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Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

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Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#71
post #46

Mastodon. https://joinmastodon.org/ But people go where people are, so we’ll see if it gets traction.

Problem is Mastodon has been around since 2016. It's got some attention, but never to the level that it could challenge Twitter. Reminds me of challengers to YouTube. Some YouTube challengers like Dailymotion, Vimeo, Twitch, etc... have got some media attention and hype, and have done OK, but just not at the level where it can be seen as a replacement. Get the feeling that Mastodon is in the same category, in compari…

tbh I'd rather it didn't try to replace twitter, it works fine the way it is for me

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#74

Surprised not to be hearing more about Tumblr. It's got the infrastructure... it would just need to develop a more serious vibe.

I don't remember twitter having a serious vibe. It's a mess of vibes. Tumblr is also a big mess, but more on the goofy side. I don't think it would change much even with a twitter diaspora.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#75
post #14

If Instagram had better text post support, I think everyone would just go there. They basically are already. Bands and companies promote them selves there already more frequently. Stories let people already share their stupid political hot tales. Honestly not sure what Twitter has over Instagram. Instagram starting from scratch for small text posts would allow them to fix a lot of mistakes Twitter made Maybe reddit,…

Instagram is practically anti-text. The app doesn't linkify URs because they don't want users to escape the app. Users worked around this with "see link in bio" to access Linktree pages. The app won't even let users select text in posts because they might copy a URL and escape the app.

which makes me kinda crazy after all these years.

links are the pillars of the web and these apps neglect them

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#76

It'd be nice if there was a platform that was specifically designed for People, not bots / propagandist. Corporations should need to pay to be identified as such, and we should know when a person vs a corporation says something. Does this exist... not that I've seen. Vanity metrics like number of users have become real metrics for valuation... until that's broken we can't have these discussions. But my biggest proble…

The way the Internet is built, it's very difficult (maybe impossible) to ever tell if a client app is being operated by a human or a bot. There are various ways to make automation harder, and there are heuristics to guess if the operator might be a bot, but neither are absolute.

The best we can build today is an environment that "feels" like everyone is human but where we don't actually know and where that's almost certainly not true. (Think about Snapchat's "no screenshot implementation" as a real-world parallel.) The only bots on the platform would be the most nefarious actors who are willing to invest in the arms race.

Any platform that solves this problem will have to take a different approach - probably assuming there are bots and then providing tools to allow humans to only interact with other humans they can reasonably trust.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#79

Twitter is now too big to fail and paid verification is a very smart business move. Those displaced by the changes will just move to platforms that are a better fit. I don't see what the problem is.

Twitter is not too big to fail, and I say that as someone who has used twitter daily since 2011.
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