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Comment by christiangenco | Hacker News Reader

The game of any platform is to attract and keep more attention on the platform.

More advanced platforms will be better at this than less developed platforms.

Content that causes users to leave your platform is, from the perspective of the platform, worse content than content that keeps users engaged in your platform.

Articles on X don't go viral as much as they used to on Twitter? That certainly makes conceptual sense because consuming an article involves leaving the platform. If you'd like that same content to perform better on X then "tailor your messaging to the medium" by breaking up the ideas from the article into a series of tweets.

That's the game. If you don't like it then play a different game.

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It used to be that the selling prop for a lot of sites was "we'll send you away, but you'll come back every day because we always have a variety of interesting places to send you." In the early days of blogs, The Atlantic would link to other sites, for example, and the Verge is doing it now with their new HP. As social media took over, homepages died, so it didn't make sense to link to a post at blog B from your blog A because no one reads your blog A anymore, they just see some of your Tweets. At this point, the social media giants have changed their algorithms to try to retain more engagement and compete with Tik Tok (which never sends users off platform), but I think in the long run they will fail because there will always be more interesting stuff somewhere else than on your site.

Counter point: reddit

They literally send you away to read the article, but with the hope you come back to add comments.

In the case of the new twitter, it makes sense to prevent people from leaving the platform, since Musk wants his platform to replace everything, blogs (hence new unlimited size tweets), YouTube (unlimited length video) and he even talked about a currency.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/26/23808796/elon-musks-x-eve...

Counter-counter point: for years Reddit has been pushing for fewer article links and more locally hosted content.

They started hosting their own images, then their own videos. This is expensive to do, but perhaps they felt that it was worth it to keep users on their site instead of risking them wandering off to Imgur.

And the new design discourages actually reading the article. When you click on a "link", it sends you to the comment page which has a small embedded thumbnail and blurb. (The old design took you to the article directly).

Counter-counter-counter point: Reddit reached its heyday under the leadership that allowed people to leave and come back to discuss. Its current leadership has intentionally driven away a decent percentage of users within the last year.

I do not think their decisions come from sound thinking but greed. They don't truly understand why they got big and now they're trying to squeeze all the money out of it they can before their luck runs out.

I think they did much better trying to give their users a good experience and they are in the process of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. It just takes a long time for a zombie social network to die.

> Counter-counter-counter point

(tangent) Does this remind anyone else of Melissa Peterson from Seattle, WA?

[0] https://www.wnyc.org/story/1421-my-dog-hates-you-too/

Yeah, there are a larger number of communities that outright ban link posts now, and others which have a pretty strict guideline against any articles (labeling them as 'blogspam' or 'self-promotion' even when something is not... it's a tough job though because spam is incredibly frequent now).

This is a very dated view of Reddit.

I just visited Reddit in incognito mode.

Of the top 20 posts, 3 were links to articles. Most were images, videos, or text posts -- very similar to Twitter.

The way to use reddit is to use https://old.reddit.com AND unsubscribe from everything + subscribe to the specific subreddits you are interested in.

That's the power user route but we're address the business model of reddit which is slowly inhousing all content.

Note that most popular content on reddit is images, short video clips or plaintext; and the majority of that is hosted on their servers.

Do people really read the article? It's a meme that nobody reads the article. Did you read this article? I didn't.

I don’t read most articles. And most articles posted on HN have famously low read rates of probably sub 1%.

I read comments. Comments are the last bastion of pure ideas exchange, articles are just pretty conversation starters.

That was my internet philosophy for a very long time, but for a multitude of reasons I see predominantly noise instead of signal in comment areas I used to enjoy and few better alternatives. I’m now trying to counteract my habits and focus more on the information.

Pre-Elon Twitter was arguably the last major social media site that actually supported some subset of the "open web" people like to reminisce about here. Articles had the possibility of going viral because the old Twitter didn't downrank external links so heavily, and even encouraged it with the ability to view all quote tweets (another feature X just disabled).

And now it's gone. I think it's fine to mourn that.

I feel you're looking at twitter from 5-10 years ago and pretend it was exactly like that pre-Elon.

Twitter months pre-Elon was pretty hard on steering the public discussion away from things Twitter didn't want

Ignoring that the major media orgs were still able to post links without being completely blackholed, Substacks and other blogs were still prominent and viral at the time as well. "Steering public discussion" is only partly related, which is why I said "some subset".

Now there is practically nothing on the algo feed that links out of X.

> Pre-Elon Twitter was arguably the last major social media site that actually supported some subset of the "open web" people like to reminisce about here.

Unless you disagreed with its politics. In which case you were suspended, or shadowbanned. This has been well covered by Michael Shellenberger and others.

> Unless you disagreed with its politics. In which case you were suspended, or shadowbanned.

I would appreciate an example about what kinds of political posts Twitter banned. Pre-Elon Twitter did suspend Republicans more than Democrats, but that was because Republicans tended to post more misinformation [1].

Tangentially speaking, Twitter also gave rule-breaking posts regarding the January 6th, 2021 insurrection a bit of leeway [2].

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/18/fascinating-new-study-su...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/29/internal-twitter-video-r...

Somewhat ironically for a post talking about misinformation, the first link that you use to support your claim links to a study that says "this study has not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal".

You'd think that piles of concrete evidence would end the denialism, but it seems that people aligned with those politics don't consider stories like the Twitter Files to be real oddly enough. I'm not sure if it's because mainstream media outlets didn't cover it, but there's a correlation.

Getting people to play the platforms game is why they end up paying content creators. Twitter recently started paying people per message specifically because they don’t want all monetization to happen off platform.

I've been enjoying watching the app Artifact progress - https://artifact.news

It's been a news aggregation app so far but with some nice features (article summary, read aloud, reader mode).

They just launched the ability to submit your own links. I have not tried it but it sounds like it may bring back things people liked about Delicious, Google Reader, old Reddit.

I mention this as I personally enjoy this platform as a way to consume content quickly. The article summary is very similar to Hacker News comments, I view that first & see if I want to read/listen the actual article.

It is in tension with the revenue model that is explicitly about driving people offsite.

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