81–90 of 121 posts
When I first started using Mastodon I felt a bit overwhelmed by angry toots from certain communities. One of my pet peeves is leftists who, just as the John Birch Society saw "communists" everywhere, now see "fascists" everywhere. (For the record I am a leftist, a friend and I were the first people to put Chomsky audio lectures on the web, I've been to Howie Hawkins' house, etc.) It was clear to me that the "explore"…
Keir
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> Your post basically says "it's bizarre you're expressing your opinion, don't do that" - that is not healthy for productive conversation (ironically op's point about those products) No it doesn't. They're just saying, millions are still using and enjoying Twitter / X and that is fine. If you don't like it, that is also fine and you can still be happy anyway. I don't see a problem with that. There is no need to misin…
The fact that Twitter and Facebook are driving divisiveness and misinformation definitely impacts my life, regardless of my lack of engagement with the platforms.
We don’t need all of what Twitter did, but we need some of it. The biggest thing Twitter did that nothing else could match was getting extremely specific or local news quickly. Is some web service down? Twitter is faster for info than both isup.me and the official status page. See smoke in the distance? Twitter can tell you all about the fire way before the local news.
I think this is under-selling the different items of value Twitter brings. For example, another thing that Twitter did was giving disenfranchised people a voice. Question for the group -- would the BLM movement have gained national following. Would George Floyd, or Central Park Karen ever have been heard of without Twitter?
Growing up, I remember only 2 or 3 incidents that took the national scene. Yet these things happened hundreds of times and were almost wholly ignored until Twitter came along.
I'd conclude it would not -- decades of Mainstream Media, both left and right -- gave only passing coverage to the issue. Growing up in Brooklyn I remember many events like this that would have been huge national conversations to never even get covered by the media of record.
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I'd say being in a position where you aren't forced to piss off the moderators to make more advertisement revenue is a major advantage this year. It's not about revenue. I'm talking about trust, so that the crowd is willing to curate data for you.
If access to moderators is the metric of success, Wikipedia claims to have ~900 moderator accounts currently. Reddit, in 2017, claimed to have ~75,000 moderators. Unfortunately the later figure is severely dated, but has Reddit really lost over 74,000 moderator accounts since? That seems unlikely. Perhaps Wikipedia has never been successful, just something that has managed to continue to exist?
I'm talking about curation and quality of the editor force. Wikipedia's editors are highly respected by everyone. Reddit... not so much.
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> For the record I am a leftist, a friend and I were the first people to put Chomsky audio lectures on the web, I've been to Howie Hawkins' house, etc. Sad to see you feel the need to include this disclaimer to be able to voice your opinion without being labelled by those same "leftists" here on HN. Yes, there are plenty of people here who are quick to downvote and throw accusations of -ism / -ist / -phobia your way…
One thing I like about Hacker News is that there is very little of that BS. Mastodon loses the right wing trolls (although I hear there are a handful of widely blocked servers) but has the minus that it does have a subculture of people who normalize othering and dehumanizing behavior in each other. It also has a large "silent majority" of nice folks but the effects of chronological feed + boosting amplifies a loud mi…
[1] Diversity of thought is the one diversity which really counts but also the one shunned by those who profess to strive for diversity.
[2] There is a clear need for a politically neutral - not "left" or "centre" or "right" but "unbiased" - search infrastructure
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.. and of course, the "rocket man bad" crowd are very anti X for obvious reasons.
Obvious? Maybe ICE driver guilt, but I have never heard a reason that made sense except for some vague accusations that too much fun is being had and that is somehow offensive. And yeah he’s made some mistakes which I guess is unforgivable because, well, it goes back to fun being offensive.
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If access to moderators is the metric of success, Wikipedia claims to have ~900 moderator accounts currently. Reddit, in 2017, claimed to have ~75,000 moderators. Unfortunately the later figure is severely dated, but has Reddit really lost over 74,000 moderator accounts since? That seems unlikely. Perhaps Wikipedia has never been successful, just something that has managed to continue to exist?
If Reddit says X but Wikipedia says Y, do you trust X to be true or do you trust Y to be true? I'm talking about curation and quality of the editor force. Wikipedia's editors are highly respected by everyone. Reddit... not so much.
Neither. One – or both – of them might be true, but who cares? It is not advantageous to give it much concern. We have evolved to not rely on truths. "Is that a lion rustling those bushes or just the wind? Let me be absolutely certain it is a lion before I run." said no one who successfully passed on their genes ever. Truths don't matter much, and the reality is that we're not capable of processing full truths anyway, having to rely on simplifications that lose a lot of the important nuance.
> Wikipedia's editors are highly respected by everyone. Reddit... not so much.
That's like saying librarians garner more respect than comedians. That might be the case when observed through some particular lens, but they're really not comparable. What would that even mean? And if this is the measure of success we want to use, I am struggling to understand why Wikipedia and Reddit were brought together for comparison.
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If Reddit says X but Wikipedia says Y, do you trust X to be true or do you trust Y to be true? I'm talking about curation and quality of the editor force. Wikipedia's editors are highly respected by everyone. Reddit... not so much.
> If Reddit says X but Wikipedia says Y, do you trust X to be true or do you trust Y to be true? Neither. One – or both – of them might be true, but who cares? It is not advantageous to give it much concern. We have evolved to not rely on truths. "Is that a lion rustling those bushes or just the wind? Let me be absolutely certain it is a lion before I run." said no one who successfully passed on their genes ever. Tru…
Truths matter. And the others who survived it are physically weaker (worse breathing) and have seemingly permanently lost their smell.
So yes, truths matter. Those who follow falsehoods will lead themselves (and their kin) into the depths of despair. While cheering and falsely claiming victory because victory/feeling good about their decisions is more important to truths to them.
That's... fine. Darwin's law will deal with them over time. But I'll stay on the side of truth thanks very much.
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I'm also in the business of programming, which is largely in the business of truths. Is X easier than Y? Do people prefer X or Y? Is X a better design than Y? Etc. etc.
You can't fundamentally alter ground truths, no matter how much money you throw into reputation. Eventually, the truth wins out as the money runs out. Seeking truth first leads to being correct over the long term, as the untruthful die out and/or fail in their projects.
Don't lose sight of the truth. There's objective truths that people have been failing to accept very recently.
Editors who care about the objective truth and seek it (however flawed our seeking of the truth is), is going to over the long term, reach the truth faster. Of course, broken clocks are occasionally correct (possibly more correct) than the truthseekers. But I've got more confidence in some communities than others.
I also recognize that truthseekers are _NOT_ as popular as I once thought, and that we have a need to create curated communities where truth-seeking is favored over popularity-machines that Twitter and/or Reddit prefers to generate. (likely due to advertising revenue. Youtube and TikTok seem to be falling into the same trap).
Twitter’s real value was its “global RSS” nature. You could get short, quick updates about local news, published papers, sports events, political happenings, and more. It made it easy to source info from your followers (or their followers) quickly. Think Ask HN but broader. Activity on Twitter is down now, mastodon and threads aren’t cutting it. There’s more activity on LinkedIn but it’s quite phoney. I genuinely fee…
Why aren't mastodon and threads cutting it? They provide exactly what you claim you want. Leads me to believe for a lot of people, the allure of Twitter isn't actually anything intentional, but just the combination of being at the right place at the right time - that feeling you got, the relationships you fostered. Just like if you were on Tumblr during its independent peak.