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

'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 172 posts

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#91

Post by monksy »

joelrunyon wrote: post #13

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

I happen to agree with you a lot. Unfortunately I think what people will take away from this article is: How can we fix twitter. The answer isn't to fix it. It's the wrong use of the medium.

The bigger problem is how can we network indepdent blogs in a federated fashion where it's easier to have responses, build audiences, etc.

i.e. You can't exactly respond very easily and see the 10k view with a single blog article.

BUT Then again this is what you get with the whole "well twitter is a better place to be"/walled garden apologists.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#92

Post by freddie_mercury »

asdfadfaf wrote: post #30

No one has mentioned substack ( https://substack.com/ ) yet. It's a product that seems to be on the right track. More generally I think getting a newsletter from a trusted source is a much better way to be informed than Twitter threads because Twitter in general encourages a weird mind-meld type of narratives where everyone just talks about the same thing 24/7 because everyone is liking, retweeting, and thinking abou…

How are they on the right track? They've taken over $17 million in funding from VCs, meaning they need a ~$170 million exit in the next 7 years, meaning they need to monetize like crazy.

Everyone loved Medium, too, in their Year 3 when they were just burning VC cash and nobody there cared about being a profitable, sustainable business.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#93

Post by rodolphoarruda »

cxr wrote: post #50
imglorp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

Today's static site generators are simply not fit for mass consumption. Even Jekyll—among the most polished and popular—immediately presents anyone stumbling onto its landing page with a facsimile of a terminal window with 3 inscrutable commands. And the kicker is that even if a prospective "customer" who was previously unacquainted with the command line managed to find their system's terminal emulator to open it up…

This describes my experience with Hugo. I ran into not only an implicit zero step, but many other intermediate steps that were not explicit in the documentation. My decision for Hugo was influenced by the clear "getting started" type of instructions on their website. I got a bit frustrated in the end, so rolled back to WordPress.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#94

Post by AgentME »

whatshisface wrote: post #89
AgentME wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police. What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? Ethnonationalist propaganda? I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms, because that gets a lot more supp…

> I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms Ten people want to say thing 1 on twitter. Ten people want to say thing 2 on Twitter. Ten want to say thing 3, and so on for ten million things. Twenty people don't want to say anything particularly controversial and don't think anyone else should either. If the gro…

The site already doesn't allow child pornography, nonconsensual pornography, posting of private information, targeted harassment, spambots, etc., and people almost exclusively choose sites using rules like these over ones that don't. (Is it not interesting that we're having this conversation on the heavily-moderated HN, and not on a free-for-all 4chan spinoff? That's not coincidental.) Either the site and the internet populace in general doesn't embrace the pure ideal of absolute free speech, or people accept that the ideal is best deployed with specific limitations.

Arguably calls to violence and ethnonationalist propaganda are things that should be similarly prohibited. I find it interesting that whenever there's a thread about an instance of that stuff being banned, people complaining about the ban rarely defend it specifically. They always go to arguing about some ideal of absolute free speech, but completely avoid the topic of what else that would allow. This setup makes me pretty suspicious of other cases that people avoid specifics and argue for absolute free speech on popular platforms. Whenever a platform bans something that's more defensible, people will always readily talk about and defend the specific thing that got banned rather than falling back to absolute generalizations about free speech.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#95

Post by look_lookatme »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #92
asdfadfaf wrote: post #30

No one has mentioned substack ( https://substack.com/ ) yet. It's a product that seems to be on the right track. More generally I think getting a newsletter from a trusted source is a much better way to be informed than Twitter threads because Twitter in general encourages a weird mind-meld type of narratives where everyone just talks about the same thing 24/7 because everyone is liking, retweeting, and thinking abou…

How are they on the right track? They've taken over $17 million in funding from VCs, meaning they need a ~$170 million exit in the next 7 years, meaning they need to monetize like crazy. Everyone loved Medium, too, in their Year 3 when they were just burning VC cash and nobody there cared about being a profitable, sustainable business.

Substack is different in that they are a kind of Patreon meets Medium (with the newsletter angle, but I think on a long enough timeline that's a gimmick). With regards to what sets them apart from Medium -- in short, they actually have a revenue story: a cut of subscriptions. Even this is phrasing is wrong though because IMO a lot of "subscriptions" in this space could effectively be categorized as "recurring donations" since they are more about supporting individuals or small collectives and less about pay-for-product.

