiki's are in theory where the data is
| consolidated but it's just a much higher barrier to entry and
| thus often you have half completed pages with outdated
| information.
|
| In short, i'm hoping the slow death of twitter (IF it dies. The
| number of people saying twitter is abhorrent...on twitter...is
| a sign to me it's not going anywhere) will finally lead to
| people realizing that we want a way to quickly spread
| information among those who want it, but we don't need it to be
| in this shallow, vapid, character limited style. Sure that
| works for "oh hey look at where I am today" but it drives me
| nuts every time i see some essay broken into 45 twitter posts.
|
| RSS feeds are an alternative tech that's honestly quite close
| to being what most people want, but it lacks the
| discovery/aggregation effect of things like twitter in most
| cases (inoreader kind of has something like that), and thus
| mostly still relies on twitter for content (at least it did
| until they nuked the API).
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I've seen "Elon ruined twitter", but everyday I'm getting what
| I signed up for years back it hasn't been ruined in any
| noticeable way. Fine they added the stupid views but who cares
| hereme888 wrote:
| They were messing with Twitter by downloading massive amounts
| of data from them. Why wouldn't Elon do what he did?
|
| I returned to Twitter recently due to great features like
| Community Notes. I don't see what people are complaining about.
| figassis wrote:
| I've been looking at Substack with the eyes of someone who has
| lived through the enshitment of Quora, Medium et al, and
| realized there are never guarantees with any such service.
| Apparently I owe them money and attention, and they owe me
| nothing. I will never get long term what I joined a service
| for, so today I simply do not commit. I never committed to
| Twitter, and I'm glad. I want to share content, I setup a ghost
| site. I want to read content, I use RSS and also read what I
| can for free. That's it.
| hersko wrote:
| How is twitter ruined? My personal experience on the site has
| not changed much.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Same. Except for the new "For You" tab, my feed is almost
| 100% the same.
| inpdx wrote:
| Many people have left, including myself, due to imperious,
| chaotic, and plain mean mismanagement. Thus making it vastly
| less interesting and more trollish.
| capital_guy wrote:
| He keeps pushing the 'for you' page over the regular
| following tab that just shows tweets of people you follow
|
| The content moderation is basically nil now so tons of racist
| content is propagated throughout the network.
|
| Various technical bugs plaguing things - videos not playing,
| images not appearing, etc
|
| The verification system has been destroyed which has allowed
| fake accounts to run rampant
|
| The API has been wrecked, causing third party apps to stop
| working and massive amounts of research being done to be
| halted
| mlindner wrote:
| All the data shows that racist content is down
| significantly following the purchase.
| aniforprez wrote:
| That's very much not the case
| https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/20/antisemitism-higher-
| than...
| mlindner wrote:
| Look at the details of that report. They're measuring by
| _number_ of tweets rather than impressions. Hate speech
| impressions are down. i.e. if you want hate speech you
| have to go out of your way to find it using bots. Normal
| users are seeing them less after the purchase.
|
| It's really tiring to counter so much misinformation
| about this that flies about.
|
| It's not just a one-time drop either, the impressions
| continues to go down. https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/s
| tatus/1613335965996810241
| Omatic810 wrote:
| Here's the report, the claim had no misinformation.
| https://beamdisinfo.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/03/Antisemit...
|
| Hate speech IS up. The claim was "hate speech is up".
| Impressions being down matters to the impact of the
| speech, but the claim stands - hate speech is up. You can
| claim it doesn't matter (and I might agree with you,
| since impressions are down, people know what to expect
| now, and the increase is significant but not huge at this
| point), but you can't honestly say the claim "hate speech
| is up" is misinformation.
|
| Edit: Actually, I had the claim backwards - YOU said it
| was DOWN, and you were wrong (according to the report).
| So to correct myself - the person refuting your claim was
| right, and spread no misinformation.
| mlindner wrote:
| I'll retract my opinion that "hate speech is down" as
| it's apparently difficult to measure but I am going to
| continue to say that "hate speech is up" is at the very
| least "highly misleading" as it gives the impression that
| the platform is worse for minorities than it was pre-
| acquisition. The reverse is the truth, given the lower
| impressions of hate speech, it effectively means that
| those that would verbally attack minorities are being
| highly squelched versus the situation before the
| acquisition. That's all around a good thing.
|
| The visibility of hate speech on twitter is down.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Fomite wrote:
| It's gutted several communities I'm a part of.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Counter anecdote: my personal experience is that the site is
| less entertaining. I've encountered technical bugs more, such
| as replies not loading without refreshing multiple times. The
| "for you" page doesn't show me anything I want to see. The
| checkmark thing remains super confusing to me. The quality of
| the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten
| more skuzzy.
| LastTrain wrote:
| > The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably
| decreased/gotten more skuzzy.
|
| This is my experience as well, and is the thing the higher
| ups at Twitter should be really concerned about. Low rent.
| Jare wrote:
| - People I follow have left. Most have moved to Mastodon so I
| can still follow them there. It's a constant trickle but some
| day the weight will be higher on Mastodon's side of the
| balance.
|
| - Ads range from obnoxious to downright scams. I know some
| people used to block ad senders as a matter of routine, but I
| didn't, most of the time they were valid and I was happy to
| support the site via their ads. After Musk, most ads vanished
| and for a while all I saw was Nintendo and SpaceX (!?) ads.
| Now there's many ads, but I block 95% of them because I
| REALLY do not want to ever again see the kind of shit they're
| pushing.
|
| - Search, and content outside of my carefully curated list of
| follows in my chronological timeline, has become complete
| hell. I used to be happy to search for "stuff that's
| happening" in Twitter rather than google or news sites, but
| now the stuff that comes out is not only irrelevant, but
| often disgusting.
|
| I still use the site but in a very specific and controlled
| manner. In that way, the experience is still good (bugs
| aside). I suspect at some point Musk will force some
| algorithmic crap down my throat and that will be the end.
| fintechie wrote:
| To be fair, many people don't seem to have these issues you
| mention. For FinTwit and CT (crypto twitter) it's business
| as usual. Maybe it happens for other niches though.
| brewdad wrote:
| If that's what's left on Twitter, I'm glad I no longer
| visit daily. If that's your thing, have at it.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah to me it's less that it's dead and more that it's
| clearly not sustainable without a new business model. Blue
| is a total flop, and you can tell from the ads they're
| running now that their ad revenue must be _way_ down. And
| they needed to grow revenue significantly after the
| acquisition because of the debt structuring, but it seems
| like a certainty they 've done the opposite.
|
| So it's not that it's dead today, but how long can they
| make it like this?
| [deleted]
| patrickmay wrote:
| Musk killed the APIs that enabled third party tools like
| TweetBot. Twitter is close to unusable now.
| prepend wrote:
| > I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of
| the world's great information platforms.
|
| I'm happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it's a net
| negative for the world and we'll be better off without it. This
| might be the only tech I've ever felt like this about
| (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates
| hate and division.
|
| It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it was a
| gawker-style takedown with the intent to purposely destroy
| something in a lasting and permanent way as described in Ryan
| Holiday's book about Thiel's purposeful execution of strategy
| to destroy gawker, https://www.grahammann.net/book-
| notes/conspiracy-ryan-holida...
|
| PS- are there any other business/tech "case study" type books
| out there. I also liked Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg, John
| Brooks' Business Adventures, Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker, Po
| Bronson's Nudist on the Late Shift, and David Kaplan's Silicon
| Boys. Looking for more of what I suspect is more common than I
| can find.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| I really like those "case study" books about our industry,
| too. Off the top of my head, two more: -
| "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton (published in 2014, about
| the early days of Twitter) - "Super Pumped" by Mike
| Isaac (published in 2019, about the early days of Uber)
|
| Neither of them go into great detail or nuance -- they're
| made for popular consumption, so they simplify things and
| gloss over details. You won't find any extensive discussion
| of microservice architecture and organizational design. But
| they were still interesting reads.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| wish they could have an API soon so you could create new notes /
| posts and get a list of them
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| I can't take it anymore
| posharma wrote:
| May be I'm old, but I love long form content and twitter took
| that away. People write long tweet threads instead of thinking
| things through and writing it in long form. This gives rise to
| tons of twitter thread collapsing tools/startups that push the
| concatenation of these tweets to Notion or whatever. This seems
| utterly silly to me. It almost looks like tech for the sake of
| tech. It's unfortunate that substack is going in the same
| direction. Are there no better problems to solve using tech?
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Substack is great for subscription long form content already.
| It is reliant on Twitter on creating a network for information
| distribution and curation, though. I don't think Substack is
| attempting to be more like Twitter - I think Substack needs
| something like Twitter to sustain the long-form subscription
| content and this is a defensive move to make sure that
| Twitter's ongoing collapse doesn't take them out, too.
| dmix wrote:
| You still don't see many people using long tweets which is
| good. I used to despise seeing tweet threads starting with
| [1/20] for years but Twitter integrating their Threader
| acquisition via "reader mode" which turns multi-tweet threads
| into a single page like a blog post really helped solved the UI
| issue with that (blue feature) but I still tend to avoid
| threads.
| 7h3rAm wrote:
| Social network must be a protocol, not a platform. That's the
| only way to gurantee free speech and cencorship resistance.
| Nostr[1] is proving to be a good first step in this direction.
|
| [1] https://nostr.how/
| cmh89 wrote:
| There isn't a huge amount of demand for 'censorship resistance'
| and 'free speech' in social networks.
|
| People want enjoyable communities far more than they want the
| 'freedom' to spam the n-word.
| lovvtide wrote:
| On the contrary, I think there is a huge demand. I can find
| enjoyable community offline. Speaking for myself, freedom
| from censorship _is_ in fact the main thing I want in a
| social network. Your values might differ.
| cmh89 wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. I understand that you
| value that. There is no question of that.
|
| The majority of people however don't value it or actively
| desire it because no wants to live in a pigsty. There is a
| reason apps like Truth Social don't take off, and that
| 4chan never gained the mainstream popularity of other
| social sites.
|
| There have been multiple reddit clones, multiple twitter
| clones, multiple social media clones all based on the false
| pretense that there is demand for a freeze peach social
| site, and they all fall flat. Mastodon is doing better than
| most and its gaining users because of Twitter catering to
| the alt-right and refusing to censor offensive or dangerous
| speech.
| lovvtide wrote:
| Dangerous speech?
| cmh89 wrote:
| Yes, if you go back and take a gander at US history,
| you'll learn that there is a long history of restricting
| speech that is likely to cause another person harm.
|
| Is that something you are unaware of?
| lovvtide wrote:
| You're still looking at this from a legalistic
| perspective.
| cmh89 wrote:
| I'm not looking at it from a 'legalistic' perspective. I
| was elaborating for you because you seemed confused or
| uncertain about what dangerous speech was.
| lovvtide wrote:
| ok :)
| lovvtide wrote:
| Nostr is the real deal.
|
| I first heard about nostr last in November when Twitter tried
| to ban it. There's an incredible dev ecosystem developing -- so
| much so that I decided to rebuild Satellite
| (https://satellite.earth) the social platform I'd been working
| on to become a client for the protocol.
|
| There's a bunch of other clients too. Someone started a
| directory here https://www.nostrapps.com/
|
| I'm happy to answer technical questions about nostr if anyone
| is curious.
| fogzen wrote:
| The big downside with Nostr is it's not built on the web.
| With blogs and webmention the feeds are websites. And there's
| already a huge ecosystem for blogs. I'd prefer people build
| on that instead. Especially if the end result is more or less
| the same: blogs with comments.
| pickledish wrote:
| On one hand I agree with you on the "protocol not platform"
| ideal (and thanks for linking nostr, hadn't seen it before),
| but on the other I guess I still don't understand why so many
| are committed to the best way to go about that involving
| "relays" / federation.
|
| RSS solved the "you fully own the content, everyone else can
| discover it via a well-known protocol" problem decades ago! Is
| it just that stuff like comments and reactions would be harder
| with just RSS?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| No thanks. Social networks are non essential. Twitter and
| Substack Notes can go away tomorrow and no one will bat an
| eyelid. In these cases, people just want to go to a website or
| a mobile app, click around and have some foolish fun for
| sometime. Banking networks need protocols, not social media,
| which is intrinsically about dumb fun. That is why Mastodon and
| these things will never be as popular.
| inpdx wrote:
| You seem to have no recollection of how Twitter has played an
| outsized role in fast reporting on breaking events, such as
| the Arab Spring.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Twitter is not important. Breaking news were always there
| on TV from the beginning of time.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I watched the arab spring unfold on aljazeera's livestream,
| what was going on with twitter?
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| [dead]
| padraic7a wrote:
| I can't see a single Note without logging in, or in my case
| creating an account. That's a hard limit on exploration.
| abzolv wrote:
| If you subscribe to someone's Notes you also subscribe to their
| email articles. No thank you, especially if aal their articles
| are behind a paywall. Not sure why Musk is so freaked out over
| Notes. Probably just general paranoia.
| msabalau wrote:
| You can just receive their notes without subscribing to their
| newsletter. You'll see their notes in your stream, albeit with
| an option to subscribe.
|
| You can also post notes without even having a newsletter.
| skybrian wrote:
| It's a start. Hopefully they'll improve the reader experience.
| Having a single general-purpose forum (a "firehose") doesn't
| really work for me since it's so random, but with so little
| content, it's probably necessary for now.
|
| Subscribing needs improvement. Subscribing to a hashtag might
| make sense? It seems like subscribing to someone's notes and
| their blog should be independent, because maybe someone has a
| good blog but you don't care for their notes, or vice-versa.
| Having them tied together also doesn't work for people like me
| who use RSS. I don't usually want email from blogs I read, so I
| only subscribe to blogs where I'm interested in the paid content
| and usually turn the email off.
|
| I think this loses what makes Substack interesting, though, which
| is keeping the community for each blog separate, so you don't
| care what people are saying on other blogs that you don't read.
| Putting everyone in one community, or an unclear blob of
| overlapping communities, seems likely to be bad for the same
| reasons Twitter can often be bad.
|
| I guess blogs need discovery, though, and maybe external sites
| aren't enough?
|
| (I think I'll repost this as a note, since they need the
| content.)
| jabradoodle wrote:
| > I think this loses what makes Substack interesting
|
| I have the same concern. Substack creators are paid for highly
| engaging content as individuals subscribe to individual content
| creators. I don't see how that mechanism works with short form
| content; it could easily prove to be another platform where
| number of minutes of eyes on content is the metric that's
| optimised, rather than engagement with high quality content.
| ctvo wrote:
| I love that it looks identical to Twitter but is orange.
|
| I love that it's going to enrage Elon. He's going to realize that
| he paid 44 billion for something that's going to lose users to
| Substack's side project.
| leobg wrote:
| Even if that were true, what would you gain from that? If it
| makes you feel better that Elon Musk (or anyone else) failed at
| something, you may want to re-evaluate your life's loss
| function.
| ctvo wrote:
| > If it makes you feel better that Elon Musk (or anyone else)
| failed at something, you may want to re-evaluate your life's
| loss function.
|
| Unfortunately I haven't reached that level of enlightenment
| yet.
|
| I root for Elon to fail in the same ways I root for Donald
| Trump to fail. He's destructive, self-serving, thinks he's
| above the law, and hasn't faced real consequences for his
| actions.
|
| I'm rooting for him to fail because he constantly lies, about
| big and small things. An example: He claimed Substack is
| downloading Twitter user data to power their competitor.
| There's no evidence of this. He said this before backtracking
| because he knew he was looking bad.
|
| I'm rooting for him to fail so folks, like the ones in this
| very comment chain, can come back to reality and see that
| he's a flawed human like the rest of us and stop the blind
| worship.
|
| In this specific case, I'm rooting for him to fail because
| he's proven over and over he's unfit to lead Twitter and make
| it a better product.
| leobg wrote:
| Sure. If I had never heard of Elon, and suddenly saw his
| name everywhere, and bros who cheer and justify him and
| feel like they're the chosen people... and Tesla this and
| Twitter that... I'd be turned off as well, call him a
| nuisance, and steer clear of anything that has to do with
| him. And yeah, maybe I'd even try to level the scales, so
| to speak, by publicly speaking against him simply because I
| couldn't bear the hype.
| therouwboat wrote:
| Its not that. I want elon to fail, because he tried to
| ruin that cave divers life by claiming that he had a
| childbride in thailand. I want elon to fail, because he
| gives voice to Russian war criminals, because he is a
| union buster, because he fired most of the twitter
| employees and made the rest work long days.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Or maybe people want him to fail for the same reason they
| want someone like Martin Shkreli or Kanye West to fail:
| because he's bad for society.
