Live data from Hacker News

Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

post.news

31–40 of 228 posts

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

#31

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

I don't believe it's climbing in the real sense. I think people like watching disasters unfold, they are taking to their Twitter feed to see news of its fast moving downfall. Refreshing to see what the next ridiculous move is, and getting that dopamine hit when it happens. It's not sustainable growth.

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

#32
It seems deeply ironic that Noam is starting a Twitter competitor, when he's mostly well-known for some comments he made about lazy startup employees which seem like something Elon Musk might have said. But then you realize it's not ironic at all.

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

#33
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…

Cause they crave an audience, and find technical challenges in alternatives.

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

#34
This manifesto is generic enough that it aligns with all existing social-network platforms. So this Twitter alternative is bringing nothing new to the table.

Worse, there isn't even an attempt to provide or support an open protocol/open endpoint as a way to entice developers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm under no illusion that had this open endpoint been provided, that it wouldn't be shut-down in a couple years once this "Post" service gains market share .. but still, this performative action would have been welcome.

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

#35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.

Indeed. Ask anyone running the general discussion group for a small town. The difficulty of effective, fair, and efficient moderation cannot be overstated.

Ask anyone running a general discussion group for a neighborhood. It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation. Most people eventually quit if they're not being compensated in some significant way.

On the other hand, if anything goes it can probably be fairly hands off.

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

#36
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’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 website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.

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

#37
post #27

I find it hilarious that the Silicon Valley Apparatik thinks that NOW an alternate is needed. Gab, GTTR, Parler, Frank Speech, Truth Social have all existed for some time. And with the exception of Gab, the others have almost identical TOS agreements to Twitter.

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?

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

#38
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! Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.

I've run an online community since 2001 and I've yet to meet the boogeymen of self-hosting. A small site and forum with ~100 users doesn't cost a shit to run ($5 per month, the cost of a coke and a sandwich where I live), updates itself automatically via CPanel, and it isn't much of an issue if it goes down for an hour or two every other year. That's an acceptable cost for not having to submit to anyone's whims about allowed content, and for not having to tolerate "redesigns". Twitter is probably down more than a standard Apache server.

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

#39
Fleeing one centralized platform into another is futile, and will end in the same problems.

I wrote more about this below, covering less centralized protocols like Mastodon, Farcaster, BlueSky, nostr, and others:

https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...

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

#40

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

Basically. Lots of people hate Musk. Lots of Twitter blue-checks hate Musk. This is an attempt to capitalize on this hate and come up with yet another platform that would be identical to all the other platforms.
Post reply on HN