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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

The Guardian and The New York Times haha good one

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.

> 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.

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.

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