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Comment by RheingoldRiver | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but what are the majority of their customers going to do? X is an unstable platform that confuses most users, never mind the moderation problems.

Would be nice if they were adding a Mastodon account, but I can't blame any company that chooses to retire Twitter presence at this point.

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Are you asking what slack users are going to do? Or like, what are twitter users who arent as big as slack going to do?

Slack users should be using https://status.slack.com/ in any event.

The real problem with walled gardens is that people actively avoid going outside the wall. Who is actually not going to Slack's own status page when slack is down? People who would rather be wrong than inconvenienced.

In its heyday, using Twitter as an aggregator of alerts in a place that I was already receiving casual updates from was incredibly convenient. Tying that to conversation, it was easy to discern if this was a global impact caused by, for example, a failed deploy, or local, say a failing CDN endpoint. I truly don't think this is a case of folks opting solely for convenience over accuracy, so much as it added both convenience and context. Not to mention it was a useful canary in the coal mine, as declaring incidents on large platforms trigger SLA contract provisions, so we often see quite delayed reports from first-party sources.

I totally agree that Twitter/X is a shit-show since the not-so-recent change of hands. I am only providing an explanation to what OP sees.

To be fair, Twitter has began pushing algorithm mess onto their users far before the Musk take over. We really can't blame him for that. I was kind of hoping he would have at least tried to reverse it though.

Twitter profile pages showed all Tweets linearly from inception until about 9 months into Naughty Old Mr Car's tenure; he can absolutely be blamed for that.

The algorithmic stuff was only ever for users' feeds, not Twitter profiles.

Exactly. We could always see a user's own tweets in order by going to their page.

It's made the whole business of status updates completely unusable. If I want to find out why the fire helicopters are out, I can no longer see that on the fire department's Twitter page (even though they do post it!). If I want to find out if my local lake is closed due to algae, I can no longer see it on the park's page (even though they do post it!).

Pretty soon all these organizations are going to realize that their pages are worthless and leave Twitter.

You can do all of those if you're logged in.

Just an aside, some of recent changes seems intended to mimic Reddit. Not that it matters much.

Yeah but only after Muskover they started to first block unlogged users, then started showing them random tweets on profile page.

Nope, they’ve been blocking un logged in users one way or another for like 4 years. Musk removed that for a few months, then made it worse.

> To be fair, Twitter has began pushing algorithm mess onto their users far before the Musk take over. We really can't blame him for that.

I don't think this is a very fair and honest take on the toilet flush spiral where Elon Musk placed Twitter. Screwing up the timeline made available to non-registered users is a recent development, and one that lands squarely on Elon Musk's rule over Twitter. So does the shitshow that was the verified badge policy changes and opening the floodgates to racist and anti-semitic content.

In fact, I dare say that there was not a single change to Twitter that spawned from Elon Musk's takeover that had any positive or neutral impact on the company in general and service in particular.

We can blame him for two decisions which have made Twitter almost unusable:

a) Favouring blue-tick comments and post over those with higher engagement.

b) Paying people to comment which has meant more click-bait, hate etc. content.

In all fairness if there is an active post it will be at the top and that's the main value of a status page, not so much about the right order of years-old outages.

In all fairness a visitor now, who sees random old tweets, will assume the status tweet page is unmaintained and useless.

No it won't. At least not for me, a not-logged-in user. What's an "active post" anyway? A pinned post is at the top, but what status page constantly pins and unpins their latest post?

When I go to most Twitter pages, now, I see completely random posts from years ago at the top.

That is not necessarily true. I don’t have an X account; if I go to Musk’s X page I see his pinned post followed by something from 2022. So Slack could always pin the most recent post but they’d still lose the progress of the incident.

> Sure, but what are the majority of their customers going to do?

Providing a status monitor/canary page does not force anyone to register an account or subscribe to a service. They can provide all sorts of push/pull notification options they can conceive. Once Elon Musk's Twitter restricted access to their API I'm afraid Twitter lost any relevance for this type of use case.

People who don't use Twitter won't use Twitter to get status updates.

There are many bad things about how Musk is running Twitter, but the UX for people not logged in is pretty low on the list.

I think it's pretty high actually?

If I'm a random person who just heard that Joe Biden tweeted something, I can't see that tweet by going to his Twitter page. That's a pretty goddamned terrible experience right there.

It's also not clear that I'm just seeing the most popular tweets — no other social network has that experience for logged-out users.

If I've heard someone tweeted something, it's almost always in the context of a news article which embeds the tweet. Even if the embed doesn't work, the direct link to the tweet should.

I agree wholeheartedly that Twitter shouldn't be the primary vehicle for official communication from just about anything (except maybe Twitter itself).

In Japan, it’s not uncommon for companies or governing bodies to announce something _only_ on Twitter.

This can be anything from websites announcing maintenance to a public safety announcement. For example, the district I live has a disaster announcement account on Twitter.

At least for people here, using Twitter only for status updates while not logged in is a very common thing.

> In Japan, it’s not uncommon for companies or governing bodies to announce something _only_ on Twitter.

Not just in Japan.

But the practice, much like the one of using Facebook or other such service exclusively, has always been a Very Bad Idea. Perhaps such entities will finally abandon it entirely.

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