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Substack Notes Launched

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Re: Substack Notes Launched

#431

Post by sleepybrett »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #286
riffraff wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neil Gaiman had 3M+ followers on Twitter, it is a pretty high profile account. Anyway, I think it's more relevant that many accounts are now also syndicating to Mastodon, which makes it a viable alternative for consuming users. It's far from being an exodus, but they are averaging 200k new users per week, which seems pretty good.

Right, but that's where absolute and relative come into play. 200k new users per week is... what, 0.05% - 0.1% of Twitter active user base? Not saying one day it might not snowball, but it's been 6 months and I wouldn't call Mastodon an existential threat to Twitter just yet. I am tremendously enjoying and schadenfreuding the twitter melodrama, but even most people making fun of twitter/musk/socialnetworks, seem to b…

My mastodon timeline has been growing pretty rapidly over the last year. With obvious ratcheting up happening whenever elon steps on yet another rake. 'Let that sink in' nearly doubled the amount of posts per day, 'hardcore mode' another, 'api shutdown' another...

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#432

Post by dysoco »

czbond wrote: post #175
jpmattia wrote: post #115

It wasn't like Twitter's business had a large technical barrier-to-entry. And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can. Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch! Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.

Twitter's barrier wasn't that it was technically hard - it was that it was free and had critical mass. There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views

>There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views

There ISN'T? Ever since Musk stepped in it's riddled with bugs and changes for the worse. As an example very recently and as of now Twitter Circles are broken and tweets that should be private only for a select few are visible to anyone in the "For You" tab. This is MASSIVE and probably even a breach of GDPR.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#433

Post by sleepybrett »

drusepth wrote: post #161
NikolaNovak wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

was there a "mass exodus"? What percentage of people actually left twitter forever to another system and stayed there? What percentage of audience or "influencers"? Disclaimer - I'm not on Twitter, but my impression is that a few folks made a large amount of noise for leaving but most people shrugged. Other networks mat have seen a temporary large percentage Increase, but a) how much of that stuck and b) a large perc…

With so many sites designed to track activity (and per-user activity) on Twitter, I'd lean towards "no mass exodus" simply from the fact that I haven't seen any gotcha graphs/charts/data literally showing it. However, anecdotally, my relatively static "following" count dropped from ~1k to ~600 over the course of the back-to-back Elon/Mastodon/Trump/etc events that were supposed to prompt mass exoduses. That could be…

I mean I kept my twitter account, I just don't use it nearly as much. When he killed the API it killed the only way I could use twitter and stay sane (tweetbot). Now I can go days without opening twitter dot com. Mostly only visiting it through links referencing specific tweets. So follower/following count might not mean much. I'm still following everyone I followed it's just that if they post I'm not actually seeing it.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#434

Post by ascendantlogic »

chipgap98 wrote: post #379
Cardinal7167 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.

I don't think Facebook really belongs in this conversation. As much as the VR stuff is silly their core business is still doing very well

A lot of "legacy" companies had businesses that were doing very well but missed the boat one or more times as new things arrived. Microsoft is a good example. Windows and Office was absolutely, positively printing money. They whiffed on mobile so hard it was comical. Going back further in time, IBM got mauled in the PC business over time, even though mainframes and PCs were keeping the lights on for decades.

I disagree with the assertion that in 5 years these companies may be heavily disrupted but these darlings that preyed on the fact the incumbents were ossified, large and slow are now themselves ossified, large and slow. The cycle continues on.

In the particular case of Twitter they're being actively driven into the ground by a guy who seems determined to wake up each day and not go to bed until he's made some very poor decisions so who knows, maybe they will crash and burn quickly.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#435

Post by evo_9 »

Cardinal7167 wrote: post #141
jpmattia wrote: post #115

It wasn't like Twitter's business had a large technical barrier-to-entry. And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can. Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch! Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.

The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.

