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Comment by ghosty141 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah somebody should mirror it. In general I dont understand why people post things like this on X. Its a horrible platform.

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Serious answer: I post things on Twitter because it is easy, lets a huge number of people read my thread, and provides easy interaction. I post the same threads to Mastodon and get orders of magnitude less interest. I also write blog posts, which take a huge amount of time (a week versus an hour) and are hit-or-miss. Sometimes they are very popular and sometimes they disappear without a trace.

I’m always delighted when I visit HN and see one of your blog posts on the front page; they posts are great and they elicit some of the most interesting HN discussions. It took me a little while to realize that all these good posts were on the same blog, but once I did I had a lovely time browsing through the archive and reading more of the “deep cuts.”

The posts about the System/360 consoles come to mind, for example. I’m not sure how “popular” those were(?), but they’ve been very helpful as references for an art project I’m working on!

Why not Threads?

Might it be that it takes a week because you spend time thinking things through in a much more coherent manner rather than just submitting stream of conscious level tweets? Sounding professional instead of trendy?

What are some better alternatives?

Current best answer seem to be Mastodon and Bluesky.

If we are going by the number of users, Facebook has more users than Twitter and Threads has about the same order of magnitude, but we still see a lot more Twitter submissions to HN compared to Facebook and Threads[1].

If users prefer the microblog format, Mastodon and Bluesky appear to be the most compelling alternatives, both have been steadily gaining users[2].

[1] Submissions from various sites:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=threads.net

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=facebook.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bsky.app

Not sure how we can find the number of Mastodon links since it has so many domains.

[2] Mastodon and Bluesky user counts:

https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11213120632905851...

https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3klzrudt4uk2z

https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3kkv3clm3su2h

For some; for technically dumb people like me, it's the only platform that's easy to use.

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