Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen. Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed only and the algorithmic feed on Twitter made a lot of people skeptical of that. Throw in the phone-app-only interface and it’s not where my people want to be. It’s a chicken and egg problem to be sure, and I don’t know where the new writer bar is going to be. It might end up being Threads ultimately, but the big challenge is for whatever new platform to get the movement happening.

View on HN

> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen.

First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.

Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the death knell for Twitter. It wasn't.

My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that comes along might show promise at the start, people quickly revert back to their familiar network that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to).

Mastodon isn't going to be /the/ new place. Hopefully it will become part of many new places.

Last year Mastodon went through a hype cycle. Everyone was declaring Twitter over. You had people stating they were leaving for good, dual-posting, etc. Funnily enough many of those same people are back on Twitter today with little mention of Mastodon.

It peaked in November and then went into decline. As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave.

Musk's antics might prop it up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users will be the most avid hardcore fans.

It did peak in December last year, but then it "declined" and stabilized at more than double the active users it had before Elon bought Twitter: https://mastodon-analytics.com/

That chart is missing the big late-june/early-july burst that came when Twitter locked out non-registered users and put a cap on read tweets. Big bump in new registrations and since then activity has been up a bunch as well. Not as big as December, but mostly because it was short lived.

It’s so funny to me watching everyone debate about what is or isn’t going to be the next ultimate single massive platform.

I, and many Fediverse people, are on the Fedi explicitly hoping it isn’t in that list. Mastodon is a success to me because of the thousands of people on it and that I interact with, and that it is precisely not containing the masses.

So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter.

Mastodon and Lemmy/etc are a smash success to me. They have more traffic, users and activity than the other comparable options combined (citation needed). And most importantly, they did it without becoming the next big thing.

Plus if, god forbid, it does become the next big thing - It can still isolate and be a small forum. That alone is lovely to me.

Whenever someone points out that Mastodon has failed to become the new Twitter, I just nod and smile, nod and smile.

100% agreed. On reddit, I've always felt there was an inverse relationship between the quality of content and the number of users on a subreddit.

Personally, interactions feel more significant in smaller communities, too.

The Mastodon "hype cycle" was jam packed with people saying "this isn't it"[1]. The choice of server, account migration issues (partly resolved), and just some aesthetic reasons made it obvious it wasn't going to be the thing. There was a strong, I would say majority sentiment that everyone was waiting for some more Twitter-like competitor.

"Everyone was declaring Twitter over."

I mean...Twitter is very much over. References to Twitter, or Twitter being the canonical source, has utterly disappeared. Whole media spheres have made Twitter just another place, not the place. Whole fields have dried up on Twitter.

If you're hardcore into culture wars, Twitter is probably your place. Probably feels as alive as ever. In virtually any other field (sports, media, tech), while some people with big accounts are still trying to hang on -- for obvious reasons as other platforms just set them back -- engagement and "the crowd" has absolutely dissolved. Governments, agencies and groups used Twitter as a public space, and not only have many pulled back, I cannot fathom anyone making that choice today.

And that doesn't mean one needs to cite where someone replaced their "Twitter-like" activity. Many people just took it as an opportunity to assess the joy that sort of site was bringing them and decoupled. In the same way that the decline of blogger didn't mean that other sites grew the same amount...many people just stopped blogging.

[1] isn't it for a "general public, all topics" solution. Mastodon absolutely is a technical solution for niche spaces and groups and is absolutely flourishing in those realms.

> It peaked in November and then went into decline.

https://fedidb.org/software/Mastodon

> ...As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave...

But, i would posit that there is a rhetorical currency exchange at play here. The "value" that one might assign to a silo like Facebook or Threads is not the same "value" one might assign to various software stacks and/or networks on the Fediverse. Like, its not enough for me to state that they're different/like comparing apples vs oranges. I mean, for example, if I only have a single kid/offspring, does that mean that i have not grown the "value" of my family, because i have not maximized my partner's reproductive capabilities, or resorted to adoption to extend that, etc.? That's sill of course. Well, i assure you, the intent of networks on the Fediverse is NOT the same as the goals and intent of silos like Facebook, twitter, threads, etc.

I think @unshavedyak stated it great with their comments, but this is my favorite of theirs: "...So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter..."

