Hacker News Reader

Comment by monetus | Hacker News Reader

Twitter isn't focused on being a microblogging platform anymore, and X has a branding problem worse than that papa John's guy, John Schnatter.

I like mastodon, but it has been described as going to a quiet restaurant only to be handed a meat cleaver and an oven.

Bluesky's interface is clunky, slow by comparison. It is run by Jack Dorsey who, bless his good intentions, doesn't inspire faith in his management of a good product.

Meta is hands off, this is Instagram and Mosseri's discretion, with Meta as a hiring pool. The hate for meta is palpable, but threads is only going to grow imo.

View on HN

My understanding is that Jack Dorsey has little to no direct involvement with Blue Sky anymore. He doesn't even have an account on the service. As far as I know, Jack has redirected his efforts to Nostr.

I do think one useful heuristic for evaluating social media apps is whether company leadership and employees are actually participating on the platform.

When I open Twitter and Threads, I see Elon and Mark both posting regularly.

Agree with a lot of this but Dorsey doesn't run Bluesky. The project was initiated at Twitter while he was CEO and he's on the board of the company, but he's not the day to day operator.

Which I would also suggest is the most questionable/concerning part of Bluesky: Twitter didn't invest in it in exchange for nothing.

What amount of control might X/Elon have over Bluesky as a company? Jack backing something other than Bluesky post-Twitter is not a good sign.

>"Twitter isn't focused on being a microblogging platform anymore, and X has a branding problem worse than that papa John's guy, John Schnatter."

It is amusing that accessing "X formerly known as Twitter" by typing "x.com" in a browser still resolves to twitter.com. Is there a reason that a CEO who is unbothered by abrupt and radical changes can't or won't retire the twitter.com domain?

Is there a practical reason for this? Certainly "tiwtter.com" being hardcoded everywhere would not rise to the level of an intractable problem.

Obviously there is a ton of technical debt involved and the devs convinced Musk not to deal with it yet. If they had hardcoded data center names , you can imagine what goes on with the domain.

Wouldn't amaze me if at least one of the major downtimes they've had has been an attempt to do this.

> I like mastodon, but it has been described as going to a quiet restaurant only to be handed a meat cleaver and an oven.

I like how a non-algo'd website is now basically being described as a massive pain

Suppose it depends on what you're used to. I started using Twitter in 2007 (no algorithm) and moved to accessing it pretty much exclusively by third party app by around 2010, and I bailed out shortly before Naughty ol' Mr Car killed the API, so I've ~no direct exposure to The Algorithm(TM); Mastodon thus suited me fine. But if you're used to an algorithm, I suppose Threads may suit better.

I wonder if the internet is splitting in two, those you interact with and those you doomscroll?

What features are missing from Twitter to be a better microblogging platform?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com