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Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

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41–50 of 187 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#41

There are two reasonable ways of using twitter 1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords 2) Not at all I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) y…

I find the official website ok, assuming you use the option to sort the feed by time rather than algorithmically.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#42
post #3

You can read directly linked tweets or the first few posts of a Twitter page but as soon as you interact with the page or try to navigate elsewhere, you get prompted for a login. So technically they're not preventing access, but they nag you incessantly after you've scrolled past the fold.

So they got on par with pinterest. Strange pattern.

to pvity I agree it's become a new normal, apparently no company managed to stay afloat in a 'free' model

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#43

Twitter...official government communications? You would be better served accessing official government communications via .gov sites. This is their purpose. If you want official bot communications from troll farms, then Twitter is the best!

Right or wrong Twitter has censored at least one government official. It will happen again. The platform has no integrity.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#44
post #33
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitter can only archive (and update) data Twitter allows them to access. For example, you cannot see who liked a Tweet on Nitter.

> "Nitter can only archive (and update) data Twitter allows them to access." That's exactly what you'd expect from a Twitter archive site. The author's point was that this is the same tech you'd need for a Twitter replacement , and this doesn't need blockchain or web3. Reminds me of the comment on HN from a few months back "On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes…

How would a Twitter replacement via Nitter tech help here?

The problem is that whoever builds the replacement can just fuck up the user experience any time in the future. Just like Twitter did.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#45
post #40
post #15

I think this is one reason why "web3", social media with a decentralized storage layer, could become a thing. As a user, when I tweet something, I do want the whole world to be able to read it. Without logging in. Ideally via the interface of their choice. Orbis is a proof of concept: https://orbis.club/ A Twitter clone that stores the tweets on Arweave.

Mastodon ( https://joinmastodon.org ) and the rest of the fediverse ( https://www.fediverse.to ) are well established if you're looking for a good alternative to Twitter.

With Mastodon, you are still at the mercy of whoever runs the instance you use.

I expect most Mastodon instances will be shorter lived than Twitter. So changing from Twitter to Mastodon seems not like a good deal if I want my posts and the comments and likes I get to stay around.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#46
post #14

> I thought courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media [citation needed] Twitter is kind of disintegrating, though. They've hit a growth plateau, the users are really fractious, management doesn't understand what they want out of it, and it's the venue for social strife.

It's truly amazing how despite all this twitter is as successful as it is. Something about _very important people_ sharing their thoughts in 140/280 characters really is the addictive nicotine of the human attention span.

Generally network business are very sticky and companies can do all kind shitty things before users leave.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#47

What Has Happened to Twitter? Answer: They hired a "ruthless" product manager, who believes in things like "we should do things that are good for Twitter, but not necessarily good for the world", and probably wants to be remembered as the PM who took the route that no one was willing to take. (S)he has the data to backup these decisions, like some analytics dashboard that shows very many unauthenticated users browsin…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#48
post #14

> I thought courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media [citation needed] Twitter is kind of disintegrating, though. They've hit a growth plateau, the users are really fractious, management doesn't understand what they want out of it, and it's the venue for social strife.

> [citation needed]

The poster you replied to may have been thinking of US court decisions related to the legality of politicians blocking members of the public, when those politicians are speaking in their official capacity [1][2]. That doesn't quite seem to be the same thing as "the public has a right to access official government communications on social media".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_First_Amendment_Institu...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/can-government-officia...

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#49

On my machines twitter got blocked. That's what happened to twitter. At least for me. It's a terrible website. Character limit leads to terribly shallow discussions that still need to be split into multiple posts. It's a dumb medium of exchange.

As bad as Twitter is, blogging is essentially dead. Wordpress's free product is garbage that now runs block ads, breaking the flow of content, and Substack is Y Combinator, which to a lot of people is a turn-off given the incubator's historical association with DVFs (domestic violence founders).

Ultimately, the greatest danger to the written word is that, because it is so easily indexed, fascistic employers (pardon the redundancy) can, in a couple of seconds, search everything a target has ever written and find reasons either to reject him (after he has passed an interview) or reduce his offer on evidence of lower leverage. Social media is a fool's game. In ten years or so, the ultimate flex will be not to partcipate.

Twitter somehow survives in spite of this, because (a) it is an unserious format, a fact that lends some plausible deniability, (b) a fraction of people--arguably perversely, but also arguably nobly--enjoy gambling with their reputations, and (c) there is a defeated, demoralized understanding among the young that, given the destruction of the middle-class labor market, not to play the social media game is just as dangerous (it suggests having something to hide) as to play it. So today's savvy young people might tweet a little bit but mostly lurk, or use alternate accounts to post anything that might get serious.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#50

There are two reasonable ways of using twitter 1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords 2) Not at all I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) y…

I’m maybe the only HN person that prefers the algorithmically sorted Twitter feed on the official site?

I really don’t want to see every post by everyone I follow. I prefer to just see the good stuff and get the hell out. Social media is a horrendous time sink.

In my opinion everyone should be doing all they can to spend less time on there.

What worked for me was to move all the time wasting apps off my phone’s Home Screen.

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