> It (mastodon) peaked in November. Musk's antics might prop it (Mastodon) up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good.

At least that's what I think you mean. Lots of ambiguous "it" in the text above.

Not accurate according to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/ or my subjective experience. mastodon is fine. mastodon is growing. Mastodon is fundamentally not a business that needs to "get big fast or die trying" so that VCs can make their big ROI back. Slow, steady improvement is fine. Scalloped growth is not evidence of a platform in decline. (1)

I'd say - to write the above in a clearer way: "Twitter peaked in November 2022 and then went into decline. Musk's antics might prop twitter up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users of twitter will be the most avid hardcore fans."

1) https://doctorow.medium.com/of-course-mastodon-lost-users-c4...

People keep claiming this but it isn’t reality. Not one of the programmers I follow have posted on mastodons in the last couple of months.

There was a huge rush of most of the people I follow going to mastodon. But even those who still has their mastodons links in their name or profile haven’t posted in months.

The fact is that discussions happen on Twitter. Not mastodon.

Saying "Not one of the programmers I follow have posted on mastodons in months" we can't argue with, I don't know who those people are, that's your subjective experience and YMMV, you do you.

But this is not my subjective experience actually. And yes I follow "programmers" and other IT people in the mix. I'm not here to tell you what's true _for you_ but you appear to be telling me that what I experience isn't "reality". On the contrary, it works fine for me, as I said above.

"Discussions happen only on X not Y" is a binary, absolutist, black or white thinking. If taken literally, it is ridiculous. I suppose you would also say that this here isn't a discussion, because that's "only on twitter"?

Discussions and communities are going to happen in different places. It's almost like there's a use for a protocol that lets them interoperate in some kind of "loose association".

For me mastodon is where I get my cybersecurity and infosec chat from now. HN is my generic techy stuff Reddit replacement, insta for mountain biking and twitter is for lower league Scottish football- it’s very well setup on there.

I’m not sure where threads sat for me, it was all the same folk who I follow on instagram but only posting text, now they post pics on thread and their reels on insta.

I’m not fully up on all the fedoverse stuff but I think that’s just due to a lack of effort so far.

Any recs on security follows on Mastodon?

Maybe give threads more than 3 weeks before declaring it hasn't dethroned Twitter.

What replaced AIM? Facebook messenger? Discord? Twitter? Whatsapp?

Twitter can go away without being replaced by a singular entity.

MSN Messenger replaced AIM globally.

and ICQ

Is this sarcasm?

If not, maybe wait more than 3 weeks before declaring it Twitter's successor.

I feel like this is a battle that will be measured in years at this point.

Mastodon has been really cool recently. It was bare at first, but I've been back since November and there's a critical mass of awesome shit and cool people imo.

Meanwhile, Twitter keeps its slow death.

People are certainly going somewhere (outside?), what isn't happening is for all of them going to the same place. IMO, that's a very good thing, but it does break any ambition of social world domination large companies may have.

Last numbers I saw, Twitter DAUs have held pretty steady. What evidence do you have of a "slow death"?

Xitter has moved from offering 50% off ad purchases of $250k a couple months ago to threatening removal of "gold checks" from companies that don't spend $1k.

That is not the strategy of a healthy advertising-driven company. It isn't even a strategy, that's flop-sweat.

I wouldn't be so sure. Tesla lowered prices and the press made the same kinds of predictions. Come earning season Tesla clobbered its competitors.

This isn't Tesla - its Twitter or X.

You might as well jabber on about tulip bulbs.

The Musk brand sells.

Except there is a fine amount of ads you can show on your platform before it becomes oversaturated...

The thing is that what matters is not the total number of users but who those users are. Anecdotally, there has been a slow exodus of people in my writer circles from Twitter, either deleting their accounts or just not using them as much. I’ve found less to bring me back each day. There might be people engaging more to make up for it, but they’re not the people in my circles.

Mastodon (actually, the Fediverse as a whole) is still growing in a very healthy, organic rate. Threads just tried to buy its way into a bootstrapped network.

> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.

Just about all the people whose opinions I'm interested in hearing are on Mastodon now. I don't really care if anyone else shows up. Maybe it's better that they don't.

