The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.
They're the reason I joined Twitter originally. The community is what I care about, not the social media platform.
It's down to posters vs reply guys vs rubberneckers. If those 1.2M active users are posters and higher quality reply guys, great.
Same goes for any sufficiently large population, but the outliers worth following still seem to be there too.
It serves the daily/hourly whims and mood swings of a single person who has proven to be petty, vindictive (to his employees), and devoid of integrity.
That lack of stability in my opinion accumulates.
Sooner or later it will balance out the momentum.
The "narrative" was right. There are actual outages now unlike earlier. It's not like twitter engineers were holding up the servers to the light for there to be outages the moment they're gone. Systems run on their own just fine, until something does go wrong. And if there's nobody there to fix it, something usually small blows up. Enough of these and users start to notice degraded performance and outages.
I think it’s due to more aggressive VPN blocking, but I’m not sure about it.
Elon seems to have given up; he's just doing jokes now like changing his name to Harry Ballz and replying to fake news from the fake news accounts he unbanned.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-perpetuati...
I use Twitter once a day and not every day.
I don’t have a monitoring service so this is the best citation I can offer.
In the last month I have experienced more issues than in the last four or five years if similar use.
The "Following" tab is showing only a fraction of your timeline tweets. Go to the "For You" tab and see an endless firehose of unrelated stuff together with some of the tweets of people you were following and were supposed to show up on the "For You" tab but didn't.
Not to mention tweets in private circles being shown in the "For you" tab
"twitter is working fine" is a bad take. It looks like it is working fine if you look at it for 30s, that's it.
It definitely feels less active and the conversation largely dominated by small accounts that are paying the $8.
By the time there is a dent, it's too late.
Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.
Overpaying, creating a mass exodus, destabilizing the platform, and losing tons of advertisers is "successful?"
Twitter on the other hand was bought with a management layer that could fairly be characterised as the opposite of true believers in whatever Elon is selling. Hence the implosion.
It's concerning that you're not.
2) All sources are cited so they can be easily verified by the reader.
I was very happy with Google but recently on my iPhone the Google website started nagging me to log in every time I do a search. This is a poor experience, add to that the ad results that have gotten harder and harder over time to distinguish from real results.
And... I don't recall this "everyone" that you are citing. Chrome launched when Google had a ton of good will.
OpenAI has $100bn+ from Microsoft, and millions of paying subscribers.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/08/microsofts-complex-bet-on-op...
"Microsoft’s $13 billion bet on OpenAI carries huge potential along with plenty of uncertainty"
Somehow Microsoft found a way to make it worse?
I think that they are simply ok with making my life worse if it makes their life better at all.
It immediately took over my whole screen, in a completely weird way that no native Mac app ever did before (in my experience, though I don't use that many Mac apps).
I assume it has more telemetry than Chrome... anyone checked?
Then it showed me so much junk and crappy news on new page, it was pure propaganda.
That was the end of it. I know it’s possible to configure all those things, but the starting experience was soo bad I got away quickly.
Most of the time, my search queries are just to find websites. Like I'll search for "[movie] rotten tomatoes" or "[book] wiki".
I've found duckduckgo to be a good enough replacement for Google for such queries.
"You should look up global search volumes and Yahoo's share of it. There’s no dent" was once a valid statement. Same for Altavista, MySpace, etc. You can go from on top to the bottom very fast in this realm.
edit: typo
Once Google can’t pay-to-play in Safari and iOS they are in very deep shit. This is the classic thing with monopolies: eventually the “innovation” is just leveraging market power to deepen the moat by burning cash.
This is what happens when the CFO runs the damn company. Sundar has no vision, at all, and Ruth’s vision is the same boring Wall Street play book that put a hundred tech companies in the ground.
Yahoo used to pay for that, and to package the Yahoo Toolbar pretty much everywhere. I remember when it used to try to install itself with MySQL. I'm sure it helps, for a while, until it suddenly doesn't.
Fuji, who was also big in the chemical film business, came out just fine.
Replace "Kodak" with "Google" and that's the exact impression I get from friends who work there
It’s also institutionally arrogant, they really think they are the best, Jeff Dean and Urs are Gods, and no other company can do what Google does. OpenAI just destroyed that myth, yet on the inside they haven’t woken up to the change.
2. For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts
3. All of this will eventually change
There is no more major growth for Google, which is all that matters to Wall Street.
It will go down slowly, but it will go down.
There are tons of free custom UIs to chatGPT by now, all vastly superior to OpenAI’s. No captchas or login screens, just paste your API token once and it gets stored in local storage.
reality is pretty different, fb business is doing great despite all their missteps
Twitter has suffered financially but I’ve seen little evidence that they’ve lost substantial numbers of users — Twitter posts are still in news articles and sites like HN as if it’s still serving it’s original purpose despite the noise.
I disagree with the assertion that in 5 years these companies may be heavily disrupted but these darlings that preyed on the fact the incumbents were ossified, large and slow are now themselves ossified, large and slow. The cycle continues on.
In the particular case of Twitter they're being actively driven into the ground by a guy who seems determined to wake up each day and not go to bed until he's made some very poor decisions so who knows, maybe they will crash and burn quickly.
And it does neatly summarize what I meant about the term “free speech” being abused: “ For them, free speech is when they can say what they want, and when you can say what they want.”
This is what makes Mastadon interesting. I'm not using it, but a lot of people I pay attention to are.
There was tons of /kick and /ban there too...
How do you get around privacy concerns for using the big AI models? Run your own. How do you get around the compute requirements for training? Push to the leaf nodes. How do you solve for personalizing AIs? Have personal AI models running locally... And wouldn't it be nice if there was some dedicated hardware those AI models could inhabit...