Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakecopp | Hacker News Reader

> I have a Mastodon account, but I don't love it, for the same reasons I didn't like Twitter. In addition, I think that way of consuming content is generally like watching mainstream TV or listening to radio with ads. You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you.

Isn't that the opposite of Mastodon? The _default_ Mastodon home feed is only people you explicitly follow and posts they re-share (and it's easy to hide re-posts if desired). There is no suggested content.

It's basically as close as social media can get to an RSS feed.

View on HN

OP doesn't like mastodon for the same reasons [they] didn't like Twitter. That would be mostly:

- "It's not really possible to use Twitter without at least a little bit of doomscrolling"

- "I think that the core concept of a "tweet" is fundamentally unhealthy, because by design it promotes angry and extreme content."

- "Most users don't understand that by "dunking" on someone, they are actually promoting the content."

This is basically a critic of fast-paced short interaction based on an infinite timeline. The comment about TV afterwards may seem weird but for me it makes sense. The whole concept of having everything in a single bucket is very TV-like. I don't believe user behavior will be very different on mastodon than twitter: people will follow some very productive accounts and their feed will be dominated by these.

>You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you.

isn't that most social media? If you want traditional news, you subscribe to a news site. if you want experts you need to be in those respective communities. Expecting journalists or domain experts to freely share quality information on an informal platform isn't impossible, but shouldn't be expected. pseudoanonymous discussion shouldn't be your primary source for most "real" content and issues.

You can also follow hashtags which for me is much more interesting than following people.

Yes, I'm following dozens of hashtags and only 3 people. This gives me a very high ratio of interesting content to uninteresting content.