The algorithmic anti-culture of scale | Hacker News Reader

The algorithmic anti-culture of scale

garbageday.email

56 pointsjsnell59 comments

Threads is so egregiously corporatist, I don't think anyone that's seriously anti-Twitter would ever consider it a viable alternative. The memes are forced, the "content" is manufactured, and, worst of all, I keep in touch with the same people I keep in touch on Instagram so, at least for me, it already feels redundant.

Meta should have started from scratch, building organic communities, and fostering mature, grown-up dialogue; but then their "signups" would've looked much worse.

The risk there is the inevitable introduction of matters related to human sexuality, which makes the corporatists extremely uncomfortable.

>My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time.

The writer's is clearly mad at life here. Threads is fine. The content is fine. The design is fine. The algorithm is also fine. Not everyone is into whatever nonsense is happening in the twitterworld.

One of my big rules is to mostly listen to product feedback from actual users. Are you using it on a daily basis? What makes it especially good for you?

Because "fine" generally doesn't cut it. There are things I use because I love them, or at least I'm addicted to them. For me, Twitter was like that. There are things I use because I have to. Like LinkedIn. But a nonessential product being seen as "fine" by people who don't use it? That sounds like the kiss of death to me.

The likes of GMail (or indeed Facebook) are, y'know, fine, and seem pretty successful that way. Frankly a good social network should annoy some portion of the Twitter crowd; there's something uniquely nasty about Twitter and replicating it wholesale is a mistake.

IMO, Gmail is allowed to be "fine" because it did a lot of things all in one go:

- provide a decent browser-based client - lots of free storage! - spam detection that beat out a lot of other providers at the time

It didn't hurt that it was being run by the what was the Big Tech's darling child at the time. Now, it's kind of hard to exist with out a Google account, and thus a GMail account. Google doesn't make a lot of money directly through GMail, but they make a decent amount of money through the enterprise license for Google Workspaces.

As for Facebook, the product is "fine" in the sense there are lots of users, but "Meta" the company is having doubts about whether the Social Graph is truly the priceless asset we all thought it was. More on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30192364

It might not be fair, but the expectation that users, Wall Street, and even Meta themselves place on Facebook is that it needs to do a lot better than "fine".

When GMail came out, it was well more than fine; it was a major advance. It had very strong word of mouth. These days it's fine, but that's because email is much less important. It still has a lot of usage for the reason I mentioned: because people still have to use email.

Facebook is similar. People were wildly enthusiastic about it. Some still love it, but for most it's in the "necessary" category. People keep using it not because of Facebook, but because their people are there. Very like LinkedIn in that sense.

If Threads is already only "fine" but isn't necessary, that sounds like the quick path to irrelevancy.

The bulk of Twitter's active userbase seemed to consist of people whoabsolutely hated twitter but were addicted to it.

The overwhelming majority of products are bought because they are perceived to be useful. Loving a social network sounds a bit creepy, to be honest.

Many, many Twitter users loved it. I loved it. You can feel weird about that if you want, but that's a choice you're making, and trying to push that on me is the only creepy thing I see here.

The writer also did not give any hints to the Threads algorithm about what he likes or prefers (he did not follow, he barely clicked on things, etc.). It's like going to Netflix and just browsing without watching any movies, and then complaining that Netflix "has no purpose" and "is for no one."

Most of the article makes no sense, but Threads won't really be usable as "a Twitter" until there's a feed of people you follow.

or the ability to discover content rather than people

that's an interesting distinction, can you elaborate, I'd like to hear more about this.

Currently, the search function only searches for users and not posts. There are no hashtags, so if I was interested in (for example) Anime art, then I would have no way of finding posts about anime art. I can only find other users who may or may not post anime art, and that search is based a fuzzy search of their name and not their bio

ah yah I heard about that feature anemic MVP rollout. Presumably they'll expand the search mechanism. Seems like a gaping omission for a debut MVP though, wonder what the rush was exactly.

I think they wanted to launch while Twitter was still rate limiting usage

aha, yah I can see that, a strike while the iron's hot sort of deal.

> Our tastes change. We move on. And then suddenly we can’t imagine ever going back.

Bingo. I can’t relate to any of this stuff. It actually is quite alienating when you experience it repeatedly.

Plus, the suggested content in Threads is so bad.

Half of it is random whining about “when she likes u then nvr replies” or brands trying way too hard by writing in that same, too-self-aware sarcastic lowercase tone. You always feel like you’re missing a small piece of context when reading it because decoding it correctly is a considered a shibboleth.

In short, it’s clearly the domain of the excessively online, just like Twitter.

So not having used twitter how does that algorithm differ from this one? I mean he did not follow anything... Does Twitter have some magic sauce that unguided gives you exactly what you want or something?

I learned from stratechery's analisis on twitter and threads that twitter did used to have (or has had at some point?) a very particular kind of 'magic sauce'

the point as I understood it: that twitter by relying on who you followed to make your feed AND sorting it just by time; did manage to create something of a niche in the social media space.

