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Comment by mirzap | Hacker News Reader

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 "alternative" narrative - twitter gets more user base and more likely is going to succeed in future iterations - while "alternatives" get stuck in the past.

How many failed startups tried to go against facebook, as "social networking alternative" as a rebellion to some bad facebook press, policies or scandals? How many of those succeeded? None.

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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.

Difference here is that we don't see people leaving at massive scale. Maybe it's to early. Anyway, I think chances are 50-50 twitter succeeds in re-launch. I wouldn't be surprised of any outcome. But I would be surprised to see something else explodes in popularity just because it's twitter alternative.

The issue is that if you wait until people start leaving it's too late. The bet here (and IMO it's a fair one) is that Twitter will continue to degrade as a service and eventually people will start leaving. If your alternative is up and running by then you've got a chance of capturing users.

Who says people aren't already leaving?

Twitter platform stats: https://botsentinel.com/stats/platform-stats

Reddit also existed at the time and was a fairly mature product. It wasn't Reddit coming in after Digg, it was Reddit and Digg slugging it out in the market and Reddit coming out on top when Digg cratered.

Reddit had a clear killer feature with user created and moderated subreddits though, which Digg lacked.

The current burst of activity is very much a "scramble for lifeboats" as people attempt to preserve a fraction of their social graph on Mastodon. But there won't be a big drop off in Twitter activity or relevance until Twitter goes full fail whale. Or there's a serious effort to kill the community somehow.

(posting "joinmastodon.com" on twitter now gets you the "not allowed to post that link error. I guess this is what Elon means by free speech)

That's because, up until a few weeks ago, joinmastodon.com was a spam domain. It's only recently been purchased and redirected to the real domain: joinmastodon.org

If you post the correct link which is joinmastodon.org there's no problem.

The phrasing "Twitter alternative" is my fault in setting the title for the thread-opening post here. The "Twitter alternative" phrasing should not be attributed to the founder of Post.

I get the impression that the founder, Noam Bardin, DOESN'T think he's building a Twitter alternative but rather, in the beta welcome page's words, "a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; converse freely; and have some fun. Many of today's ad-based platforms rely on capturing attention at any cost — sowing chaos in our society, amplifying the extremes, and muting the moderates. 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."

Twitter has never been quite like that. If the founder's vision succeeds, I might like Post very well indeed. In all such things, the proof is in the user experience as experienced by each user, but I think the goals sound good for Post.

I like the goals and intent behind it, that alone is worth it. Most comments here don’t even debate Noams welcome words. A platform that isn’t a wild west race to the bottom of ad revenues? Sign me up! Micro payments for valued content? Heck yeah!

Existing platforms that use micropayments just end up filled with content optimized for micropayments. Just like reddit is filled with content that is optimized for upvotes.

In tech - today's leaders will not be tomorrow's leaders. The tech graveyard is full of former high fliers.

How about the early days of Covid when Zoom came out of nowhere to dominate Video Communications? They were nowhere near the market leader.

Facebook (as you recall) was also not the market leader on social media when the VCs decided they were going to be the winner.

I am taking a wait and see approach to Twitter. I wish them the best, but history is not on their side.

> How people don't get it

well, for one, because you're wrong. I mean, it's not like a hard topic to research, a walk in any supermarket should be plenty evidence, even before reaching the cereals section.

if you want something more aking technological, you can stop by the mobile phone shelf.

and if you insist with software, the choice is so ample whole sites exists just to help people navigate https://alternativeto.net/software/3ds-max/?license=commerci...

Sorry, but what's this grocery-market proof you're alluding to?

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).

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.

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