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

121–130 of 395 posts

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#121

Post by ohtwenty »

twblalock wrote: post #101

I went to the Mastodon website and clicked "Get Started" and was brought to a menu where I needed to choose a server. Many of them focus on niche interests, and it was not very clear what to do if I wanted to be a member of more than one of them. I'm a techie; I could figure it out. But it is too much to ask of the general public to wade through many niche servers they won't understand, e.g. the one for BSD fans and…

You make a good point (and one that's being worked on being overcome, better onboarding and whatever).

But consider twitter:

>Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done!

And then what? follow some celebs? Figure out if you know anyone? On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking. I've seen many people be surprised that within an hour or two on mastodon they've had more and better interactions than years on twitter. The experience once you're there tends to be quite good (from my completely unbiased and scientific viewpoint, of course)

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#122

Post by zazen »

asntbqjkwbucaa wrote: post #110
zazen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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, withou…

I think the parent meant something closer to legal standing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law) ) than an obligation. The investors have actions available to it than can punish executives for not pursuing profit opportunities sufficiently aggressively. Many of these don't involve the court, but some may. Conversely, a founder that loses his/her business because investors punished them in this manner has no…

Well, your wikipedia link seems to confirm my layman's understanding of the term "standing", which is that it is about a party's right to participate in a court case. I am no closer to seeing how the English phrase "you aren't prioritizing profit" could "have standing". I think quadrangle is confused in his phrasing, if not in his underlying ideas.

Of course investors may do various things. But we're particularly interested in the question of whether the company must legally maximize profit, even if not directed to do so by a majority of shareholders. wool_gather says no, quadrangle says yes, I wonder whether quadrangle in fact knows what he's talking about.

You say "Many of these don't involve the court, but some may." But the "some may" is kind of what we're trying to get into: if you like, the question is "can a shareholder successfully sue the company for not maximizing profit, even if a majority of shareholders haven't directed it to do so?". As far as I know, that's equivalent to asking whether the company has a legal duty to maximize profit.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#123

Post by ArtWomb »

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…

The competitive advantage to "X is a protocol versus a license" is it's inherent proclivity to being bootstrapped. It's no different than Bitcoin spawning a million nodes from a single white paper.

The big worry is how do you maintain that early adopter culture as the service scales. Some will adopt invitation-only gatekeeping. Others an onboarding process that emphasizes customer development.

Mastodon makes its culture explicit up front and in its design. And it seems to be working.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#124

Post by Rjevski »

TillE wrote: post #117
bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

You say problem, I say advantage. Not everything has to be a massive public square! It's okay to be niche. Until the mid/late 2000s, the internet was far more decentralized and often much the better for it. In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032

The internet and a social network are two different things.

The internet doesn’t necessarily need everyone to be on it to be successful.

The whole point of a social network is that the majority of people are on it. That’s why Facebook is still successful despite being an absolute dump.

I don’t care about the technicalities, open source, etc (and I say that as a software engineer). I care about being able to lookup the person I just met at the bar and add/follow them. Until Mastodon can achieve that, I won’t care about it.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#125

Post by rm445 »

phreack wrote: post #118

So instances are like subreddits? Having never used Mastodon I'm not entirely sure I understood what an instance is, but if they are just like subreddits then I'd say that's a way better elevator pitch than trying to define them, and it also helps to show that people do like to congregate on a large platform around topics.

It's a decentralized, federated, network. So choosing an instance I guess is more like choosing an IRC server.

Or picking between Gmail and Hotmail, or any other e-mail service. Livejournal or Blogger. It's no coincidence the examples I can think of seem slightly old hat, because these things have been out of fashion for a while. They need to involve the blockchain somehow if they want it to seem modern.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#126

Post by randomsearch »

ohtwenty wrote: post #121
twblalock wrote: post #101

I went to the Mastodon website and clicked "Get Started" and was brought to a menu where I needed to choose a server. Many of them focus on niche interests, and it was not very clear what to do if I wanted to be a member of more than one of them. I'm a techie; I could figure it out. But it is too much to ask of the general public to wade through many niche servers they won't understand, e.g. the one for BSD fans and…

You make a good point (and one that's being worked on being overcome, better onboarding and whatever). But consider twitter: >Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done! And then what? follow some celebs? Figure out if you know anyone? On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking. I've seen…

Wait, so once you've overcome the off-putting insanely technical (who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?) onboarding, mastodon is a lot better?

It does not make an iota of difference.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#127

Post by nl »

asntbqjkwbucaa wrote: post #115
tlholaday wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

It's true that investors can sell if profit isn't being maximized, but how often does that happen in privately held companies? E.g. if startup X has the tech to take over a market, but is insufficiently pursuing a profit opportunity because of moral squeamishness, chances are relatively good that investors in X will simply replace the executives with somebody that will pursue those opportunities since that's vastly c…

Similarly with publicly traded companies, not pursuing profit opportunities can result in large sell offs of a stock.

That isn't obviously true. Eg, Amazon spent years actively doing everything possible to avoid making profits.

If investors don't like a company's strategy then they can try to get management changes or they can sell. But company strategy goes way beyond the blind pursuit of profit.

E.g. if startup X has the tech to take over a market, but is insufficiently pursuing a profit opportunity because of moral squeamishness, chances are relatively good that investors in X will simply replace the executives with somebody that will pursue those opportunities since that's vastly cheaper than building up competitive tech in a new investment.

That maybe true sometimes, but it is a lot rarer than you seem to believe (especially with early stage companies). The team running the company is a very large part of what people invest it. As a good counter example: Uber. Few would say that Travis wasn't pursuing profit every way possible, and it was the investors that moved against him because of his bad moral judgment.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#128

Post by ohtwenty »

phreack wrote: post #118

So instances are like subreddits? Having never used Mastodon I'm not entirely sure I understood what an instance is, but if they are just like subreddits then I'd say that's a way better elevator pitch than trying to define them, and it also helps to show that people do like to congregate on a large platform around topics.

Kiiiind of, but there's quite some general instances. Most of them are more like a "here's some people interested in the same subjects as you". So yes, on my (politically motivated, I guess) instance I find quite some people with the same political slant (and some commentary on that), but many cats, daily stories, etc. Just like twitter or other platforms. It's worth a try seeing what joinmastodon.org tells you, and have a look.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#129

Post by randomsearch »

bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

To summarise what you've said in one sentence: "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business.

And if it did, well it'd be just another commercial social network, and most of them completely suck.

Technology is not the solution to this problem.

Post reply on HN