I'm surprised no one seems to have commented on the lack of usernames, I think the lack of usernames may hinder adoption since it's much harder to follow someone just from seeing a tweet, err note, displayed. With Substack Notes you'll need to know the user's id, or search by their non-unique name.
Substack Notes Launched
491–500 of 789 posts
Re: Substack Notes Launched
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
But is twitter really dying? The fields I watch (AI, software engineering, writers), all thought leaders are still there, still posting regularly.
My post will sound like a stupid gotcha but… what’s a thought leader, how do you measure them? Is it possible that the twitter crew skews more toward talking than doing?
> skews more toward talking than doing
Same goes for any sufficiently large population, but the outliers worth following still seem to be there too.
Re: Substack Notes Launched
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm loving Mastodon myself (@pxtl@mastodon.social) but I worry that the UI stumbling blocks caused by the multi-server system and the far-poorer discoverability than what we're used to from Twitter will keep it from growing well -- twitter's algorithmic feed and relevant-to-the-user trending topics and features like that help make twitter feel lively even for a new user even with just a handful of follows. I don't kn…
> that help make twitter feel lively But also that help make twitter feel like a constant outrage factory that impacts negatively on a lot of people's mental health. I got off of twitter a year ago (deleted my account after 14 years,even) and I'm really appreciating mastodon's less addictive, less "lively"ness.
Imho it was the quote tweets that were the big problem, those were mostly for directing lynch mobs.
I just find the "follows of follows" or "include some frequently-favorited users" that twitter does for the algorithmic view is useful for expanding and finding more interesting content.
Re: Substack Notes Launched
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just resigned from Google. There’s no future with current leadership. I was a at high level (6), with an incredibly broad scope of responsibility, making an absurd amount of money. But life is too short to spend my days propping up a dying monopoly when there’s bigger game to chase. It’s also institutionally arrogant, they really think they are the best, Jeff Dean and Urs are Gods, and no other company can do what…
Hey, myself and an ex-microsoft dev (like 2007-2008, not recent), with some VP experience have teamed up. We're working on memory solutions for AI, as well as creating better agents, workflows, etc... In the early days it'll mostly be a GUI over langchain/autogpt/babyAGI, eventually it might morph to creating our own in-house brain-like database, something beyond vectors (or built on top of them w/ a better ranking/i…
Sounds like fun. Do you have a specific end product in mind or are you just in the experimentation stage?
Re: Substack Notes Launched
#495It 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.
In what sense do you think Twitter‘s business doesn’t have a large technical barrier to entry? Perhaps having a low-volume version makes it a lot easier and skipping all the ads stuff reduces the work.
Many many senses. First, it's already been built. Now people now how to build it. In fact, many of the people that actually built it have left the company and could presumably help to build it again.
Second, the toolchain has matured in absolutely huge ways. AWS exists. Twitter had to build their own cloud to meet scaling needs. Languages have matured or been purpose-written to enable building/scaling these types of systems. A huge portion of the N+1s and hidden footguns have been cleaned out of the thousands and thousands of open source libraries that you can glue together to get the system up and running.
Third, Silicon Valley engineers as a whole have spent the last decade-plus building all sorts of Twitter-adjacent Web 2.0 projects, so there's an incredibly deep pool of people that have extremely relevant experience, even if they never stepped foot inside the Twitter building.
Fourth, Twitter (and companies very similar) have been publishing literal engineering designs and post-mortems for public consumption on their engineering blogs. Even if you have no idea what HTML is, your path to self-education and building your own Twitter clone has never been shorter or better paved. They've even published huge chunks of their own work as open source projects.
And on and on and on and on. And here's the thing about growing to Twitter-scale: it doesn't happen all at once. You can build the low-volume version and just follow approximately the same technical scaling path that Twitter itself followed, except you'll be able to skip a whole bunch of mistakes.
Re: Substack Notes Launched
#496This is a case where an algorithmic feed would make this into a truly amazing product. I don't want email spam from every follower, but do want to see the best snippets on substack. Super easy to create a for you page, given text content: Step 1: embed every article I ever read, or note I liked/comment/share and stuff it in a DB. Step 2: every time a new note is posted (by anyone anywhere), embed it, search the db fo…
> This is a case where an algorithmic feed would make this into a truly amazing product.
how many platforms need to be ruined by an algorithmic feed before people understand that its a terrible idea?
Re: Substack Notes Launched
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
[citation needed]
Re: Substack Notes Launched
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Free speech” is a term that’s been completely abused and used in bad faith.
Is your assertion that I'm using it in bad faith?
No, but rather that Musk has been using it in bad faith (I’m assuming “I support free speech” was meant to qualify the criticism of Twitter under Musk’s leadership).
Re: Substack Notes Launched
#499Earlier 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.
But is twitter really dying? The fields I watch (AI, software engineering, writers), all thought leaders are still there, still posting regularly.
Maybe their audiences are smaller. People that depend on their large reach on Twitter are going to be much slower to move on than those without audiences.
Re: Substack Notes Launched
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not on Mastodon. So that works? Actually, this site is usually the best, and Facebook (the latter might reflect my audience). Reddit subs tend to censor any attempt at self-promotion, which you can't blame them for, I guess. And StackExchange is the absolute worst. The level of asshole-ness there has to be seen to be believed.
Is it really asshole-ness? YC/Reddit/SE being good/bad/worse for self-promotion seems to be 100% in line with the intended use of these sites.
I'm hardly the first person to single out SE / SO for trashing.