Right. Hell, I wasn't among those saying Mastodon was going to be the "new place" or that Twitter was otherwise on its way out. Even with my proximity to tech circles, Mastodon seemed to me hardly a blip on most people's radars.

I only finally checked it out during all the Reddit protests and am thoroughly amazed to simply see content without all the cruft.

It is only now that I don't feel as sure; Twitter still has its login wall today. I reactivate my facebook account only when, say, I absolutely need to interact with a particular small page/business. I don't use Instagram. I have only since logged in to Twitter once to look at my Following list and make a first pass at building my Fedifeed by seeing who's moved over (incidentally, most of the people I follow that are still active). This time, I might actually check my feed regularly while logged in, since I'm not seeing a sponsored submission or ad every other post.

Yeah, same here. For my purposes, Mastodon is superior to what Twitter was at its peak.

I only look at Xitter for Ukraine news - that community hasn't migrated elsewhere. But that's mostly on third-party pages, I don't log in anymore, so the site itself is useless to me.

you're here, and your old blog is about tech stuff, so there's a decent chance you follow a lot of tech people. there are plenty of _those_ on mastodon, because tech people will suffer through bad UX if the product has certain qualities that that community values (federation being the big one in this case)

that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols (most people) throw up their hands and leave at the first notion of needing to choose an instance or needing a JS bookmarklet to follow someone not on your instance

plenty of those people are experts in their field and write interesting content i wouldn't otherwise encounter, but they aren't migrating to mastodon because of that, and there's a decent chance they won't migrate anywhere and will return to sharing their work in niche walled garden academic journals and conferences

sure, mastodon maybe keeps out the garbage firstnamelastname9023285023 accounts that do nothing but send low-content replies and retweet inane celebrity(s' social media managers') posts, but it's keeping them out because only a very specific population will bother to get in, which is a bad filter

> that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols

It is a startup wisdom that it is better to have less users who love your product than many who merely like it. Tech-savy people often have a strong opinions (both positive and negative). By the mentioned startup wisdom, it can be very valuable to have them as users.

The most technical of people seem to have remained using Mastodon, but others seem to have migrated back to Twitter.

I don't go to Twitter to read takes by other programmers about a world which exists only online. I go to Twitter to discuss the world in front of us, a world which hasn't been so exciting and full of conflict for a very long time.

Mastodon is great if you want to read nerds talking with other nerds. For the rest of the population though, we need some takes from outside the nerd-cage.

> that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to).

I assure you I genuinely do not like what Twitter has become. The lack of viable alternative doesn’t change that fact.

VC money is tight right now, and Twitter was never profitable. If I were an investor, you'd have to have some kind of revenue story if you were selling me a Twitter killer.

Mastodon works for the people who are willing to "pay" (in social labor or hosting money) the startup costs. Threads very likely has the limitations it has because that's what Meta thinks will generate useful advertising data — their bread and butter.

For tech people, I think the most likely way to get a Twitter killer in the near-medium term would be to convince Microsoft to add that feature to Github. As usual, you're the product.

> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.

Mastodon is chugging along, still growing steadily, unglamorously. I don't see a boom and bust there. It is unbacked by VC "get big or die trying" money, not buoyed by big tech or media hype. Don't write it off in a week or a month.

I completely agree that Mastodon isn't the new place, and I am increasingly thinking Threads may not be either (at least not to Twitter level, or not for a few years), however I'm very convinced that Twitter is no longer the place either.

The technology is crumbling (see rate limiting, interaction counts), the product is moving further away from what people want not towards it (see Zuck's tweets about Threads to see what popular product direction looks like, even if it's not perfect), the ad quality has dropped very noticeably suggesting they've lost good top paying advertisers, the new ad payout program suggests that their ad inventory is low anyway (see also interaction numbers here too), and the culture has gone from pretty bad to openly hostile to large swathes of the population, at least among English speakers (see anti-trans trending topics, rise of hate speech).

I'd agree that reversion to the mean and people going back to what they know is the most likely course of action in most circumstances, but these are not most circumstances. Twitter can't recover from this, at least not without a change of leadership and many years to rebuild.

Mastodon was really never going to be that place where most of the internet moved. It would've been nice in a perfect world, but it's simply not set up as an advertiser-friendly social networking site that would attract celebrities and brands, and quite frankly I think the vast majority of its userbase considers that a feature and not a bug.