| leobg wrote:
| I think there are better ways to make the world a better
| place than wanting someone you don't like to fail. Besides,
| there's often an ulterior motive - not just for wanting
| that person to fail, but also for telling yourself that
| they are "bad for society".
|
| Where one cannot love, one should - pass by. - Nietzsche
| mlindner wrote:
| Really? It's hard to imagine him doing anything at this
| point that would offset the good he's done for society.
|
| He upset and tore down the military-industrial complex
| launch monopoly saving the collective US tax payers
| billions through starting SpaceX (and could soon
| revolutionize access to space for the average person within
| the next decade). (Also note that without SpaceX, we'd
| still be paying money to Russia to send US astronauts to
| space, which wouldn't be a good look during the Russian
| invasion of Ukraine.)
|
| He created an electrical vehicle revolution that's taking
| the world by storm, changing industries and pushing us much
| faster toward ending global warming than would have
| happened without. It's hard to imagine a few misguided
| political opinions could offset all of that. Let's be
| realistic here.
|
| (Yes you can't attribute all that to him solely, as Elon
| himself says commonly, the praise should be given to the
| workers at SpaceX and Tesla, not him. But at the same time,
| without him, they would have never happened.)
| ncallaway wrote:
| This feels like some kind of the opposite of the sunk
| costs fallacy. Like a "past gains" fallacy.
|
| None of those good things magically disappear if Elon
| fails in his Twitter purchase or changes. Those past
| gains have already happened.
|
| If your argument was forward looking it would make more
| sense to me (if he fails with this Twitter program, he
| won't be able to deliver Starship which would be bad
| because XYZ; or it would impact his ability to continue
| Tesla forward because ABC). I don't know that I agree
| with the forward looking argument, but it seems more
| sound to me than the backward looking argument.
| leobg wrote:
| You said it well.
|
| I actually suspect that many people hate him not in spite
| of what he has done, but because of it:
|
| They think if they acknowledge what people like Elon Musk
| have done in their lives, they'd have to loathe
| themselves, their own choices, values and weaknesses.
|
| Which is, of course, quite silly. Each human being has
| their own path in life. Comparing yourself to anyone, no
| matter who, is going to cause misery. But with people
| like Elon, the threat to the ego is particularly great.
|
| So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He,
| too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after
| all".
|
| (The irony being that many of these people say that Elon
| Musk is self-centered. Though the question he is asking
| is "What do I believe is greatest good to humanity as a
| species", whereas they, by their very act of comparing
| themselves to him, are asking "How can I be greater than
| and more right than Elon Musk".)
| rvz wrote:
| Precisely put. I wouldn't attempt to ignore his work on
| SpaceX, Tesla, etc since those companies have kickstarted
| their own revolution(s); electric vehicles and Starlink,
| even though I think Tesla FSD is a dangerous scam.
| Without it, the cars are fine.
|
| Before, almost all the techies here were dreaming and
| begging to work for Elon Musk. Then the blue bird
| happened, got bought out and gave them 'emotional
| distress' and Elon immediately became public enemy number
| 1.
|
| > So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He,
| too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after
| all".
|
| Hence that, the same techies who loved him are now
| eternally desperate for Twitter to be Elon's biggest
| failure as much as possible, giving 24/7 over-coverage
| about Twitter schadenfreude.
|
| The manipulation of human psychology due to over-coverage
| and creating villains every month or year is just too
| easy to create a story out of that is guaranteed to
| attract eyeballs and clicks. It is an symptom of
| obsession.
| mlindner wrote:
| Curious question I have. What makes you think FSD is a
| "dangerous scam"? It's quite functional even if it
| doesn't quite meet the advertising yet. Maybe slightly
| dangerous for now yes, but hardly a scam.
| mlindner wrote:
| I tend to agree. By tearing him down as much as they can,
| and making his minor issues stick out more than his major
| good sides they can offset his "worth" per-se.
| Additionally there's the narrative that all people with
| lots of money are automatically assumed to be evil, so if
| they're not evil they need to be torn down enough that
| they fit with the stereotype.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| I actually suspect that people who idolize Elon Musk are
| subscribers to the Just World Fallacy, believing that he
| represents the kind of person that they -- though in a
| temporarily diminished and embarrassing state -- can
| become. They can't wait for the time when they too have
| the consequence-free power to sneer at disabled people,
| spread lies about victims of violent attacks, and call
| people who mildly disagree with them "pedo guy".
|
| (By the way, I don't actually agree with any of what I
| wrote above. It's just another example of a bad-faith
| argument like the one I'm responding to.)
| nemo44x wrote:
| I could never accomplish what he has. He is so many
| standard deviations away from a regular person that it's
| ridiculous to to feel anything but admiration. He's human
| and imperfect like everyone and that's ok. He was born
| with certain abilities and drive and he has made the
| world a better place by using those gifts. He is not
| beyond criticism either and some of his fans are too
| eager to dismiss them.
| mlindner wrote:
| [flagged]
| i_cannot_hack wrote:
| A good reason to want self-absorbed bullies to publicly fail
| rather than publicly succeed is to discourage others from
| adopting similar attitude and methods.
| leobg wrote:
| Verily, I have beheld greater self-absorbed bullies than
| the man who speaketh thus. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WX_mgnAFA0
| mlindner wrote:
| If Elon was self-absorbed he'd be buying private yachts or
| private islands or massive mansions. He wouldn't be
| constantly talking about existential risks to humanity and
| trying to come up with ways of fixing them. Is Bill Gates
| self-absorbed? Much of what Elon Musk does is in a similar
| vein as the Gates Foundation, though often through for-
| profit companies.
| leobg wrote:
| And also wouldn't deny that he had a threesome Amber
| Heard and Cara Delevingne. [1]
|
| > I think people think these things are generally more
| salacious than they are.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/style/elon-musk-
| maureen-d...
| mlindner wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're saying, but the source is
| actually him denying it.
|
| > About the contention that he had a threesome with Ms.
| Heard and her friend Cara Delevingne, Mr. Musk said,
| laughing, "We did not have the threesome, you know. So I
| think people think these things are generally more
| salacious than they are."
|
| He's laughing at the reporter for even proposing the
| idea, followed by downplaying it in a way that makes it
| clear that this was the media being sensationalist for
| clicks again.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Are there people who think Bill Gates is not self-
| absorbed?
| canadiantim wrote:
| Elon paid 44 billion for twitter's existing users and wanting
| to overthrow the censorship regime that was defacto the
| standard before Elon bought twitter. Thank god Elon bought
| twitter and made it possible for other social media sites to be
| more open to free-speech.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That 'censorship regime' (your words, not mine) was doing a
| very good job compared to the clown running it today.
| tenpies wrote:
| Everyone likes the censors when they are on their side.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, but Twitter was arguably doing a reasonably good job
| of that part of their mission. You can debate about the
| business side, it's not easy monetizing something like
| that but they showed rather a lot of restraint and if
| they messed up they fixed things.
|
| The people that see this differently are typically the
| same people who believe that 'the Twitter files' were
| revelatory, when in fact they weren't. Strong overlap
| there with eternal Trump supporters and various complot
| theory proponents, I'm not sure what degree of evidence
| would be able to convince people like that.
| Kye wrote:
| Somehow Elon's Twitter is even worse for anything remotely
| queer. I run into the "sensitive content" click walls any
| time I follow a link to anything on furry Twitter these
| days, and it's _never_ a tweet that remotely warrants it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I wasn't expecting anything different from a company run
| by the archtypical techbro. Musk is doing a lot of damage
| in a very indirect way: plenty of people see in him their
| justification for being jerks.
| mikestew wrote:
| Am I right in that it's Poe's law[0] that's getting the
| workout today?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
| jddj wrote:
| Watching the increasing polarisation of the public's opinion
| of Elon as he's inserted himself into the culture wars has
| been such a bizarre experience.
|
| I guess by now he probably appreciates people going off the
| deep end for/against him.
| dom96 wrote:
| From my perspective Twitter has become more censorship prone
| than ever before after Elon took it over.
| rahmeero wrote:
| Also, for whatever reason, the quality of conversation has
| declined on Twitter since Elon.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| 'Censorship regime'? In the time since Musk took over twitter
| I've gotten right-wing tweets forced into my feed despite not
| following a single right winger and a ton of high profile
| people have been banned for speaking out about him.
|
| Not to mention that old Twitter never hamfistedly censored
| people by straight up shadowbanning users for using the words
| 'mastodon' or 'substack' in their tweets.
| nemo44x wrote:
| You literally said Twitter is less of an echo chamber and
| that makes me upset. I enjoy seeing a wide spectrum of
| ideas.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| [flagged]
| nemo44x wrote:
| Your "Following" feed only contains who you are following
| so the smooth brained right wingers shouldn't show up
| there. If you see a smooth brained right wing tweet in
| the "For You" feed you can mark it as "Not Interested"
| and the algo will stop suggesting smooth brained right
| wing tweets.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| Your snark isn't needed. I'm obviously not a user of the
| 'for you' timeline and still got those artificially
| promoted tweets from people I don't follow and were not
| retweeted by those that I do. It's why I stopped using
| twitter and I see no reason to change that.
| getcrunk wrote:
| I was in mobile and clicked the link to try notes and it
| redirected me to App Store. Lol
|
| So much for giving a new platform a try. I will never use this
| Confiks wrote:
| Compare the two homepages without cookies [1][2]. The rounded
| buttons in orange instead of Twitter-blue. The footer nagbar. The
| similar navigation menu.
|
| Following the whole banning-saga my impression was that Notes was
| a genuine extension of the Substack platform, but it being a
| frontend clone explains why such a tantrum was thrown by Musk.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/
|
| [2] https://substack.com/notes
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| This is just what 95% of websites look like these days, they
| both could be demo pages from the react or angular doc's.
|
| The fact that Musk is known to be thin-skinned and prone to
| internet outbursts explains why he threw such a tantrum.
| drusepth wrote:
| I wasn't able to see the Substack design until I hacked away at
| the obtrusive signup wall.
|
| Here's a side-by-side comparison for anyone that doesn't want
| to go through the same process:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/On0RZG8.png
| epolanski wrote:
| Strikingly similar, but so are most websites anyway.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| If you sign in to twitter the sidebar becomes almost
| identical
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Is there any way to access Substack Notes without an account?
| alsodumb wrote:
| I'm not saying Twitter front end is that hard to clone, but I
| wonder how many ex-twitter employees are at Substack now
| working on Notes.
| paxys wrote:
| Seems just like one of the many cookie-cutter Twitter clones
| out there. I don't think people would even be talking about
| Substack Notes had it not been for Musk's tantrum.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Competitors are refining their Musk Tantrum Inducer
| algorithms to better market their products.
| j45 wrote:
| Substack notes is an interesting reimagining of blog post
| comments to be presented in a more familiar social media style.
| user00012-ab wrote:
| One thing I noticed right away, is when I scrolled down their
| page it didn't pop up that horrible popup all substack pages have
| asking you to subscribe; maybe they can ditch Notes and implement
| that feature on the rest of substack.
| gumby wrote:
| Is there a way to follow notes via RSS? This is how I read
| regular substack posts.
| hnaouesteuho wrote:
| I wonder if the founders really want to be launching this, or if
| this is a move pushed by their VCs.
| coldpie wrote:
| For me, it's just an empty login form, and I'm not going to
| register an account just to see what's there.
|
| I'm sympathetic to the idea of paying for content directly (I
| spend over $100/mo on Patreon), but I feel like Substack has
| cultivated a nasty branding issue for themselves. To me, and I
| know I'm not alone, Substack is where you go when you want to
| hear some 17-year-old who got high for the first time tell you
| what THE MANNNN doesn't want you to know, duuude. Greenwald and
| Taibbi and the like. I guess there's probably other types of
| content on there, but that's all I ever see from the domain.
|
| Anyway I'm not going to register an account to see whatever's
| going on with Notes. Good luck, guys.
| ugh0 wrote:
| [flagged]
| drcongo wrote:
| You're not alone. Substack is also where former journalists
| publish when those pesky editors decide to fact check them and
| find them wanting.
| pandeiro wrote:
| Especially when they're factchecking for partisan narrative
| compliance
| ugh0 wrote:
| [dead]
| samstave wrote:
| Just wait for Reddit screenshot reposts.
| praisewhitey wrote:
| Personally I've always disliked Substack because their links
| used to only show a newsletter sign up form and a button that
| said "Let me read it first". I'm sure everyone who works at
| Substack knows no one wants to sign up for a newsletter before
| "reading it first" but they still put that form there in hopes
| some small percentage of people type their email not realizing
| they don't need to.
| ugh0 wrote:
| [flagged]
| xirdstl wrote:
| On the other hand, I have a quite positive opinion of Substack
| given the articles I read there, and I know I'm not alone.
|
| I don't like Twitter though, so I don't really care about Notes
| claytonjy wrote:
| On the hand I know exactly what you mean about Greenwald and
| Taibbi (and so many other neoreactionary media folks), but it's
| also where I get great content from economists (Noah Smith,
| Claudia Sahm, Doomberg) and technologists (our own Simon
| Willison, Gergely Orosz, Molly White).
|
| The media folks are clearly escaping scrutiny and playing to
| their base, but there are many excellent Substackers in other
| fields!
| ska wrote:
| A branding problem doesn't mean all of the content is bad,
| no?
| seti0Cha wrote:
| How are they escaping scrutiny? They hardly seem interested
| in hiding what they believe seeing as how they are both very
| active on Twitter. And whose scrutiny do you consider them
| anxious to avoid? Their opponents know very well what they
| are saying. This whole framing reeks of the kind of
| censoriousness which they both spend a lot of time railing
| against.
| jacooper wrote:
| Simon willison is on substack? Doesn't he have his own blog?
| claytonjy wrote:
| He does, his substack is a weekly collation of his blog
| posts.
| cholantesh wrote:
| >Greenwald and Taibbi (and so many other neoreactionary media
| folks)
|
| I intensely dislike both of them, but are they really
| considered NRx?
| pandeiro wrote:
| lol just go along with it, we need to label them something,
| and "non-partisan" just doesn't give anyone a self-
| righteous dopamine hit
| coldpie wrote:
| I believe you, but Substack is clearly trying to appeal to
| that same base[1]. I'm sure there's fine content on there
| somewhere, but Substack's brand is so unappealing to me I'm
| just not interested in supporting the company.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/lulumeservey/status/1511376638487019524
| hackerlight wrote:
| Does anyone have a method to discover good writers on Substack?
| There's so much trash there that I'm tuning out every writer that
| publishes on Substack, except for a small handful that I already
| knew about.
| tedmiston wrote:
| _Coming Soon: Substack Orange_
| charlierguo wrote:
| I've been checking out Notes all morning (I write a jargon-free,
| FOMO-free, AI newsletter). It's kind of a weird product launch?
| My feed is primarily content that the people I subscribe to post
| or comment on, but I don't subscribe to that many people.
|
| I'm not sure what the average number of subscriptions a Substack
| user has, but it seems like a very echo-chambery setup right now.
| As an author there are definitely things that I want to share
| that aren't worth of an email, but I'm pretty sure very few of my
| audience members are going to see it. Maybe this makes more sense
| for writers with audiences who are on the Substack app all day.
| austincassidy wrote:
| Completely agree with this. This is basically the perfect
| formula for creating mini echo-chambers. If Substack wants to
| make this a real competitor to Twitter, it needs to have the
| "two feed" set up that both TikTok and Twitter have: a feed for
| algorithm-based recommendations and a feed solely for people
| that the user follows. They also need to make it so that you
| can follow someone's notes without also following their
| newsletter.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Since when did "ignoring-shit-I-didn't-subscribe-to" become a
| "formula for creating mini echo-chambers"
|
| Is my email inbox an echo chamber because I don't get random
| newsletters from political activists?
| austincassidy wrote:
| Your email inbox isn't an echo chamber because it's not a
| social platform.
|
| According to this research study, these are the two main
| ingredients: 1) Homophily in the interaction networks 2)
| Bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023301118
|
| Substack Notes is their way to venture into the social
| platform realm, which differs from the personal email inbox
| model, which isn't a social platform. With that in mind,
| for ingredient #1: people can only see notes from people
| they follow. People will overwhelmingly only follow people
| that align with their ideas/political leanings/beliefs.
| This creates the homophily in interaction networks. For #2,
| users can easily share biased information to their like-
| minded peers without pushback/opposing views since their
| social network is comprised of people with the same
| viewpoints.
|
| To be clear, algorithms can definitely create echo chambers
| as well but ideally an algorithm based feed will promote
| discourse and dialogue about ideas.
|
| An anecdote: I follow quite a few people on TikTok that
| post about housing policy in NYC. TikTok's algorithm
| exposes these videos to people with varying viewpoints,
| which creates a ton of dialogue on proposed solutions and
| pushback on ideas that could potentially harm certain
| demographics/historical areas, etc. This pushback is very
| important but is only possible when there is a chance for
| those with opposing views to discover it, which means there
| needs to be an algorithmic recommendation feature.
|
| If TikTok had no FYP and instead people could only watch
| videos from people they follow, this would create a closed
| loop system and those opposing views for housing policy
| would not be nearly as prevalent.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > because it's not a social platform.
|
| Is that what people actually want? To be algorithmiclly
| fed content from strangers? Why is this the imputed
| ideal?
|
| > but ideally an algorithm based feed will promote
| discourse and dialogue about ideas.
|
| Is there any evidence that this is true or should be an
| expectation? Is that really why billions of dollars are
| spent on this space?
| nkjnlknlk wrote:
| > Is there any evidence that this is true or should be an
| expectation? Is that really why billions of dollars are
| spent on this space?
|
| Yes. If people only used social media to connect/follow
| people they know the industry would be making nothing.
| akira2501 wrote:
| This only makes sense if you assume large national
| conglomerates are the norm. If they weren't, then the
| industry could make _plenty_ of money off a much larger
| base of small to medium businesses advertising to local
| citizens.
| austincassidy wrote:
| > Is that what people actually want? To be algorithmiclly
| fed content from strangers? Why is this the imputed
| ideal?
|
| I never made the argument that it's the imputed ideal.
| Rather, my point is that in the context of a social
| platform, having an option for an algorithmic feed leads
| to other people with opposing views to discover the
| content and have dialogue about it/contest that
| viewpoint. Otherwise, it's a closed loop system that
| contains only like-minded viewpoints that can lead to an
| echo chamber. How do we prevent echo chambers from
| forming? Well, the most straightforward option is to
| introduce opposing viewpoints. How do we introduce
| opposing viewpoints? Well the people with opposing
| viewpoints need to be able to discover the content - so
| it needs to be shown to them somehow. The best way to do
| that (right now at least) is through an algorithmic
| recommendation engine.
|
| > Is there any evidence that this is true or should be an
| expectation? Is that really why billions of dollars are
| spent on this space?
|
| That's why I said "ideally". There's huge differences in
| algorithms for all the major social platforms. Algorithms
| can easily be used to make echo chambers worse, but
| algorithms can also be used to reduce echo chambers on a
| platform. To your point, that's why billions of dollars
| are spent on this because it's a complicated problem. One
| thing is a fact though, dissenting opinions create
| engagement and keeps people on the platform. If you
| responded to my comment and said "I agree with you", I
| wouldn't be commenting here right now and back on
| Hackernews. Most social platforms take advantage of this
| feature of our human psyche to get people to stay on the
| platform to then show them more ads and drive more ad
| revenue. That's why engagement is such a critical factor
| in social media algorithms and also has the unintended
| consequence of promoting controversial content - because
| it receives the most engagement. Which goes back to the
| need of having an algorithm that can balance reducing
| echo chambers by showing the content to others with
| dissenting opinions without unintentionally promoting
| only the most controversial content because it has the
| highest engagement. There's really no easy answer to this
| and again, that's why they spend billions like you said.
| hiidrew wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about this and some of the other twitters
| clones I've been experimenting with: bluesky, mastodon, read.cv's
| posts, farcaster. They're reminding me of the wave of audio-first
| social features that came after the Clubhouse hype.
|
| Though I do appreciate the niche focuses of these apps, e.g.
| posts is primarily designers, farcaster is a lot of crypto
| people, etc, I still use Twitter for most of my content
| discovery.
| phtrivier wrote:
| You can now start a timer until they announce that they're going
| to algorithmically organize the feed of "Notes" because
| "chronological order is too hard to follow."
|
| Then, they will let an Algo organize the feed of articles.
|
| Then the ads - no, wait, the "sponsored post - will start popping
| in, etc, etc...
|
| Maybe they won't. I enjoy substack as it is today, and maybe
| they'll pull it off. But I can't help seing this as the next step
| towards enshitification. In the words of a 21s century social
| media author : "so sad".
| andrewmutz wrote:
| I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with
| algorithmic feeds. Algorithms work well when finding you
| interesting content when there is too much content to show you
| all of it. Netflix does this every day and people don't
| complain about it.
|
| I think the real problem is when this is done with an ad-
| supported business model. In that model, the interests of the
| algorithm designer are too far removed from the interests of
| the user. Presumably, since substack has a subscription
| business model (like netflix) we may end up with algorithmic
| feeds that users enjoy using.
| rwmj wrote:
| Maybe there's not anything "inherently wrong", but in all
| instances I'm aware of they've been worse than simply showing
| the posts in date order.
| dopamean wrote:
| I kinda prefer the algo feed tbh. It shows me stuff from
| yesterday when I didnt check the feed at all. I'm on some IRC
| servers and a couple discord as well and it often feels like
| if I don't check constantly I'll miss something and have to
| scroll for ages to sort it out. I don't mind that as much on
| those platforms but for things like IG and twitter I do enjoy
| the algo feed.
| pvarangot wrote:
| I think before that you need to get all the fake journalists
| that just get payed by companies to review their products and
| say it's awesome for the price. Substack doesn't have those
| yet.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I doubt that will be the case. The cash cow is subscription,
| not ads or engagement. The fundamental value proposition for
| the product is getting more people to pay for subscription
| content. It has a similar feel for the end user, but that
| appears to be the only overlap.
|
| No need for a $8 verified button, they can just say how many
| paying subscribers has as a form of social truth. That is game-
| able, obviously, but imposes a substantial cost on buying
| credibility.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Catastrophising about a future that doesn't exist based on pure
| speculation. You're already upset about this product on the
| basis that bad things MIGHT happen in the future. Live in the
| moment, this type of chronic negativity is unhealthy.
| tomcam wrote:
| > Maybe they won't. I enjoy substack as it is today, and
| maybe they'll pull it off.
|
| Mindread much? You have no idea whether GP is upset.
| [deleted]
| phtrivier wrote:
| I not sure I'm upset yet, but I'm definitely concerned, and
| rather pessimistic on the outcome.
|
| Looks too much like deja vu all over again.
|
| What bother me the most is that they don't seem to address
| the issue at all in the announcement. I'm not going to
| pretend I'm the only one who sees how things could get awry
| here. I wish they had at least given a nod to the very likely
| worst case scenario, and maybe explained why they think
| they're in a better position then pretty-much-every-other-
| social-media.
|
| I just wonder how long it's going to take for:
|
| * this Notes tab to be the first thing that the app opens
|
| * Content from people I have not subscribed to, to be the
| first thing in the Notes tab
|
| * This content being stuff I do not care about
|
| * In short form
|
| * Optimized to get "engagement" (aka "arguments between
| trolls")
|
| We'll see...
| naet wrote:
| You could argue that it isn't just a hypothetical future,
| it's a trend that already exists and has repeated multiple
| times over in recent history. Nothing wrong with recognizing
| that and warning about it ("if you don't learn history you're
| doomed to repeat it" or something like that).
|
| I think that since Substack already has a monetization in
| subscriptions it's possible that they won't need the same
| revenue. But it's also hard to convince execs to leave
| potential revenue on the table when they see it.
| zulban wrote:
| It's not "pure speculation" if you've seen it happen many
| times, and you see the same early patterns now. That's not
| speculation, that's pattern recognition and intelligence.
| BulgarianIdiot wrote:
| Happens every time. But there are alternatives. It's just that
| everyone copies prior art and so we have this algorithmic mess.
| MikusR wrote:
| Can you explain what you enjoy about substack? It just seems to
| be Forbes contributors with even less vetting.
| adamrezich wrote:
| can you explain what you mean by "It just seems to be Forbes
| contributors with even less vetting"? I am subscribed to
| several different columns, with a couple of paid
| subscriptions, all about a very wide variety of topics--it's
| just a blog/podcast platform.
| ugh0 wrote:
| [flagged]
| neither_color wrote:
| Layperson here:
|
| When I click on a forbes article I usually don't notice the
| author.
|
| On Substack I'm subscribed to specific authors and one former
| newspaper/ now independent journalist I follow.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Honest question: why is noticing/not noticing the author
| relevant to you? Isn't the point of reading something to
| consume the actual content?
|
| I totally get the point of following people you're already
| familiar with and have a track record of quality. Not
| arguing against that.
|
| I'm just interested in your comment about not noticing the
| author.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| This is exactly right. Because they will have to.
|
| If you follow 100 people who post 3 times a day, that's 300
| posts. You're awake 16 hours a day, so an average of ~18 posts
| per hour, or 1 every 3 minutes. Many users follow way more
| people and/or follow accounts which post much more often.
|
| Having a non-algorithmic feed means that posters will see low
| levels of engagement and users will quickly be overwhelmed with
| their reading list, and miss most of the posts. It's a vicious
| circle which will cause both writers and readers to eventually
| give up.
|
| If, on the other hand, posts are ranked based on user
| popularity and engagement and that rank affects its position in
| subscriber feeds, then it's a virtuous cycle where more people
| will be directed to interesting posts, and those posters will
| be incentivised to post more.
|
| This is why Mastodon has seen its usage drop after their
| initial surge earlier this year. We don't have time to wade
| through a firehouse of random posts every day.
| phtrivier wrote:
| > If, on the other hand, posts are ranked based on user
| popularity and engagement and that rank affects its position
| in subscriber feeds, then it's a virtuous cycle where more
| people will be directed to interesting posts, and those
| posters will be incentivised to post more.
|
| ... or it's a vicious cycle when someone understand which
| kind of cheaply generated content games the recommandation
| system the best. If history has told us anything, it's that
| radical, divisive, tribal, infuriating, titilating,
| voyeuristic, trivial, scammy, stupid short form tends to
| works very well.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I don't disagree in any way. But in the short term, an
| algorithmic feed will be the only way to make the service
| "sticky". But yes, any algorithm can and will be gamed and
| it's a cat and mouse game from that point on.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| In that case, just continue using it until it sucks and move
| on.
| phtrivier wrote:
| This assumes there will be an alternative system to move on
| to.
|
| I'm starting to wonder if there is a law of physics that
| inevitably turns any content publishing platform into
| youtwitokbook (tm).
|
| Let's hope we keep a critical mass of "suckers" who still
| write good, long form content despite it being the least
| effective strategy.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Substack really competes with creators leaving and setting up
| their own newsletter + payment gateway software. That's like a
| $20,000 or so project from a web dev firm and for a creator who
| gets $200,000 a year from their newsletter it pays for itself in
| a year. The trouble is that substack makes almost all of its
| money from two handfuls of users who make more than that so if
| substack loses those creators it is left with all the expenses
| but none of the revenue.
|
| The question about any feature they add is "what does it do about
| that situation?"
| blackshaw wrote:
| $20,000? I could code up a basic newsletter app in half a day's
| work, with payments handled by Stripe.
|
| If it's really possible to charge $20,000 for this service then
| please tell me where to find clients.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If I were doing it on my own account my estimate is close to
| yours. I have a cloud-native email newsletter system I built
| already, hooking up a payment gateway is routine, testing can
| be a bit of a hassle.
|
| You could put a job like that up on a freelancer platform for
| a lot less money and you might get a good outcome or you
| might not.
|
| My figure would assume there is a certain amount of arguing
| and barguing about requirements and that you're dealing with
| somebody who will really come through, dot all the i's and
| cross all the t's and it is worth it if you are really making
| money on a newsletter.
| runako wrote:
| This is similar to the "Amazon problem," where manufacturers
| can earn a higher margin by selling direct.
|
| >The question about any feature they add is "what does it do
| about that situation?"
|
| The answer is the same in the cases of Amazon & Substack:
| generating sales isn't free, and in all likelihood the platform
| can do it cheaper than you can. Take the $200k writer who pays
| $20k to Substack annually. Either Substack can generate 166
| subscriptions ($10/mo) annually so it's worth the money, or you
| move. (That's almost correct: if you are a writer, it may be
| worth it to you to let Substack continue to own this piece so
| that you don't have to run a business. There's a lot of value
| in being able to focus on thinking and writing and not SEO and
| ad placement.)
| gen220 wrote:
| I've seen people trying to compare Amazon to Substack, but it
| doesn't add up for me.
|
| One Substack "generates" the sale, transferring the
| relationship to your own site feels cheap.
|
| It's like if Amazon stopped selling New Yorker subscriptions.
| If I actually gave a crap about the NYer subscription I was
| paying for, I'd find some other way to pay for it. Amazon
| [Substack] is a commodity in this vertical.
|
| Of course, the people who didn't care about your subscription
| because they never read it would disappear. But, they were
| going to churn eventually. I imagine if you amortize over a
| year, this marginal loss is less than the diff between
| Substack's take rate and operating your own blog +
| newsletter.
|
| ---
|
| Acting rationally from an economic point of view, the only
| reason you'd want to stick around on Substack is that you
| think this equation holds true:
|
| (Future subscriber base on Substack * (monthly rate -
| Substack fee)) > (Future subscriber base as an independent *
| (monthly rate - cc transaction fees)).
|
| For "young" writers who don't yet have an audience, Substack
| helps a lot. But if you have a well-developed audience, IDK,
| I imagine Substack must view them as big flight risks (hence
| the advance payments).
|
| Some substantial things Substack can do to make this equation
| more favorable:
|
| - Give you free (or low-fee) marketing on substack properties
| (note this is a zero sum game over ad inventory, choosing to
| give _you_ ad space means choosing to not give it to others.
| this is a hard game to solve, but they can probably do it).
|
| - Reduce their take rate for mature audiences.
|
| IMO, their current model doesn't make a lot of sense if
| you're somebody with a large audience. Especially now that
| we're out of ZIRP and they can't afford to sweeten the deal
| as much anymore.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's an interesting case.
|
| So far the superstars of Substack (say Matt Taibbi) were
| superstars before Substack and promote Substack as opposed to
| the other way around.
|
| Substack competes with traditional journalism, which delivers
| more journalism per dollar than the typical Substack but is
| based around the strength of the brand of _The Guardian_ or
| _The Economist_ as opposed to that of the individual
| journalist. From the viewpoint of the journalist the
| newspaper is an aggregator that is doing their marketing work
| for them.
|
| Substack also competes with Medium which plausibly claims to
| be doing promotional work for its authors, but despite
| claiming to be a place which is a little bit better than the
| rest of the web it's actually a place that is a little worse
| than the rest of the web and isn't making significant amounts
| of money for anyone.
| futhey wrote:
| Ghost is effectively pivoted into this, so, it's an open-source
| and cheap/free alternative to Substack, if for some reason
| Substack doesn't work for you.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I mean look at Patreon that basically exist as 100% overhead
| over just a Paypal account. They're doing fine. They
| demonstrated that convenient cash transactions for digital
| subscriptions is a viable business model.
|
| I mean, youtube had half the internet complaining "I wish that
| link was text and not a video" and the other half complaining
| "I wish it was as easy to monetize writing as it was to
| monetize video" and Substack saw the obvious solution.
|
| Most creatives don't want to run a business, they want to
| create.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That's a good comparison.
|
| I know a warvlogger, however, who is still active on YouTube
| but moved to Patreon because he felt constrained about what
| he could post on YouTube who left Patreon because Patreon
| kicked out all warvloggers, now he has his own members-only
| website.
|
| Another example is OnlyFans which has the same inequality
| problem as Substack. In my mind it is a little more mysterous
| how you'd run your own video streaming platform than how
| you'd run an email newsletter system, but I know you can rent
| video streaming from AWS so it isn't so hard. I think it's
| interesting how live-interaction platforms like Clubhouse
| outside pornography collapsed really quickly though.
| abzolv wrote:
| I use a unique email address for each substack author that I
| subscribe to. That is incompatible with Notes.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Curious how they plan to handle handles. Right now they're using
| full names for link text and having the URL as the unique
| identifier. Seems difficult to account for in the actual notes
| when you have multiple instances of the same name or full name
| (for example I'm @Zachary).
| buzzwords wrote:
| The fact that I have to be signed in to see people's notes/tweets
| means that I will not use it any time soon.
| astroalex wrote:
| All substack.com pages freeze for me on iOS Firefox. Anyone else?
| mrahmadawais wrote:
| Perfect way to grow Substack. Didn't see this coming.
| lcnmrn wrote:
| [flagged]
| Obertr wrote:
| twitter, is that you dude? what happened?
