Current thoughts on social media
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
Nitter helps; a bit. In fact, Nitter is like an ideal Twitter; without all the javascript bloat; but because of that, it does not support Twitter's rich media such as spaces; and it also sometimes cannot connect to the api. And it isn't clear how long its api key will last.
The profile/tweet history is downright unusable.
Blocking might be a problem to second order. Say there is some climate denier who is just always saying that reports of 115F at the airport in Phoenix are false. Can the weather service block that person, even if means they can’t get weather alerts anymore?
It only make sense that large enough entities run their own instance, they don't even have to self host it.
I always found it strange that no serious professional would use an @gmail.com email but somehow publishing behind twitter.com was normal. At least now there is a viable alternative...
The "sometimes cannot connect to the API", is because the APIs they use (which IIRC are the APIs the official twitter website uses), changes from time to time and is not a stable API and probably because Twitter wants to make it harder to "abuse" the API like nitter does.
So they are proxying the calls to Twitter servers.
I miss quite a few things about the Old Internet, and one of them is how easy Pidgin, Trillian, and the like made talking to people on Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, or whatever. I think I even used a social media aggregator at one point so I could stay current on Facebook and Twitter at the same time.
I don't think that's possible anymore. Talking to people cross-platform is definitely not possible without something like Beeper (which is buggy, but not because of Beeper)
For WhatsApp, Beeper needs to have an active session token on their servers that you approve via QR code. This is needed because WhatsApp doesn't have a public API and the only way they can grab messages is by scraping web.whatsapp.com.
It's very similar to the approach that Spark (iOS Mail App) takes for connecting to Gmail (they hold refresh tokens server side). Will someone from Spark or Beeper read your messages on the sly? Probably not.
But if their servers get compromised, someone else might, and that's a problem!
In the Old Days, everything was username/password Basic Auth, and all of the chat platforms exposed some kind of an API. No need for an intermediate server to hold tokens on your behalf.
Is it really impossible or just very difficult? To me it seems like it's the latter since alternative frontends as in libredirect [0] exist for many sites. You can't rely on APIs and would need to build custom browser simulation for each site. That's certainly difficult, but doesn't seem impossible?
I don't see how these sites could ever make automation completely impossible without locking out humans as well.
And that's before you get to the Cloudflare final boss
Potential irony? Wasn’t this model, at least in part, popularized by the Facebook game Farmville?
I'd rather just have a feed-reader that I manage, and manually subscribe to people's content. Something like how Spokeo or FriendFeed back in the day.... FriendFeed was also awesome. I wish we'd go back to those days.
It doesn't feel like there's critical mass keeping rss feeds up to date. And I had a pretty extensive Feely configured for awhile after the google blog reader went away, too.
Also how little content they can actually fit on screen. When you optimize for press release photos everyone suffers.
That's pretty much the norm on twitter, idk about other social networks. On some social networks (including twitter) it's quite normal to just lurk and not contribute anything.
Twitter/X should have been shut down 6 months ago maximum according to such prophecies like this one [0] by many HNers here. For example, even with predictions of Threads to 'to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion' [1] giving them just months after launch. Not even that happened, let alone the other dramatic changes to the platform.
We have given the doom-mongers plenty of time for Twitter/X to shut down or completely collapse and go permanently offline but all we got was the alternatives like T2 shutting down [2] due to Threads crushing and killing off the rest of the smaller competitors (Spill, Post.news, Substack Notes, etc) and some Mastodon instances shutting down to recentralize to Mastodon.social, the most centralized and one of the only viable instances that has enough funding to be sustainable.
We are slowly realizing that the completed takeover that happened 1 year ago, lots of emotions and hysteria took over by a small minority begging for the collapse that never happened.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
- US web traffic down 19%
- Ad portal traffic down 16%
- Mobile traffic on iOS/Android down 17.8%
- Granted, all social traffic was down around 3-4% globally, but we can see the anomaly that is Twitter's traffic.
To me, it's all rubbernecking at a car burning on the side of the road. We'd rather see it burn down while we're there, rather than watch it on the news.
Anecdote: I used to be a daily twitter user, and I barely use it now because you can pay to traffic terrible content (not ads)
People will shout "agile" from the rooftops, but when it comes to actual change, people are (as they've always been) uncomfortable with it.
In the case of running a business it comes down to Profit = Revenue - Expenses. The purchase of Twitter brought in and will continue to bring in change that aligns with this formula.
People can be upset that a bunch of people got fired, or that new changes have happened, but as they say, it's not personal, it's just business.
> In the case of running a business it comes down to Profit = Revenue - Expenses. The purchase of Twitter brought in and will continue to bring in change that aligns with this formula.
Do you think Musk bought Twitter in order to make money? By that standard, it's been a horrible failure. The prediction that it will change is groundless speculation.
