Can Mastodon be a reasonable Twitter substitute for journalists? | Hacker News Reader

Can Mastodon be a reasonable Twitter substitute for journalists?

niemanlab.org

30 pointsmooreds14 comments

I joined one of the shards of Mastodon in 2018 or so and it's amazing to me how little it has evolved even since then. Not a knock on the developers who maintain it, but something is inherently broken in how it functions. It is not a consumer product and will not get adoption. Way too much friction that will be too alienating to journalist-types.

I also get irked by quotes like this from the article:

> All the chaos has scared away advertisers and users, who are leaving [Twitter] in droves. [...] On November 12, Mastodon founder Eugen Gagron posted that “[t]here are 1M more people using #Mastodon today than there were on October 27.”

Unless this writer has evidence that these 1M people are deactivating their Twitter accounts, this is meaningless. Signups to a new platform do not equal to those signups "leaving" the other one. The point the writer is making for advertisers is more reasonable, but they too have likely just paused campaigns for the time being and could scurry back as soon as traffic warrants it.

If your instance hasn't yet updated to v.4, that is a major step forward and addresses a number of concerns (and adds a few).

Notably: status edits (you can edit a toot after it's been published) and the ability to open all CW'd toots when viewed as an unauthenticated user (e.g., general public). Latter isn't fully what I'd prefer to see, but it's a big step forward. Following hashtags would be a third.

There's more, I'm still discovering myself and have yet to read the changelog.

i think so. a very popular infosec account just posted that they’re now getting more engagement on mastodon than twitter.

over the past week i’ve also noticed a number of journalists and media outlets are now testing the mastodon waters as well.

i think the media growth will be similar to twitter a few years ago—trial and error to figure out what does and doesn’t work.

Oh no journalists might have to go out into the world and do journalism again!

Maybe journalism doesn’t need to be “getting the scoop” so you can post the same article as every other organization, just with marginally different numbers of minutes between the event happening and an article being generated

Yes, very much. It is designed for sub-cultures.

Probably not if journalists are trying to get "the pulse" or get in on a scoop. It can work as nice in-group comms system.

I can't answer that but I know we can measure it by when those threatening to leave Twitter actually do.

No, it’s too difficult to discover content outside the instance boundaries.

No one I know is on it, so no. Most journalists go to Reddit anyway.

What? News on reddit? Reddit isn't even close to twitter in terms of speed, I often see posts three, four or even 6 hours after they were posted.

This is simply unusable for fast-paced scoops, reactions and reports that made Twitter what it is today.

Breaking news is only one subject matter of journalism. Twitter is definitely better for live events, but some of this content is filtering over to reddit, especially if you look at the comments. For news that is not nearly as time sensitive, reddit has a much deeper trove of content.

> But Twitter is in crisis. Elon Musk bought it, fired a huge portion of the staff, changed the rules so many times that I’m not even sure what the rules are anymore, and has warned that the company will likely have to file for bankruptcy soon.

Crisis? This assessment seems like FUD vs rationality. Twitter was on the verge of mass layoffs regardless if Elon bought it. In 2021, Twitter's annual net loss amounted to $221 million, a significant decrease from the previous year of -$1.4 billion.

I don't question the growing uncertainty of quality, but to think Twitter is in crisis seems more like media bias pushing a narrative.

I thought this at first but now I’m not sure. My understanding is they have gotten rid of ~70% of the workers (7500 down to 2700 [1]). Speaking generally, IMO 20% would have perhaps been a fitting haircut after a couple years of excessive hiring that did not lead to growth. 70% is a serious reduction of manpower and it is fair to wonder how they can maintain critical functions of a global network and also implement the whimsies of a billionaire.

On that end, Twitter was a growth stock with no dividends. IIRC last year they announced a 4B buyback program, 2B of it this year. My assessment was it was floundering in that it was failing to grow KPIs and ad rev, not because of profit/loss. But I am not a stock market expert, so maybe someone else has a better analysis.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-recruits-en...

No.

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