And patient Apple waiting it all out to see whose lunch to eat next.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#436

Post by sleepybrett »

LightBug1 wrote: post #149
rcarr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree with this. The majority don’t care about twitter, the only people who absolutely adore it are journalists and techies which is why it was such a big deal in the news and on forums and everyone in the real world just went about their business. The celebrities are only there for marketing and connecting with the journalists.

>>×The majority don’t care about twitter Exactly. Exactly. Good luck to Substack, though. I'm rooting for them in this scenario.

Substack has attracted so many shrill rightwing kooks (Greenwald being the canary in that particular coalmine) that when I see someone has a substack I roll my eyes.

So here's to them being a more pretentious rumble/truth/parler/etc...

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#437

Post by wolpoli »

andy_ppp wrote: post #356
emodendroket wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fear of investors and, to some extent, Google, is that LLMs will supplant traditional search and by the time enough people are catching on to affect metrics the momentum will be too great to stop. My experience with LLMs has not led me to believe that is all that likely but opinions differ there.

We need search to be able to fact check the LLMs, but this might become extremely difficult once all the content is written by them…

Just like how it is hard to fact-check Wikipedia now that it's used a reference. A thought came to me - perhaps it's Wikipedia that should be worried that it'll be supplanted by LLMs.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#438

Post by commoner »

Andrex wrote: post #387
jacquesm wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it doesn't. Because it essentially sets us up for a repeat. If Mastodon was 'just not the thing people were looking for' then at least it solves the problems that both Twitter and Substack have, which is that they are not federated. Better to fix Mastodon than to waste another decade on something that will ultimately blow up and with the way Substack has - in my head at least - been associated negatively with…

The fact Mastodon sites don't even load without JS is absurd, a huge not-talked-about barrier to entry (globally), and a betrayal of its "protocol-first" talking points. Until that changes Mastodon isn't trying to be a serious player.

Brutaldon is an alternative FOSS client for Mastodon that does not use JavaScript:

- Brutaldon: https://brutaldon.org

- Source: https://gitlab.com/brutaldon/brutaldon

Because Mastodon has an open API, you don't need to use the official Mastodon web client. Twitter upset a lot of users when it limited access to its API because many alternative Twitter clients were rendered useless.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#439

Post by 13years »

jononomo wrote: post #371
13years wrote: post #227

So, I gave it a try today. Was hopeful, because on Twitter all my posts go essentially into the void. However, Substack Notes seems to have no method for discovery. They add some random larger accounts to my feed. You can't search Notes to find people posting content in order to find others potentially interested in similar content. So, unless you already have a large following, seems like posting into another void.…

Perhaps they will have improved the product in a few months. I'm sure they're collecting a lot of feedback.

I'm just amazed that no social media has really attempted to put what you view in mostly the control of users.

I put forward this suggestion to Twitter, I doubt they will use it, but it is currently ranked 4th by up votes.

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/1363

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#440

Post by therouwboat »

leobg wrote: post #211
ctvo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it makes you feel better that Elon Musk (or anyone else) failed at something, you may want to re-evaluate your life's loss function. Unfortunately I haven't reached that level of enlightenment yet. I root for Elon to fail in the same ways I root for Donald Trump to fail. He's destructive, self-serving, thinks he's above the law, and hasn't faced real consequences for his actions. I'm rooting for him to fail beca…

Sure. If I had never heard of Elon, and suddenly saw his name everywhere, and bros who cheer and justify him and feel like they’re the chosen people… and Tesla this and Twitter that... I'd be turned off as well, call him a nuisance, and steer clear of anything that has to do with him. And yeah, maybe I’d even try to level the scales, so to speak, by publicly speaking against him simply because I couldn’t bear the hyp…

Its not that. I want elon to fail, because he tried to ruin that cave divers life by claiming that he had a childbride in thailand. I want elon to fail, because he gives voice to Russian war criminals, because he is a union buster, because he fired most of the twitter employees and made the rest work long days.
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