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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

#61
post #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 webs…

Not everyone is a wanna be influencer who wants to reach a billion people. If that’s the case private Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and Telegram groups wouldn’t be as popular as they are.

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

#62
NEVER AGAIN will I be a sharecropper on someone's land. I'm sick of all these oligarchs who promise the world to you and then they tell you what to think, how to behave and what you can say. Eventually they will take it away from you without an even a recourse.

Just join Mastodon. Start by using someone else's instance [1] and then learn how to run your own. It's not hard.

[1] https://instances.social/

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

#63
post #57
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…

There are many counter precedents. The most prominent in my mind is Zoom: exactly like all the others with only slight differences, zero-to-100% market share in 3 years.

There’s an important difference between competing on features and competing on “x but not x”. Zoom (which is over a decade old) is video conferencing software, it’s not “webex but not webex”. Zoom stands alone, it competes on quality of service. Starting a “Twitter alternative” is not the same as building a short-form social media service (even if it does eventually become a Twitter alternative).

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

#64

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#65
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation

And yet some Reddit mods manage subs with 10s of thousands for… free.

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

#66
post #57
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…

There are many counter precedents. The most prominent in my mind is Zoom: exactly like all the others with only slight differences, zero-to-100% market share in 3 years.

I think you underestimate MS Teams marketshare. If I'm not mistaken, I've read somewhere Zoom is loosing ground with each Q to competitors. But MS dominates now, for sure. Also worth pointing out, almost none of these online conferencing products were "alternatives to X". They all had their own unique propositions. Superior video quality and streaming, collaboration tools etc. Those who build "alternatives" - fail.

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

#67
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is the key perceptive question!

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

#68
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…

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.

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

#69
post #46

> Post will be a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; > Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them. If a licensed practicing doctor recommends against getting the covid vaccine, for reasons, is he an expert or an anti-vax extremist?

This is the hard problem in a nutshell and one thing that no-one who proposes "an alternative Twitter" seems to get.

Extreme free speech? Racism? Maybe. Racial hatred? No, I'm a bit uncomfortable now. Someone questioning the mainstream? Seems harmless; because lizards are taking over the world! No, you are mad but the person who thinks that Soros is taking over the world is welcoime because that sounds less mad.

Good luck.

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

#70
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!

The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters in the people I followed, but the overall breadth was large.

In theory something like the fediverse provides this as well, but I'm not sold.

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