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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?

#101

Post by capeterson »

mayankkaizen wrote: post #56
x86hacker1010 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s revisit this comment in 5 years.

Twitter might be dead in few years. But it doesn't mean some other Twitter clone would have replaced Twitter. People like novelty. People would migrate to other venues which will be novel rather than to Twitter clones. In current scenario, nothing is going to 'replace' Twitter. Think about TikTok. It is sort of killing FB. But is it FB replacement? No.

Conversely, maybe some Twitter clone does replace Twitter! Using TikTok as your example, it killed Triller which was (and still is) moderately popular. Even further, Triller was mostly just an iteration of Vine. Vine was definitely the first of line though, I can't think of any earlier mobile-first video sharing social media platforms.

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

#102

Post by tomcam »

yellow_lead wrote: post #91

I think that Twitter's problem is more bots, shills, and manipulation than centralization. I would like to see another centralized platform which takes bots more seriously with maybe some other features like up/down vote, rather than just "likes."

I think the new owner agrees with you

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

#103

Post by tomcam »

somenameforme wrote: post #52
mradek wrote: post #11

I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts. Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example. I'm just some random guy who works at a so…

You care about what you have to say, and this phenomena at scale is why Twitter succeeds. The "important people" came after Twitter succeeded. And I'd argue that "their thoughts" amount to little more than a mixture self promotion, virtue signaling, and an occasional hot take. Twitter is likely more valuable to them than they are to Twitter, which is probably the driving factor behind the recent change. Validation ch…

> Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month.

Has Twitter said so on the record? AFAIK the only reportage comes from unnamed sources in an article from The Verge.

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

#104

Post by tkk23 »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

There are probably 100 twitter alternatives and none are close to replacing it . Hard to say but does not look promising.

Those 100 alternatives, if they had settled on a protocol, that protocol could have become the standard and could have motivated Twitter and Facebook to join. Each alternative could have coexisted in that environment.

I would like to know why neither ActivityPub nor the Matrix protocol were adopted. Maybe https://atproto.com/ will gain the necessary momentum.

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

#105

Post by NayamAmarshe »

mradek wrote: post #11

I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts. Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example. I'm just some random guy who works at a so…

> I don't believe that I have contributed anything super valuable to the world thus far.

Neither have most of the blue checkmarks. Many of them cause more pain if anything.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

alias_neo wrote: post #84
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You have a very "positive/optimistic" outlook on how this would go down; My immediate thought was that an implementation of this platform would be using legal identification to prove humans, allowing for one a huge depository of highly-accurate personally identifying information; a security and privacy nightmare in my opinion. This already happens in many places, but those are regulated companies, banks etc, I couldn…

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by samtho »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #87

Nothing is going to replace Twitter. thankfully. We're heading toward smaller communities with 1000 max member forums, about narrow topics, hosted by regular people and not startups. Centralization needs to end. Twitter barely made any money and VC aren't willing to invest in these projects, again.

> We're heading toward smaller communities with 1000 max member forums, about narrow topics, hosted by regular people and not startups.

We had this, but those days are gone. Forums used to reign supreme but was killed by a small number of centralized players. Due to the power of the network effect, I don’t see us going back to stand-alone forums anymore, unfortunately. I am skeptical about a federated system of individually managed instances due to the fact that all it takes is some minor inactivity/inaction on the part of the operator to render the service down for the count.

I would love to be proved wrong on this.

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

#108

Post by worldsayshi »

alias_neo wrote: post #84
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You have a very "positive/optimistic" outlook on how this would go down; My immediate thought was that an implementation of this platform would be using legal identification to prove humans, allowing for one a huge depository of highly-accurate personally identifying information; a security and privacy nightmare in my opinion. This already happens in many places, but those are regulated companies, banks etc, I couldn…

You don't have to have the social networking site handle the privacy information. You could integrate eId as identity providers and for a site like Twitter only provide guarantee that this is a human and this identity is unique for this human on this service.

You wouldn't be anonymous but you could be anonymous towards everyone but the identity providers.

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

#109

Post by klabb3 »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #76
afinlayson wrote: post #62

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 c…

> 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.

Indeed, I'm leaning towards it's not possible:

- Even if you required government id, you'd get a market of people selling their unused accounts, or access to them.

- You can use end-to-end DRM, like iMessage, to rate limit and complicate access to accounts, but it prevents access to legitimate actors.

- Even if you magically solve it, it still prevents legitimate bot access, such as those that keep track of when Elon musks private jet is being used.

The older I get, the more I think we're all just holding it wrong. Like the war on drugs, you can't just hunt down the bad actors. Instead, social networks simply become what they incentivize. If you make "followers" and "influence" your inofficial currency, the spam and impersonation isn't exactly a mystery. In fact, I'm pretty sure that engagement optimization contributes to making spam much worse (think clickbait).

I don't think our current generation of social networks was designed with a solid understanding of game theory. Or perhaps it was, but the important findings were ignored because it tends to interfere with growth.

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

#110

Post by blacklight »

Millions have been using the Fediverse for years, I haven't looked back for the past two years myself. It's built on open protocols and it's multi-platform by definition. You can even follow your Twitter accounts from Mastodon. So what exactly are you folks waiting for, and why do I have to keep hearing the "is there an alternative to social network X" question every couple of days? Just jump on any Mastodon instance, invite others to do the same, and let's stop whining.
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