I never said he is or that everything he does is guaranteed to work.
> Do you think Musk bought Twitter in order to make money?
I think he bought it to bring an idea to life, and that in order to do that it needs to have a viable business model behind it.
And it already has and is changing. I don't think that's a controversial statement...
This is such a great litmus test for responsible internet use. Who picks the content? Is it you? Is it curated by one individual? Is it determined by a voting system? Is it determined by an engagement algorithm? Is it determined by a content corporation?
Realistically, the healthiest way to consume content would probably be to feed it to yourself. And the unhealthiest diet would involve being fed by engagement algorithms.
I might start thinking about more things this way.
If you want value, if you want it to worth your time, you need that bubble. 90s and early 2000s ideals are dead.
The internet today is like one big web forum, we all use our real names, but nobody knows us.
I wish X had a proper UI like Telegram. The "Following" feed is pathetic. The problem is, of course, that I would spend 90% less time on X if there was such a feature. Really drives home that You Are The Product.
But after I downloaded, I quickly realized the discovery experience was non existent. I was googling for good TG channels, which is crazy in my opinion!
The problem is in my country if you go for a gun licence the cops give you the side eye if you're on telegram. It may affect your ability to get (re)licenced.
Everything: https://t.me/hackernewslive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
side note but Fowler's organization runs an employee Mastodon instance. This is the "correct" model that should have been applied to social networking from the beginning (interoperability, not silos)
Windows Live Messenger, on the list, had 330 million active monthly users
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Messenger
India TV claims Orkut was exactly that popular (300 m)
https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-orkut-farewell-m...
"X" is definitely running right into a similar problem that Google+ faced: a good name can't save you but an awful name can sink you. I've never heard even the most ardent Musk fans defending the name change. It's ridiculous.
Those communities, plus stable infrastructure, great integration with photos, publicly viewable profiles without requiring sign-in, transparent moderation that I never knew I missed until I joined Diaspora, and no ads. It was a real shame.
Even Musk was trying to argue it was all bots before he got stuck with the bill.
But ultimately it doesn't matter, I don't think your first point is correct - the window of opportunity for this cycle is behind us for a decentralization of social media imo. The network effects of X are too strong, eventually people will come back.
For me the most useful part of Twitter was real time news trends. I don't even open that tab anymore.
Next most useful thing was the network of scientists from my field. It is also non existent now. I saved a lot of tweets about new papers over the years. When I went back to read them during literature review for my dissertation, I found most of them gone and accounts deleted.
What has increased drastically is verified accounts spewing either sensationalism without any care for engagement, or outright misinformation, sometimes taken down hilariously by community notes.
You're living in a fantasy bubble if you think anything in this comment is insightful or representative of the current state of Twitter.
The only thing that was in doubt during the various recent Twitter changes was how rapidly it would decline - people have underestimated network inertia, which is why Mastodon and now Bsky have failed to capture sufficient impressions to convince everyone they're the "next Twitter". Which ultimately brings people back to Twitter - noone is going to Twitter because Mastodon/Bsky don't work, they're coming back because with each migration they overestimate the finality & are disappointed.
Ultimately though, slow as Twitter's decline is, it is continuing to decline steadily & will inevitably cross the critical threshold where one can consider it first irrelevant (Facebook's currenly approaching this state, a process which has been slow), then eventually "defunct".
TL;DR: declines always take longer than everyone predicts, but ultimately still happen. Comebacks generally speaking don't.
Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many times you click not interested on hard right content, street fights, etc. it just forces it on you. They have stop letting you adjust aspects of your feed.
I have literally never seen this stuff in my feed. Are you commenting on or reposting far right content or street fights? Even if you're commenting or reposting to say how awful the content is, that still counts as "engagement" and will cause the algorithm to give you more of it.
This isn't about whether Mastodon is better or any other existing alternative though: people as a group are less interested in individual rational concerns like these and will ultimately go where the network is, and wherever it's going to (yet to be decided) it's clearly moving away from Twitter. Slowly, but surely.
You don't really. In fact, historically, migrations away from a large declining platform don't tend to have a unified destination. Consolidation doesn't happen directly, it's usually a later stage of any given social network (immediately preceding decline).
e.g. people didn't move from MySpace to Facebook en masse. They went to LastFm, Bebo, Orkut, many other places. It wasn't until long after Myspace's decline that Facebook started to be a singular dominant force (at which stage Snapchat/Vine/Instagram/others started seeping in).
> The next stable state of consolidation
This "stable consolidation" tends to follow mass abandonment of a network to disparate places, it doesn't precede it.
