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

311–320 of 395 posts

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#311

Post by scabarott »

adventured wrote: post #244
elm-tree- wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon made it easier to get books; you no longer need to leave your house. What does Mastadon make easier?

To simplify the issue here: Amazon made buying books 10x easier, and expanded the easily purchasable selection by more than 10x. Mastodon doesn't make anything 10x better or easier. It will never gain mass adoption accordingly. Mainstream users will never care about it, not under any circumstances. It'll languish as just another techie fantasy, with every other decentralized premise (not one of which has ever acquire…

>>It's the standard techie failure to understand average users

You mean like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, Shazam, Grubhub, Bell labs, Intel, Xerox Parc, Pixar, Amazon etc, just to name a few (and of course Twitter)? Techies have been doing just fine in the anticipation department.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#312

Post by danShumway »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #228
teleclimber wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, that was technical. But regular people care about being threatened and hateful conduct. On twitter countless reports go unanswered, and it's pretty clear at this point that there is no intent to make the situation better. On Masto when you report someone or a post for being abusive you've got an actual human (your instance admin) who will look at it and actually do something about it (like blocking that user fo…

In good old times we had IRC, where you could go to channel op and report an abusive message. Or to bot master, or to server admin. Depending on personality of that guy (usually they were guys, not girls), it could end with a ban for the offender or personal attack on you. The problem with actual human is that actually you cannot trust him to govern without being accountable, even if you know him and even if currentl…

> I was not able to find any signs of a formal and legally binding policy

Every single centralized service (Hacker News included) reserves the right to ban anyone for any reason. Twitter may have a policy, but in practice it's no different than anyone else's Code of Conduct. It's certainly not legally binding.

Regular users don't care about whether someone could theoretically become abusive in the future - maybe they should care, but they don't. They just look at the track record and decide if they trust that person right now.

And right now, Mastadon instances are better at moderation than Twitter. You're worried about an instance admin theoretically not protecting you in the future; Twitter already, today, doesn't protect you.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#313

Post by golemiprague »

adventured wrote: post #240
pmyteh wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The large majority of people aren't on Twitter, FWIW. Every social media platform except possibly Facebook is globally niche, and most are locally niche too.

Twitter isn't niche when it comes to what matters the most for their platform: having all the most important attention getting users on there. It's dominant. Even Instagram doesn't have what Twitter does on that front. Twitter has an immense collection of people that particularly matter in their given field, interesting famous people, and so on: celebrities, journalists, media personalities, musicians, authors, polit…

I don't think the majority of people care, most people don't follow twitter, they might have a user but they don't use it that much. In many non anglo parts of the world most of the conversation is in whatsapp groups which is part of facebook and telegram

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#314

Post by scabarott »

danShumway wrote: post #250
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…

> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Moderation and content quality. You know the reason why people prefer reading the New York Times instead of checkout-counter tabloids? The reason why people like buying from Amazon instead of Ebay? I mean, Ebay usually has better prices. Why would anyone buy from a store just because it's able to (or at least claims to…

Maybe a little harsh on youtube. Not entirely garbage. Lot's of good content actually, you just have to tune out the noise to find them.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#315

Post by danShumway »

duiker101 wrote: post #302
danShumway wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Moderation and content quality. You know the reason why people prefer reading the New York Times instead of checkout-counter tabloids? The reason why people like buying from Amazon instead of Ebay? I mean, Ebay usually has better prices. Why would anyone buy from a store just because it's able to (or at least claims to…

> Moderation and content quality. Those are pretty much guaranteed to go down the more people would use the service. If you want to attract a lot of people, you will have to accept a lot of people, wether you consider their content crap or not.

Mastadon instances are designed not to become large.

The platform is still in its infancy, but it's intended that people can migrate around the same way that you might move to a new neighborhood. And this is the feature that Twitter just fundamentally can't copy.

When you're talking about popularity, you have to distinguish between Mastadon as a platform/protocol and each individual instance.

I am (increasingly becoming) convinced that moderation does not scale - you can either have a single large community with no moderation, or you can have a small community with good moderation. This is what's clever about Mastadon. Moderation on Mastadon doesn't need to scale, because instances are fragmented.

Twitter will never be able to compete with that unless they split apart their service, which they will (probably) never do.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#316

Post by danShumway »

scabarott wrote: post #314
danShumway wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Moderation and content quality. You know the reason why people prefer reading the New York Times instead of checkout-counter tabloids? The reason why people like buying from Amazon instead of Ebay? I mean, Ebay usually has better prices. Why would anyone buy from a store just because it's able to (or at least claims to…

Maybe a little harsh on youtube. Not entirely garbage. Lot's of good content actually, you just have to tune out the noise to find them.

That's fair, but also kind of my point.

There's a lot of good content on Twitter too. You just have to deal with nazis to get at it. And a lot of good deals on Ebay as long as you don't mind being careful about scammers.

The question is, do users overall want to have to filter out all of this stuff on their own, especially if filtering means fighting with the platform that they're on? Youtube is a great example of this - tons of great content, but you have to put up with the recommendation engine. You either get horrible recommendations, or you constantly train the platform like a cat.

Getting Youtube to give quality recommendations on the homepage is work.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#317

Post by cabalamat »

iamdave wrote: post #213
xigma wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I hate about Twitter is getting content pushed into my timeline that I don't care about. I unfollow everyone who becomes overly political or comments on every outrage-du-jour. These people are inviting the bullshit. They're not making important contributions to political discourse. I don't care if they get dogpiled for it. As a result, my Twitter experience has been smooth.

This has been my same approach lately. I'm noticing certain friends are constantly the ones either starting arguments, or their posts are the ones that frequently get bumped back up to the top of whatever the hell Facebook's "timeline" thinks its doing-because there's a small arms conflict going on in the comment section. Even though in many cases, I would otherwise be in complete agreement with the core argument bei…

> "($CONSERVATIVE_PERSON| $LIBERAL_PERSON | $GROUP | $PARTY ) DID A THING, I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT IT, AND YOU'RE GOING TO HEAR ABOUT IT".

This phenomenon is more concisely expressesd as "boo outgroup".

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#319

Post by jejones3141 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #260
tomohawk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. We've seen this kind of thing in history before, and the one thing we know about it is that it is a process without end. Once one group gets removed, another group becomes the outlier, and they become the next target, and so on. Heck, they're already banning political ads from mainstream candidates for US Congress. Th…

“The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them” That is a flat-out lie, unless you disagree with the terms of service. Find me one person that was booted that wasn’t booted for violating the ToS.

If the TOS effectively forbids disagreement, what's the difference?

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#320

Post by tomohawk »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #260
tomohawk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. We've seen this kind of thing in history before, and the one thing we know about it is that it is a process without end. Once one group gets removed, another group becomes the outlier, and they become the next target, and so on. Heck, they're already banning political ads from mainstream candidates for US Congress. Th…

“The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them” That is a flat-out lie, unless you disagree with the terms of service. Find me one person that was booted that wasn’t booted for violating the ToS.

You might want to get outside of your bubble a little instead of making accusations like that.

Perhaps you could explain the case of Elizabeth Heng, a candidate in CA of the US Congress?

Post reply on HN