I haven't tried threads, yet, but this seems an extreme amount of hate to level towards it. Curious why there are so many emotions flying on all of these places.

I'm also always wary of such distinct causal threads of how we got the companies that we have now. Feels like things could have easily gone in many other directions, as well.

I do agree that it seems that Twitter isn't actually going anywhere any time soon.

Twitter is still going to be around, Tumblr is still around. I just hope Musk keeps it open to everyone. There was a DNC bias in its content moderation before him. I prefer to hear everyone’s opinion and propaganda. It makes thoughts less inbreed.

> Twitter is still going to be around

It should be, given some barely baseline level of competence from the people running it.

But not paying office rent or cloud bills might be below that level...

I imagine if it gets close to properly dead though it'll get sold again.

It's so funny how people talk about Musk like he's a volatile child and then rave about how well SpaceX is doing. Social media is a cognitive dissonance echo chamber.

You don't need to be personally offended that people dislike controversial billionaires, it's really not a big deal.

Who's offended? I said I thought it was funny. Also you could stick to the point instead of being passive aggressive, it's really not that hard.

There's a very good chance Twitter won't be around. Even Musk has said so. Or it might be around in some negligible way, where it's a backwater that people mainly used to use, as with MySpace. Tumblr survived through a long era of benign neglect due to luck, not some inexorable law.

That's all speculation. Something as big as Twitter doesn't get thrown away, it gets repurposed. I prefer the way Musk is running it but it has it's elitist detractors. Under Jack Dorsey it was a rumor mill for independent spin doctors, character assassins, and propagandists. A fishing hole for DNC PR.

Yes, all discussion about the future is speculation, including your claims. Something as big as Twitter is less likely to get thrown away, sure. But it is shrinking, and could well shrink further.

There's also a big question of who might buy it. The first time Tumblr got sold, it was for $1 billion. The second time, for $3 million. And the receiving organization has been putting a lot of money into it trying to create a viable business. It's perfectly possible that nobody with the money to buy and run Twitter would actually want it. Twitter was available for sale for many years, but was never purchased except by somebody doing it for decidedly non-economic reasons. Consider how Disney decided not to buy it, for example: https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/9/7/23339402/bob-iger-disney...

For many organizations, Twitter is brand poison. It'd be a continuous source of bad PR. And with some of its key assets destroyed or lost, plus so much negative press, it's going to be at best a fixer-upper. And what would they get out of it? It was never a good business even before the Threads launch when it had no serious competition for its niche. I have a hard time imagining who would pay for it even at fire sale prices.

If I said a traffic light will turn from red to green you'd be exaggerating if you called my statement speculation. To my knowledge the only social media sites that have been shutdown were the ones that never had any traffic. LiveJournal is still up. Disney is a massive corporation that buys other companies, why and why not is speculation.

Twitter's brand under Dorsey was "brand poison", that's how it attracted so many post-progressive lunatics. A lot of those lunatics are now fleeing and/or attacking the site. CNN and FOX News have good reason to hate Musk's approach. Mainstream media has lost almost all credibility, if we could see a return to something approximating journalism that could hurt them.

If you see yourself as to the right of not just CNN but Fox News, I hope you can understand that your perspective on what makes for a good platform is not likely to align with not just the median user, but executives who will have billions of dollars in acquisition budget.

I also note that you haven't named any plausible buyers for Twitter, which suggests to me you're not very serious about this discussion.

I voted for Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders. Realignment is exactly what our two party system needs. Obama was right when he told a group of children that politicians should be fighting for our vote. That's what I believe. Also I'm not your butler, find your own plausible buyers. Maybe if you stop pretending to be a mind reader you could learn to think for yourself.

I already said I don't think there are any plausible buyers. If you are claiming they exist, please name them.

Grow up.

> To my knowledge the only social media sites that have been shutdown were the ones that never had any traffic. LiveJournal is still up.

MySpace was the original biggest social networking site in the world, and they deleted everything in 2013. Friendster was once huge and is completely gone, even the company doesn't exist any more.

MySpace is still around. Also, "huge" is a relative word. Friendster was started in 2002, at it's peak it had 115 million users. Twitter has more than twice that now and Facebook has 2.96 billion users. Social media is a different animal now.

> MySpace is still around.

Not really. A company with that name exists and has a website up on their domain, but, like I said, they deleted all their existing accounts and content in 2013.

> Friendster was started in 2002, at it's peak it had 115 million users. Twitter has more than twice that now

"More than twice that" does not seem like a big enough difference to be confident in, particularly when you compare to the overall growth of the internet over the same period.

ngl they seem like old ludicrous example, man

Seems like there's a good reason that your four year old account is barely positive in terms of karma.

