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

Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

codesections.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 395 posts

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#91

Post by masklinn »

simula67 wrote: post #52

> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group. > How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retw…

> I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters.

It's not even the right problem.

The problem is not mocking people, disagreeing with them or whatever (incidentally the twitter character limit doesn't preclude external links or tweet chains, which are extremely common at least in science twitter). It's that doing so through a retweet (or a boost) is a signal to followers, and that can send hordes harassing a single person, because it's very easy for followers to click on the RT/boost and reply, and they're not going to see that thousands of people already did exactly that.

And the person at the other end of the pipe has to deal with a flood of burning garbage.

And more generally that kind of crap is easily weaponisable, twitter provides few tools to deal with it, and they don't usually apply their own rules. I don't know that Mastodon is any better.

Fundamentally, social platforms are only good so long as they've not reached their eternal September yet, or are actively prevented from doing so through active and unforgiving moderation — which can have its own issues.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#92

Post by sonnyblarney »

If Mastodon wants to be successful, it might be beneficial to try to get some luminaries on board, i.e. the 1% that the rest follow. Unfortunately, they are in the conflict business as well.

Another option would be to consider dropping out of the concept altogether.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#93

Post by elpakal »

zigzaggy wrote: post #89
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…

This may be a culture thing more than anything else, and more deeply how certain environments affect culture. For example, in my career I’ve seen nonprofits, large and small, being very hawkish in competition for government contracts. So much so that I developed a saying - “Nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model.” I think Wall Street is another business environment that creates these very hawkish business cu…

What’s your view on the “not-for-profit” structure, I wonder?

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#94

Post by RileyJames »

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…

Beyond incentivising revenue and profits, it also incentivises growth. Twitter gets punished when it’s account growth or activity numbers drop (or fail to meet expectations). Which leads to perverse incentives for the platform such as tackling spam accounts / low value interactions, high volume / low value mobile notifications (I find twitter the worst for this), the whole re-ordering of the timeline controversy. This is what I feel turns products into skinner boxes, because the need for growth incentivises those kinds of features, and the numbers go up. Those numbers can mask the decline in quality. That’s where I see mastodon having a huge advantage.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#95

Post by xigma »

What I expect of a "better" Twitter:

- A timeline that shows what people I follow say, in chronological order

- no censorship, unless requested and enforced by authorities in my jurisdiction

- no notifications, no @messages (unless I follow them)

I don't even understand how Mastodon really works or how it's comparable to Twitter. Do people post onto channels? Do I have to join channels to read what they post on those channels?

To me Mastodon just looks like "Twitter with more moderation" and I don't think the average Twitter user cares about that, because they don't partake in mudfights with other users, nor do they care about other users getting into mudfights with one another.

Social Media isn't actually that terrible to use, it just looks terrible when some journalist selects some particularly "outstanding" posts and proclaims the end of civility because of this technology.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#96

Post by notabee »

simula67 wrote: post #52

> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group. > How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retw…

The number of people that will take the time and effort to verify the things that they read or hear pales in comparison to those that cherry pick whatever fits their biases, and everyone is limited in time and attention span. It's a signal to noise problem, and while technical people have a mental model of this problem in the concept of DDoS attacks, I would guess that many people lack awareness of how bad information can simply clog their attentional pipeline and exhaust motivation to verify.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#97

Post by twblalock »

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"?

It's clearly an attempt to make people think about "tweet" without infringing copyright/trademark, much like the way the generic Dr. Pepper at the grocery store might be called "Dr. Skipper". Mastodon should come up with its own concepts.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#98

Post by zazen »

quadrangle wrote: post #87
wool_gather wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://ne…

If investors feel that profit is not being maximized, they can sue or take other actions to punish those they see as not focusing on profit etc. I mean, the point is that "you aren't prioritizing profit" has legal standing for investors. And "we don't prioritize profit in cases that involve harming the world" does not is not a legal stance for the company unless the harm itself is illegal or the entity is a Benefit C…

"Legal standing" isn't quite the right phrase. I think you're saying the board does in fact have a legal duty to prioritize profit above all else?

If so, are you sure, and do you have sources? wool_gather said that "There's no categorical legal requirement for a company to make share value the absolute, #1 priority", despite a widespread belief to the contrary. And you seem to be just flatly contradicting him, without making any argument or providing any sources, which is... not the most helpful way of moving the conversation forward.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#99

Post by fredsir »

xigma wrote: post #95

What I expect of a "better" Twitter: - A timeline that shows what people I follow say, in chronological order - no censorship, unless requested and enforced by authorities in my jurisdiction - no notifications, no @messages (unless I follow them) I don't even understand how Mastodon really works or how it's comparable to Twitter. Do people post onto channels? Do I have to join channels to read what they post on those…

> I don’t even understand ...

It works exactly the same as Twitter, except that not everyone is using Twitter.com. Some are using mastodon.social, some are using some other instance and so on, but you can still follow people on other instances, like you can email people using gmail from a hotmail adress and so on. A username is @username@instance instead of just @username as with Twitter.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#100

Post by tlholaday »

quadrangle wrote: post #87
wool_gather wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://ne…

If investors feel that profit is not being maximized, they can sue or take other actions to punish those they see as not focusing on profit etc. I mean, the point is that "you aren't prioritizing profit" has legal standing for investors. And "we don't prioritize profit in cases that involve harming the world" does not is not a legal stance for the company unless the harm itself is illegal or the entity is a Benefit C…

I agree that investors may sue management for fraud or corruption. "Not maximizing profit" is neither fraudulent nor corrupt.

Investors who feel that profit is not being maximized can sell their shares or can vote to replace management. They can also buy sufficient shares from other unhappy shareholders to let them take control of the company altogether, and manage it themselves.

What evidence do you have that any shareholder has ever won a lawsuit against a company on the basis that the company was not maximizing profits?

Post reply on HN