| sidcool wrote:
| As much as I love Twitter, I welcome the competition. Twitter
| needs a vitamin shot
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I've already noted that when you select text on substack, it
| shows a popover with a "ReStack Quote" button. I think when any
| blogging platform -- medium does this as well -- shows a popover
| when you select text, it's over. Selecting text is such a natural
| mechanic, there are so many reasons you might want to select
| text, I often even do it to "play" with the text, or to focus on
| a specific part.
| nullgeo wrote:
| The sign in flow is completely broken for me. I am signing up
| with an email, after I click the verification link it takes me to
| a page where I need to enter my email yet again. Here it says I
| already might have an account and sends another verification
| email which does the same thing again. Also found other issues
| the site after going to the home page. Multiple modals
| overlapping with the sign in flow.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Same. Managed to get in by opening one of the links in Chrome
| instead of my usual Firefox. Haven't managed to set a password
| yet though. It's a real fucking mess.
| MasterScrat wrote:
| I'm looking for a new platform to write technical blog posts, is
| Substack the right place?
|
| I'm basically looking for the "Medium from when Medium was good"
| drdrey wrote:
| Notion's editor is great for this, publishing not so much
| samhuk wrote:
| I use substack for this (samhuk.substack.com), and all I can
| say is Substack is _better_ than medium, but absolutely it is
| not good IMHO. It 's support for code snippets is basically
| non-existent, as one example.
| 13years wrote:
| So, I gave it a try today. Was hopeful, because on Twitter all my
| posts go essentially into the void.
|
| However, Substack Notes seems to have no method for discovery.
| They add some random larger accounts to my feed.
|
| You can't search Notes to find people posting content in order to
| find others potentially interested in similar content.
|
| So, unless you already have a large following, seems like posting
| into another void. People are reluctant to follow you as well,
| since you must subscribe to the persons newsletter, they are the
| same action.
| jononomo wrote:
| Perhaps they will have improved the product in a few months.
| I'm sure they're collecting a lot of feedback.
| 13years wrote:
| I'm just amazed that no social media has really attempted to
| put what you view in mostly the control of users.
|
| I put forward this suggestion to Twitter, I doubt they will
| use it, but it is currently ranked 4th by up votes.
|
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/1363
| processing wrote:
| _clicks link to Notes_
|
| "Log in to Substack"
|
| _closes tab_
| [deleted]
| potamic wrote:
| Very precisely my course of action. As consumers, we will do
| well to protest and boycott services that ask you to identify
| yourself unnecessarily. But I had to scroll far to see this
| comment. The general interest here for a new product and the
| willingness to look past mandatory login in worrying. I feel
| companies have successfully normalized this and consumers don't
| question this much any more.
| pornel wrote:
| To be fair, the signup process is hassle-free.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| No signup on twitter anymore
| feliixh wrote:
| +1
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Substack is an "absolute free speech" app. They have gotten away
| with it so far because nobody could see the highly offensive
| content unless they actively sought after it and subscribed.
|
| However now that Substack is becoming more like a conventional
| social media platform they will have a harder time being an
| "absolute free speech" app.
| w______roy wrote:
| It's a good thing, I think. "Absolute free speech" is most
| often championed by people who want to build society around
| pure logic rather than empirical evidence. The slippery slope
| bogeyman they gesture to is laughably dated in a time when
| misinformation and misdirection are so much easier.
| [deleted]
| tensor wrote:
| One thing that is often lost with the free speech argument is
| amplification. For example, no one is stopping most people from
| going and yelling on a street corner. But that doesn't mean
| that you need to be allowed to speak in a particular venue or
| platform. Our society is currently not one in which there is a
| right to "equal volume" on speech, and I think that's a good
| thing.
|
| The entire free speech movement was a response to government
| literally throwing people in jail for even talking about a
| given topic. It was never about allowing minority opinions to
| be as loud as majority opinions.
| snotrockets wrote:
| You make it sound like a bad thing. Being proud of harboring
| hate speech puts one in a very specific category of people, one
| I wouldn't be proud to be part of.
| asenna wrote:
| I've been enjoying Farcaster in recent months. I think they've
| taken a very thoughtful approach with the "sufficiently
| decentralized" philosophy [1] and that openness is now helping
| them grow the ecosystem of apps using the network.
|
| [1] - https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-
| decent...
| orsenthil wrote:
| Can I look at a note without logging in first?
| hrpnk wrote:
| I use Substack by subscribing to every blog with a unique email
| address, just as one would do for a newsletter.
|
| Forcing me to login to a single account is not going to work
| beyond a single email address that I can pick.
| upstream wrote:
| Substack and Beehiv is my favorite.
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from
| https://twitter.com/cjgbest/status/1645804524068818945, which
| (sort of) points to this.
| obblekk wrote:
| This is a case where an algorithmic feed would make this into a
| truly amazing product.
|
| I don't want email spam from every follower, but do want to see
| the best snippets on substack.
|
| Super easy to create a for you page, given text content:
|
| Step 1: embed every article I ever read, or note I
| liked/comment/share and stuff it in a DB.
|
| Step 2: every time a new note is posted (by anyone anywhere),
| embed it, search the db for my last 100 embedded items, and see
| if new note has relevance > 50%. If so, add it to my feed
| inventory. Resort my feed inventory by semantic relevance every
| hour. Remove items older than 7 days from feed inventory every
| hour.
|
| Step 3: On page load, move everything in my feed inventory to my
| feed archive - never rerank again. (Bonus points for tracking
| note level views rather than assuming all were viewed, but small
| detail).
|
| Bonus Step 4: Every 4th item in my feed inventory, intersperse
| something that's solely there based on popularity/top liked note
| of all notes visible to all of my followings. i.e., show me
| something possibly irrelevant but viral.
|
| That'll get you pretty far, each step can be endlessly optimized
| over time.
|
| I want to see the results of this so bad that I'll volunteer to
| build v1 this weekend if you really don't have time to do it
| internally. Tiktok for text... could be amazing.
| 2h wrote:
| > This is a case where an algorithmic feed would make this into
| a truly amazing product.
|
| how many platforms need to be ruined by an algorithmic feed
| before people understand that its a terrible idea?
| snordgren wrote:
| Algorithmic feeds generate more user engagement, that is what
| they are for. That's why platforms built around following
| updates from people that you like can't help themselves but
| implement them.
| getcrunk wrote:
| The terrible idea is only having an algorithmic feed. If you
| always offer the user the option to not use it and instead
| have a feed they can control, then it's a non issue
| Tepix wrote:
| Is there a way to get rid of suggestions on Instagram?
| 2h wrote:
| As soon as the site is owned by a public company, it's
| over. They are legally required to have an algorithm only
| feed, as this gives the best engagement, regardless of
| how much the userbase might hate it.
| Eumenes wrote:
| On this episode of a boring dystopia: a twitter clone
| 1attice wrote:
| I honestly can't imagine a better marketing campaign for Substack
| Notes than Elon 'Streisand Effect' Musk's ongoing shenanigans.
|
| I'm left in awe of the wranglers at SpaceX and Tesla who have
| managed to keep the companies in question profitable despite
| being surgically sewn to a narcissistic fauntleroy
| [deleted]
| cyclecount wrote:
| Seems like their infrastructure is not holding up today (a good
| sign that the launch has got a lot of attention?). I cannot load
| article pages without 2-3 tries.
| jpmattia wrote:
| It wasn't like Twitter's business had a large technical barrier-
| to-entry. And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical
| barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can.
|
| Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch!
|
| Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu)
| to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so
| I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Twitter's moat was and is network effect and having a critical
| mass of humans interacting through them. It was never about
| tech as such.
|
| But Musk seems, knowingly or unknowingly, to be systematically
| pissing off Twitter's users. The blue tick shenanigans and
| conflating it with paid membership, pissing off advertisers,
| the bots problem that was never addressed, promoting himself at
| the cost of business, his covert/overt approval of extreme
| right wing tweets, so on and so forth.
|
| There's only so much crap users can tolerate. A bunch of users
| have left for Mastodon, and a few more are doing so after he
| banned Substack links. Once a good chunk of core and
| influential content creators leave Twitter it'll get
| overwhelmed with bots and advertisers and will set of a
| negative spiral.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| In what sense do you think Twitter's business doesn't have a
| large technical barrier to entry? Perhaps having a low-volume
| version makes it a lot easier and skipping all the ads stuff
| reduces the work.
| heylook wrote:
| Many many senses. First, it's already been built. Now people
| now how to build it. In fact, many of the people that
| actually built it have left the company and could presumably
| help to build it again.
|
| Second, the toolchain has matured in absolutely huge ways.
| AWS exists. Twitter had to build their own cloud to meet
| scaling needs. Languages have matured or been purpose-written
| to enable building/scaling these types of systems. A huge
| portion of the N+1s and hidden footguns have been cleaned out
| of the thousands and thousands of open source libraries that
| you can glue together to get the system up and running.
|
| Third, Silicon Valley engineers as a whole have spent the
| last decade-plus building all sorts of Twitter-adjacent Web
| 2.0 projects, so there's an incredibly deep pool of people
| that have extremely relevant experience, even if they never
| stepped foot inside the Twitter building.
|
| Fourth, Twitter (and companies very similar) have been
| publishing literal engineering designs and post-mortems for
| public consumption on their engineering blogs. Even if you
| have no idea what HTML is, your path to self-education and
| building your own Twitter clone has never been shorter or
| better paved. They've even published huge chunks of their own
| work as open source projects.
|
| And on and on and on and on. And here's the thing about
| growing to Twitter-scale: it doesn't happen all at once. You
| can build the low-volume version and just follow
| approximately the same technical scaling path that Twitter
| itself followed, except you'll be able to skip a whole bunch
| of mistakes.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Twitter used to go down a lot. In some sense, struggling
| under load is a nice problem to have (as you want the
| users) though.
|
| I find I'm not super convinced that 'aws exists' or
| whatever solves the problems Twitter had. Though I guess a
| bunch of the problems with eg distributing a notification
| to millions of followers or super-deep reply chains or
| football games or new years or whatever can be punted on
| until you have significant numbers of users which fits 'low
| barrier to entry'.
| heylook wrote:
| Seriously? I think "AWS exists" is self-evident enough to
| almost be a tautology. It's a hugely successful business
| whose business is making tools that make it
| easier/faster/cheaper to build and scale software and
| internet products. If that doesn't prove how much easier
| it is now to build the technology of Twitter, I'm
| genuinely curious if you could present a hypothetical set
| of facts that would actually be convincing to you.
|
| ETA: I want to be careful to say that it's not "lol easy
| peasy" to build Twitter, but that the question "How
| likely would an investor be to pass on your Twitter clone
| startup because they thought the technology couldn't be
| built by your team with their investment?" is laughable,
| possibly even if the founding team is non-technical. With
| $5m, anyone competent enough to even file a YC
| application could hire a good enough technical
| consultancy to get a Twitter clone that scales to
| millions of users.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-
| to-entry just about as hard as he can.
|
| He's completely pissed it away. The skills at finessing the
| demands of different regulatory regimes were some of the first
| he got rid of, no doubt deriding it as "wokism". Now he's got
| fines racking up for publishing Nazi shit in Germany, privacy
| breaches in the EU, and is globally censoring anything that
| Hindu extremists don't like.
|
| Turns out that the main problem in social media is the social
| bit, not whether you can convince a man-child that your code
| works.
| greyman wrote:
| But if we look at the "mainstream" usage, like English-
| language thought leaders, they are still there, still posting
| regularly. Like for example in the AI field, all relevant
| people are on twitter.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I see plenty of AI thought leaders posting on LinkedIn.
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| What's "mainstream"? Why is English "mainstream" while
| other languages are not?
|
| Twitter's second largest market is Japan, with Saudi Arabia
| ranking fourth, Brazil, Turkey, India, Indonesia, and
| Mexico all in the top 10[1]. While a lot of people prefer
| to Tweet in English, I can confirm that Twitter has a
| healthy amount of content in other languages if you want to
| go find it.
|
| [1] https://www.newsweek.com/countries-most-people-twitter-
| socia...
| akitzmiller wrote:
| It's true that they are still there, but I think loyalty is
| really soft. Musk seems to make some antagonizing change at
| least once a month that results in defections, the whole
| Substack thing being the latest. I follow Rex Chapman who
| seems to be one of those people that just does not want to
| have to rebuild his following somewhere else. He just
| recently signed up at Spoutible.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| In my communities, niche though they are, most people have
| shifted to masto and have been crossposting to twitter. The
| replies on masto in general seem more engaged and
| thoughtful.
|
| Discoverability there is, of course, harder. At least
| initially, but just like twitter once I see someone making
| interesting replies, or someone in my follows boosts them,
| I tend to follow them faster (and drop them faster if their
| smart reply was a fluke).
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Network effects are real and good luck reaching to the point
| where I'd need to switch when most of my follows had switched
| and abandon the network
| g42gregory wrote:
| Well, he is definitely upsetting some (many) people. But, at
| the same time, he is getting the new set of people as users. In
| the last few years, I would not touch Twitter with a ten-foot
| pole. Mostly because, I could no longer assess the provenance
| of the posts and the authenticity of their rankings. Is this
| post popular/important or is this post was put into my stream
| by Twitter/other entities in order to influence me? I don't
| like being manipulated so brazenly.
|
| Now, with the new management, I find myself going to Twitter
| more and more often. I disagree with many posts and I do not
| like many posts, but now, I could have some assurance that I am
| getting an authentic information.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I've fallen back to mostly just using the Recent (Following)
| tab, which means I miss a lot, but at least it's mostly
| relevant. I'll often search on a topic that I see on my
| youtube channels that I want to dig into.
|
| My biggest complaint, is that even paying for it, you still
| see (a lot og) ads... I'd be happier paying for it, and
| getting no ads than the blue checkmark. Also, the UX on the
| post delay/edit with blue is annoying as hell.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| In what way is Elon Musk _not_ brazenly manipulating Twitter?
| It 's certainly a different flavor of manipulation, but his
| management certainly isn't a great counterexample.
| strunz wrote:
| Wait, what? This made no sense.
| nr2x wrote:
| I was trying to formulate a response, but I can't top "wait
| what?"
| foogazi wrote:
| > but now, I could have some assurance that I am getting an
| authentic information
|
| How ? And how is this different than before ?
| hobs wrote:
| That would make sense, if you had your pants and shirt on
| backward.
|
| Musk has introduced several high profile changes to corrupt
| "the authenticity of their rankings" - what on earth are you
| talking about regarding "authentic information" given the
| person running the place is a known and repeated liar, whose
| lied directly about his management decisions regarding the
| property you've mostly recently started liking?
|
| Seriously, what?
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Please refrain from directly attacking other HN users - it
| does not contribute to discussion. The guidelines can be
| found here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| As for the content of your post, users who have subscribed
| to Twitter Blue are more likely to be engaged with and
| invested in the platform, leading to wanting it to succeed.
| The additional verification markers for businesses also
| helps.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > users who have subscribed to Twitter Blue are more
| likely to be engaged with and invested in the platform,
| leading to wanting it to succeed
|
| Superfans are _less_ credible /trustworthy, not more.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Agree to disagree then. If I had the money to subscribe,
| then I'm monetarily invested in the content and the
| platform as whole - otherwise I have the market power to
| withdraw my subscription and make that known to the
| service.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN?
| You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not
| what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
|
| Personal attacks and swipes are particularly unwelcome, so
| please make sure to edit those out of your comments if any
| do make it in.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Mostly because, I could no longer assess the provenance of
| the posts and the authenticity of their rankings.
|
| How are you doing that now?
|
| > Is this post popular/important or is this post was put into
| my stream by Twitter/other entities in order to influence me?
| I don't like being manipulated so brazenly.
|
| Bad news: Musk is doing plenty of that.
