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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?

#231

Post by hinata08 »

blitzar wrote: post #144
remarkEon wrote: post #138

The vast majority of commenters here fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is, or rather what it has become. It's not a "social network" anymore. I mean, it is in the technical sense - you and I can both sign up for an account. But what it is today is an elite coordination mechanism, and Twitter became this because it was the first of it's kind and some sort of momentum or technological inertia put us where we're…

wtf is an "elite" anyway? The richest people in the world ... but not the ones that agree with me? The politicians ... but not the ones on my side? The athletes ... except for my team?

Different countries have different networks of power. I suggest you google 'networks of power', which is the academic term as far as I know.

English countries like UK and USA are shaped around 'clubs'. You can only join one if you're appointed

Japan has a set of corporation leaders who exchange informations, who came from families.

And some countries like France are being weird. There, your social status isn't decided that much by your family, but by which college alumni you belong to.

As an engineer, for example, you hit a glass ceiling if you don't come from a few specific schools that have a network. Join Paris X to be in the board of a large company. Join The Mines to be a well paid engineer in these large companies. And graduate from the INSA to still be an engineer, but the proletarian kind in consulting firms, which is ironically not so bad to continue build a network.

You can't even really apply to phd either when you graduate, as you're recommended by your school researchers to other coworkers, as gifts of goodwill.

The most ridiculous is the standard to be a high ranking politicians like presidents, ministers, or CEOs. In the 20 years before 2017, they used not only have studied at the same school, the ENA, but where mostly from the same prom : 1978-1980, the (in)famous Promotion Voltaire. News articles about them are all over, but in French, because the topic interested journalists at some point. They were giving each others formal orders of merit, and they are retiring and being replaced by the Senghor prom, from 2004.

So in various contexts, 'elite' is a club you can't join because of who you are at a specific moment in time, and not just skills. It makes decisions about you, and you can't influence them.

This reliance on networks is why I don't like current social media like LinkedIn or Twitter. It just emphasizes networks, instead of allowing everyone to join and publish. And I don't like 'federated' social media either, because they're the same. I feel like even mainstream media like radio or TV allow a better blend of news, made by journalists, who can invite whoever has something interesting to say.

So for me it's an open question ! I didn't like Twitter, and I don't know what I would prefer.

Maybe I would like one of these projects that aimed to build a platform for local citizens.

Let's check out what they do in Taiwan, the digital democracy.

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

#232

Post by TrackerFF »

blitzar wrote: post #144
remarkEon wrote: post #138

The vast majority of commenters here fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is, or rather what it has become. It's not a "social network" anymore. I mean, it is in the technical sense - you and I can both sign up for an account. But what it is today is an elite coordination mechanism, and Twitter became this because it was the first of it's kind and some sort of momentum or technological inertia put us where we're…

wtf is an "elite" anyway? The richest people in the world ... but not the ones that agree with me? The politicians ... but not the ones on my side? The athletes ... except for my team?

The ones with enough capital - may that be monetary, social, etc. - to influence the masses.

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

#233

Post by borbulon »

worldsayshi wrote: post #108
alias_neo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not completely true; you would be anonymous towards everyone but the identity providers and any government or organization powerful enough to wield influence over the identity providers. Which completely defeats the most important reason people choose to remain anonymous.

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

#234

Post by donmcronald »

INTPenis wrote: post #164

I have a problem with this fundamental thinking of what "site" should replace it. This is exactly why I'm an ActivityPub geek, because it's not one site, it's sites. It's many softwares and many sites. Now I'm not claiming it will replace twitter, or that it's easy to use for most people. I can say for a fact that it is not, I see twitter users come over confused all the time. But regardless I think the concept of fe…

> I think the concept of federation being available to any software like Wordpress or Nextcloud is truly something we should treasure

I think federation will struggle because everyone will be allowed to participate regardless of the quality of their software. Nextcloud is a good example. They keep adding features and making releases, but can’t fix nasty sync bugs that have been around for a year [1,2].

What’s the use of a federated platform that’s unreliable and unusable?

1. https://syncloud.discourse.group/t/disaster-with-nexcloud-3-...

2. https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/4378

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

#235

Post by mcv »

deanCommie wrote: post #69
somenameforme wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> virtue signaling I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote. And if you've had the luck/misfortune of becoming famous, should you not use the attention and reach you wield to focus on issues that you think are important in society? > Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month. A) They're not…

> > virtue signaling

> I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote.

Accusations of virtue signalling get misused a lot, especially by people opposed to those important issues. But it's absolutely a real thing. I think the most notable form of virtue signalling is public prayer on TV by politicians. They want to display their piety in public for all to see. They're not raising any kind of awareness by doing so, they're just fishing for approval from the right crowd. (And of course this is exactly the kind of behaviour that Jesus condemned.)

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

#236

Post by golergka »

remarkEon wrote: post #138

The vast majority of commenters here fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is, or rather what it has become. It's not a "social network" anymore. I mean, it is in the technical sense - you and I can both sign up for an account. But what it is today is an elite coordination mechanism, and Twitter became this because it was the first of it's kind and some sort of momentum or technological inertia put us where we're…

> coordination mechanism

And isn't that basically what social network is? I mean, including real-life social network of just people knowing one another and talking.

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

#237

Post by dmolinac »

sneak wrote: post #222
tiarafawn wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content moderation (which seems to be the biggest point of contention with Twitter right now) is decentralized. By choosing your hoster, you delegate content moderation capabilities for your feed to them. If you don't agree with their policies, you can switch to a different hoster without having to leave the ecosystem. I am not sure to which degree this is practiced/convenient in Mastodon currently, but its distribut…

> If you don't agree with their policies, you can switch to a different hoster without having to leave the ecosystem. But you lose all of your followers, so in practice this is never done. You’re stuck with the censorship imposed by your chosen instance operator. Most are more strict and less transparent than Twitter.

Actually it is not true, you can migrate from instances. You lost all messages but the followers are informed of the change:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...

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

#238

Post by Bud »

tayo42 wrote: post #29
etrautmann wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Links for one. Threading for two. IG is really images-first, and would be a horrible platform for blogging or conversation without major changes.

Ig already ripped off snap chat and tiktok somewhat successfully. I'm sure they could figure it out. Unless meta totally implodes taking Instagram with it

No post body was provided.

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

#239

Post by donmcronald »

combyn8tor wrote: post #156
ryzvonusef wrote: post #149

how about we don't fall into mass hysteria and wait? People don't move from platforms, they drift away naturally. I didn't move away from slashdot, I just found reddit suited my needs and naturally visited the site less and less. and then, I didn't move from reddit to HN, I just used reddit less and less until I realized HN fit my niche more. I still have my slashdot account, but it's been unused since 2014 with redd…

> People don't move from platforms, they drift away naturally. Digg has entered the chat.

> Digg has entered the chat.

Where the “vocal minority” turned out to be everyone. Lol.

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