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Comment by zelly | Hacker News Reader

Reddit was always cringe.

The best internet communities are ones that don't need to be a "company".

HN is a great example. HN is run by a rich guy as a hobby. There will never be ads, there will never be a board of directors, the UI will basically never change, there will never be consultants hired to figure out how to make money off of us posting. Yeah you probably could put ads on HN or data mine and make some money, but it won't be enough money for Paul Graham to get out of bed for.

Twitter is also like this. Jack makes his real money from Square. He can run Twitter like his hobby. That's what makes it so great.

View on HN

Twitter is a dumpster fire of companies self-promotion and angry people yelling at each other.

Don't kid yourself that it's anyone's hobby. If it were, they wouldn't constantly ask VCs for money, wouldn't run ads, and wouldn't have quarterly earnings calls about how they can grow revenue.

Twitter is just a less successful Facebook.

Twitter's actually worse I think, there's almost literally nothing nuanced you can write in 140 characters. The very nature of microblogging reduces discourse to "I'm right, you're wrong, shut up about it".

I don't think the world would be worse off if Twitter or even the concept of microblogging had never taken off.

Yeah, and it makes me kind of sad. I think the idea of microblogging is really cool, and with the right user base it could be really awesome.

But, with a general audience of hundreds of millions of users, it does devolve into smug, uninteresting arguments very quickly.

I was with you on the HN part...but then you compared it to Twitter. HN is full of mostly educated, inspired, helpful people. Twitter is a dumpster fire full of people spreading lies and rumors, arguing, and trying to get each other fired. In what world are the two in any single way alike?

> Reddit was always cringe.

Just out of curiosity, when did you first come across Reddit? Prior to the Digg exodus 10 years ago it was a super solid community, and if my memory serves correct, it didn't really start going downhill until somewhere between 2012 and 2014.

Twitter is nothing like that. It's a publicly-traded company with thousands of employees, covered in ads, and Jack Dorsey owns something like 2%.

Yeah and Steve Jobs owned even less of Apple. There's a difference between ownership and leadership. Twitter would be a very different place without Jack. It would turn into Facebook or TikTok.

Twitter is like a BDFL hobby project. I obviously don't mean that literally and am aware it's a publicly traded corporation. Twitter is a hobby project in the way that Oculus is a hobby project of Zuckerberg, even though Zuckerberg is the biggest shareholder of Facebook. It's a matter of where the leader made his money--Zuckerberg made his money from selling ads on FB (not VR), Jack made his money from selling a financial product (not social media).

There are already ads on HN. They just happen to be tasteful and well targeted.

Are you referring to the Work at A Startup posts? I agree that it's perhaps one of the best cases of aligned incentives I've seen. How do you get a group of high competency engineers to congregate in the same place so you can hire them? Create a forum with content uniquely of interest to high competency engineers (who consequently engage with and enjoy the content, creating more content, causing more engineers to join).

> Are you referring to the Work at A Startup posts?

Yes. it's brilliant and highly tasteful IMHO. I haven't responded to any of those myself, but their frequency is low enough and interesting enough that they don't bother me. I'm glad the site gets support to cover costs.

Twitter... great? In what way?

Twitter is a modern-day gladiator arena, where all the spectators are also actually inside the arena.

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