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-
| tweets...
| daveguy wrote:
| I'm curious why you think Twitter is suddenly authentic and
| non-manipulative? If anything, it seems worse -- less news
| more hate.
| raytube wrote:
| It feels like a wasteland. But then the tech accounts all
| left for mastodon. All I am left with is weird cycle rage
| cringe. That I try so desperately to not interact with.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Over on Japanese Twitter, the sudden shift in the kinds of
| post getting recommended pre- and post- Musk layoffs were
| undeniable. No longer were political posts the
| recommendations, but rather cultural posts such as those
| concerning games, anime, and manga among others.
|
| Most of the Japanese user base welcomed the change, amazed
| at just how much manipulation Twitter Japan was (or is)
| doing behind the scenes.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Twitter had de facto commissars in every region that
| coordinated with their contacts at various activist
| networks to ensure everyone was coordinated. Musk broke
| that wheel.
|
| Twitter in the USA is noticeably better too. A few people
| left but no one cares. So many more interesting voices
| have been raised.
| rvz wrote:
| I deleted my Twitter account long before Musk took over
| it because Twitter has always been a outrage capital.
|
| I'm not sure why it is now fashionable to see many
| techies here scream about it now after tolerating the
| years of garbage that has proliferated on the site. It is
| likely has something to do with the layoffs which can
| cause many to become highly emotional of all their
| reasoning.
|
| The network effect of 220M+ users do not care and are
| still sitting on the platform as predicted with the
| alternatives failing to challenge Twitter and failing to
| surpass Twitter at all.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >It is likely has something to do with the layoffs which
| can cause many to become highly emotional of all their
| reasoning.
|
| It's just the pendulum finally swinging the other way (as
| was foretold) and the people concerned becoming appalled
| with the realization they now have to drink their own
| kool-aid.
|
| It's not unlike what happened when journalists, who told
| people who lost their jobs to go and "learn to code",
| were told to go and "learn to code" when they in turn
| lost their jobs.
|
| Basically, these people can dish out but can't take.
|
| Any smart bystander who witnesses these things would do
| well to take away the need for prudence in one's
| statements and desires. The pendulum swings with absolute
| apathy.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| This is hilarious, Elon Musk himself spreads random nonsense
| such as the rumours about Nancy Pelosi's husband's lover.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Newsfeed based systems like this lead to lousy consequences.
| Trolling, toxicity, witch hunts, tribalism, racism.
| Distraction. Disconnection between people and having to be a
| slave to some algorithm to get noticed. I'm really sad to see
| substack do this
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| 500M humans are not in Twitter looking to have pleasant,
| cordial, thoughtful interactions and consume high quality
| content in a highly moderated environment.
|
| Actually that's exactly what we don't want.
|
| So Substack will be successful in its own niche, doesn't need
| to eat Twitter's lunch for that.
|
| The problem is at the current valuation of $650M and bleeding
| $25M per year, they will have to come up with a plan to
| generate revenue pretty soon, most likely in the form of ads
| and generally that's incompatible with high quality content.
|
| Now if Substack's fan base put their wallets where their mouth
| is and pay say $30 per month, then maybe Substack wouldn't need
| ads, but we know that's not going to happen, not even at $5 per
| month.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I'm loving Mastodon myself (@pxtl@mastodon.social) but I worry
| that the UI stumbling blocks caused by the multi-server system
| and the far-poorer discoverability than what we're used to from
| Twitter will keep it from growing well -- twitter's algorithmic
| feed and relevant-to-the-user trending topics and features like
| that help make twitter feel lively even for a new user even
| with just a handful of follows. I don't know that Twitter would
| be as successful today as it is now without those features.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > that help make twitter feel lively
|
| But also that help make twitter feel like a constant outrage
| factory that impacts negatively on a lot of people's mental
| health. I got off of twitter a year ago (deleted my account
| after 14 years,even) and I'm really appreciating mastodon's
| less addictive, less "lively"ness.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Imho it was the quote tweets that were the big problem,
| those were mostly for directing lynch mobs.
|
| I just find the "follows of follows" or "include some
| frequently-favorited users" that twitter does for the
| algorithmic view is useful for expanding and finding more
| interesting content.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think "is X the next Twitter" is the wrong question to ask.
|
| When I started working at Twitter (now years ago) my
| relatives asked me if they should join. And after thinking
| about it, my honest answer was "no". The only person who
| needs to be on Twitter is somebody who wants to feel like
| they're part of a global conversation. Most people just don't
| and won't.
|
| Twitter is only successful because it started in an era where
| that was a novel and appealing idea, and because it developed
| a critical mass of users. Both traditional participants in
| that conversation (journalists, politicians, media
| personalities, etc) and new ones (like dril) came on board.
| It is now gradually losing that critical mass.
|
| These days there are just too many options tuned to too many
| sets of needs. Mastodon will get a chunk of those people, as
| will existing social media properties. But I don't think
| we'll ever again see a global groupchat at the scale of
| Twitter. Assuming Musk persists in running it into the
| ground, I think in a decade's time Twitter will be in that
| bucket with MySpace or SixDegrees, one of those early-
| internet things that people remember with varying degrees of
| fondness but would never go back to using.
| tracker1 wrote:
| TBH, I really like Facebook's groups in terms of UX and
| maintainer level. I don't like FB themselves though, and
| their warnings are sometimes just at a level of insane.
|
| Keep thinking I'd like to create an easy button for FB
| groups like self-hosted community setups. Then you can
| control/host your own interest group... add in live group
| chats (that FB used to have for groups) and just have a
| centralized auth and search that are opt-in.
| nemo44x wrote:
| [flagged]
| wpietri wrote:
| I see. As somebody who left Twitter, I'm glad somebody
| finally had the courage to tell me that everyone always
| disliked me. At last, the truth.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Ok, probably a poor word choice by me. I guess what I was
| trying to say is a number of people that left came across
| as self important and that Twitter would somehow be less
| good without them and someone else taking their space.
|
| The truth is, very few people are missed. Others have
| filled the gaps. The algorithm wins.
| ISL wrote:
| I think Twitter's popularity and endurance suggests that
| there _is_ interest in that global groupchat.
|
| What's unclear to me is whether or not there is enough
| money in it to make it worth maintaining/moderating.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm not saying there's no interest in global groupchat.
| I'm saying that after Twitter dies, there will be
| insufficient critical mass in any one spot to have a
| global groupchat.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Everyone I talked to who worked at or joined Twitter early
| on talks about how they felt like they were part of a
| global conversation but it was always really puzzling to
| me. I read Twitter occasionally in the early days but most
| of my friends were on IRC or GChat, with a lot being
| offline, and my networks migrated but never got onto
| Twitter. Twitter never really felt that relevant to me and
| over time it felt like it only got more not less insular. I
| lurked on it the way I lurked on tons of IRC channels. Once
| IRC began to fade, early Reddit (from the founding) was
| where I found the community I was looking for.
|
| My feeling as an outsider is that Twitter was useful and
| valuable ("high engagement") for the folks who enjoyed the
| culture that built up on the platform, but for everyone
| else it was always a bit insular and self-important. Since
| Twitter's founding, more and more online communities and
| spaces have sprung up, so if Twitter does indeed decline in
| usage its regulars will diffuse into the many other
| alternatives that have sprung up.
|
| That's my $0.02 at least as someone who's watched from the
| sidelines for a couple decades.
| wpietri wrote:
| I mean, every platform develops its culture and attracts
| the people who enjoy that culture. If it's not for you,
| nothing wrong with that.
|
| But I think "insular" is a funny word to use here, in
| that it being one giant space meant that self-segregation
| was a much harder choice to make than on, say, HN or a
| given subreddit. The thing that always kept me using it
| was the great variety of voices there. Some of my
| favorite people to follow were not the ones saying much,
| but the ones with excellent editorial judgment about who
| to retweet, exposing me to so many different
| perspectives.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Twitter is indeed a place with a lot of interests and
| topics but after the initial period it built up a pretty
| unique culture. As you say, it's just an aspect of
| platforms. But there was something unique about how
| Twitter folks really felt like their network was the
| "global conversation" that I never felt elsewhere, even
| though it felt just as self-selecting as the other
| networks.
|
| Early Reddit definitely attracted a pretty interesting,
| insular bunch but there was never any feeling that
| Redditors were creating a similar global network. I was
| on IRC channels that had Americans, Europeans, Indians,
| Singaporeans, and Hong Kongers but we all knew we were
| weird. There was always something unique about Twitter
| users that made them think of their space as a global
| village, and I think the large presence of journalists
| and MSM friendliness was a big part of that.
|
| Twitter also managed to create a product that its sticky
| users loved in a way that I'm not sure any other network
| managed. Redditors loved Reddit but not nearly as much as
| Twitter users liked Twitter. Whatever it was I hope
| product folks study it closely.
| wpietri wrote:
| Sorry, I'm not getting what you're not getting. IRC
| channels and subreddits are defined around special
| interests. There is a thing that unifies people.
| Sometimes that topic can have a well-distributed
| membership, but there is always a selection bias that
| comes from the chosen topic bias.
|
| Twitter is unique in that it had both wide international
| reach and no topic structure. Reddit is an engine for
| shutting you off from 99.9% of the Reddit discussion.
| Twitter, for better and for worse, didn't and couldn't do
| that.
|
| As you say, the journalists were definitely part of that.
| To the extent a global conversation existed previously,
| it was among journalists and the people they covered,
| like major politicians, NGO heads, and the like. Twitter
| expanded and disintermediated that. Suddenly you could
| hear from all those media subjects directly. And even
| more unusually, you could try to join in, speaking
| directly to people previously unreachable, maybe even
| getting replies. One major motivator for people joining
| Twitter was exactly that, as the Waiting for Bieber art
| piece demonstrated:
| https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/waiting-for-bieber
|
| The only platform with anything like that reach was
| email. And although email has global reach, it isn't a
| global stage like Twitter was. No other platform has
| that, and I doubt one ever will.
| maegul wrote:
| I'm with you on this. I suspect with hindsight the
| Twitter story will have "self importance" and traditional
| cultural factors like journalism and political
| institutional buy-in as major factors behind its apparent
| significance. Its friendliness mainstream media and news,
| where it was perfect for news that hashtag trending could
| be monitored.
|
| Did any other platform ever get so much attention from
| mainstream media?
| tr1ggerwarn wrote:
| [flagged]
| Cardinal7167 wrote:
| The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with
| AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts,
| Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will
| look very different in 5 years.
| okdood64 wrote:
| So are you going to take large short positions on Google and
| Facebook?
| Cardinal7167 wrote:
| I won't be predictive or prescriptive about the markets.
| But it's clear that tech giants will soon have to fall or
| evolve.
| greyman wrote:
| But is twitter really dying? The fields I watch (AI, software
| engineering, writers), all thought leaders are still there,
| still posting regularly.
| bee_rider wrote:
| My post will sound like a stupid gotcha but... what's a
| thought leader, how do you measure them? Is it possible
| that the twitter crew skews more toward talking than doing?
| rch wrote:
| > skews more toward talking than doing
|
| Same goes for any sufficiently large population, but the
| outliers worth following still seem to be there too.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| In my communities most people are double posting on
| mastodon and twitter. So much so that I only check twitter
| every few days for the stragglers.
| AJ007 wrote:
| I have multiple communities I follow on Twitter and the
| ones that don't care about the elon stuff, they do now.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Mastodon only has about 1.2M active users, so if most of
| your community is on there, it's an unusual community.
|
| https://mastodon-analytics.com/
| lapcat wrote:
| Most of the iOS developer community has moved to
| Mastodon.
|
| They're the reason I joined Twitter originally. The
| community is what I care about, not the social media
| platform.
| dymk wrote:
| That's fine and valuable, but it doesn't sound like much of
| a moat. Those thought leaders used something else before
| Twitter - even if it takes a while, it's not a crazy idea
| that they'd eventually move somewhere else if the grass is
| greener.
| somsak2 wrote:
| What is this "something else" that you refer to? In fact,
| this kind of short-form, global conversation wasn't
| happening before Twitter, at least not on their scale.
| sblom wrote:
| I'm sure MySpace thought the same thing about their
| never-before-seen accomplishments. I suspect very few
| people knew what "something else" was in that case,
| either.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| I'm not really sure what a "thought leader" is, but it
| sounds like someone that would feel at home on LinkedIn.
| archagon wrote:
| Is it really a conversation, though? I rarely see
| "thought leaders" actually engage with their audience in
| a meaningful way.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Twitter now has daily outages where parts of it just don't
| function and no one knows when we'll experience a more
| serious one.
|
| It serves the daily/hourly whims and mood swings of a
| single person who has proven to be petty, vindictive (to
| his employees), and devoid of integrity.
|
| That lack of stability in my opinion accumulates.
|
| Sooner or later it will balance out the momentum.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| You'll need a citation for this. I've been using it for
| years and haven't noticed any difference or outages.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| "'Sometimes Things Break': Twitter Outages Are on the
| Rise" New York Times -
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/technology/twitter-
| outage...
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| At least three times in the last two weeks I was unable
| to load images or threads or like tweets or post tweets.
| That's three separate days where this functionality was
| unavailable. Using the official Twitter client. I'm in
| Southern California.
|
| I use Twitter once a day and not every day.
|
| I don't have a monitoring service so this is the best
| citation I can offer.
|
| In the last month I have experienced more issues than in
| the last four or five years if similar use.
| propogandist wrote:
| this was the same narrative pushed when most of the
| tweeps was axed, but the site has been running fine and
| has only grown in popularity.
| arvindamirtaa wrote:
| Grown in popularity is not really a metric. A normal
| tuesday and the day half the company's staffers got fired
| aren't going to be the same in popularity. Doesn't mean
| one is better. Twitter is definitely more popular for all
| the mess they've made, yes.
|
| The "narrative" was right. There are actual outages now
| unlike earlier. It's not like twitter engineers were
| holding up the servers to the light for there to be
| outages the moment they're gone. Systems run on their own
| just fine, until something does go wrong. And if there's
| nobody there to fix it, something usually small blows up.
| Enough of these and users start to notice degraded
| performance and outages.
| wyclif wrote:
| It's actually faster now than it's ever been, especially
| if you're using it from outside of North America.
| super256 wrote:
| Search breaks for me all the time, and I need to manually
| refresh the site at least once a day. Also, I can only
| scroll on Musk's twitter profile to his tweets from
| September.
|
| I think it's due to more aggressive VPN blocking, but I'm
| not sure about it.
| astrange wrote:
| All the Apple ecosystem developers left, all the neo-
| Nazis were unbanned to add subscriber numbers, I see 1-2
| ads a day because all the respectable advertisers left
| due to the Nazis[0], and the For You page now regularly
| does things like show you tweets from locked accounts,
| circles you're not in, and people who've blocked you.
|
| Elon seems to have given up; he's just doing jokes now
| like changing his name to Harry Ballz and replying to
| fake news from the fake news accounts he unbanned.
|
| [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-
| perpetuati...
| gordian-mind wrote:
| Wow, if the McDonald's marketing chief says Elon Musk is
| a nazi, it must be pretty serious...
| raverbashing wrote:
| I'm surprised to see people that can't see this (or are
| just Musk apologists)
|
| The "Following" tab is showing only a fraction of your
| timeline tweets. Go to the "For You" tab and see an
| endless firehose of unrelated stuff together with some of
| the tweets of people you were following and were supposed
| to show up on the "For You" tab but didn't.
|
| Not to mention tweets in private circles being shown in
| the "For you" tab
|
| "twitter is working fine" is a bad take. It looks like it
| is working fine if you look at it for 30s, that's it.
| nkozyra wrote:
| Anecdotally it seems so. Further anecdotal, but I think
| I've seen one ad that was from a company I recognized that
| wasn't weird dropshipping stuff in the last few months.
|
| It definitely feels less active and the conversation
| largely dominated by small accounts that are paying the $8.
| ptero wrote:
| It feels this way to me, too; and just from a user
| perspective it feels better, too. Although it may not be
| financially sustainable.
| robryan wrote:
| Maybe their audiences are smaller. People that depend on
| their large reach on Twitter are going to be much slower to
| move on than those without audiences.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Discord attacking Twitch too
| evo_9 wrote:
| And patient Apple waiting it all out to see whose lunch to
| eat next.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| What do you think those 16-core Neural Processing Units
| that ship in every Mac are for? They're not waiting to see,
| they're waiting for everyone to discover their lunch has
| already been eaten.
|
| How do you get around privacy concerns for using the big AI
| models? Run your own. How do you get around the compute
| requirements for training? Push to the leaf nodes. How do
| you solve for personalizing AIs? Have personal AI models
| running locally... And wouldn't it be nice if there was
| some dedicated hardware those AI models could inhabit...
| abathur wrote:
| With umptillion gigs of shared memory, too. Really the
| only reason I'm entertaining moving up from an mba to an
| mbp, but I haven't convinced myself it's worth the
| splurge yet.
| jimsimmons wrote:
| You should look up global search volumes and Google share of
| it. There's no dent
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > You should look up global search volumes and Google share
| of it. There's no dent.
|
| "You should look up global search volumes and Yahoo's share
| of it. There's no dent" was once a valid statement. Same
| for Altavista, MySpace, etc. You can go from on top to the
| bottom _very_ fast in this realm.
| geraneum wrote:
| Same could be said when iPhone came out. Now look where
| Android is. The fact that something happened to others
| means nothing. Could go either way.
|
| edit: typo
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| Well, it means it could go either way. Which with respect
| to Google and search is quite a novelty, as Google has
| been on top for 20 years, without a serious competitor
| for most of that time.
| nr2x wrote:
| Key difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be
| default search provider. The US Department of Justice is
| going after this.
