Live data from Hacker News

It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

simonwillison.net

161–170 of 472 posts

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#161
Musk is simply roleplaying as a competent businessman, with a side mission of appeasing his bizarre army of deluded sycophants who worship him for being a kooky crazy genius (he isn't). This is exactly the kind of image he thought he had when he swanned in and fired everyone: he thought it made him look like a cutthroat, intelligent businessman; it's simply a coincidence that Twitter does happen to be a bloated, mismanaged mess.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#162
post #112

I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline! I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithm…

stated vs revealed preference. many people say they want chron, but actually end up using algo a lot more (figures)

When you say "figures", do you mean that's what the evidence shows? If so, presumably twitter's automatic switching from chrono to algo is a significant factor.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#165

'Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.' Since when were they? The mistake was perhaps to ever think that they were. It was twitters 'priority to sell themselves to Musk, hence why they took him to court to ensure he bought them. This is a somewhat crazy, knee-jerk reaction to some news headlines, the author has no idea of what is really happening, i'm not saying that i do, but for exam…

It certainly is a knee-jerk- reaction.

tl;dr: "I don't like Elon Musk either!"

Nothing but virtue signalling.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#166
post #49

> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s richest man pay the loans he took out So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed? Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.

I've never been a fan of Twitter or any of the closed, private social networks, and Musk's takeover doesn't change anything about that, but I absolutely welcome the fact that many people are finally inspired to look at some alternatives.

They didn't do it before, but they're doing it now, and are pleasantly surprised by what they find. Even if Musk hasn't ruined Twitter yet, there's nothing wrong with him being the catalyst for this improvement.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#167

A year ago nobody would have thought free speech/open platforms are going to be adopted by censorship-loving left wingers. This is actually excellent for open platform technology improvement, as most engineers tend to lean left.

Like everything on social media the most important thing is not the rationale or outcome of actions, it's first and foremost about virtue signalling.

Although it's always a good thing when outrage drives people to open-source and federated platforms.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#168

As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision to eliminate the accessibility team. I am myself moving to Mastodon. I was amazed in doing this that the UI/UX of Mastodon is much better than Twitter. I feel better.

What would a team of "accessibility engineers" occupy themselves with every day anyway? Did they build features that will fail unless someone is there to handhold? " Day 2: still accessible? check. Day 3: still accessible? check. ".... Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do. Likewise, Twitter remains fairly static, with only minor ch…

I'd imagine there's some amount of work, I doubt it was a huge team but they probably needed a few people to focus on the various platforms and regions their apps support

it seems easier to have a team focused on a features like that keeping things consistant and whatever dosen't seem that crazy.. fatter than what a startup would but twitter is a multinational worth tens of billions

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#169
post #79

As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision to eliminate the accessibility team. I am myself moving to Mastodon. I was amazed in doing this that the UI/UX of Mastodon is much better than Twitter. I feel better.

One could argue the accessibility team wasn't doing a very good job if Mastodon have done it better without a dedicated team. An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team

The UX can be better and the accessibility worse.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#170

It doesn't seem sensible to invest yourself so much into Mastodon without having thorougly explored it. I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse

I mean, what instance did you register on? Because I've been using it for a couple years and uhh, the toxicity is nearly non-existent for me. I see some stupid crap once in a while in a response to some highly-followed user, but then I just mute the person's entire instance (if I find that similarly-toxic crap is a common sort of output from there). Simultaneously, I've had more meaningful communication on Mastodon i…

> or maybe tweet at some brand whose service has made my day crappier

It's like something must stink before it goes on Twitter.

Post reply on HN