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Comment by throwaway0x7E6 | Hacker News Reader

>predictions

0. a twitter clone backed by a few billion VC dollars will emerge with the promise to continue the practices described in the twitter files, and the refugees will flock to the warm and familiar embrace

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Eh, I'm starting to suspect maybe nothing will replace Twitter. Or that nothing consistent will anyway.

We've got Mastodon, and it's doing a bit better. We had Hive, which did okay til the security issues and shut down. Cohost and Post kinda... exist I suppose? And there are a few more I can't remember.

I've got an account on each one, and about 1/10th of those I follow exist across all of them combined. Maybe most people just don't care about a Twitter replacement and are fine without one.

I always try to steer people away from Post because one of their founders thinks prejudice based on net worth is up there with racism and homophobia.

I'm an unashamed Mastodon advocate.

Firstly, a significant fraction of the most interesting accounts I follow on Twitter have moved to Mastodon.

Secondly, Mastodon feels incredibly fresher than Twitter, which has completely ossified.

Thirdly, I know this sounds slightly contradictory, but it really is quite a lot like Twitter, in terms of recreating the good aspects of Twitter.

what does "fresher" mean to you?

New shiny!

Yes this. I've been on Twitter for decade, it's nice to be somewhere different.

I agree people won't leave because of Mush, but here are a few ways things could go south for Twitter in the next year or so.

* Advertisers leave to protect their brands

* Major multi day outages

* Data corruption

* Security breaches

* Outlandish payment schemes for posts or reach

* Company is broken up and sold off in chunks to pay down the financing debt

Yeah, Twitter's situation is a risky one to say the least. Definitely not denying that it could come crashing down due to poor management decisions.

But I do question whether people will move towards any particular alternative, or whether they might even stick with other services they use instead. None of these replacements seem to quite have the pull necessary to attract most of the existing Twitter userbase, and none seem to be taking over in the same way Reddit beat Digg or Facebook beat Myspace. Perhaps the market for a Twitter esque microblogging service might decline as people spend more time on Discord/Reddit/YouTube/TikTok/whatever instead?

Hmm, I guess the only way to know for sure is to wait and see what happens when Twitter comes crashing down.

I deleted my mostly unused accounts (one of them even dating back to 2007) when the post advocating who to vote for was published. Of course, not being a heavy user made it easy to do. There are so many different ways people use Twitter, I suspect it will persist. Digg and MySpace (and maybe LiveJournal and del.icio.us) are perfect examples of a social network dying, but Twitter is orders of magnitude bigger than those were. I think Reddit and FB got a big help from the advent of mobile as it brought boatloads of new users online. That pool of new users doesn't exist in 2022.

That timeframe might be a bit optimistic. He's also stopped paying rent and severance, apparently.

Mr. Musk also continues to cut staff and leaders, including Nelson Abramson, Twitter’s global head of infrastructure, and Alan Rosa, the global information technology head and vice president of information security, according to four people familiar with the moves.

I remember the fail whale. I suspect we’ll see it again soon. Twitter stability used to be a joke, then it evolved into something fundamentally impressive. There was a major infrastructure change brought about by some key hires iirc. I’ve also heard that Twitter would get your tweet to all your followers in 5 seconds. That will be hard to measure externally, but I’ll bet it’s one of the first things to slip.

The year of the decentralized social network is right around the corner, just past the year of the Linux desktop

Do we need social media? Can this just be the age of "maybe we should all stop mindlessly scrolling through crap we dont care about"

But we do care about it, that's why we're all scrolling through it.

I think there is a difference between actually caring (when you reflect on your life, it is important to you) and having a rush of dopamine that makes you feel the need to check these apps and continue scrolling.

Who gets to define 'actually caring'?

It's a drug that younger generations have taken their entire life. It's not going away.

You say that, but its my parents who are the ones still clinging to social media out of the rest of my immediate family.

Thsts entirely anecdotal of course, but I think phrasing it as an issue of the newer generstions doesnt encapsulate the whole problemspace.

If anything id say those who didnt grow up with tech is even more susceptable to dark patterns.

Do we need the internet?

Do we need electricity? ...

Do we need writing? (Plato, 600BC)

Do we need drinking cups/glasses? (Diogenes, ca. 350BC)

(btw, anigbrowl, in case you haven't already seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942280 )

I had missed it! Thanks so much for following up with that.

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