Still, I believe that BlueSky and Threads remain a looming existential threat to Twitter. One important role that Twitter filled was being the de-facto centralized RSS feed. It is by far the thing that I see that Twitter is still used for, even by ex-Twitter users and people like me who never used the site in the first place.

To be the centralized RSS feed, you need a web-facing interface, so you can pass links around over the clearnet. Threads doesn't have one. BlueSky isn't even open to the greater public yet. But either one of those could change overnight.

I'm getting regular bluesky invites, and people use them. It looks like the most "correct" implementation to me at this stage, although the having to jump through hoops to share videos is frustrating.

That tracks with what I'm seeing - BlueSky is where most of my twitter-addict friends have either already ended up or are angling to get into. A few of them have Mastodon accounts too.

Based on my own old Twitter circle, I see that:

A. Attention-seekers have gone to Threads or stayed on Twitter

B. People who are into niche interests and not part of group A are very active on Mastodon.

Mastodon to me very much feels like early-days Twitter. I truly I hope it stays like this. Threads might even be blessing in disguise for Mastodon network when it develops into a network similar to Instagram (content creators, brands, attention-seekers).

> I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are

For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe.

"But you can't respond to people there". Yeah, but I don't care. Since Elon changed the meaning of the blue checkmark and made it effectively pay-to-play, the chances of someone seeing my responses are effectively zero.

> For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe.

Didn't Musk break Twitter a few weeks back in a hamfisted attempt to deal with scrapers? What that was he was fighting against?

That was his excuse, there are some alternative theories that say that he put the rate limits only to cut his AWS bills.

Anyway, it should be known that fighting against scrapers is a lost cause. Nitter is still going strong, BirdSiteLive (the software that powers bird.makeup) as well, and even if he really blocked these alternative methods, I wouldn't be surprised if the archive.org people came up with some browser extension that could help replicate the content elsewhere.

Twitter doesn't use aws for anything important... Lol people's just say anything online

Replace AWS with whatever cloud provider they use...

they dont use a cloud provider...

https://www.platformer.news/p/twitter-stiffs-google

While Twitter hosts some services on its own servers, the company has long contracted with Google and Amazon to complement its infrastructure. Prior to Musk buying Twitter last year, the company signed a multi-year contract with Google to host services related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things.

I worked there, I think i know what I'm talking about

So is the information of Twitter having a contract with Google a complete fabrication?

No they have contracts with all of them because of acquisitions and attempts to be less reliant on just the data centers. Google cloud was another attempt to move some workloads or extend into it. But like I said earlier, nothing significant. Real work is done on the data center machines

[deleted]

Wow, this seems really bad. Did you ask for your money back?

> Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed

That was probably a wise decision to seed it with something for people to look at and interact with so they didn't just sign in and see a blank page. The random influencers and other people "go away" pretty quickly if you start following and interacting with people you care more about.

A common complaint with Threads was that, no after who you blocked or muted, it's near impossible to get away from a feed filled with influencers and common celebrity gossip nonsense. That seems to be part of the ongoing design intent - not just an aspect of how they wanted to bootstrap the service.

A few days ago they introduced a 'following' feed. They seem pretty intent on iterating quickly on it.

And even without that, the influencers mostly went away for me when I followed people I found more interesting.

> a feed filled with influencers and common celebrity gossip

And marketers. Remember: marketers ruin everything. They early adopt every up-and-coming platform and fill it with grifty posts.

The empty timeline problem is a completely different problem of an algorithmic timeline of not people you follow.

Hell, it required an Instagram account to sign up. You already have their follow graph.

Agree, they rolled out the "Following" tab and it's a ghost town. Shipping it with the algorithmic feed at least made it look like a lively, if somehwat chaotic place.

What's a Twitter? We're supposed to be xing and rexing our xs on x now.

> We're supposed to be xing and rexing our xs on x now.

Relevant: https://www.xing.com/

(a site very similar so LinkedIn that rather has its mainstay in the German-speaking market instead of a more international focus like LinkedIn)

People have spent years getting followers and algorithmic advantage based on previous engagement. Social media is not a shopping app - content creators will not just bolt for something better as they are invested.

