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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?

#321

Post by codq »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #290
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…

Twitter is the most valuable database in the world because it mimics human conversation better than any other tech company. This is priceless for training AI with the goal of AGI. Once you extrapolate that, it makes more sense. It’s literally the hive. We probably are simulated from the Twitter in the Other universe.

I'd say reddit is a far more robust archive of conversational data. Tweets are engineered to be entertaining or informative in small bits, typically designed for maximal impact and/or clout.

Sure, reddit has a karma system that incentivizes cleverness, but it's also designed for longer form conversation in a way Twitter can't possibly replicate. The pseudonymity also encourages vulnerability and openness in a way Twitter typically doens't.

There's a reason Google/Meta/Others train their AIs with reddit conversational data.

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

#322

Post by jtode »

LinuxBender wrote: post #318

There was a Southpark episode about this. Well, not Twitter, but Walmart. Same or very similar problem. Everyone in town was convinced to stand up to the big-man and riot against Walmart in favor of the little stores that had more integrity. Walmart was destroyed, people rejoiced and everyone went to the smaller local store. This caused the local store to get big and experience the same problems that Walmart had and…

>There was a Southpark episode about this. Well, not Twitter, but Walmart. Same problem. Everyone in town was convinced to stand up to the big-man and riot against Walmart in favor of the little stores that had more integrity. Walmart was destroyed, people rejoiced and everyone went to the smaller local store. This caused the local store to get big and experience the same problems that Walmart had and displaced other small businesses. Then they rioted and burnt down the formerly small store. Rinse and repeat.

It seems to me that this SP episode is describing a failure of American entrepreneurism. The script posits that a Walmart replaced a single store and grew fat and complacent, and when the Walmart was gone, everyone who was previously going to the walmart then flocked to that single store in South Park, rather than dispersing back to the many local hardware/grocery/dry goods stores they had shopped at in all their respective towns, before Walmart showed up, choked them all out, and imposed a new model where everyone who doesn't live where the walmart is now has to drive 20-60 minutes to do their shopping.

Granted, the people who had previously run these stores and watched their customers choose Walmart in sufficient numbers to let them die are probably not going to jump at the chance to reestablish their old businesses when only one Walmart in a vast network has been momentarily eradicated. Nonetheless, this is America we're talking about, and someone would... but not in Colorado, apparently, if you ask masters Stone and Parker about it. In their America, apparently nobody remembers that there was once a world without corporate behemoths reducing everything to a lowest common denominator nightmare, and once they are separated from it, they react like the chained in Plato's cave and set about recreating it like some sort of neurotic gollum-like cargo cultist, desperate for more cheap overseas goods.

I have never cared to live in the world they seem to inhabit, have to say.

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

#323

Post by collegeburner »

criddell wrote: post #303
blitzar wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

29 Sept 2022 — More than 1.5m active users of DALL-E are creating more than 2m images a day.

It feels like the AI image generators got huge overnight but the hype has faded away almost as fast. In my family, we were obsessed with them for about 72 hours and I haven’t heard anybody mention them since. I know it’s still there if I ever have a need for them, but I don’t really have any interest in using them anymore.

tbh the only time i hear about ai image generators now is with the craiyon memes and even those have tapered off. however i have seen a few articles using them to create title images and some presentations using them instead of stock images.

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

#324

Post by skybrian »

onion2k wrote: post #65
skybrian wrote: post #60

You can have a blog anywhere, but to promote it to people who aren’t subscribers, you’ll likely still want to post links to Twitter, and maybe other places too. It may make sense to treat Twitter solely as a way of advertising content hosted elsewhere. Thinking about where you might post a link, Hacker News and Facebook and Reddit can sometimes work, when appropriate. It seems unlikely that Twitter will stop being a…

That makes no sense. Posting on a site only makes sense if people who are interested in your content are reading it. If no one is reading Twitter (eg everyone has left) then posting links there won't drive any traffic to your blog.

Maybe traffic will start going down, but people aren’t going to stop reading Twitter all at once.

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

#325

Post by [deleted] »

blacklight wrote: post #155
Gordonjcp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three problems with Mastodon: 1) It's hard to get on it, unless you know someone who is running an instance. 2) No-one I know is on it, and can't get on it since they don't know anyone running an instance. 3) The people who are on it all have names like xXxFuchsSturm1488xXx and think I want to see a constant rolling feed of politically-orientated furry pr0n.

1. I run my own instance, and it's not that hard to set up and get connected to other instances. Those that don't want to run their own instance usually either join an existing instance (there are about 10k servers out there), or just join mastodon.social (and that's where most people are anyways). 2. When I joined I didn't know anybody either, but in a short time I connected to a lot of new interesting people. Now I…

[deleted]

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

#326

Post by mcv »

pjc50 wrote: post #310
riffic wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't worry about it? on good instances identity will be tied to membership in an LDAP or AD sort of thing, with membership handed out as a perk of employment for example. bad instances get treated like spam email sites.

This sounds way worse than email in the spamhaus etc blacklist sense, because all new instances will have to go round all the existing instances asking to be recognized as a "good" instance. This is very centralizing.

Yeah, there needs to be a benefit of the doubt until an instance proves it tolerates spammers.

It would be nice if people had some hard online identity that this could be tied to, but we all know there's plenty of problems with that too. Still, social networks, even distributed ones, don't seem to have much of a spam problem so far.

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

#327

Post by drstewart »

codq wrote: post #321
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is the most valuable database in the world because it mimics human conversation better than any other tech company. This is priceless for training AI with the goal of AGI. Once you extrapolate that, it makes more sense. It’s literally the hive. We probably are simulated from the Twitter in the Other universe.

I'd say reddit is a far more robust archive of conversational data. Tweets are engineered to be entertaining or informative in small bits, typically designed for maximal impact and/or clout. Sure, reddit has a karma system that incentivizes cleverness, but it's also designed for longer form conversation in a way Twitter can't possibly replicate. The pseudonymity also encourages vulnerability and openness in a way Twi…

>but it's also designed for longer form conversation in a way Twitter can't possibly replicate

Reddit sucks at long form conversation. Every thread is stale and gone within 24 hours, so long lived conversations are basically impossible. Thus every topic that comes up is a rehash of the same super basic high level points over and over and over and over and over again.

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