Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjackson5324 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting because the content I get on X is far, far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined.

It’s the only place you can follow subject matter experts and get their real time thoughts.

I think people on HN just don’t know how to use Twitter?

If you want to use it effectively, you have to utilize lists. Curate your own lists or find someone you respect and follow their lists.

If someone is posting things you don’t enjoy then remove them.

Frankly, if X is causing you to be angry/depressed then a big part of that is on you.

View on HN

Nearly every subject matter expert I followed has left. Scientists, mathematicians, journalists, authors, comic book people, and so on.

What I now see are people with demented political opinions about women and American politics. It sucks.

i follow about a thousand physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, try searching keywords like “quantum mechanics” and then “follow all” when recommended. Really no place like twitter for math/science content

> Scientists, mathematicians, journalists, authors, comic book people, and so on.

Intersting, I haven't had a single person leave. People make a big fuss about leaving, but the traffic you get from Twitter is too attractive to leave.

> What I now see are people with demented political opinions about women and American politics. It sucks.

As I said, that's because you're not using lists. It's literally impossible to see posts from accounts you don't like if you're using lists.

As a journalist who has been involved in newsroom analytics at three organizations since Twitter launched, I can assure you that most online news outlets have seen very little to no referral traffic from Twitter in nearly a decade. Journalists love to point to some viral retweet of their story, but most of the time: the number of likes/retweets > actual referrer traffic.

See NPR: https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

> far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined

What do you learn from 280 characters at a time?

Mostly I follow artists who post pictures, so the character limit doesn't matter.

The 280 character limit was raised to 4,000 in February of 2023.

Only for people who pay.

Getting more value from tech twitter these days.

I mostly follow L7+ SWEs, creators of popular tech like dynamoDB, and professors in AI/systems/DB/PL. The ones who tried to move to sites like mastodon eventually came back, or are now using twitter much more than these alternatives. There's been more top SWEs and professors especially in AI and systems sharing content there.

Noticed as well that twitter is also more optimistic about tech than HN, especially with subcultures like e/acc, learning/building in public, etc.

> Interesting because the content I get on X is far, far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined.

That has been my experience as well. Easily. I learned a ton about LLMs, open source projects, growth hacks, marketing tips, a lot of great from the trenches lessons. Best site on the web.

Yep exactly. I’m also a big formula 1 fan and it’s the only place where I can get insight from engineers who are involved in the day to day of building race cars for ex.

Reddit’s f1 subreddit has really degraded in quality unfortunately (just people posting clickbait articles).

It’s the same for investing, politics, cars, poker and everything else I enjoy.

> It’s the only place you can follow subject matter experts and get their real time thoughts.

I have no use case for anyone else’s “real time thoughts”. Neither does almost anyone else.

Twitter’s one trick is FOMO for news junkies.

I follow subject matter experts on Mastodon/ActivityPub. Scientists, engineers, librarians, mathematicians, doctors, programmers, designers, artists, musicians, retro computing enthusiasts, amateur radio operators, etc. etc.... They've been migrating away from Twitter for a long time, because it has shown us how horribly "millions of people in the same room" works out, especially when a sociopathic algorithm rewards conflict and sensationalism at the expense of thought/consideration and kindness.

Why is this reply getting downvoted?

I'm guessing

1) HN readers don't like Elon Musk (I don't like him either) so they don't like Twitter

2) I implied HN readers are doing something wrong (as any other human being, they don't like being told that)

3) I (slightly) insulted the intelligence of HN readers by saying they didn't know how to use Twitter and they really don't like that

I've just gotten downvotes and no one's responded with any actual rebuttals so I don't think what I've posted is wrong.

You are missing the fact that, for many of us who used to enjoy Twitter in exactly the way you described, X no longer fills that need, because the subject matter experts whose real-time thoughts we used to follow have left the platform, and all that remains are people whose real-time thoughts we don't generally want to hear.

That may differ from your experience - your real-time expert community might be different than mine.

But for a lot of us who actually used to enjoy Twitter, what you're describing is no longer to be found there.

> because the subject matter experts whose real-time thoughts we used to follow have left the platform

Do mind naming 10 subject matter experts who've permanently left twitter?

I'm really curious as to which communities used to be vibrant on Twitter and then died after the X switch over.

Yeah, as you stated, my personal experience is that all the communities I follow continue to be active.

Andrej Karpathy - I guess. The tweets i see when i click on it are out of chronological order, maybe there's something new i don't see

Nah Andrej is still active on [Twitter](https://i.imgur.com/KEa6dx4.png)

I'm guessing he's less active now because he's back at OpenAI and not on sabbatical anymore.

Thanks!

Not going to indulge in an 'oh, you like Twitter? Name ten of their albums' kind of question.

My friends left. I left.

The entire discussion is based on subject matter experts. I asked you to name a few and you didn't name a single one.

> My friends left. I left.

Ok? That has no relevance to our discussion.

Nah, you're probably wrong about HN users not knowing how to use Twitter. You're assuming the worst - perhaps assume that people have good reasons for avoiding it and ask what those might be?

I have about 5k followers on Twitter and have posted roughly 10k tweets over the last 16 years of having an account there. I'm pretty familiar with how to use it. I've moved to mastodon - the part of Twitter I used to value is a dumpster fire, many of my colleagues have moved, and I don't want to contribute to monetizing hateful garbage. And that includes preferring not to log in, which means threads don't show up any more. So it was nitter or nothing.

I used to use Twitter and I simply disagree with it being more useful than HN. I suppose it depends on the focus of content you want to learn or read about

For me it's the abysmal SNR no matter where I look, except if it absolutely needs to be real-time. Even considering just the "content" and ignoring the unfathomable interface that we're left with now.

It’s HN. Everyone here has encountered many true believers who, when confronted with a criticism of their favorite tool, responds “well, you are using it wrong. Change your workflow to match mine, which is superior anyway, and then you’ll see.”

It’s tiresome, and I for one have little patience for someone patronizingly suggesting that I'm being stubborn for refusing to allow them to enlighten me.

Is that what you were doing? Maybe not. But you certainly matched my regex, so to speak.

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