Do they want to? Definitely, but it's not a simple lift and shift. It will only happen once Musk either terminally runs Twitter into the ground (bankruptcy), or makes it completely unbearable.

The feed could be somewhat overlooked, at least for the time being, if hashtags and searching were properly implemented. If no interesting conversations appear in my feed then there's no way for me to spend more time on Threads. Open, Look, Close. Repeat that a few times and give up. I gave it a chance but there's just so little to do.

It's also possible there will be no successor place.

I think you can now disable algorithmic feed, which was my main gripe as well. But the lack of website is still a show-stopper for me.

You can switch to a following-only view, but it resets whenever the app is re-launched, which is a real scummy pattern.

Agree on the need for a proper website that isn’t read-only. I get that most usage will come from mobile, but for the more interesting and prolific posters, tapping out blurbs and interacting with others on mobile is a second-rate experience that doesn’t feel as rich when compared to using a web app.

Meta’s working on it, so hopefully we’ll see if the culture of the service shifts away from that Instagram feel.

Yeah, that's exactly the "Cold Start Problem". You must get the "hard side" of the network (drivers for Uber, content creator for social networks) asap and they must be happy to use your platform, otherwise your product is going to be a failure

> Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed only

On it’s first fucking day

Been using the new follow feed and honestly I appreciate the algo feed sprinkling some randomness here and there

why not just ignore the "chaos monkeys" and focus on your writers instead? no one is forcing you to interact with anyone you don't like on X.

One thing that’s impossible to ignore is that Twitter now forces you to read bad replies. Before, it would rank the most popular replies near the top, but now you have to scroll past lots of low-quality replies from people who are boosted just because they pay for the privilege.

I use Twitter daily and unless you're looking at major threads (like an Elon tweet) it's rarely more than a single verified user (if at all). And they are rarely better/worse than the average Tweet normally is in those mega threads.

It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO

Bad replies aren't necessarily the least popular. Any number of people would prefer blue check (basically signed) replies than pseudonymous drivebys whose entire participation in twitter is sharp replies that get massively upvoted.

Also, popularity based in upvotes from nobody, unverified accounts is usually inorganic. Scoring upvotes based on how many of them are from verified or likely authentic accounts can only improve user experience (for content providers, not professional reply guys.)

> Any number of people would prefer blue check

... where "any" is the number of people who paid for a blue check.

What’s X?

it's that thing you used to call twitter.

x.com

This is what GP was referring to when they said "chaos monkeys"

If I go to x.com it redirects me to a site called twitter.com in which there are things called "tweets" and "retweets"

A variable you could substitute with anything.

I'd like to substitute it for x

which holds a value "X"

It's what Musk is trying to rebrand Twitter as.

The X Window System allows applications to present bitmap images on a display, and receive mouse and keyboard input. The main implementation is X.Org, shepherded by the X.Org Foundation: https://x.org/. Originally for Unix-like systems, it is now available on many other architectures, such as Microsoft Windows: I find ssh's X forwarding feature especially useful there.

So does twitter redirect to x.org now?

Would be an improvement to be honest :)

It's a slang term for MDMA. Clearly the poster means that you don't have to interact with anyone when you're on ecstasy.

The chaos monkeys aren’t Twitter users, they’re changes to the site that Musk dictates.

A not implausible theory I’ve seen bandied about is that Musk isn’t happy about having been forced into buying Twitter so he’s trashing the place out of spite.

It seems a rather expensive bit of spite, but it makes as much sense as anything else.

Threads now has a “following” tab - and most importantly, so far, it hasn’t randomly switched back to the “for you” tab.

If I had to guess what the indicator of where the new writer bar ends up, it will be wherever Joyce Carol Oates goes. Not because people like her or her tweets necessarily, but that she’s kind of like the black hole at the center of a galaxy, you don’t want to get too close (she’s the queen of the bizarre takes, not to mention her post with a rather disturbing picture of her feet), and yet everything kind of ineluctably ends up orbiting around her anyway.

She once posted a picture of her keyboard that haunts me.

