Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch • Hacker News Board

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#41

Post by talkingme » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #30

> Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary. I disagree. Retweets can be an issue but they have their place as well What all "timeline" social networks are missing is the underboost, the downvote button, call it as you want. People will boost good stuff but they will boost crap. Networks need the c…

The downvote is to ignore it. People will still boost crap but even with a small amount of users anything will quickly get buried in the timeline.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#42

Post by wool_gather » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:04 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #27

From the article: > Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices. If you can get a business or a project to the point where it's stable and competitive and it's funding you enough to keep going, then there's a whole…

It's worth noting that one of the supporting points here

> And Twitter doesn't have any choice in the matter, either. [...] Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can

is not, strictly speaking, true. This has been discussed a few times on HN recently. (And this book The Shareholder Value Myth is well worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17529520 .) There's no categorical legal requirement for a company to make share value the absolute, #1 priority. On the other hand, it may be that enough people believe this duty exists that it has a sort of ipso facto existence.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#43

Post by raverbashing » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:05 PM UTC

talkingme wrote: post #41

raverbashing wrote: post #30

> Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary. I disagree. Retweets can be an issue but they have their place as well What all "timeline" social networks are missing is the underboost, the downvote button, call it as you want. People will boost good stuff but they will boost crap. Networks need the c…

The downvote is to ignore it. People will still boost crap but even with a small amount of users anything will quickly get buried in the timeline.

Ignoring is ok, but not as good.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#44

Post by ColinWright » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:07 PM UTC

kylnew wrote: post #12

I can’t quite get over this critiquing of Twitter’s Retweet system. I totally understand how it’s misused but all the benefits are overlooked too. I love retweeting with commentary for positive reasons. I find they are a great way to validate and engage people who reply. I never think of using them as a tool for shaming, so I would be sad to see the feature go.

You can effectively achieve the equivalent by boosting a toot and then replying to it.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#45

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

armandososa wrote: post #37

We should remember that the retweet feature was originally created by the community, like, years before twitter implemented it officially. You'll compose a tweet with the format "RT @username " and broadcast it to all your followers. There's no reason mastodon users can't do the same. Right?

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#46

Post by wool_gather » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

jamesrcole wrote: post #25

I think the term "toots" is spectacularly bad, and could majorly hinder broader uptake of their service. Word of mouth (or 'word of text') is a major way services like this spread. Imagine discussions of Twitter in the media but where the words "tweet" and "tweeted" are replaced with "toot" and "tooted".

Can you elaborate on the problem you see with the word "toot"?

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#47

Post by denzil_correa » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:10 PM UTC

armandososa wrote: post #37

We should remember that the retweet feature was originally created by the community, like, years before twitter implemented it officially. You'll compose a tweet with the format "RT @username " and broadcast it to all your followers. There's no reason mastodon users can't do the same. Right?

Slightly off-topic but important mention about the RT feature. RT was definitely not the first "feature" and there were many other ones which existed. There were some factors that led to the adoption of the RT convention [0].

> The inventors of these variations were not the typical user. They posted more tweets, had higher network degree, and were more likely to describe themselves with words like “geek” and “founder”; in other words, they were the core members of the Twitter community. The early adopters were also more active and innovative. The variations spread through densely connected networks, bouncing from person to person in a way that meant most adopters of the varia- tion were fewer than two hops from someone who had never been exposed to the variation on Twitter when they first used it. This could be a general finding, that social conventions are more likely to arise in the active and densely connected parts of a community.

[0] https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM12/paper/view/...

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#48

Post by azangru » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

Could anyone share their thoughts about the attractiveness of a platform that says how many characters long your posts can be?

What I see on Twitter is that people are constantly fighting this limitation by writing several tweets in a row (sometimes marking them as parts of a whole message). I would think that’s an annoyance. So what’s the attraction?

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#49

Post by dorfsmay » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

Isn't the concept of local servers making it easier to create a bunch of echo chambers?

I haven't even tried Mastodon because my understanding of identify is tied to a server rather than an email or a gpg key... so outside of your control (unless you run your own server). My understanding is that when the server you are currently using disappear, your current identity, history, etc... disappear too.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#50

Post by johnnyb128 » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

wool_gather wrote: post #46

jamesrcole wrote: post #25

I think the term "toots" is spectacularly bad, and could majorly hinder broader uptake of their service. Word of mouth (or 'word of text') is a major way services like this spread. Imagine discussions of Twitter in the media but where the words "tweet" and "tweeted" are replaced with "toot" and "tooted".

Can you elaborate on the problem you see with the word "toot"?

Beans beans, the musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot.