Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 187 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#61

Post by TekMol »

jll29 wrote: post #58
TekMol wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Mastodon, you are still at the mercy of whoever runs the instance you use. I expect most Mastodon instances will be shorter lived than Twitter. So changing from Twitter to Mastodon seems not like a good deal if I want my posts and the comments and likes I get to stay around.

For that reason, I'd prefer an architecture, where the users don't belong to individual servers, but a transparent fediverse, where a few thousand servers disappearing won't even get noticed. It would be important to ensure the integrity of the software running on such servers, though, perhaps via regular check of the binaries also at runtime.

Storing the data on a decentralized storage layer seems to achieve all of it and the tech is here now.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#62

Post by TekMol »

hald wrote: post #57
TekMol wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Mastodon, you are still at the mercy of whoever runs the instance you use. I expect most Mastodon instances will be shorter lived than Twitter. So changing from Twitter to Mastodon seems not like a good deal if I want my posts and the comments and likes I get to stay around.

You can run your own instance. It's probably not easy to do with Mastodon, but there's other server software aiming to be lightweight and easy to set up. Though I guess it will probably not be the normal way to use the fediverse in the near future.

I don't think self hosting will ever become the norm.

I have decades in the IT industry, and I don't want to self host.

As long as the majority does not self host their fediverse content, the fediverse is not a solution of the problem discussed in this HN story.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#63

Post by astoor »

TekMol wrote: post #44
astoor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Nitter can only archive (and update) data Twitter allows them to access." That's exactly what you'd expect from a Twitter archive site. The author's point was that this is the same tech you'd need for a Twitter replacement , and this doesn't need blockchain or web3. Reminds me of the comment on HN from a few months back "On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes…

How would a Twitter replacement via Nitter tech help here? The problem is that whoever builds the replacement can just fuck up the user experience any time in the future. Just like Twitter did.

If enough people don't like the changes in an open source system, they can get together and fix it or fork it. I see a number of others comments mentioning the already working (non web3) solution Mastodon - and that's a great example of this in practice.

To look at it another way, how would web3 actually help here? As far as I can tell it would only make this example worse - a more user hostile UI (faffing around with wallets and keys and whatnot), less decentralised (everything going through one API to interact with the blockchain), more resistant to change (forking blockchains is a big deal and only tends to happen when rich people at the top of the pyramid don't like something), more expensive (gas fees), less privacy (your wallet address being essentially an undeletable cookie), more likely to incentivise divisiveness and conflict (flamewars driven by the expectation of personal profit rather than just likes), etc. etc.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#64

Post by gnyman »

kybernetyk wrote: post #27

On my machines twitter got blocked. That's what happened to twitter. At least for me. It's a terrible website. Character limit leads to terribly shallow discussions that still need to be split into multiple posts. It's a dumb medium of exchange.

I find the character limit a interesting limitation, both negative and positive. On one hand, as you say, it's impossible to have a nuanced discussion in 280 chars. But on the other hand it forces (and allows) people to write interesting things in a very concise format.

Should be noted though that I only interact with twitter trough Tweetbot and with a extremely curated follow list. And in this specific way I find it's a great way to keep up to date on industry specific news and learn about new things (by following people in other industries).

It's far from perfect but I have not found any other way to keep up to date with the thoughts of people I look up to or find interesting. I had high hopes for micro-blogging but it has not caught on yet.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#65

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

alkonaut wrote: post #38

There are two reasonable ways of using twitter 1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords 2) Not at all I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) y…

> Granted, you need an account to use a third party client

But that's basically what the OP wants to avoid. It's not a question of creating an account, but giving them your phone number.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#66

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

YEwSdObPQT wrote: post #24

I am not sure what happend to twitter. However if you just want to browser twitter you can use a nitter instance (there are quite a few public instances). https://github.com/zedeus/nitter I use browser plugin that redirects me to nitter when clicking a twitter link. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...

Here's a version for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#67

Post by nottorp »

greenyoda wrote: post #7

The "uBlock Origin" browser extension blocks Twitter's login prompt and enables you to read posts without logging in.

Oh... i have a friend who actually passes twitter links around and I was wondering why I never see a login prompt from his stuff. uBlock Origin must be it.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#68

Post by charcircuit »

progval wrote: post #12
charcircuit wrote: post #5

Making a Twitter account takes less than a minute to do and is free. It's not a big deal. Edit: I'm not seeing the issue in an incognito tab.

> takes less than a minute to do and is free You are also supposed to read and accept 13k words of terms of use. And I'm not even counting the ~50 pages of "Twitter Rules and Policies [...], which are part of the User Agreement"; most of which contain a couple thousand words.

If you are just browsing twitter like the OP, you aren't going to be doing anything against either of those.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#69

Post by a2128 »

TekMol wrote: post #60
a2128 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This vision doesn't require blockchain whatsoever. Mastodon[0] is a successful decentralized social media without the use of blockchain. Because of federation, users can like and reply to posts from other instances, and other people will be able to see it. I can even follow a PeerTube channel and have recent videos show up in my feed, because of the ActivityPub federation protocol (a W3C standard). Best of all, it do…

Using Mastodon just shifts the power from Twitter to whoever runs the Mastodon instance you use. The Crypto wallet you use for Orbis can be a fresh, empty wallet. No need to put any cryptocurrency in it.

I disagree about the power shift.

Twitter holds a complete information monopoly over all its content. This means they can make hostile changes, such as forcing a login in order to view public content, without much repercussion. If Twitter were to ban me, I would be completely cut off from all of my friends on Twitter. You can't easily move away from Twitter, because Twitter is a huge entity with swaths of content and users already on it.

On the other hand, Mastodon instances have only a fraction of that power. They have control over information only that is on their instance, in a world that contains thousands of such instances. They are tiny entities holding control over small fractions of the content available in the fediverse.

If a Mastodon instance started acting hostile, people can relatively easily move away to a different instance. If my Mastodon instance were to ban me, I can sign up on a different instance (or host my own) and still keep in touch with my friends; unless my friends used the same instance and the owners broke federation with the instance I moved to, at which point a lot of people would probably want to move away from that hostile instance immediately.

Post reply on HN