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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham famously started to use Mastodon (but has not written anything there since last year). But the HN Status emergency “is HN down” channel is still only on Twitter. It used to be publicly readable at <https://twitter.com/HNStatus>. But now, if HN was to go down, only logged-in Twitter users would be able to see why.

View on HN

If HN is down, I'll just try again in a few hours, or maybe tomorrow. Maybe I'd start getting interested about what happened it was down for a week or so.

Would HN being down count as an emergency for anybody else?

“Emergency” is used here in the sense of “sudden or unexpected occurence”, i.e. “fallback”. Maybe “backup channel” would have been a more appropriate term.

Well, I read HN daily at breakfast so having it down feels annoying. But yeah, if it'down, I won't consider it an emergency.

> But now, if HN was to go down, only logged-in Twitter users would be able to see why.

There may be a post about it in /r/sysadmin

Well Reddit is hardly better. They have already started applying a login wall and app wall on mobile.

> Paul Graham famously started to use Mastodon

And he just as famously went crawling back to Twitter. He's too addicted to quit it.

so is Musk. even if he weren't addicted to the platform, per se, he is to the exalted admiration and social proof. once one has acquired all the money in the world, what do they want? power

he is hopelessly addicted to Twitter

The link from robotblake's redirector rules works (for now):

https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36544185

>if HN was to go down, only logged-in Twitter users would be able to see why

That's probably close to 99% of HN users

I highly doubt that.

doubtful

You can count me in the one percent then. :)

Seriously though, lots of people don’t use Twitter. Of my friends, only one has a Twitter account, and he’s switched away since Musk took over.

*raises hand* I've also avoided Twitter entirely, except where someone was linking into it from outside.

In the beginning I felt the original length-limit fundamentally doomed it to a certain kind of not-so-valuable conversation. I mean, hell, even this quick comment here is already ~381 chars. I know the limits have been raised, but I think its effect on the culture remained.

I've never had a twitter account...

That's an extreme overestimate

> That's probably close to 99% of HN users

Projection probably. I use my twitter account so seldom, I'm definitely in the 1%.

But then, I'm probably in the 0.5% who if HN happens to be down, will check back the following day instead of worrying.

Never had a Twitter account. Never saw the appeal. Mostly annoyed when occasionally asked to read long-form writing split into multiple tweets. Now I never have to worry about that again!

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