Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat.

Moderation and content quality.

You know the reason why people prefer reading the New York Times instead of checkout-counter tabloids? The reason why people like buying from Amazon instead of Ebay? I mean, Ebay usually has better prices. Why would anyone buy from a store just because it's able to (or at least claims to be able to) filter bad products and keep off scammers?

That's Mastadon's advantage. The userbase isn't crap. Twitter, so far, has shown no indication that its userbase is ever going to be anything except crap. I don't think it's possible for Twitter to even start fixing that problem. Moderation doesn't scale.

If you're on social media not just to connect to friends - if you're on social media because you want to actually consume cultural content or interact with new communities, then this is like comparing Youtube and Netflix. 90% of everything on Twitter is garbage, and it's suddenly your responsibility as user to sort through all of it?

People want a platform that just works. They don't want to have to download custom block lists off of Github, or turn off DMs whenever anybody gets mad at them. They don't want to have to curate their own timeline. They want somebody else to do it for them, and Twitter can't do that.

> Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access?

Probably? Twitter has policies about pornography - they're inconsistently applied, but they're there. You could make a dedicated Mastadon instance that allows whatever. You can also choose not to have porn show up when you search across an instance because, again, Twitter can't moderate and Mastadon can.

I would feel a lot more comfortable allowing a kid to sign up for a Mastadon instance than Twitter.

> Moderation and content quality.

Those are pretty much guaranteed to go down the more people would use the service.

If you want to attract a lot of people, you will have to accept a lot of people, wether you consider their content crap or not.

Mastadon instances are designed not to become large.

The platform is still in its infancy, but it's intended that people can migrate around the same way that you might move to a new neighborhood. And this is the feature that Twitter just fundamentally can't copy.

When you're talking about popularity, you have to distinguish between Mastadon as a platform/protocol and each individual instance.

I am (increasingly becoming) convinced that moderation does not scale - you can either have a single large community with no moderation, or you can have a small community with good moderation. This is what's clever about Mastadon. Moderation on Mastadon doesn't need to scale, because instances are fragmented.

Twitter will never be able to compete with that unless they split apart their service, which they will (probably) never do.

Maybe a little harsh on youtube. Not entirely garbage. Lot's of good content actually, you just have to tune out the noise to find them.

That's fair, but also kind of my point.

There's a lot of good content on Twitter too. You just have to deal with nazis to get at it. And a lot of good deals on Ebay as long as you don't mind being careful about scammers.

The question is, do users overall want to have to filter out all of this stuff on their own, especially if filtering means fighting with the platform that they're on? Youtube is a great example of this - tons of great content, but you have to put up with the recommendation engine. You either get horrible recommendations, or you constantly train the platform like a cat.

Getting Youtube to give quality recommendations on the homepage is work.

  >> You know the reason why people prefer reading 
  >> the New York Times instead of checkout-counter
  >> tabloids?

I'm not actually sure that's true. Upon a cursory check, People Magazine has a slightly greater circulation than NYT. Heck, a non-trivial number people on YouTube have greater circulation than NYT or mainstream TV News channels and shows, while filming their stuff in the living room of their apartment.

McDonalds serves more customers than a five star restaurant, but that doesn't mean the restaurant is a bad investment or won't be able to turn a profit.

You're talking about different target audiences. The question isn't whether or not Mastadon completely kills Twitter and literally everyone moves over - it's whether there's a compelling reason for a significant number of people to switch over. Is it viable to for Mastadon to become a Twitter alternative with a broad level of adoption?

What people bring up over and over on every one of these articles is, "Oh, the project is doomed because why would any normal person switch over? You're only ever going to have the idealistic tech people on it, and it'll die as soon as they lose interest."

But it turns out that quality has a wide mainstream appeal, and it is a valid strategy to compete with other businesses purely on the basis of "our content is better." If Mastadon grows to the point where it has a similarly sized (albeit slightly smaller) userbase than Twitter and then stalls out, I don't any of what I said above would be invalidated. ;) Quite the opposite.

Sure, but you did not narrow down the audience. People as a whole, it would seem, slightly prefer checkout counter magazines as opposed to NYT. Likewise, I'm not sure bite-sized bullshit regurgitation services like Twitter/Mastodon are even useful in the first place, let alone benefit from refined moderation.

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