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Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

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

#151
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…

I make music, and for that small communities like mastodon just don't work. In order to be heard and to grow a following, you need to be able to just be heard by a wide variety of people-- That visibility is exactly what sites now sell (nefariously and deceptively) as a commodity that often doesn't return the investment...

Paying to be viewed and heard (ads) is not cost effective for most artists.. It's almost always a scam, and it makes life as a musician even more impossible than it was prior to the Internet. You're better off now buying a billboard by the highway instead of trying to share free music on social media.

I think it's insane how limitedly people view the Internet, and how often it's only viewed only from one personal perspective at a time... Designers think from their personal perspective and that's it, there is only one success path and post format imposed on millions of people with these platforms.

This is Elon's problem right now too. He is trying to work out issues that suit his perspective, to the disappointment and dismay of many who those decisions will stump.

What the Internet needs is a community that separates big industry from independent creators (and that also does not charge people who are not making a profit to function), and also separates advertising from organic content They'd also need to police that heavily, just as much as illicit and negative content... That's the only social solution that will work moving forward. All these social platforms, like the metaverse seem to think that they can just build yet another shopping mall full of ads and then people will want to hang out there, and that won't work. Sites like facebook and Twitter were originally successful because they were free and equal for visibility, but as they try to tweak that, the same sites fall apart and fail. People are growing wise to the sites that begin the free to paid shopping mall conversion model.

People now want social sites and apps that help them to make money in simple and direct ways, and apps that free them from needing desk jobs, not sites that want to trap them into watching ads and spending money on big business products and services and scams like Crypto and NFTs. The app makers that don't get that will languish with weak user bases, and they will burn a lot of money in the process.

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

#152

With Twitter usage apparently climbing, why is this important? Is the general assumption that Musk is ruining or wrecking Twitter accurate?

> Is the general assumption that Musk is ruining or wrecking Twitter accurate?

If it weren't true, why would there be a hundred articles a day about it, and a US President announcing in a press conference that Musk's connections to foreign governments should be investigated?

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

#153
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might feel that way, but I promise you it's definitely not "everyone". Hell, it's only about 45 million in the US (assuming you believe Twitter's own numbers - which I definitely do not). So at best, you're getting 1 in ~8 folks in the US. More realistically, I'd assume your audience is more likely 1 in ~20 in the US - assuming you manage to get literally everyone to follow you. Is that larger than you're going to…

Tweets often do reach much further than active users of the Twitter platform as they are often embedded in mainstream news stories and such.

Sure - but that's true of every site on the web. Conflating mainstream media's reach with Twitter's is fairly disingenuous, since mainstream media also highlights basically every other platform in similar ways.

The brief exception to this is politics - where Twitter was an easy way to get a relevant soundbite from a politician on a topic. I think that era is waning very quickly.

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

#155
post #44
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

The quicker the technorati accept that Mastadon will never have mass adoption even remotely close to Twitter, the better. Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes. It should just be happy being a niche product for a niche audience.

The Mastadon hype here has serious "year of the Linux desktop" vibes -- technical people getting excited about features that don't matter at all to the average user.

Until journalists, politicians, musicians, artists, and brands can have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's clear that Twitter is going down the drain sooner or later because Musk exceeded the limits of his competence. I don't think it's a question of competence. Musk bought a company that was already losing billions, and saddled it with debt and billions of interest payments per year. His recent actions also cost near-term ad-revenue loss, thereby further amplifying losses. As bad as those things are, in-and-of them…

> I don't think it's a question of competence. Musk bought a company that was already losing billions, and saddled it with debt and billions of interest payments per year. That's incompetence > His recent actions also cost near-term ad-revenue, thereby further amplifying losses. And so is that. > As bad as those things are, in-and-of themselves, they don't represent an existential crisis. Why not? I mean, maybe it'll…

>That's incompetence

It may well be. I guess it's a question of semantics. To me his ability to afford a money-losing company is the salient factor, not his chaotic early tenure as 'Chief Twit'.

>> As bad as those things are, in-and-of themselves, they don't represent an existential crisis. >Why not?

1. Because none of his actions are irreversible.

2. If he acted responsibility, he still would be running a company that is losing billions (plus the extra debt he saddled it with) in a terrible economic climate. I don’t think he can afford it.

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

#157
post #15
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

Technically its the Fediverse, not just Mastodon. But, your point still stands 100% that there exists mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do. Of course, to each their own; if Mr. Bardin has the time/resources, i guess good luck to him. Though, I do wish smart folks like he and others would help move forward the existing protocols like ActivityPub, or participate in efforts like…

I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out the best way to follow my interests on Mastodon. I had to figure out which instance to use, and the most popular ones cannot keep up with the traffic surge right now. And then I don't know how much the instance matters, can I follow a hashtag across all instances? It seems yes, but I spent time figuring this out.

How much time will the average twitter user invest into this? How much will it cost these hobbyists to run Ruby on Rails apps that can service hundreds of millions of users? I'm just...skeptical it can take off. Whereas something VC funded that can monetize and its just one thing you point people to, and they can sign up in 30 seconds and it handles all the traffic with no hiccups or slow-downs. That could work.

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

#158
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By a lot of people, do you mean 0.3% of Twitter users?

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

#159
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s sounds like everyone has to join specific servers or something. That will never work, it’s too complicated. You need one server that everyone is on.

Having "one server that everyone is on" is precisely what we don't need. Twitter sucks because it's a single room dominated by a bunch of shouting jagoffs, and "that, but federated" isn't any better. Mastodon is nicer because your home instance is small and intimate.

Well, what IS needed is a straightforward registration process you can point EVERYONE to, and they just go do it in two minutes and get on with their lives without spending 30 minutes learning about instances and fediverses and activitypubs.

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

#160
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit comes to mind as an alternative (to Digg) that succeeded (by at least some definitions of the word). A massive amount of Reddit's early user growth came from a poorly-received redesign to Digg's home page. There are a lot of parallels to draw to the changes Musk has in mind for Twitter.

Difference here is that we don't see people leaving at massive scale. Maybe it's to early. Anyway, I think chances are 50-50 twitter succeeds in re-launch. I wouldn't be surprised of any outcome. But I would be surprised to see something else explodes in popularity just because it's twitter alternative.

The issue is that if you wait until people start leaving it's too late. The bet here (and IMO it's a fair one) is that Twitter will continue to degrade as a service and eventually people will start leaving. If your alternative is up and running by then you've got a chance of capturing users.
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