|
| Once Google can't pay-to-play in Safari and iOS they are
| in very deep shit. This is the classic thing with
| monopolies: eventually the "innovation" is just
| leveraging market power to deepen the moat by burning
| cash.
|
| This is what happens when the CFO runs the damn company.
| Sundar has no vision, at all, and Ruth's vision is the
| same boring Wall Street play book that put a hundred tech
| companies in the ground.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Key difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be
| default search provider.
|
| Yahoo used to pay for that, and to package the Yahoo
| Toolbar pretty much everywhere. I remember when it used
| to try to install itself with _MySQL_. I 'm sure it
| helps, for a while, until it suddenly doesn't.
| nr2x wrote:
| People have no idea how quickly the house of cards can
| collapse. It's a very dangerous path to juice profits by
| paying to be a default. Basically a self-made Ponzi
| scheme.
| nr2x wrote:
| Kodak had pretty strong film sales when the first digital
| cameras hit the market as well.
| ekianjo wrote:
| bad analogies are bad
| thrashh wrote:
| Yeah but that doesn't mean anything. Kodak saw a train
| coming, did a study that told them that they had to do
| something, but then sat on the tracks.
|
| Fuji, who was also big in the chemical film business,
| came out just fine.
| mgfist wrote:
| > Kodak saw a train coming, did a study that told them
| that they had to do something, but then sat on the
| tracks.
|
| Replace "Kodak" with "Google" and that's the exact
| impression I get from friends who work there
| nr2x wrote:
| I just resigned from Google. There's no future with
| current leadership. I was a at high level (6), with an
| incredibly broad scope of responsibility, making an
| absurd amount of money. But life is too short to spend my
| days propping up a dying monopoly when there's bigger
| game to chase.
|
| It's also institutionally arrogant, they really think
| they are the best, Jeff Dean and Urs are Gods, and no
| other company can do what Google does. OpenAI just
| destroyed that myth, yet on the inside they haven't woken
| up to the change.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| Hey, myself and an ex-microsoft dev (like 2007-2008, not
| recent), with some VP experience have teamed up. We're
| working on memory solutions for AI, as well as creating
| better agents, workflows, etc... In the early days it'll
| mostly be a GUI over langchain/autogpt/babyAGI,
| eventually it might morph to creating our own in-house
| brain-like database, something beyond vectors (or built
| on top of them w/ a better ranking/indexing based on
| frequency/recency). Hit me up, if you'd consider
| partnering up.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Sounds like fun. Do you have a specific end product in
| mind or are you just in the experimentation stage?
| jimsimmons wrote:
| Curious what "absurd levels of money" means, even if you
| could just vaguely gesture at it
| nr2x wrote:
| levels.fyi
| nr2x wrote:
| I take it you don't work at Google?
| jononomo wrote:
| I just switched to Bing about three months ago -- I haven't
| noticed any difference, to be honest.
| dmix wrote:
| People like to be predictors of doom before the hard
| evidence comes out.
| cfeduke wrote:
| > There's no dent
|
| By the time there is a dent, it's too late.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Sounds great but you'll have to provide some logic
| because I don't automatically follow your extremely
| confident opinion...
| emodendroket wrote:
| The fear of investors and, to some extent, Google, is
| that LLMs will supplant traditional search and by the
| time enough people are catching on to affect metrics the
| momentum will be too great to stop. My experience with
| LLMs has not led me to believe that is all that likely
| but opinions differ there.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| We need search to be able to fact check the LLMs, but
| this might become extremely difficult once all the
| content is written by them...
| wolpoli wrote:
| Just like how it is hard to fact-check Wikipedia now that
| it's used a reference. A thought came to me - perhaps
| it's Wikipedia that should be worried that it'll be
| supplanted by LLMs.
| jrmg wrote:
| [citation needed]
| jamilton wrote:
| The phenomenon they're referring to is when something
| spurious is posted on Wikipedia with no or poor
| citations, then used as the source for a "reputable"
| article (without citations), then the article is cited by
| Wikipedia, making the spurious information look more
| trustworthy.
| callalex wrote:
| 1) that hardly ever happens, it hasn't caused any
| widespread issues in the decades Wikipedia has existed.
|
| 2) All sources are cited so they can be easily verified
| by the reader.
| NavinF wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenes
| is_...
| two_handfuls wrote:
| The user experience with ChatGPT is pretty good. No ads,
| no spam results. There are downsides too of course: the
| hallucinations, and the way the ChatGPT site wants me to
| log back on now and then.
|
| I was very happy with Google but recently on my iPhone
| the Google website started nagging me to log in every
| time I do a search. This is a poor experience, add to
| that the ad results that have gotten harder and harder
| over time to distinguish from real results.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I've found it amusing but haven't gotten that much
| practical use out of it. I still make multiple Google
| searches every day.
| lenkite wrote:
| People here are praying _very hard_ for Twitter to fail.
| Nearly any social media post nowadays has 50-100 comments
| predicting Twitter 's failure and ranting about Musk. He
| is living rent-free in many heads now.
|
| Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and
| rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever
| Twitter/Musk is mentioned.
| Nathanba wrote:
| It reminds me of the Trump thing, it seems people really
| lose all rationality when they are faced with a man who
| publically doesn't care and does whatever he wants and is
| successful at it. I wonder if we will one day have a
| psychological name for this. It must be related to
| something in the human brain that touches on social
| repression and decades of instilled moral codes like
| "Don't say this, nobody will like you" and then when
| somebody does it anyway, you feel like it's an invader
| from a different tribe or a tribe member violating the
| fabric of what holds together the tribe. When really,
| he's not doing much different at all and they'd privately
| do the same exact jokes as a kid like "Twitter is Titter!
| haha! Like titties get it?" I bet lots of people had such
| a dumb thought but repressed it and when a supposed adult
| and major social figure acts like that, it evokes anger
| that the tribe is in danger.
| coliveira wrote:
| [flagged]
| 1attice wrote:
| Trump _fomented an attempted insurrection_ and you are
| shaking your head about the rationality of the people who
| are _concerned_?
|
| It's concerning that you're _not_.
| inpdx wrote:
| "and is successful at it."
|
| Overpaying, creating a mass exodus, destabilizing the
| platform, and losing tons of advertisers is "successful?"
| Nathanba wrote:
| The Twitter thing is still in progress and probably his
| first project where you could say that he has a problem
| phs318u wrote:
| I'd argue that one of the reasons Tesla and SpaceX are
| successful is not just because Elno is a "visionary" (or
| functional equivalent). It's because he was/is supported
| by a cadre of "true believers" (eg that we must disrupt
| the auto industry in order to do something radical about
| climate change). Those true believers (like all true
| believers), are willing to put up with lots of strange
| behaviour in the name of that belief.
|
| Twitter on the other hand was bought with a management
| layer that could fairly be characterised as the opposite
| of true believers in whatever Elon is selling. Hence the
| implosion.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| What are your thoughts about The Boring Company?
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah you're right about this, but it isn't irrational.
| Human societies have been as successful as they have
| because of social contracts. The phenomenon you're
| highlighting here is just society's immune system to
| protect itself against violators of those contracts.
| gessha wrote:
| Any publicity is good publicity it seems like. People
| don't get that hating is not the opposite of love, it's
| indifference. Mute and forget.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Hate is just confused admiration
| callalex wrote:
| I confusedly admire bigots and racists? That doesn't make
| any sense...
| Kye wrote:
| Many bigots are revealed as self-hating closet cases and
| fetishists, so I could see a naive analysis attempt to
| flip it around and assume it must go both ways.
| [deleted]
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I just sent the second part of this to my friend WRT his
| ex-wife...
| sanderjd wrote:
| I actually think the "living rent free in heads" peaked
| awhile ago. At this point it's just clear in a more
| pedestrian way that things aren't going well over there.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Apparently the people that have Musk living rent free in
| their heads are living rent free in _your_ head.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Mental subletting.
| boo-ga-ga wrote:
| I think the answer is network effect. As soon as there
| appears a properly working easy accessible alternative
| (not Mastodon), people with will start moving to it. At
| first it won't be visible in twitter's popularity, but
| when the new service reaches some critical mass of users
| - the popularity will start falling quickly. Let's see if
| Notes is this alternative.
| abathur wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
| jshen wrote:
| How many of the companies with the largest market cap
| (top 15) were also in the top 15 20 years ago? Why do you
| think Google will be an exception to this reality?
| Nathanba wrote:
| When Chrome launched, it only launched with ~2-3% market
| share in the first week compared to Firefox. Everyone
| thought that Chrome wasn't that good and Firefox would be
| fine. However I knew on day one that Firefox was in
| serious trouble and I switched browsers immediately. But
| what I didn't know is that Firefox would do nothing to
| compete for 10 years.
| taeric wrote:
| Chrome launched with an absurd amount of money to burn,
| though.
|
| And... I don't recall this "everyone" that you are
| citing. Chrome launched when Google had a ton of good
| will.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| > Chrome launched with an absurd amount of money to burn
|
| OpenAI has $100bn+ from Microsoft, and millions of paying
| subscribers.
| ekianjo wrote:
| By the time someone makes a bad argument its too late. We
| are beyond reason.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 1. ChatGPT is very, very new, and habits change slowly
|
| 2. For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow
| responses, captchas and random logouts
|
| 3. All of this will eventually change
|
| There is no more major growth for Google, which is all that
| matters to Wall Street.
|
| It will go down slowly, but it will go down.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Google wanted to be an Answer Machine before ChatGPT
| hence "I'm Feeling Lucky" button but road to there is
| long and hard. I think the biggest Google's problems are
| SEO spam often coupled with scams and fraud and last but
| not least, lack of transparency on how exactly they rank
| their search results.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I don't think we should pretend that google doesn't have
| the power to crush spam today if it wanted to. They have
| chosen to let scrappers have top spots in their search
| results and their reputation is dying as a result.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| > For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow
| responses, captchas and random logouts
|
| There are tons of free custom UIs to chatGPT by now, all
| vastly superior to OpenAI's. No captchas or login
| screens, just paste your API token once and it gets
| stored in local storage.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning this. I'd assumed this was the
| case, but I'd been wary of using them because I wasn't
| sure which of them would be reliable and non-sketchy.
| Your comment made me take a second look, this time
| specifically for FOSS custom UIs, and
| https://chatwithgpt.netlify.app/ seems pretty decent (and
| is FOSS).
| drexlspivey wrote:
| You can also put a hard dollar limit on OpenAI just to be
| safe.
| [deleted]
| markstos wrote:
| I used Bing today. I'm denting.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| For almost all technical queries, I've found GPT-4 to be
| vastly superior.
|
| Most of the time, my search queries are just to find
| websites. Like I'll search for "[movie] rotten tomatoes"
| or "[book] wiki".
|
| I've found duckduckgo to be a good enough replacement for
| Google for such queries.
| benatkin wrote:
| Arthur or Harvey?
| emodendroket wrote:
| If I used the preferences of commenters here as a basis
| to make investments I'd lose all my money pretty quickly.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| I used bing chat (supposedly using gpt4) and it was far
| more annoying than openai free chatgpt (supposedly using
| gpt3.5)
|
| Somehow Microsoft found a way to make it worse?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I have access but don't have a box with Edge running on
| it nearby to use it. What about it was worse? A few
| friends tell me that uniting chat with the LLM makes it
| hallucinate a lot less and makes it easier to check its
| work, but they only used it a couple times.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I'd pay Microsoft monthly if they'd just give us
| untethered gpt-4 access, the same from the API, for those
| of us on the waitlist. I don't care if it wants to marry
| me, haha - I think being able to maybe full around with
| the settings could make it play nicer too.
| redmaverick wrote:
| exactly.. its not very usable. They don't even have to
| innovate anything. just copy ChatGPT interface and
| display the results.
| 6031769 wrote:
| Of course they did. That ought to be their slogan.
| "Microsoft: finding a way to make it worse since 1975"
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, I wonder why is so difficult for people to
| understand this. Microsoft wants to make your life worse,
| even when they have good software.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that they WANT to make my life
| worse.
|
| I think that they are simply ok with making my life worse
| if it makes their life better at all.
| heckerhut wrote:
| Agree, prefer to pay for chatgpt then using Microsoft's
| free crapware.
| somsak2 wrote:
| I was able to use Google twice today so was able to
| offset your dent.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Boomer. The kids use reddit and tiktok.
| benatkin wrote:
| The original redditors are the boomers of HN. The crowd
| has changed quite a bit though. Still lots of good stuff
| on there.
| alfor wrote:
| I tried Edge and bing, God awful. You just feel their
| desire to take control of your experience of the web. On
| the flip site, made me see how much Google own us all.
| AJ007 wrote:
| I've been using perplexity.ai for anything that's not a
| site/company/person name look up.
| jascination wrote:
| What's wrong with Edge? I started using it when Chrome
| started eating my RAM, it's been mostly unobtrusive and
| unnoticed, like a good browser should be.
| alfor wrote:
| I wanted to be the default browser, ok. It wanted to
| import all my info.. no thanks there was other nastyness
| I don't remember.
|
| Then it showed me so much junk and crappy news on new
| page, it was pure propaganda.
|
| That was the end of it. I know it's possible to configure
| all those things, but the starting experience was soo bad
| I got away quickly.
| coliveira wrote:
| It is classic microsoft behavior. They don't create apps,
| they create traps. The end goal is just to make people
| slaves of their software. The software they create is
| just "leverage" so they can trap more and more of you or
| your business.
| alfor wrote:
| It seem to me that Google at first was focused on making
| the best products but ended up in a very similar place.
| Absolute power corrupt absolutely.
| coliveira wrote:
| This is indeed a theme for large software companies, but
| Microsoft has perfected it over the years. The way they
| turned open source and web technologies to further their
| goals is just another reminder. Many companies are now
| entrapped into Azure-related software that can only
| survive in a Microsoft world.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Right, I just wanted "new tab" to open about:blank --
| doesn't seem possible. You get their news feed on every
| new tab.
| emodendroket wrote:
| How much better could the memory profile really be if
| they're using the same rendering engine?
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Edge keeps trying to turn on sync-to-Microsoft. I keep
| saying no. Once, I think it turned it on without asking.
|
| I assume it has more telemetry than Chrome... anyone
| checked?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Can't speak for anyone else, for me I've mostly liked it.
| But I use a separate password manager (bitwarden) and
| disable most of the embedded addons (shopping, etc). So
| it's a bit mixed.
| tomp wrote:
| I installed it on Mac to use Bing Chat.
|
| It immediately took over my whole screen, in a completely
| weird way that no native Mac app ever did before (in my
| experience, though I don't use that many Mac apps).
| raytube wrote:
| I use ddg everyday and I hate it. I resort to Google
| shortly after. Not personalised so I guess I am missing
| out on decent returns.
| manmal wrote:
| Have you tried kagi? I'm finding it better than ddg and
| often on paar with G.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| +1 for Kagi. It's been my default search engine since Jan
| '22 and I'm very happy with it. On the rare occasions
| when I use Bing or Google I'm reminded all over again why
| I'm happy to pay for search.
| manmal wrote:
| I'm having the same experience. Anytime I'm not satisfied
| with kagi's results, I try Google and that's usually
| worse.
| K5EiS wrote:
| I tried ddg, but i found myself adding !g a lot, so i
| just switched back.
| propogandist wrote:
| try Brave's search service
| pantalaimon wrote:
| If AI assisted search gets larger it might be to Google
| what Google was to AltaVista
| mrkramer wrote:
| Google controls distribution on Web through Google
| Chrome. How would AI assisted search even reach casual
| web users? Word of mouth is not enough.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I switched to edge on all my devices (in hopes of getting
| early access to Bing Chat), and honestly there's a lot
| more features and it performs better, so they won't get
| anything from me except whatever they can milk from
| gmail. I haven't searched using them in over a year, used
| to use Brave Search, and You.com for awhile.
| QuantumYeti wrote:
| I actually just switched all our default search engines to
| Bing yesterday. Google is showing "Sponsors" that link
| _directly_ to a full screen page with tons of warnings
| telling you to call some 800 number so you can get scammed.
| And that 's after nearly downloading a fake Blender install
| a few weeks ago. I'm done with it.
| redmaverick wrote:
| you should look at all the blockbuster stores and Netflix's
| share of it. There's no dent. ~ Someone in 1997.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| You should look at all CD sales and minidisk's share of
| it. There's no dent.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Relatively happy to see it... though I do tend to lean
| towards the free speech side of the coin, and kind of miss
| the relative wild west that was IRC in the 90's. I feel like
| centralized social media is a blessing and a curse. What's
| old is new again.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > I feel like centralized social media is a blessing and a
| curse.
|
| This is what makes Mastadon interesting. I'm not using it,
| but a lot of people I pay attention to are.
| davidw wrote:
| > wild west that was IRC in the 90's.
|
| There was tons of /kick and /ban there too...