The brief period when Twitter started was the start of a transition from a nerd-only internet to a general-use web. It was a single moment in time when everyone still felt open to internet socialization. Nowadays, niche interest and groups form insular groups the way they used to in the pre-internet days. The stuff I read on the more social HN threads could be interchangeably posted on IRC channels, Matrix rooms, or Mastodon posts. There's a more definite sense of "FOSS-y tech tribe" than I feel there used to be 15 years ago.
In that, it's just a return to form. Nerd groups were often niche groups in the past and now that everyone is on the web, they have returned to being niche groups. It is sad that we lost a brief moment of openness, when groups were interested in cross-pollinating. But it was just a moment in time, a mere blip in the development of social culture, rather than a lasting change.
I suppose we shouldn't feed either one but right now "the algorithm" is the bigger threat. I mean, I can usually get a troll to work for me with a bit of patience and perseverance... algorithms? They'll only work for me if it's profitable for someone else. It's so soulless.
But your post is pretty typical of the viewpoint you see in these technical circles. I know some non-technical small business owners and while dealing with "the algorithm" can be stressful, many of them respect the power of the algorithm to generate awareness of their products. That's what I mean. Niche spaces online have become tribal and niche just like they used to be when they were offline. The brief open period of the web was just the time period when the old ingroup was joined by everyone else.
RIP Google Reader
I saw many journalists/political activists who made lots of doom predictions on twitter creating an urge for people to perhaps try other options but these aren't competitors to twitter.
This is not a either/or type situation. You can be on twitter and Linkedin at the same time.
The way I see it, Twitter has no competitor. Mastodon could have been a competitor but before elon bought twitter they made public decisions which has basically made mastodon impossible to compete against twitter. What a huge shame.
I wonder what the definition of social media is which includes Usenet, but not email or BBSs, which presumably Fowler used to some extent as well. To me, social media by definition has some level of participation by users who are not posters or responders—i.e. an upvoting mechanism, a sharing mechanism, or an algorithm based on usage—which changes the prominence of the content in some way. Maybe that's just the definition I've cobbled together in my head.
Be it Hackernews, Facebook, Valve's Steam Forums, Instagram, EU Chatcontrol, Google Reviews, YouTube comments. Silicon Valley companies are making sure you can't speak freely.
This. so much. And also it is not repeating the same corporate for-profit business model that FB/X/Twitter and other also have and has led to nothing but enshittification. Let's not repeat the same mistake and go to something really different this time and Mastodon/ActivityPub is it.
What I noticed is that even with all that happened, it's surprising that the number of people interacting with his posts hasn't really changed. The network effect seems to be holding things together.
> The reason I'm posting on Mastodon is because the future I want is one that's based on interoperability. I want to see an open protocol that isn't dependent on a tech-lord's whim. ActivityPub is currently the one that looks most developed. Bluesky's AT Protocol may become important in the future, so I'm also keeping an eye on that.
I think there are 3 things on Facebook: friend posts, short videos from content farms, and actual ads. The first are what I want to see, the third… well, obviously I don’t like them, but they pay the bills, right? The second are, I guess, like things Facebook puts there to hide the fact that nobody posts anything to Facebook anymore.
If you must buy something from Facebook, use specialist groups that are moderated and preferably private.
It's still filled with obvious scams and reporting them does nothing. Meanwhile FB's AI Algorithm bans legit posts for selling prohibited items :D
Also, I quit Facebook before they added marketplace so I can't make a comparison. I'm just going off of this thread mostly. I also know people who sell things on marketplace fairly regularly / successfully.
Marketplace
That aside it's funny because I have the exact opposite experience. It's the best place to buy and sell locally. Not every place has Craigslist (for better or worse) so it's good to have at least an OK digital alternative. I use it pretty much every day.
Then navigate to Facebook.com/hacked as directed by the help docs and have it reject any attempt to recover your account because it only works with currently used email addresses and phone numbers which the hacker has removed and updated to a value which you cannot know.
Does anyone work at FB or knows if they have a public facing bug tracker or ability to contact their developers? This is a pretty bad bug.
Myself and many many other people attempt to help the situation by reporting the old profile as a hacked impersonator, only to be promptly closed by Facebook, as they cite they see no rule breaking. They reach this opinion despite the profile being massively changed, from an English speaking father of two, to a woman persona now posting obvious scam links and new family photos in a different language (and country) entirely.
Even as we admit defeat on recovering the old account, often tied to a small business page, and eat the cost of starting over, the old profile still masquerades under the old name, but with reputation damaging and clearly fake content.
[1] https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/menlo-park/profile/internet-servic...
I made a Facebook account solely for the purpose of selling this extra set of cabinets on the marketplace, made no other posts about anything anywhere on Facebook, and my account got banned within a week. They asked me to send them a scan of my id to get it unbanned, which I did and they unbanned me. It was then permanently banned a week later with no explanation and no option to appeal.
