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Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the people who are concerned enough to leave twitter over the direction it's going will not jump straight into another app completely controlled by a single person.

My guess is they will possibly see some growth from instagram power users who are convinced to try it, but I don't anticipate a mass diaspora from twitter to threads.

EDIT: others in this thread are claiming that it may be compatible with activity pub. If that is the case then it may look a little more interesting to those leaving twitter.

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Twitter’s gonna be a ghost town soon the way it’s trending. Instagram is providing a lifeboat, and it’s a known quantity of “evil”. Compared to whatever the heck Musk is doing.

What is the trend? Downwards in the sense of a few percent a year? Or a week?

A view quota is not a feature. Especially when the site was acceptably functional the day before.

Completely anecdotal but: “views” as reported by Twitter of tweets on my private account are down roughly 80% YOY. My follower count has dropped slightly. I’ve been on Twitter since 2007. It’s been a roller coaster of fun, annoying, vaguely threatening and the company’s love/hate/begging/hate relationship with API developers has been maddening. It has the feel of every private equity takeover of a previously popular business, except that Musk and Co. failed to extract any value from the company before saddling it with untenable debt.

That's most likely due to changes in the algorithm. Especially if you're not verified.

Value prop: operated by an adult

yep. The same it became a "ghost town" after everyone migrated to mastadon, hive, tumblr, truth social, bluesky, post and the rest of the other meme "twitter killers"

So, on one side we have twitter with its crazy policies and on the other side we have fb with its "content moderation guidelines". I don't think you'll see much change since Twitter is twitter because of conflict. That's the reason twitter "replacements" aren't successful: Echo chambers for each faction.

I do wonder if Threads will allow rather graphic videos like Twitter does. If it doesn't it will not do well. War videos from Ukraine have been extremely important, and Facebook will need to allow much raunchier and sometimes downright NSFL content to truly be a replacement especially to be relevant to current events which is the main selling point of Twitter for most people.

The average person doesn’t really care about that. They care if the site is functional & can other people see their posts.

Right now neither of those are true of Twitter.

> I feel like the people who are concerned enough to leave twitter over the direction it's going will not jump straight into another app completely controlled by a single person.

I think you vastly overestimate twitter users.

People never left MySpace or Digg either, they just stopped visiting as frequently as the content dried up and one day stopped visiting entirely.

The average Instagram user doesn’t know or care that zuckerberg runs the show. They know it works all the time and isn’t constantly making changes that are annoying to deal with.

But Twitter is just so much objectively worse than it used to be, the user experience is mostly a nightmare for the very people who made Twitter so fun to begin with. The posters have to go somewhere.

Its not that anybody likes Zuck, but they also don't think Zuck will cozy up with Nazis quite so... obviously?

We all make choices every day about choosing the lesser of two evils. That's all this is.

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