I don’t comment often because it’s pointless. Most techies I talk to are higher functioning normies. That’s why it took me so long to even create an account. I like to hear people rationalize and trash talk though.

I’ve wondered if censoring the Nazis and antivaxx cranks might have been helping them. Twitter today is a showcase for how dumb they are, with all their posts followed by pages of people laughing or debunking or gawking at them.

My personal favorite are the Roman statue avatar trad accounts posting photos of classical art and architecture with “why is this not done anymore?” followed by either debunking of the photo or 50 examples of similar work from today.

Fox never would have let Tucker interview Andrew Tate, but Twitter is happy to provide a place for him to do that to himself.

Give them more rope?

The functionality issues have had 95% of the impact-- almost no one actually cares about the changes in "content moderation."

Functionality seems fine to me. It appears that they're making improvements and that's causing slight disruption that lasts for at most a day. And I care about content moderation, I don't know why you're using quotation marks. It was huge a issue when Jack Dorsey ran things. He and Vijaya Gadde got grilled on Joe Rogan's podcast and then in front of a US Senate hearing about it. It's all anyone is talking about lmfao

I meant that functionality issues, which have been quite real (especially rate limiting and API access) have had more impact in terms of driving away users than an increase in content they perceive as offensive.

They haven't effected me at all yet.

Twitter had lots of casual users who wanted to view tweets without logging in or having an account. They were locked out, even if it was only briefly, driving them towards alternatives.

Twitter had lots of power users who consumed its content on third party apps because they (understandably) hated the default interface. They're mostly gone.

Could be a good thing. Twitter was suppose to be riddled with bots and obsessive compulsive types. Keffals was revealed to be a meth addict and he was hyper active. Direct attacks, free riding and stalking are other huge issues for social media to tackle.

Isn't the Taliban on Twitter? It's an odd place. Then again I don't like the idea of censorship but I am an American. I prefer idiots to speak and be debunked. Silent errors are the real headache.

DNC as in Democratic National Committee/Convention? Because Twitter themselves has admitted to unequal algorithmic boosting of right-wing accounts [1], and ignoring violations of right-wing accounts [2].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/us/politics/twitter-congr...

While DNC might have been the wrong group to reference, they're obviously alluding to the government and Biden campaign censoring (or attempting to censor, especially in the case of Adam Schiff's office) Twitter content. It was well-documented as clearly shown in internal emails and likely far more consequential than the right wing boosting you're talking about.

https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-fil...

I meant DNC because they're responsible coordinating party brand. The DNC promotes the Democratic Party's interests at a national level. I don't know of another entity by name that plays a bigger role. But yeah Biden's camp has it's own strategies, which once they become public, should align with the Democratic Party brand.

The Guardian and The New York Times haha good one

Curious why there are so many emotions flying on all of these places

Because it marks the beginning of a full-scale war on Twitter. Because it represents a new threat to the fediverse in the form of embrace-extend-extinguish. Because both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are polarizing figures.

And I'd add there's also a legitimate sense of loss when it comes to Twitter. It meant a lot to me when I was a user of it, but I left early on in the Elon era when it was clear where things were heading. (Here I would link you to my explanation of why I left, but Twitter is now so broken I apparently can't.) Twitter functioned for years in spite of the poor management, thriving because of the community. But Musk has in short order managed to ruin something a lot of people loved. People are still working through that anger and grief.

Well, the thing is threads is catering to brands and famous people, so other than the absolutely brand "sheep", the rest prob. won't find the content appealing enough to engage or even be there. Heck, the narrative went from "twitter killer" to "friendly content" and "we're not trying to compete with twitter, and we don't like political takes, etc...".

Some users are saying they like threads because there aren't any x, y people posting egregious takes, etc. If that's the case, threads will be nothing more than an eco chamber just like truth social, etc. I follow ML researchers, Software Engineers, etc... and even if they have personal takes I prob. won't agree with, that's ok.

My bold statement is that either threads cannibalize ig, or they integrate it to ig in a couple of years.

> My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one

wrong. it has a purpose, and it serves someone, just not its users.

they're looking for a way to shove more advertisement and other sorts of manipulation right at you; after all, that is their product.

I remember a decade ago, mail.ru has released a new and fresh social network just like Threads.

At first there was chaos but it was fun - you could write something unusual and get strangers see it and respond, and see yourself somewhere in global reach rankings. In a week, though, you would only see accounts posting the same kind of content over and over again (be it jokes or kittens) and in two weeks it died because nobody cared to visit it anymore.

A semi-successful thing was Yandex Zen, designed to be an anti-social network where you do not have to subscribe to anything since it will show random stuff to you and see how you would react. What was great is that it was long tailish, such as you could find yourself reading about train spotting, airplanes and that dude working kitchen in a restaurant. No celebrities unless you really clicked that stuff yourself.

Has Yandex not badly mismanaged it at least three times, it could still be relevant by now.

author is half right.

threads sucks.

but so does twitter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com