That's classic scam-bot behavior right there.
This isn't a criticism of you - what you did makes perfect sense. But I'm not surprised at all that you got caught by a ban algo.
The only surprise is that you were ever unbanned.
[friend post, promoted/ad, friend post, recommended group, friend post, promoted/ad, group post, friend post]
So not quite as bad as your experience.
At first I didn't see any ads, but that was because of adblock.
As far as the problems people complain about on X, I don't see them. Twitter was always buggy at times, and that hasn't really changed. After the exodus of those who just can't stand Musk, I see far less political posts than I did in recent years, which is an improvement tbh. When I see something I don't want to see, I mute it or block the account, just like I always have.
That's not my experience at all. Who are you following?
In my niche, Apple platform software development, the community has almost entirely migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and it's now as active and thriving as ever.
IMO the Mastodon experience is even better than the Twitter experience was, because there are a lot fewer random trolls on Mastodon.
My little niche was the reason I originally joined Twitter back in 2008, so frankly, I don't really miss the millions of other people. I was never interested in following celebrities.
The "explore" feed on mastodon.social is absolutely toxic because it shows the most boosted and favorited posts and unfortunately this is people angry at politics, people who get a thrill out of dehumanizing people, etc. There's a story that "two sides" drive each other crazy on Twitter but my take is that "one side" can conjure the presence of the other side and drive themselves every bit as crazy and there is that subculture on Mastodon.
I block the names of most Republican politicians and certain words used by people who aren't comfortable in their own skin and don't want me to be comfortable in mine. If I ever see angry words in an image (screenshot, image meme, whatever) I block the poster immediately.
Thus I get to meet the "silent majority" of nice and mature people on Mastodon. I've found my flower photos get a lot of engagement, though I wish there was more enthusiasm for my sports photos that I put more effort into. Here is my profile
Have you tried to follow different people? Wouldn't that solve this issue since 100% of mastodon posts in your feed are people you follow (unlike on twitter that has ads and such).
I call BS. Twitter was rock-solid for the approximately 8-year window bookmarked by retiring the failwhale and the disastrous Twitter Blue launch.
Twitter was the place people would go to complain about other platforms being down.I could rely on their availability dashboard, the UI was stable and there were no subsystem brownouts of the kind I'm seeing now (e.g. "Tweet not available" until you refresh several times)
I moderated the Twitter subreddit at that time, I'd be happy to dig up outage threads (like this one! https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/msfyvs/is_twitter_..., coverage: https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/twitter-down-outage-12...)
Twitter Spaces was buggy at times, but the core product had much better stability than it has now.
Twitter has shown anti-user behavior over and over again. (From the encouragement of putting conflicting users together, to boosting toxic users, to unbanning the worst of the worst, also throwing people who disagree with their government in the wood chipper [there are ME countries that will follow through with legal and fatal consequences for opposing them in the platform].
Social media is now less town square ("Speakers Corner") and is a information weapon. I think Musk hoped to use blue checkmark attribution as a means of putting posts to the attribution test, and I believe he underestimated the appeal of bias enforcing anonymous posting. The tension between freedom of speech and dog whistling is unresolvable and I would argue different times call for different approaches. Its clear state and state-sponsored actors are abusing social media liberalism to the great detriment of Western values and stability. Its clear these same actors do not permit the freedom of communication they abuse elsewhere.
By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors.
We live in very interesting times.
I don't know what you think network effects do here. There is a very clear reason why LGBT+ community is allied with radical Islamic, and everyone knows it.
[edit] Actually I'll recant somewhat, you can probably find racists in any community, but I dare say that those messages come from individuals being assholes rather than individuals expressing community opinions.
Its really difficult to browse through these. Some of the most wonderful people I know are Lesbian and Gay people my age, and while not a single one of them identifies with Hamas, its clear the younger generation does. Its madness.
The reason is radial Islamic hates the US for supporting Israel, but also for the other reasons like the US army's presence in Middle East, and for other non-reasons like they're just crazy and hating everyone.
The LGBT+ community also "hates" the US, not in the sense they want US to be nuked like Hamas does, but they feel they're oppressed victims in the US[0]. So they have the same imaginary enemy.
Of course, LGBT+ people will be oppressed to death under Hamas's regime. But it doesn't matter for many: the chance Hamas conqures the US is about zero, so they don't fear Hamas. They fear the discrimination from their American fellows.
[0]: Still true in many places today, and everywhere 20 years ago.
Even ignoring the current situation, criticizing something doesn't necessarily ally you with someone else criticizing the same thing. The "enemy of my enemy is not my friend" etc.
So, was Musk wrong or not lol. Let's hope Fowler won't get cancelled.
Guess they'll have to settle for Instagram where they value privacy and personal rights, oh wait...