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Comment by raytube | Hacker News Reader

Why can't it get enough reach?

What if each news outlet ran their own server? Or would this feel like bondage with people wishing for multiple personas/autonomy?

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I think GP's comment about reach runs in the other direction:

If someone tweets about an issue, it is trivially discovered globally and readily embedded on news sites with arbitrary volumes of traffic (or shown on TV).

Is the same true for toots?

Bah I wish journalists would stop using twitter.

They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.

If that happens, I mute and move on. As a result I only see the work of proper journos on my TL, not people writing 500 word hot takes on some Netflix show for Buzzfeed.

Mute? They copy paste into printed newspaper.

> Why can't it get enough reach?

> What if each news outlet ran their own server?

I think you answered your own question.

Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach.

Most companies don’t run their own email servers, either.

But they could. You can't run your own twitter instance and communicate with other Twitter users.

Nobody uses email to discover new email addresses, outreach is direct. Discoverability is a massive part of social media platforms and is hindered by the isolated pod structure that Mastodon supports

Discoverability and onboarding and authentication is hard.

I remember the fluffy days of Facebook, where almost in an instant there was a wildfire of 'you might know' suggestions, from harvested addressbooks and cross referencing.

I found, and find discoverability hard on Twitter. My follow list rarely gets bumped and I am pretty clueless as to who and what is in it. I have to make an effort to grow the list.

Tweet reach may be massaged by favs, comments and retweets. Not totally sure how this is different in Mastodon.

Are we talking timeline/search promotion?

I remember email round robins pre Facebook and you did add people if you recognised them.

Directory services just got pulled as they were harvested by spammers. Not that I think this would help. You need some nudging.

If I read an article and the author had an easy lookupable and addable feed, I might note it.

>Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach.

The "reach" in gp's context is "audience reach". A measure of "audience size" in a broadcast type of medium. It doesn't mean reach in a technical sense like "reachable ip address or DNS resolution".

Email is more point-to-point and 1-to-1 rather than 1-to-many. Yes, the concept of "mailing lists" could arguably be described as "broadcast" but it requires explicit subscriptions and is not the same "reach" as Twitter tweets acting as global "billboards".

E.g. this HN site often has user-submitted Twitter tweets on the front page. In contrast, it's very rare to have a mailing list mirror post to HN. The reach is not the same. (E.g. last week, the thread on front page about "Adobe removing Pantone colors" was referencing a Twitter post.)

Another example related to HN... the creator of this site, Paul Graham, created a Twitter account in 2010 (https://twitter.com/paulg). It has 1.5 million followers. Clearly, the Twitter platform gives him exposure that his existing email address (and his web blog at http://www.paulgraham.com, and this HN site ycombinator.com) -- does not.

Can we stop pretending that email is a great example of decentralized networks? Modern email is extremely centralized with most people on either Gmail, Apple, or Outlook. No one rolls their own server.

Email on the other hand is a great example of how decentralized things become centralized over time due to the network effect. There's even a weak network effect with email and it still happened.

This is the same flawed logic that claims that Bitcoin is really centralized. You are looking at the wrong properties when you call email centralized. With email, as with Bitcoin, you can participate in the network and roll your own if you so wish, and no one can prevent you from transacting. That doesn't mean most should roll their own, but the fact that it's possible is a vast and fundamental difference. I really don't think most people understand what decentralized means. We are talking about the protocol, not the implemented topology.

Same as democracy in the US. Even if for the most part policy is set by centralized interests, just having the populace believe that it's a democracy and they have the agency to change things makes the system function in a fundamentally different way. The ruling class can't just cart blanche do whatever they want like in China, even if they are the ones holding most of the levers.

> This is the same flawed logic that claims that Bitcoin is really centralized.

Except it isn't because centralization-decentralization is not a binary discrete variable but a continuous one. There's a reason the trilemma exists and you score on each axis. No coin is at any extreme.

There’s probably a good test for competing products that one could apply. Between my daughter, me, my mother, and my grandmother, how many of us can or will want to switch to the competing product? If it’s too hard for at least two generations, you’re probably not going to meet success because you’ve already lost a large chunk of your potential user base before we even begin discussing if the users want your service in the first place.

That's an unfair comparison though. What about someone that never used either of them ? Like someone that just hit 13 (or whatever the minimum legal age is). (See also : TikTok.)

You could also probably ask how many of those people used Twitter to begin with? In my own experience, most of my friends and family don't use Twitter at all, especially if they don't have a business or creative hobby to promote online

News outlets all canned their comments sections - I see absolutely no reason why they'd want to bring back something even worse.

Did they? Alive and kicking in the UK.

The vast majority of US comment sections went to Disqus and then Facebook comments and then shuttered altogether.

Some smaller ones remain, but it's mostly gone.

And the ones that are left tend to be either filled with spam or content I'd describe as "YIKES".

If I own a media company the last thing I'm doing is investing in the IT and moderation infrastructure it takes to run a Mastodon instance.

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