One of the things that I think is sad about the decimation of Twitter eng | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that I think is sad about the decimation of Twitter eng

mastodon.social

12 pointsdredmorbius9 comments

I always understood decimation as 90% less, not 10% less

The term comes from a particularly extreme form of Roman military discipline where a military unit (usually a cohort) was split into groups of ten; one person in each group was then killed by the others. It was very, very rare. But, yeah, the literal meaning is to lose 10% (though that's not how it's used in modern English, in practice).

Awesome content. Twitter looks simple on the surface but there are deep technical solutions there.

Is there some alternate Mastodon UI that would be better? You have to expand the toots one by one and it also jumps around. Something like thread reader for Mastodon?

Abuse, misuse, and UI/UX misdesign of CWs is one of my own long-standing gripes about Mastodon.

I've written a few epic gripes about this, though ... can't find them at the moment.

(Mastodon's search capabilities, or lack thereof, is another long-standing gripe.)

That said, I hadn't realised just how bad Dan's thread was to read from outside Mastodon until after revisiting it from HN. Sorry!

More HN commentary on the post of the Twitter version of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33619874

Oh great! Now people are posting 'toots' as news stories, as well as tweets.

Why don't we just go the whole hog and embed Twatter inside an iframe on HN and discuss our favourite Tweets entirely via emojis?

I mean, it's essentially a blogpost, with a blogging platform that has particularly poor UX (Mastodon actually does allow longer-form posts, but mastodon.social, the instance being used here, doesn't support them). If something's of interest but poorly formatted, posting it here doesn't seem that unreasonable?

Point taken. I didn't actually follow the link. Just saw the domain and, in my mind 'Mastodon = Twitter-Lite'.

  >If something's of interest but poorly formatted, posting it here doesn't seem that unreasonable?

No offence meant. It's just one of my bug-bears at the minute that practically every news site on the planet now [even supposedly professional outfits like the BBC and Reuters] seems to have abandoned any pretence at primary research in favour of endlessly quoting what people tweeted... often with a screengrab of the tweet and then the content of the tweet written out underneath.

As someone who has nothing to do with Twitter [or FB or Mastodon for that matter] I just find it both extremey irritating and equally as alarming that it seems to be becoming the de facto place where journalist go to research a story.

Hence why I tend to voer-react when I see the same tendency creeping in on HN, which I used to think of as a 'place where I can go to read interesting science and technology articles that people have come across'. If I wanted to know what someone tweeted, I'd go directly to Twitter. I can really do without the entire newsgathering section of the internet turning into a Twitter mirror site.

This _is_ a technology article, in an annoying format. (FWIW I would prefer that people didn't do it this way, but we are where we are)

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