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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

#181

Post by bedhead »

dale_glass wrote: post #94
bedhead wrote: post #26

[flagged]

Oh fine, I'll articulate why. Musk doesn't know what he has bought. He seems to think it's a technology company. It's not. It's an advertising business mixed up with a social platform. Those don't require lots of brains, in fact Twitter is already built and works. The what the likes of Twitter require to be successful is the willingness to carefully navigate a bunch of minefields and come up with compromises that mak…

Not one thing is different since he bought it. Nothing. Literally nothing. Some articulation that carefully explains...nothing about why anyone would be inclined to leave other then "zomg Elon doesn't like woke people noooo!"

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

#182

Post by cwkoss »

LanceJones wrote: post #9

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

People are reporting twitter has retained less than 10% of pre-Elon employees now.

Certainly plausible that twitter could survive without significant downtime, but it seems unlikely at this point: it appears Elon has been taking big reckless actions and he'll need to rapidly pivot to smart measured actions to keep infrastructure from tipping over.

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

#183

Post by edude03 »

krapp wrote: post #166
jeremyjh wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of people, not nearly all of whom are technical users, which pretty clearly goes against the narrative that Mastodon is too difficult to use. Although to be fair a lot of people are also complaining about it, but the lesson here seems to be that people are more willing to put up with complexity and inconvenience than they're given credit for. That it's still a minority of Twitter users doesn't make it a failure…

It kiiiind of is a zero sum game, since if you’re signed up for both, you’ll naturally use the one that gives you better results for your chosen metric. For twitter it’s usually engagement, so if you get a lot of engagement on twitter and little on the fediverse, you’ll end up focusing on twitter.

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

#184

Post by e_i_pi_2 »

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 and I think more people are starting to get it

I've seen a lot of people talking about the need for a nationalized version of something like twitter as a result of seeing how much damage one person with money can do. That would make it more like a community garden where people are doing it on their own land, but communally owned and in the same location as other people to take advantage of all the benefits that make it successful in the first place. Small decentralized communities are nice, but never really went away and fulfill a different need - there's plenty of small forums or discord channels for programming questions, but I still prefer to use stackoverflow when it's an option.

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

#185

Post by darkwater »

pjc50 wrote: post #51
boplicity wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing. Not true; you can build and own your own "island" and grow the population of your "island" to be quite large. This can and does happen quite regularly. It's the only sensible thing to do, really, if you want to build a susta…

"quite large" is very different from "everyone", and that's what has been so great (and terrible) about Twitter: it feels like everyone.

Mmmh everyone that I follow or Twitter thinks I should read. I follow Musk on Twitter and I don't see any of his shitposting, or I don't see many celebs or journalists tweets either. Am I not one of the everyones?

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

#186

Post by wcunning »

jasondigitized wrote: post #168
jasode wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb [...] To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences . Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok. Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN webs…

Why is broadcasting the high order bit? I personally don't want to scream my message to thousands of people. I want a high signal:noise two way dialogue with a small group of people who know what they are talking about.

Discoverability, basically. You can get a lot of incredibly good information from Twitter with a very carefully curated follow list. You can get that from Mastodon as well, but you're going to have a much harder time finding the same people in a fully decentralized world. I think I'd rather that existence, which I'm noticing as I wind up in more niche Facebook groups and Discord servers than on broader platforms like Instagram or Twitter, but it's not zero value per se.

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

#187

Post by maire »

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…

In tech - today's leaders will not be tomorrow's leaders. The tech graveyard is full of former high fliers.

How about the early days of Covid when Zoom came out of nowhere to dominate Video Communications? They were nowhere near the market leader.

Facebook (as you recall) was also not the market leader on social media when the VCs decided they were going to be the winner.

I am taking a wait and see approach to Twitter. I wish them the best, but history is not on their side.

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

#188

Post by agallant »

winternett wrote: post #151
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…

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…

I also make music, and have found the Fediverse to be a far more welcoming and varied place than commercial social media. Sure, I'm only getting maybe hundreds of impressions - but that's better than the dozens I got organically (without paying) on Twitter. I'm not making a living from my music - but from your profile it looks like you're not either.

Of course a site that enables making money "in simple and direct ways" would be a hit - but I'd suggest that what you're missing isn't a site but a time. Early social media was part of the general gold rush of commercializing the net - a lot of easy money was bubbling about. The Fediverse doesn't really have that gold rush, but neither will Twitter 2.0 - it'd require a paradigm shift (like the Metaverse - which I'm not particularly bullish on, but it's a possibility) for fresh investment at scale.

Anyway, depending on your creative goals, I encourage you to still check out the Fediverse. It won't be simple and direct, but (if you're not already popular / willing to pay for ads) you'll probably get more genuine listens and engagement than you will from commercial alternatives.

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

#189

Post by the-printer »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #99
boplicity wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing. Not true; you can build and own your own "island" and grow the population of your "island" to be quite large. This can and does happen quite regularly. It's the only sensible thing to do, really, if you want to build a susta…

Island influence stops at the water. Yes, you might get quite famous on your own island, and if that's what you're going for, power to you. Everything from mailing lists to mastodon will do that for you. But if you want to reach "everyone", you need a network that will potentially broadcast to "everyone". Should you want to reach "everyone"? Very different question, but that's not the issue raised. The upside to user…

This is not a refutation because I think that you’ve given a nice response to the topic. But I think that the people who are concerned or interested with reaching “everyone” deserve being beholden to the Big Box platforms of today; whichever ones rise and gain steam in the future that use phrases like “foster dialogue and bring people together” in lieu of “drive engagement and bring in ad dollars” then crash and burn under the weight of internal whistleblowers and damning The Guardian exposés.

I think the future of online communities will be community for the sake of community…and nothing else. Very mundane and boring on the outside, driven by nothing other than “I’m sharing waffle recipes and I’m going to just upload them to the internet on my hosting provider or via my old Compaq Presario and I do not care about engagements just email me later and goodbye.”

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

#190

Post by gre »

dymk wrote: post #143
barbazoo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Mastodon not able to accomplish this?

Key technical decisions made early on kneecap its ability to be performant and to scale to anything approaching Twitter's userbase size, if instances want to still be part of the fediverse.

What are those decisions, got a link?
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