So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker culture, when topics like this come up. A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code t…
Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
281–290 of 521 posts
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#282Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…
There is a comparison to be made between the IP protocol and ActivityPub.
When we all first went online we hopefully had more than one ISP to pick from, because they could federate data between each other using the IP protocol.
I believe that the same type of evolution is going to happen in social media. Whether it will be with ActivityPub, ATP or whatever else I don't know but it must happen. Because having just one ISP, one social media platform, one online shopping platform is not a healthy system.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many rich people and fund managers around the world have been throwing money at engineers they thought were smart for the past several decades? How many have succeeded on the scale Elon has? "Throwing money at smart engineers" is not a novel idea. Executing it well is extremely hard, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades.
Do you know the NFL betting scam? It's awesome. Here's how it works. You choose 1024 people, and you send all of them a prediction about one upcoming sports game, free of charge. 50% get one prediction, 50% get the other. Next week, you have 512 people who think you can guess pretty good. You pick another game. 256 people get one prediction, 256 get the other. The following week, 256 people think you got two in a row…
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#284Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#285Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30 years. The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because it has tiered decentralized controls - sending server, relays (when they were a thing), receiving server…
Email is an example of a federated system failure.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely! People love to hate it’s very infectious. I personally believe for-profit social media companies should have always charged a subscription. People tend to be more respectful and use things they pay for.
none of the big social media companies would have gotten big if the users had to pay. See something awful where you had to pay a tenner to post.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#287Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…
I’m always surprised when there are still people acting like Elon isn’t just BEGGING to be hated. I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work. Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like th…
1. Choosing hard (and inspiring) problems that decompose down to a series of relatively linear engineering challenges;
2. Getting large amounts of investment money from the market or government sources to fund development;
3. Yelling at engineers to solve problems (and remaining close enough to engineering to identify the specific problems to yell about), often through overwork, while keeping the core mission inspiring enough to reduce churn;
4. Cutting corners in order to productionize faster than more risk-conscious competitors.
In other words, Musk is very good at steering organizations through certain kinds of complicated challenges. But he's also terrible at complex challenges, where the path isn't linear and yelling at engineers isn't enough to unstick the process, or where cutting corners is going to be disfavored by the market or by regulators.
Twitter is by its nature a horribly complex, poorly-understood, highly-dynamic complex system that will react unpredictably to any interaction. The decisions Musk needs to make aren't engineering-based (except when it comes to slashing staff and yelling at the survivors to work harder), but open-ocean strategy: product design; market fit; and playing nice with the userbase, high-profile accounts, and advertisers. Unfortunately, Musk has never demonstrated an ability to succeed in these areas -- consider SolarCity, which held a commanding lead early on, but had to be acquired by Tesla due to debt and growth problems, and has fallen to a tiny fraction of the market due to poor sales strategy and customer complaints. Add on the fact that he has a very narrow critical path to profitability (he bought a barely-profitable entity and loaded it up with a cool $1bn/year in debt payments that will need to come out of expenses), and there's more than can go wrong at Twitter than right.
Beyond that, Musk's problem with Twitter is simply that he looked at his social media experience and assumed that it was reflective of Twitter's userbase as a whole. But the alt-right instigators, bots, crypto-enthusiasts, and general (to be frank) weirdos that developed a parasocial relationship with his account are a tiny fraction of a fraction of Twitter's population; even if we consider "political" Twitter as a whole, it's tiny, just loud since it's populated by people with media megaphones. Most Twitter users have much more normal hobbies: sports, pop culture, videogames, whatever, and with Musk catering to his followers (who he seems to think are much bigger and more valuable than they are), their experiences are likely to get a lot worse. So unless he's willing to act more like a normal social media mogul -- aggressively mute the communities that create undesirable experiences for other users, turn down the personality volume on public communications, and suck up to the ad agencies and advertisers who keep the lights on -- I don't expect Twitter to get more successful.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#288Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…
I’m always surprised when there are still people acting like Elon isn’t just BEGGING to be hated. I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work. Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like th…
This meme is on fire but I did not expect it here on HN where people can understand what he is talking about. There are many videos like this [1] and interviews (e.g. with Munro regarding Tesla) where the guy shows deep technical knowledge.
Besides, try making a startup throwing money and smart engineers. Just money will not even get you the really good ones. People who have a choice don't work for morons.
I mean, sure, there's plenty to hate (there was much more to hate about say Columbus, Gandhi or Ford), but if we were dismissing achievements of people who give others good reasons to hate them we wouldn't have calculus.
Let's try to let people stand out without gaslighting them if they are doing some great things. There are many people who smell real bad, are a*holes, have really weird opinions on some topics and were necessary for us to be able to write these comments here.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#289If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…
>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the…
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#290So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker culture, when topics like this come up. A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code t…
HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product culture. It was started by a VC after all. Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be st…