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah, but generally that was on a channel by channel
| basis.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| But there wasn't the equivalent of Mastodon culture of
| "hello server admin, nice instance you have here, it's a
| shame if it were to be defederated simply because you
| chose not to defederate the people we tell you to".
| corobo wrote:
| Wasn't that literally how and why EFnet started?
| emodendroket wrote:
| "Free speech" is a term that's been completely abused and
| used in bad faith.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Is your assertion that I'm using it in bad faith?
| emodendroket wrote:
| No, but rather that Musk has been using it in bad faith
| (I'm assuming "I support free speech" was meant to
| qualify the criticism of Twitter under Musk's
| leadership).
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah, Musk's definition of supporting free speech wasn't
| much to speak of... better than the old guard, but really
| weird in ways too. For me, short of threats or calls for
| violence I'm pretty open to whatever... As long as you're
| able to as an individual block/filter. Though the NSFW
| content on Twitter can be pretty bad and wouldn't mind
| being able to selectively filter that as a user too.
| chipgap98 wrote:
| I don't think Facebook really belongs in this conversation.
| As much as the VR stuff is silly their core business is still
| doing very well
| jabradoodle wrote:
| And so is googles, Facebook are spending more than $10B a
| year on VR. For context that is more than Nvidia's quite
| large R&D budget, which they have ramped up on consistently
| over years. Facebook has gone from 0 to 10B real fast.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| people treat facebook as if it were like their myspace,
| something dumb they did in their youth that's not longer
| relevant and is dying
|
| reality is pretty different, fb business is doing great
| despite all their missteps
| wvenable wrote:
| I use Facebook more than ever these days but oddly for
| none of things I used to use it for. It's now got some
| obscure technical community groups that are too niche and
| too small for reddit or discord. Facebook Marketplace has
| replaced craigslist. My friend feed is totally incidental
| to my use of Facebook.
| bigger_cheese wrote:
| Personally in my circle I still use Facebook messenger
| service - my extended family has a group chat and some of
| my friend groups still use messenger chats (I'd say post
| pandemic discord is used more then messenger now) my
| parents use messenger to video chat with their grandkids.
| It's essentially become skype. The actual facebook.com
| friend feed etc. is essentially dead for me at least.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| Google's core businesses are doing just fine too.
|
| Twitter has suffered financially but I've seen little
| evidence that they've lost substantial numbers of users --
| Twitter posts are still in news articles and sites like HN
| as if it's still serving it's original purpose despite the
| noise.
| ascendantlogic wrote:
| A lot of "legacy" companies had businesses that were doing
| very well but missed the boat one or more times as new
| things arrived. Microsoft is a good example. Windows and
| Office was absolutely, positively printing money. They
| whiffed on mobile so hard it was comical. Going back
| further in time, IBM got mauled in the PC business over
| time, even though mainframes and PCs were keeping the
| lights on for decades.
|
| I disagree with the assertion that in 5 years these
| companies may be heavily disrupted but these darlings that
| preyed on the fact the incumbents were ossified, large and
| slow are now themselves ossified, large and slow. The cycle
| continues on.
|
| In the particular case of Twitter they're being actively
| driven into the ground by a guy who seems determined to
| wake up each day and not go to bed until he's made some
| very poor decisions so who knows, maybe they will crash and
| burn quickly.
| somsak2 wrote:
| Indeed. Really makes you respect the repositioning
| Microsoft has achieved with their cloud and AI
| businesses.
| [deleted]
| czbond wrote:
| Twitter's barrier wasn't that it was technically hard - it was
| that it was free and had critical mass. There still isn't much
| of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to
| signal their disdain for Musk's political views
| naravara wrote:
| > There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it,
| except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's
| political views
|
| Most of the people I follow have moved off it. They use
| Twitter largely for announcements when they've put out
| something new but all their casual, unfiltered thoughts are
| going in Mastodon. Every time I check in on Twitter now it
| seems the noxious behavior to signal ratio gets worse.
| Pxtl wrote:
| In the artistic/creative space, a crapload of the best
| artists on twitter are trans. Musk is a loud and proud
| transphobe, and has implemented his politics into Twitter's
| moderation.
|
| You don't have to be LGBTQ to see how important trans
| people are to Twitter's health. Many are still there
| because business is business, but many trans people and
| their allies have left because the new owner seems to hate
| them on a deeply personal level, and they have the
| professional wiggle room to ditch that promotional space.
|
| Edit: W00t deep negatives for affirming that trans people
| exist and for stating the obvious that Musk hates them.
| least wrote:
| > W00t deep negatives for affirming that trans people
| exist and for stating the obvious that Musk hates them.
|
| People aren't downvoting your post for trans affirmation
| or that Elon doesn't like trans people. They're
| downvoting it because you are inflating the value of the
| trans population on Twitter as integral to Twitter
| itself. I would not be surprised if there is a higher
| percentage of trans people using Twitter relative to the
| general population, but I find it unlikely that they make
| up a significant enough portion of its users to even move
| the needle if they all migrated away to Tumblr, Mastodon,
| or another social network.
| sundaeofshock wrote:
| You are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the
| only platform where users could have interactions with
| prominent people in a variety of fields and know the
| interaction was legitimate. That mattered! Killing the
| verification system chased away many blue checks, who
| happened to generate a huge amount of traffic for the site.
|
| Musks politics on their own didn't create problems. However,
| Musk's tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There
| aren't many major advertisers were willing to risk having
| their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.
| ugh0 wrote:
| [dead]
| wpietri wrote:
| As somebody who used to do anti-abuse engineering for
| Twitter, maybe I'm biased here. But I don't think his
| politics are separable from his tolerance for hate speech.
| I think they're closely related.
|
| The tricky part here is, as you point to, not wanting to
| see people abused is turning out to be good business.
| That's why Twitter came around on hate speech, harassment,
| and the like. Claiming to be the "free speech wing of the
| free speech" party sounds great, and it's appealing certain
| types of people. But at the end of the day, a place has to
| choose. Either you keep the people who want to shout racial
| epithets or you keep the people who they're shouting at
| plus the ones who don't want to be around that. It's the
| that nazi bar Twitter thread, but at scale:
| https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-
| swiftly-k...
|
| But back to politics. Racial resentment waxes and wanes in
| American history. Most of us know it went into decline
| after the civil war, during the Reconstruction. Many don't
| hear, though, that there was an upswing, known as the Nadir
| [1] that peaked in the early 1900s with events like the
| Tulsa Massacre [2]. This period includes the only time an
| American government was violently overthrown [3]. It waned
| and we eventually got the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes
| known as the Second Reconstruction.
|
| We're now in a period that some call the Second Nadir.
| Racial resentment has increased, and the US's political
| parties have sharply diverged on levels of racial
| resentment. One of the biggest political divides is around
| being "woke", which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as
| "the belief there are systemic injustices in American
| society and the need to address them." The agreement with
| that also sharply diverges by party. And Musk has very much
| chosen a side, repeatedly rejecting "wokeism".
|
| Most people can dodge or ignore questions of systemic
| issues; it's bigger than their choices. But Musk just spent
| $44 billion to buy control of a major system for
| conversation. In Twitter's CEO seat, there are a lot of
| switches to flip, and few of them have a "neutral"
| position. E.g., You have to pick between the Nazis or the
| people they like to harass. Same deal for the people who
| hate black people, women, Mexicans, trans people, queer
| people, et cetera, ad nauseam. The "woke" move is pretty
| clear here: you decide you want your platform to be a
| reasonably humane and inclusive space. The anti-"woke" move
| is also clear: you gut the anti-abuse efforts and turn the
| terrible people loose (perhaps occasionally nuking a few
| accounts when they cause too much bad press). All in the
| name of freedom, of course.
|
| The problem for Musk is that's terrible for business. Even
| if you don't care at all about systemic injustice, most
| people find distasteful the ugliness that drives ethnic
| cleansing campaigns, digital and otherwise. The US consumer
| economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer
| focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience; they
| want all the eyeballs. He's supposedly a business genius,
| so we'll see which breaks first: Twitter's financials or
| his anti-"woke" politics.
|
| [1] known as the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir
| _of_American_race_relatio...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_o
| f_189...
| gordian-mind wrote:
| > You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they
| like to harass.
|
| Nice rhetoric, but no you still do not get to censor
| people.
|
| > The US consumer economy is diverse enough that
| businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the
| (shrinking) white audience
|
| On your "woke", "humane", "inclusive spaces", I hope that
| celebrating the "shrinking" of the black population of
| any country on Earth would put you in the category of the
| terrible people... Double standards etc.
| wpietri wrote:
| That isn't rhetoric. It's an inescapable fact of running
| a platform. You have to choose. If you choose the
| maximalist free speech position, you get the Nazis. You
| lose the speech of the people they harass, because a lot
| of them will either leave or stay and shut up. So the
| maximalist no-moderation position also ends up with a lot
| of speech suppressed. Plus, as a business reality, a
| platform that is smaller and with much lower ad revenue.
|
| > hope that celebrating the "shrinking"
|
| I'm not celebrating it. Again, it's just a business
| reality. In the Jim Crow era, businesses could ignore the
| non-white market, even be hostile to it. See, e.g., the
| Negro Motorist's Green Book. But most national-scale
| businesses can no longer do that, because the non-white
| market is much larger, as is the chunk of the white
| market that is reluctant to associate with open bigotry.
| And that part, I'm happy to celebrate.
| brigandish wrote:
| > which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief
| there are systemic injustices in American society and the
| need to address them."
|
| That's not a quote from Ron DeSantis. From [0]:
|
| > Ryan Newman, DeSantis's general counsel, said the term
| referred to "the belief there are systemic injustices in
| American society and the need to address them."
|
| [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/05/de
| santis-...
| wpietri wrote:
| Technically true. But Newman said it on the stand, under
| oath, an a case where DeSantis was being sued for firing
| a "woke" prosecutor. So I think that's as close to an
| official answer as we're going to get from DeSantis.
| brigandish wrote:
| > Technically true.
|
| There's no _technically_ true - there 's what you wrote,
| which was _untrue_ , and what I wrote, which was true.
| _Technically_ is entirely unnecessary in that assessment,
| especially when you go on to admit that DeSantis _hasn 't
| actually given an answer_.
| wpietri wrote:
| I get your point. But politicians are not lone
| individuals; they are effectively teams. They have all
| sorts of people thinking and speaking for them. This is
| about a topic where most of the anti-"woke" crowd will
| absolutely never given an answer, because to answer
| accurately about it gives the game away. For example,
| consider the example of Bethany Mandel, a person who
| wrote a whole anti-"woke" book, who somehow can't define
| it when asked: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido
| /2023/03/16/anti-w...
|
| But if we're being extremely precise, something you are
| apparently very excited about, you'll note that I didn't
| say that Ron DeSantis said those words. I said that
| DeSantis "defined" it that way. Given that this was one
| of his closest legal advisors speaking under oath to a
| judge, I think it is entirely correct to say that this is
| their true definition of "woke".
| memish wrote:
| Don't confuse tolerance for free speech with the dubious
| concept of hate speech and its selective application.
| hobs wrote:
| Ah yes, that's why he banned all those journalists who
| spent time reporting on the lawsuits against him, because
| he's all for free speech.
|
| Nah, the dude is for his brand of free speech, which is
| you can hate the people he hates and you can do what he
| likes and you can stay on his website.
| robby_w_g wrote:
| Interesting how you provided a direct counter example and
| your comment got flagged for it. I thought the free
| speech absolutist crowd wouldn't mind someone disagreeing
| with them
| crazygringo wrote:
| Wow. This is a totally legitimate, reasonable comment and
| you got flagged for it.
|
| I've actually never seen that on HN before -- every
| flagged comment I've ever looked at turned out to be full
| of abusive language and attacks.
|
| It makes me sad that multiple HN'ers flagged this. :(
| natch wrote:
| While relying on unchecked assumptions about what those views
| are. EDS = Elon Derangement Syndrome.
| dysoco wrote:
| >There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it,
| except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's
| political views
|
| There ISN'T? Ever since Musk stepped in it's riddled with
| bugs and changes for the worse. As an example very recently
| and as of now Twitter Circles are broken and tweets that
| should be private only for a select few are visible to anyone
| in the "For You" tab. This is MASSIVE and probably even a
| breach of GDPR.
| brigandish wrote:
| It was always riddled with bugs, I'm not sure why people
| are blaming that on Musk as that is surely the least
| applicable of any of the criticisms that get thrown his
| way. Are people's memories that short that they thought it
| was a bug free experience up till a few months ago?
| astrange wrote:
| It had a lot of performance and loading bugs, but it
| never showed me private tweets.
| brigandish wrote:
| Is your contention that now you've been shown a more
| serious bug than you'd experienced previously that it's
| an indication that there were not similar or worse bugs
| in existence before the takeover?
|
| Even if I myself hadn't experienced more serious bugs
| than those prior to the takeover, it'd still seem a
| stretch.
| astrange wrote:
| I mean, yeah, bugs that get you in legal trouble are the
| worst kind.
|
| Their traditional largest issue is their terrible ad
| targeting but that's not gotten better.
| brigandish wrote:
| Private tweets aren't private, they're limited audience.
| If you're saying something defamatory behind "private"
| tweets then, I hate to break it to you, it's still
| defamation. You might get some mitigation from limiting
| the audience but that's it.
| astrange wrote:
| Hm? I'm talking about private info leaks. GDPR fines are
| quite severe, you know.
| rvz wrote:
| > Are people's memories that short that they thought it
| was a bug free experience up till a few months ago?
|
| Hilarious how people here have tolerated all garbage and
| bugs from pre-Musk Twitter takeover for years and now
| they all complain about them now.
|
| It is selective memory based on the current villain of
| the year to hate. Twitter has always been an outrage
| capital with a strong network effect. It is just that for
| the 220M+ daily active users, it is better than the sea
| of worse alternatives out there.
|
| Many HNers here won't admit it, but the reality is that
| network effects are real hence the difficulty in creating
| a viable alternative, No anecdote, short term hype or
| subjective responses such as _'for me it is'_ refutes
| that.
| brigandish wrote:
| I honestly think people were resigned to the previous
| poor level of the app/website, and of course you are
| right, they now can use it and any regressions that have
| been actually introduced as a stick to beat an
| ideological opponent with.
|
| Even a cursory search of HN brings up absurd bugs[1]:
|
| > Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter
| bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would
| automatically force them to follow you.
|
| From what Musk has told us since he took over, and others
| it sounds like an unholy mess behind the scenes. From
| [2]:
|
| > In Tuesday's hearing, which ran for more than two
| hours, Zatko painted a portrait of a company plagued by
| widespread security issues and unable to control the data
| it collects. Calm and measured, he stuck closely to his
| expertise, unpacking technical details of Twitter's
| systems with real-world examples of how information held
| by the company could be misused.
|
| > "It's not far-fetched to say that an employee inside
| the company could take over the accounts of all of the
| senators in this room," he warned.
|
| From [3], a Twitter engineer on the work ethic:
|
| > "If you're not feeling it, you can take a few days
| off," he was recorded saying. "People have taken months
| off."
|
| > "I basically went to work like four hours a week last
| quarter," he added. "And it's just how it works in our
| company."
|
| Which tells me a lot. And should we forget about this
| doozy from Dorsey's days in charge?[4]
|
| > Oh, and while he was in charge, there was no backup of
| Twitter's database.
|
| I could go on _for a long time_ but it 's clear that
| people are being selective with their memories.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16942844
|
| [2] https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122671582/twitter-
| whistleblo...
|
| [3] https://nypost.com/2022/05/17/twitter-engineer-says-
| commie-s...
|
| [4] https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/jack-dorsey-twitter-
| ceo-fired...
| waboremo wrote:
| Musk is the least of my concerns, I can ignore his account if
| I cared that much. I can't really ignore that a lot of higher
| quality accounts have been interacting less because Twitter
| has become a technical mess, fucking up their timelines and
| notifications. This sort of loss is quiet, and slow. You only
| really notice it when it's too late, when your feed is
| nothing but mindless ads and random accounts you never
| followed shilling the latest thing on amazon.
|
| The only reason most larger accounts are still "active" is
| because nobody wants to have to rebuild elsewhere without
| strong commitment from platform owners - and outside of
| Tumblr, nobody has really done that. Except maybe now with
| Substack, we'll see.
