Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

I do fully agree that there are philosophical and ethical problems with TwitterX, and I would like to see it fail however the rumors of the demise of Twitter / X are exaggerated.

It is a massive and difficult job to pull regular users away from what they are comfortable with X / Twitter to a completely new platform without any real end user benefit. In fact, it lacks a lot of features users may like on TwitterX

View on HN

I think Twitter/X charging money might be what kills it off. If you need to pay to post/view anything, then about 95% of the population will say "sod this, I'm out of here".

I'll be very surprised if Musk actually does go through with that promise/idea (even someone like this knows how network effects work, right?), but if he does, I'd say that would be the tipping point.

As somebody with only second-hand exposure to Twitter, it feels like they're actively driving it to irrelevance. All I hear for a year now is that they turn off interfaces that enabled people to integrate with them.

Just last week a customer called because the Twitter embed on their site didn't work anymore. When we said we'd investigate, they said not to bother and just replace it with a link.

As somebody who’s been on Twitter since 2008, you couldn’t be more wrong. The site has never felt more alive, anyone vaguely tangential to TPOT or other Twitter subcultures could tell you the same. The difference now is that more of the conversation is happening amongst actual users and less so amongst corporations as I assume is the case for your client.

Personally, I’m totally happy if Burger King and Tom’s Plumbing leave Twitter and head to Mastodon, they weren’t the ones making it a good platform in the first place.

The client is a scientific institution. I wanted to check whether they are tweeting at all anymore. But it doesn't show their tweets without me registering. Shrug.

What is TPOT?

"i think xyz would be what finally kills twitter" "this time bro, just trust me. it wouldn't go like the 1000 other times i predicted twitter would get killed"

I get the skepticism, but I've never seen people pay for a social media site en masse. If Twitter/X changes that I'll be very surprised (and probably disappointed in humanity's unwillingness to let go of the past).

> I think Twitter/X charging money might be what kills it off.

I don't think this is true at all. Where did you get this idea they'd charge money for reading and posting?

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/19/musk-x-twitter-charge-all-u...

And a video where Musk states it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sea-Uxw5Syg

..."because a bot costs a fraction of a penny call it a tenth of a penny, but if somebody even has to pay a few dollars, some minor amount, the effective cost of bots is very high. And then you also have to get a new payment method every time you have a new bot".

I understand where Musk is coming from, but that's crazy.

I think if X charges even a dollar a year, it'll lose 95%+ of its customer base. Unless, of course, X has some serious value proposition in the future. I don't see much right now.

> "I do fully agree that there are philosophical and ethical problems with TwitterX, and I would like to see it fail..."

Agree with who? The article mentions nothing of the sort. It seems you have your own philosophical and ethical problems. Agreeing with ghosts, and wishing failure on others.

Now I'm curious to know know what you think the philiosphical and ethical problems with X are.

Supporting Musk just to view tweets (or whatever they are called) is a big moral compromise imho.

I get that if you are a news or social media source you need the views so it's work with him or lose money but that's not the case for many other people.

I left months ago and think it was the right decision for many reasons.

Probably that owner is a Billionaire online bully with a large following of acolytes ready to brigade anyone he feels like.

And that Twitter/X has now been login-walled so anyone that wants more than an embedded Tweet link has to make an account. Which means organisations like the BBC which use it are now implicitly supporting Musk.

I'm not sure you used Twitter much before he bought it, at that point was full of village mobs roaming and brigading anyone they felt like. To be honest that's actually calmed down since it's changed, they've probably all left to their very own echo-chamber mastodon instances.

I only ever see 'your side' constantly grind on about the politics of an artist, athlete, or business owner, in discussions completely unrelated to said politics, in an attempt to censor, cancel or otherwise leg-pull. To me, it's pretty clear who the bullies are.

Being a platform.

Of course that's not new : Twitter's APIpocalypse that spawned Mastodon happened in 2013...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com