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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

Aside: it is the second day in a row that a thread from Mastodon ends up on the frontpage of HN. When was the last time I Twitter thread did the same, and does anyone else doubts that Twitter is no longer at the center of tech-related conversation?

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A lot of the recent OpenAI events that were posted here were links to Twitter and I’ve seen plenty of people point this out as evidence that Twitter still is at the centre.

This is part of the current cycle of fragmentation. Twitter is no longer the centre, but it still holds certain cultural niches. Other niches have migrated to Mastodon or elsewhere.

I am personally pretty excited to see this diversification and fragmentation as it should help provide more niches for more people.

Which niches have migrated? The only people that use mastodon hate Twitter/Elon if you count that as a niche, there are no notable groups on mastodon.

Substack is significantly more threatening and interesting to Twitter.

Mastodon… lol. Is that even still alive? Are you gonna say that Threads is thriving as well?

The OP link is to a very much alive mastodon instance… so yes its doing fine. No idea about Threads but apparently some people use it.

But your claim is that twitter is no longer the center and many niches have migrated to Mastodon. I highly doubt this, unless you can point out an actual niche where Mastodon has more active discussions than twitter.

My claim is not "many niches migrated to Mastodon", but "Twitter is not at the center of tech discussion". At least, not for the hacker types. Even here, the majority of HN links that show up as a Twitter thread are about technology "businesses", not tech itself.

I don’t know how you can say that. The whole fiasco with open AI recently was a good example of how Twitter was the place where you could really stay up-to-date with everything going on. All the main players were posting there.

I love HN, but just because there wasn’t a lot of links to Twitter doesn’t mean it’s not the center of tech discussion

Do you care about the channels used by the "main players" to broadcast their message, or where the conversation about the events were happening?

The OpenAI saga was such an outlier in the usual news cycle, it is hard to use it as a measure of anything.

Also, lots of OpenAI fans and venture capital/crypto people are still on Xitter. It’s a special demography that makes it more an outlier.

You can't call any piece of evidence that happens to not support your theory as being an outlier. And even then the OpenAI saga is probably the most important development in tech in the last 10 years (conservatively).

Perhaps, in terms of how much it's affecting Silicon Valley; though I'd say iPhone adoption, the tail-end of Flash, the death of ActiveX, the destruction of libraries, and the growth of Amazon were all more impactful, there.

Probably not, in terms of how much 2040s tech will be based on this stuff. Language models are good for machine translation, and real-time image transcription, but everything else I've seen them do has better solutions (which have been around for decades in many cases, but don't have much funding).

> iPhone adoption, the tail-end of Flash, the death of ActiveX, the destruction of libraries, and the growth of Amazon were all more impactful, there.

Not sure what you’re referring to with “the destruction of libraries”, but all of the others happened more than ten years ago.

One difference is that Twitter no longer shows threads to logged-out users, while Mastodon does. If someone posted the same thread to both sites, the Mastodon one would be better to link to.

I think this is a misfeature that will hurt Twitter going forward. I don't bother clicking a link to a Twitter thread any more because I know I'm just going to get prompted to log into the account I don't have. And I don't care enough to use an alternate tool, so I just move on. I expect I'm not alone.

But it is a feature. Musk’s takeover of BLUEBIRD is a deliberate act of transmutation, possibly even demolition.

Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/front for the last ten days: one today, one five days ago, three seven days ago, two nine days ago.

I'm just glad to see the entire thread of conversation without having to switch to nitter or whatever.

Are you familiar with the libredirect plugin? It can automatically rewrite all twitter links to point at nitter instead.

I'm not, but I'm on mobile Safari 99% of the time. I see there is an extension that does something similar, which I'll check out. Thanks for the nudge.

What you are experiencing is a great example of confirmation bias.

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