He didn't kill threads but he definitely killed it's profitability. Let's see how he recovers from that

I'd like to see some semi centralized but social benefit Corp create a Twitter that utilizes the h factor score that scientific researchers have.

ie something like Reddit karma but it's based off how controversial a users posts and comments generally are, how many times posts are reported or flagged, and use ai to do sentiment analysis as well to verify the reports and scores are accurate.

Maybe have the users tweets a shade of blue and the more respected the brighter the blue color.

> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk

Is this hyperbole? Twitter will be fine, Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions. Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. The biggest change has been perception from ideological extremes. I'm sure Twitter will evolve but evolution is for growth, not death.

You use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers? Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a source of income?

> Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk.

If you don't have a Twitter account, you cannot see threads on Twitter anymore.

And if you don't pay for twitter blue you can't DM people anymore unless they know to explicitly turn off that new filter. You also are limited in how many tweets you can view in a day, and without paying your reach is also shortened.

At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted in my feed are now showing up all the time.

If you're using twitter web, the Control Panel for Twitter browser extension takes the 'for you' abomination behind the back of the barn and gives it both barrels.

(there's also a userscript version IIRC)

> Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions

He already has?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-i...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-inves...

It's big enough and established enough that it's not going to disappear overnight, but so far the results are pretty underwhelming.

I, for the life of me, can't figure out why someone who has been successful and earned a decent amount of goodwill in other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal with social media which is just super difficult to manage even in the best of cases.

>He already has?

What’s the point of the question mark there? Are you not sure of your statement?

The network Twitter has will be hard to break for sure. But I think it's already worth much less than what he paid. Musk needs to be careful here, it is possible to lose.

I would go further and say that at this point it will be difficult not to lose. Twitter is a wounded animal just waiting to be eaten.

Twitter feels like MySpace in 2008. Its main saving grace right now is that there isn’t the equivalent of Facebook ready to devour it. Yet.

It couldn’t be more fundamentally different for people who just want to read content without an account. Previously, Twitter was a thing that existed, now it’s not a thing that exists.

99.9% of people will just click the google login button and continue on as if nothing had happened. i sympathize with you. i had to make a throwaway google account. but it's not even close to relevant to the vast majority of users. not saying that's a good thing but it's reality.

> 99.9% of people will just click the google login button and continue on as if nothing had happened

You have a very, very rosy perception of login walls. All the stats I’ve see would disagree.

Based on the most recent estimates of Twitter's value, Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars.

You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a year in debt payments from the buyout, and they're facing a number of large lawsuits based on how they handled layoffs.

> Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars.

Why would a user of the site/app care about this? How is it impacting their experience?

Because if the site isn't making money, it's not sustainable. Unless musk wants to run it from his pocket money.

It doesn’t usually matter to the user “why” a product is no longer appealing.

Financial woes though will usually produce change that impacts the user, for better or worse (a good kick in the ass, or craven desperation may follow).

I never made the claim that a user should. The guy I was replying to said "Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions" and I was responding to that.

Why are you asking that like someone suggested it? This was a reply to a specific claim.

I read the replies oas being in the context of the first comment they were under. It wasn't clear to me that the context changed.

It will certainly impact my experience when Musk gets tired of losing money and sells the husk to some grifter or Verizon.

Are you kidding? Twitter has limits on how much you can read now. It's useless for me.

I don't have a twitter account. Do you regularly hit the 1,000 tweet view limit? That's over 83 tweets an hour, for 12 hours.

Scrolling through 1,000 tweets in your timeline will take a lot less time than you imagine.

Clicking into a thread will use up those views really fast. Could easily hit 200 views in 5 minutes.

So, you hit the limit often?

I'm trying to find if there's anyone who regularly experiences hitting the limit.

I'm pretty sure the limit was one of his experiments that he's since rolled back on. It may even have been an emergency measure to mitigate the worst effects of another bug, but I'm not sure if he's ever been openly honest about any of this. There was certainly a weekend where the limit was imposed, then raised, then—I think—raised again... and I don't think we've really heard anything about it since.

Twitter doesn't track your eyeballs to see how many you literally read. It's how many has been sent to your device.

I consider myself a pretty frequent Twitter user. I don't pay and I've never run into the daily limit.

I had hit the rate limit a few trimes when it was new, but never since then. I think the limit has been either removed or vastly reduced from that experience. I don't see any of the people I follow complaining about it either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com