Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

post.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 228 posts

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#101

Post by discardedrefuse »

pjc50 wrote: post #47
mirzap wrote: post #22

How people don't get it - you can't succeed as an alternative to something. You need to build your own thing, find your product market fit with unique proposition. In 5y nobody will know about any of twitter alternatives that are launching these days. IMO even twitter didn't find its product market fit, that's why Musk is breaking it. The more people talk about twitter (in any way) and more people go with "alternativ…

The current burst of activity is very much a "scramble for lifeboats" as people attempt to preserve a fraction of their social graph on Mastodon. But there won't be a big drop off in Twitter activity or relevance until Twitter goes full fail whale. Or there's a serious effort to kill the community somehow. (posting "joinmastodon.com" on twitter now gets you the "not allowed to post that link error. I guess this is wh…

That's because, up until a few weeks ago, joinmastodon.com was a spam domain. It's only recently been purchased and redirected to the real domain: joinmastodon.org

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#102

Post by TheRealPomax »

Why? Why even get in this race, there is nothing to win. Win by not playing, and just give those millions of dollars that were about to commit to losing anyway to local schools, community centers, food banks, and hey maybe just buy housing for the homeless (oh no, so unfair! they got a house for free! All they had to do was be on the brink of death every single day!). Do something good with those dollars instead.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#103

Post by tokenadult »

mirzap wrote: post #22

How people don't get it - you can't succeed as an alternative to something. You need to build your own thing, find your product market fit with unique proposition. In 5y nobody will know about any of twitter alternatives that are launching these days. IMO even twitter didn't find its product market fit, that's why Musk is breaking it. The more people talk about twitter (in any way) and more people go with "alternativ…

The phrasing "Twitter alternative" is my fault in setting the title for the thread-opening post here. The "Twitter alternative" phrasing should not be attributed to the founder of Post.

I get the impression that the founder, Noam Bardin, DOESN'T think he's building a Twitter alternative but rather, in the beta welcome page's words, "a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; converse freely; and have some fun. Many of today's ad-based platforms rely on capturing attention at any cost — sowing chaos in our society, amplifying the extremes, and muting the moderates. Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them."

Twitter has never been quite like that. If the founder's vision succeeds, I might like Post very well indeed. In all such things, the proof is in the user experience as experienced by each user, but I think the goals sound good for Post.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#104

Post by aaron_m04 »

hn2017 wrote: post #7

We need more alternatives to Twitter. Hopefully one of them will excel. Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts.

> Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts.

That is demonstrably false. If you spend some time there, you will notice a lot of nontechnical people using it.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#105

Post by registeredcorn »

jghn wrote: post #70
ceres wrote: post #18

I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform. To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you. At this point…

> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters…

>I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc.

I don't mean to sound overly dismissive, but maybe instead of putting the onus on a social media website to provide that experience, wouldn't it be more sensible to get that from a news aggregate site? I.e. Google News, Fark, Reddit, etc.?

Part of the issue with how modern social media platforms is the intent to keep users on their platform for many hours at a time.

Instead, limit content on social sites to the subject of the platform, and allow users to find that other content outside of the site would be a "better" way to manage their experience on the platform. For example, a platform devoted to Formula 1 would not be a good place to inject articles about COVID information or political events. It wouldn't be a good place to do so, not just because it would be severely off topic, but also because it would be managed by people who would otherwise be focused on curating the topic they are (presumably) knowledgeable on.

Basically, I'm saying it's not a good idea to get news updates from Twitter for the same reason why it's not a good idea to get a sushi from a gas station bathroom.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#106

Post by standardUser »

Jerry2 wrote: post #62

NEVER AGAIN will I be a sharecropper on someone's land. I'm sick of all these oligarchs who promise the world to you and then they tell you what to think, how to behave and what you can say. Eventually they will take it away from you without an even a recourse. Just join Mastodon. Start by using someone else's instance [1] and then learn how to run your own. It's not hard. [1] https://instances.social/

Until Mastodon finds a way to let the average user sign up without any friction, it will never be more than a small niche service.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#108

Post by krapp »

standardUser wrote: post #100
thal3s wrote: post #6

We've already got a replacement that's owned and administered by users, with no ads, that can't be bought and ruined by billionaires: Mastodon. The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social

Users don't want convoluted nonsense like Mastodon. They want a one-click sign up and ease of use.

That's always been the assumption, but a lot of people are trying it anyway.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#109

Post by [deleted] »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #77
ceres wrote: post #18

I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform. To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you. At this point…

>Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb Exactly. Landlords should not exist.

[deleted]

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#110

Post by stusmall »

macspoofing wrote: post #37
altacc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the ToS that people don't like about those services. What makes social media sticky is the culture. If people like the culture of a social media platform then they stay. Very few people like the culture of Gab, Parler, Truth, etc...

Who likes Twitter culture?

There was one huge part of twitters culture that I liked. It was a place where I could I read less filtered thoughts of influential people and get news that hadn't quiet met the standard to publish in reputable newspapers. It's a fine line. I just like the bar lowered slightly, not all the way so it is mental diarrhea or completely unsubstantiated rumors. I had to be careful about who I followed and keep a critical mind about what they posted.

I think a big part of what "Twitter culture" is it was many things for many people. Some people use as a place for weird shit posting, some use it for porn, some enjoy bias confirmation, some enjoy the drama and beef. I guess some people enjoy anime avatar reply-guys since some of the new offshoots seem to be catering to maximize them.

For me Twitter would have been better if it didn't have any of that but I get that using it as basically a shitty, short-form substack isn't the most popular usecase. So what I liked about "twitter culture" is that all of these things could co-exist on one site and just curating who you followed could dramatically change that experience.

With a lot of the current drama some of the more serious people are leaving. I'm not sure how it will all shake out in the end, but I don't expect my use case to stay intact.

Post reply on HN