| alfor wrote:
| Haven't see any meaninfull problems. A bit less spam and
| crap.
| astrange wrote:
| Pretty easy to attract spambots, just mention "metamask
| instagram account hijack unban sugar daddy glock".
| There's a lot of other-language spam too, some of it from
| state actors trying to hide news in the search results.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Really? Amount of ads is so high, it's pretty much every
| 4 tweets. It's unrecognizable from a year ago
| alfor wrote:
| I have noticed annoying add a few time, I deactivated
| adblock on Twitter to see what they are doing. Install
| addblock, you are welcome.
| graeme wrote:
| Indeed. Twitter recently killed off the apps and RSS feeds
| used by twitter power users. Those users who were likely to
| post widely viewed content on twitter or those who would
| embed tweets in news articles.
|
| Very few people produce on any platform. Musk has the value
| relationship exactly backwards. The creators do get value
| from twitter, but they generate the bulk of the business
| value Twitter has and they can easily move to other
| platforms.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > Musk is the least of my concerns, I can ignore his
| account if I cared that much.
|
| You really can't tho. Even if you block him, he'll still
| routinely show up in your timeline when people tweet a jpg
| of his tweets. Even if you somehow ignore all that, he'll
| still do random shit like change the Twitter logo to a dog
| to make sure you don't forget it's his playground, and
| you're just an NPC in his main character existence.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| You can't actually block Musk's account these days. If
| you do, his tweets will still be automatically put in
| your feed.
| crysin wrote:
| That wasn't just any dog, that was doge the now mascot
| and namesake of the cryptocurrency dogecoin of which Musk
| has been known to pump with memes.
| astrange wrote:
| He's being sued for pumping it too, which makes 4/3 a
| weird time to run a late April Fool's joke about it.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I should have known there was some shallow meaning behind
| it.
| brigandish wrote:
| What's the deep meaning behind any company's logo? Start
| with Google, then Facebook and move on.
| somsak2 wrote:
| > higher quality accounts have been interacting less
|
| any source / concrete examples of this? I've asked for this
| before but all I ever hear are general, sweeping claims
| without any actual data.
| waboremo wrote:
| What kind of "actual data" are you looking for, and are
| you unable to acquire it yourself?
| a4isms wrote:
| _There still isn 't much of a reason to move away from it,
| except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's
| political views_
|
| This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving
| Twitter.
|
| I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave
| a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that
| my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with
| fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know that. I do not have a
| "disdain for Musk's political views," to put it like that is
| to suggest that white supremacy is a view no different than
| believing in universal healthcare.
|
| Your rhetoric is a shallow and obvious attempt to invalidate
| and dismiss other people's concerns.
|
| And while you have a right to your beliefs, no matter how
| much they lack empathy, no matter how much they are divorced
| from a belief that other people are not NPCs and are truly
| entitled to their own world views...
|
| This type of talk is not in the best traditions of Hacker
| News, a site that yes, has a far more Libertarian slant than
| I personally hold, but also yes, attempts to hold its
| discussions and debates to a higher standard than you display
| in this comment.
|
| ------
|
| [1] Other people of colour take a different view on whether
| to use Twitter, and that's the entire point of not dismissing
| other people's views. They have their own strategies for
| making the world a better place, and I don't have to dismiss
| their choices as posturing, I can respectfully make different
| choices for myself.
| btilly wrote:
| You are arguing that people should share your disdain for
| Musk's political views. You are not arguing against the
| claim that this is the only really strong reason why people
| would want to leave.
|
| Second, libertarian ideals around free speech say that
| fairly engaging people whose views you disagree with is a
| better way to change minds than deplatforming them. That is
| because deplatforming them just encourages them to migrate
| to cesspools like Truth Social, which then become echo
| chambers for extremist views. Therefore there are reasons
| to allow offensive people to remain on a platform other
| than agreement with their offensive views.
|
| Speaking personally, I am firmly of the belief that the
| obvious political censorship applied to social networks,
| including by the previous management of Twitter, is one of
| the CAUSES of the extremism that lead to the Jan 6
| insurrection. You might dislike that there are people who
| think your children are a disease. But surely you'd dislike
| it rather more if we slid into an authoritarian
| dictatorship where people like that are the ones in charge.
| Therefore it is worth looking past your good reasons for
| taking offense, and asking seriously what is most likely to
| keep violent extremist networks forming that are in a
| position to do just that.
|
| Note that multiple countries in Latin America copied the US
| Constitution's idea of separation of powers. A common
| pattern is that they wound up as authoritarian regimes
| after a powerful executive solved gridlock through
| declaring a state of emergency. It could happen here. In
| fact, it nearly did.
|
| And finally, I find the comment that you're responding to
| far more in the best traditions of Hacker News than your
| reply. Hacker News has a tradition of polite and reasoned
| discussion of controversial positions between people of
| diverse points of view. I would rather keep that tradition
| alive, rather than implying that people who disagree with
| you are horrible people who might not mind your children
| being eradicated with fire.
| freejazz wrote:
| Ah yes, legitimizing people rioting in the US capitol
| because Twitter censors, when they aren't busy drinking
| bleach!
| btilly wrote:
| I will never understand people like you interpreting
| "this is a cause of that" as "legitimizing" that.
|
| It doesn't. I strongly oppose the riot, which is why I
| want people to take seriously the things that helped
| cause that.
|
| Similarly I'm not legitimizing gang violence when I say
| that the War on Drugs helps cause gang violence, I'm
| explaining why I oppose the War on Drugs.
| freejazz wrote:
| It's legitimizing the notion that it's even a response to
| the thing you claim it is. I totally dispute that.
|
| Let's look at the things the jan 6 rioters took
| grievances with: Mike Pence not overturning the election,
| nancy pelosi's existence, the federal court system which
| completely rebuked Trump's stolen election narrative, ALL
| of the media, the LIBERAL media, media in GENERAL,
| twitter, twitter moderation, george soros, jews, hunter
| biden, the crack he smoked, his penis, people who were
| verified on twitter, hollywood, jews, the thought that
| racism _still_ exists...
|
| if someone tells me the said they did something, and it's
| because of a ghost, and I accept their reasoning, then I
| am legitimizing the connection they allege. I dispute
| this connection. that's what I'm accusing you of
| legitimizing, their 'rationality'. they might call it
| rationality, but I don't have to. and maybe that's not
| what you meant, but I fairly took you to mean it, because
| you are apparently taking them at their word.
| btilly wrote:
| Meh. You still seem like you're so fixed on making your
| point that you're entirely missing mine.
|
| My point is that the way that they were censored made it
| easier for them to find a likeminded echo chamber that
| helped them become radicalized extremists. And now rather
| than dealing with obnoxious idiots with a few bad ideas,
| we've got an armed rabble. Which is far worse.
|
| Whether or not this dynamic happened is completely
| independent of the specific extremist rhetoric that they
| absorbed. But having been on the receiving end of a
| liberal conspiracy to censor information which might be
| supportive of Trump, it was easier for them to take
| everything that Trump said to its illogical extremes. And
| it was easy to discount all information coming from any
| source which denied the existence of the conspiracy that
| they experienced.
|
| The result is that they were convinced that powerful
| liberal forces had subverted democracy and were trying to
| shut down the truth that Trump presented. This made
| Trump's lies about a stolen election very believable to
| them. And they got fired up enough about such conspiracy
| theories that it came to seem reasonable to them to
| ensure that the TRUE will of the American people prevail,
| even if that required undoing electoral fraud by tying
| down representatives with zipties and making them
| recognize Trump as President. And executing those at the
| heart of enabling this fraud to destroy democracy.
|
| If we don't like this outcome then it is on us to decide
| how to handle such extremists. My position is that it is
| best to undo the conditions that encourage the creation
| of extremism. An alternative position is to fight fire
| with fire, to become as extreme in opposing the
| extremists as they are in fighting for what they believe.
|
| However I fear that the alternative position, as
| emotionally satisfying as it might be, is a recipe to
| turn political polarization into political unrest and
| potentially into a civil war down the road. Enough other
| countries have gone down that road to project what it
| would be likely to happen then. And it isn't pretty.
|
| Everything that I've said is part of an argument about
| how to best respond to the potential for extremism. None
| of it legitimizes extremism or extremist positions.
| freejazz wrote:
| "But having been on the receiving end of a liberal
| conspiracy to censor information which might be
| supportive of Trump, it was easier for them to take
| everything that Trump said to its illogical extremes."
|
| Yeah... this is what I'm talking about when I say
| legitimizing. And hiding it in everything else you wrote
| doesn't make me not see your point. Clearly the opposite
| is going on.
| czbond wrote:
| @freejazz - I understand your point, but there is a
| similar counter example which I believe is powerful.
|
| The gay community made large strides as a movement to
| allow a civil discourse and transparent conversations
| with others who opposed their lifestyles by deciding to
| be open rather than secret. When people meet face to
| face, and realize we're all really similar - people tend
| to soften their views to be "human".
| freejazz wrote:
| Who is stopping them? Twitter? Twitter isn't the public
| square - it's just a website. It's full of advertising
| money that twitter controls and takes. It might be LIKE a
| public square, but it's not the public square.
| czbond wrote:
| @a4isms We probably just have very different streams, based
| on who we follow and what they retweet, etc. I follow a
| very small amount of strictly business / technology /
| economy as technical topics and cull if they strayed from
| that (as it was my intended use). I don't see the more
| broad universe of content many see on Twitter due to that
| curation.
| lenkite wrote:
| I am a person of colour too. And I don't get what is wrong
| with what the person you replied to said.
|
| I mean, if you wish to signal your disdain for Musk's
| political views, you can leave Twitter. How is that an
| "attempt to invalidate and dismiss people's concerns" ?
|
| And radical "woke" folks have been tweeting about killing
| and murdering white people on twitter for ages without much
| blowback. I always found it strange that was tolerated in
| the woke twitter days.
|
| If Twitter fails - which it may definitely do - it will be
| because Musk screwed up and fired a lot of good engineering
| folk and got rid of power user features - which has made a
| lot of creators angry. But "racism" is un-likely to be the
| primary driving cause. It has _always_ existed on Twitter.
| drstewart wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| bolanyo wrote:
| I honestly don't care about his political views in my choice
| of social media (and I'm not aware of any views he holds that
| I would find extremely objectionable in any case).
|
| I care about being able to choose between "For You" and
| "Following". I don't want an algorithmically curated feed
| which includes things I have consciously chosen not to look
| at. And I don't want people who follow me not to be able to
| see things I link to because of a pissing contest between
| tech companies.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Just by not showing random posts which the algorithm decides I
| should see on my timeline itself makes Mastodon leagues better
| than Twitter.
|
| I've been interacting with only couple of people whom I follow
| and vice versa for past several months I've been on Mastodon
| and I feel great about it. I'm convinced that federated
| instances are the solution to the social media problems just by
| strong focus on the theme and inherent limit to scaling without
| any pressure from VCs.
|
| P.S. Please consider donating to your Mastodon instance.
| rewtraw wrote:
| without a UX that abstracts away the siloed nature of
| federated instances, it really is a massive hindrance to
| network effects and will prevent Mastodon from ever growing
| beyond a small niche
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| >without a UX that abstracts away the siloed nature of
| federated instances
|
| Can you be more specific? Only thing I found missing was
| "Quote Posts" and almost everyone seems to agree that it
| was the right decision to make.
|
| > will prevent Mastodon from ever growing beyond a small
| niche
|
| And its not a good thing? "There's an instance for
| everything" is fast becoming an reality, Let those
| instances be small as its managed by volunteers;
|
| There's no need for everything to grow into a democracy
| destroying scale, Especially Social Media platforms.
| runjake wrote:
| As far as I can tell, there's no Substack app (at least for iOS)
| that allows posting?
|
| If so, I don't really see this taking a notable chunk out of
| Twitter until this happens.
|
| I see a Substack Reader app, but it's more or less read-only.
| japhyr wrote:
| I think you have to update the app today to get access to
| Notes.
| [deleted]
| rchaud wrote:
| Wow, didn't exactly stick their necks out on the design did they?
| Almost zero visual differentiation from the noisy flamewars of
| Twitter this is supposed to be the antidote to.
| [deleted]
| warning26 wrote:
| DESIGN SPEC:
|
| * Make it look exactly like Twitter in every way
|
| END OF DOCUMENT
| hbn wrote:
| * s/#499BE9/#ED7135
| DanHulton wrote:
| ...and his actions. He's not just a nebulous political creature,
| thinking thoughts but not acting upon them. He's actually _doing_
| things that people might rightly not agree with.
|
| Not to mention, a good chunk of those actual actions have
| resulted in Twitter being a legitimately worse place for a great
| number of people to spend time on/engage with, and thus they...
| leave.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| Whenever someone criticizes Elon Musk I just remember he sent a
| car he drove, a car built by a company he leads, into
| heliocentric orbit using his own rockets via his own space
| launching tech company. I don't know how you can talk about the
| guy without that context. People talk about him like he's just
| another jerk on Twitter. His car is in space. He's also the
| wealthiest person on the planet. And his car is in space.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| [dead]
| shafyy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
| deanCommie wrote:
| Whenever someone criticizes Elon Musk, it's not about his
| abilities to launch a car into space.
|
| In fact most of us would much prefer that he focused on his
| space launching abilities and electric-car making abilities
| (with the usual caveat that it's not clear how much of both
| are based on his contributions vs others, but I'm willing to
| give some benefit of doubt).
|
| He doesn't know anything about tunneling (boring company),
| mass transit (hyper loop), software (twitter), or social
| platforms (twitter). And those are the areas he gets
| criticized for.
| [deleted]
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Please let's not have the nth (or n-thousandth) celebrity
| flamewar about this celebrity. It's not what this site is for,
| and destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35530201.
| perceptronas wrote:
| I wonder, if Substack Notes fail - will Substack survive? It
| feels like they are pivoting into not-that profitable domain
| kritiko wrote:
| Looking at Notes, I get why Elon is so mad about it. They totally
| ripped off the Twitter UI.
|
| I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter.
| He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for
| shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of
| Substack.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > they totally ripped off the Twitter UI
|
| I wasn't aware of any IP protection of Twitter's UI, which in
| one form or another has been done 100's of times.
| kritiko wrote:
| I didn't claim there was IP infringement. IG & lots of other
| companies stole the stories format from Snap. Makes it easier
| for users who recognize the ui, but it's still got to be
| galling.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Why? It's just a UI for something where there aren't many
| alternative ways to present it. Timeline, follower,
| following. That's it. The rest is styling and that is even
| less relevant.
| jjulius wrote:
| >IG & lots of other companies stole the stores from Snap.
|
| I've been saying it since Twitter launched, but Twitter
| was/is just some folks stealing Facebook's status update.
| pests wrote:
| I remember both MySpace and Facebook status updates
| actually being a copy of Twitter style updates. I don't
| think Facebook even had status updates as we know it
| today when Twitter released.
| seydor wrote:
| And it s not like twitter has some kind of optimal design. The
| heart button in the middle is bad for my fingers! the left
| sidebar is useless and search sucks. Both of these services
| should try to make good work instead of copying each other
|
| I actually thought that a newsfeed would be a good fit for
| substack, but looking at this i dont think i m going to use it.
| It should be simpler, a timeline of things i ve subscribed,
| with some threaded, sane comments. The medium shapes the
| message, and twitter's medium is just not a good fit for
| substack's message
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Why would you use this twitter clone when the original has way
| more interesting content?
| dvzk wrote:
| GitLab initially copied GitHub's UI, virtually identically, and
| the CEO advertised GitLab in every thread that involved GH for
| over a year. It didn't seem that many people on HN cared,
| because GitLab was "open source" and ethics didn't apply.
| jononomo wrote:
| I think it would be fantastic if Substack Notes were to become
| dominant and replace Twitter.
| Johnie wrote:
| What's the rationale?
| jononomo wrote:
| I got banned from Twitter for tweeting that I would commit
| suicide if I were still programming in Java after the age of
| 50. I appealed, and I got rejected by a bot (I know because
| my appeal was rejected instantaneously). So I think Twitter
| is stupid. Also, Elon is stupid.
| oefrha wrote:
| Honestly, you can basically do all of Substack + this Notes thing
| in Tumblr, maybe minus the email newsletter. Damn, that's
| something I haven't heard about in a long time; apparently they
| support paid content now.
| tedmiston wrote:
| My thoughts exactly.
|
| But... paying for a Tumblr sounds weird. People are already
| used to paying for Substacks, so there's that.
| rldjbpin wrote:
| i am not an avid user of either platforms, but substack just
| seems like another take at medium to me, more than twitter.
|
| am i missing something in my understanding?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-12 23:03 UTC)