Live data from Hacker News

Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

blakewatson.com

361–370 of 388 posts

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#361
post #198

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Eventually, with subscription…

Well twitter doesn't exist anymore so yes it is dead. Also it is funny that for a lot of people including me, slashdot, digg, twitter and reddit are already a thing of the past while we are still visiting regular old forums.

Semantics. Sure, Twitter is dead. For the benefit of everybody. X again is more lively than ever, for the good of not just current civilization, but near and far future.

X will have some trouble shedding some of Twitter's old behaviors and such though, and it can't really scale down to a boutique-level platform like HN. But these are fundamentally different types of platforms due to the kind of people they attract.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#362
post #198

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Eventually, with subscription…

I’m unconvinced that subscriptions are ever going to make enough money to pay the bills. Musk has been pretty clear he needs to get advertisers back. I don’t think his approach of specifically telling Bob Iger to fuck off is going to help with that, but he isn’t hiding that he needs to figure it out pretty quickly.

Sure, in the short term yes. You can't fix the lack of funds from advertisers with subscriptions in a few days.

But eventually I hope it will. Being dependent on advertisers is kryptonite for platforms of user speech, regardless if it's YouTube or X.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#363
post #198

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Eventually, with subscription…

“Better than ever” when it’s constantly promoting hate speech? And Elon is too? And advertisers are dipping out? And Twitter definitely doesn’t have free speech. People still get banned, or have their posts artificially limited, but they do allow more hate speech. Nearly everyone I followed on Twitter is on Mastodon now. It works great. Conversations still happen there on news topics. I deleted my Twitter account a w…

More and more of the time when someone mentions "hate speech" they're just angry something isn't being moderated like Reddit. One needs to have perspective and if you have zero accusations of enabling hate speech as a platform that big, you're actually the bad guy.

X does have the best model of Free Speech. Nothing can be perfect but they're the F1 car of the effort when others are oxcarts on rails. Yes conversations happen even on Facebook, I have frequented it this month. Doesn't mean they are that meaningful or capable of actually working as the critically-needed Town Square.

X requires login for many things, as it did during the Twitter times. Congratulations for shooting yourself in the foot by impulsively deleting your account I guess? Like, what in earth would that benefit you instead of just having a pause ...

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#364
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought community notes already existed as bird watch before the takeover?

Yeah, Elon just rebranded it, and pushed fwd its full deployment I was fully bought into the premise of birdwatch due to it being based on a great tool I've worked with for years (Pol.is), but Elon seemed to have loved it for all the wrong reasons, in a way that irked me. He seemingly just wanted to cut the trust & safety teams, and remove onus of creating policy :/

"loved it for all the wrong reasons"

What? It sounds like you don't actually support the basis of Community Notes and were looking for it to be used selectively. No. Power to the people. Not power to the the bloated team that was on rails to destroy Twitter. I fucking loved the "print your code from the last 30 days" imitative in its crude efficiency. With that team, Twitter/X wouldn't exist in any form anymore even without the takeover.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#365
post #198

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Eventually, with subscription…

subscriptions are most of their income, they don't pay the bills at all

That is simply not true. Subscriptions are at best at ~20% but lookin up. And yes they do actually pay bills, no landlord would have had them pause that for this long lol

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#366
post #198

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Eventually, with subscription…

> [Twitter]'s off better than ever I'd agree that it's hard to take an opinion seriously that pronounces Twitter as dead. As you pointed out, when OpenAI's drama was unfolding, the conversations happened mainly on Twitter. But saying Twitter's current form is the service at its best is also hard to take seriously. I tried to follow said conversation about OpenAI during Altman's ouster and I found the site to be an in…

I really recommend just logging in once, the unregistered UX is crappy intentionally.

You're the first one to bring up First Amendment. We are not talking about it. Note that "Freedom of Speech" and "First amendment" are different things. Freedom of Speech can mean laws (and there are other nations but just USA) but it also means an idea, an ideal. Crudely, an environment that acknowledges the old saying of "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me".

If you see the forest from the trees you'd see Elon actually runs a platform that favors Freedom of Speech more than any other platform by a country mile. On X any violations of it are exceptions (the ones you're talking about), NOT the modus operandi.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#367
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting thought. As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out with interesting people who share an inter…

Yes and wouldn't you like to join it? If you had a way to search like "hey there's an interesting conversation going on at my local community center, maybe I will go and join their next session." wouldn't you?

At the same time, does your local community center want the unfiltered public to have input to their conversations? Or are they only interested in spreading it to friends/neighbors of people already at the center?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#368
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made an account and can’t seem to figure out where this magical community actually is? It seems like I can just link other open services? And for some reason I can receive email? Not a single other person(‘s content) in sight though.

https://home.omg.lol/directory

Okay. A list of names. Most of which are just a short bio/some of which don't lead anywhere. What now?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#369
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Twitter]'s off better than ever I'd agree that it's hard to take an opinion seriously that pronounces Twitter as dead. As you pointed out, when OpenAI's drama was unfolding, the conversations happened mainly on Twitter. But saying Twitter's current form is the service at its best is also hard to take seriously. I tried to follow said conversation about OpenAI during Altman's ouster and I found the site to be an in…

I really recommend just logging in once, the unregistered UX is crappy intentionally. You're the first one to bring up First Amendment. We are not talking about it. Note that "Freedom of Speech" and "First amendment" are different things. Freedom of Speech can mean laws (and there are other nations but just USA) but it also means an idea, an ideal. Crudely, an environment that acknowledges the old saying of "sticks a…

You keep saying "See the forest from the trees". It's "See the forest for the trees"

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also participate in discussions like any other regular user, but I can't look away when I see somebody butcher the english language like that (and it isn't even my first language). It takes me 10 seconds to correct someone, and hopefully the corrected person makes less mistakes in the future. Nobody loses here, I don't see any harm in this, there are only good outcomes. Once you realize how many people can't write…

Sometimes I'm posting from my phone, and it autocorrects it wrongly. I know the difference between it's and its, but I'm not going to go back and clean up simple typos that don't prevent understanding of what I was trying to say.

Believe me, it sometimes prevents people from understanding. Not very common, but I had a couple of cases when I had to re-read a sentence until I finally understood what the author has meant.
Post reply on HN