I'm a little skeptical about the overall size of their market or their ability to create sustainable revenue opportunities for individual creators in the long term, but they certainly have more obvious a pathway to revenue than Medium.

They ought to be investing in low friction, easy to use customer acquisition tooling for creators btw. Something that doesn't feel like marketing but is, effectively, marketing. That's where they can apply those millions in technology and differentiate between Medium. For these "substacks" (btw this phrase is actively being xeroxed and they should invest in ensuring this is the case) where people are trying to quit their jobs to become full-time creators, they need to come with a story and tooling that eases these creators into the idea that part of their new lifestyle is keeping certain KPIs up and to the right (without drenching these concepts in growth jargon).

By doing this they can effectively outsource their growth to their customers: they take the vig from creators and at the same time utilize the creators to grow their platform. It's a smart idea.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#96

Post by gonehome »

jasonv wrote: post #68
gonehome wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Zuckerberg is more right on this issue than Jack and twitter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb... The hard part is who is deciding what is true and what is not. It’s important to verify authenticity of the message (who the message claims to come from is actually who it’s coming from), but deciding what to disallow based on truthiness is a lot more problematic.

I can't read that, but nothing Facebook/Zuckerberg has done feels aligned with any principled standing that I agree with. From a slightly different direction.. for instance: banning any content that contravenes the WHO's official recommendations for pandemic response definitely feels too narrow, esp given that the WHO might reverse course or admit they weren't optimal. I completely disagree with Trump's defunding of…

Pastebin of the text: https://pastebin.com/pcaH0Z8H

The full text is worth reading.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#97

Post by whatshisface »

AgentME wrote: post #94
whatshisface wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms Ten people want to say thing 1 on twitter. Ten people want to say thing 2 on Twitter. Ten want to say thing 3, and so on for ten million things. Twenty people don't want to say anything particularly controversial and don't think anyone else should either. If the gro…

The site already doesn't allow child pornography, nonconsensual pornography, posting of private information, targeted harassment, spambots, etc., and people almost exclusively choose sites using rules like these over ones that don't. (Is it not interesting that we're having this conversation on the heavily-moderated HN, and not on a free-for-all 4chan spinoff? That's not coincidental.) Either the site and the interne…

Of course people only want speech protection for taboo topics, when else would they need protection?

It's easy to prove that taboo topics need to be allowed: it's taboo today to express the usual 2004 opinion on homosexuality, and it was taboo in 2004 to express today's usual opinion on the same topic. So no matter what your beliefs are you have to admit that you, personally, either need or needed cover for having taboo opinions.

No, of course I can't defend any individual taboo, I'm part of the group of normals that enforce them in polite society. However I have no choice to concede that out of the long list of 2020 taboos, one might be wrong.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#98

Post by bicx »

jedimastert wrote: post #23
imglorp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

> I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that. You mean like running your own webserver? Why would I do that instead of just getting a web host that'll take care of all of the sysadmin for you? With a lot of web hosting platforms all you'll need is to just press a button on a web site, then all you'll have to deal with is the wordpress interface

I use GitHub Pages and a static site generator like Hugo. It's a little more code, but this is Hacker News.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#99

Post by iateanapple »

AgentME wrote: post #62
aazaa wrote: post #31

The article mentions the 15-20 tweet roll as being cumbersome, and it is. But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being pulled in two opposite directions. It's a platform in which authoritative content is hosted. For example, the president conducts foreign policy through Twitter. And Twitter is also a platform where bots try to influence elections, people post images of dubious taste, and plain ol…

>Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police. What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? Ethnonationalist propaganda? I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms, because that gets a lot more supp…

> What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically?

They ban interesting content all the time - a very recent example is they banned the AYTU Bioscience page where they talk about an experimental covid treatment.

YouTube censored their videos as well.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#100

Post by throwaway8879 »

dlivingston wrote: post #43
Barrin92 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, I don't really like this focus on the size of audiences that has come with social media. For experts or scientists who want to communicate with other scientists, it shouldn't matter how large the casual audience is but how they can effectively communicate with each other.

"Socrates probably didn't draw a crowd": that's how I've seen this described. Meaning, the amount of people who see your content matters much less than who sees it.

Socrates didn't draw a crowd mostly because he was super annoying. Imagine going to the marketplace to buy food and then this short and ugly man with his two sidekicks shows up to start a dialectic about the nature of forms or something goofy, while you just want to get back home and start dinner...
Post reply on HN