Hacker News Reader

Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

To me, Twitter is by far the most toxic social network. It has the power to turn the most interesting and smartest people into bitter trolls. Maybe some people get value from it, but it requires serious self discipline to not get dragged into stupid arguments.

View on HN

I've tried to "get" Twitter since the early days. I've created a couple of Twitter accounts over the years to support various creative endeavours but I've never found myself getting much value out of it as a user.

I heard that it's original use-case was that back 2008 there were no good ways to do group messaging over SMS on a cell phone. That's a problem and solution that I can understand.

But as a broader social network? I don't get it.

Things that bother me to the point that they are deal breakers:

- The character limits (there is nothing worse in life than reading through a x/N self-reply to read something long ... I'd rather file a tax return)

- Showing me posts from pages I don't follow in the feed (in 99% of the cases I'm aware of that page/profile already and have chosen not to follow it because I don't like them)

- Ads in the news feed

Some have said that they like Twitter for getting news. I have way better options for that.

I know that I'm not representative of the typical person, generally speaking, but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular. And it's not that I'm hating on something I don't know anything about ... I've honestly tried to use it and get value out of it, but I've never found anything of value on offer.

> but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular.

I think it's a carryover of general nostalgia for how the Internet "used to be", i.e. before every site with a few million users decided to start experimenting with algorithms to max out user engagement and ad impressions, leading to the hell we see everywhere, from IG to Tiktok.

Yes, there was a time when Twitter wasn't a toxic mess. It's the last social network that was popular before smartphones took off.

Interesting. That might explain why I dislike it so much. As a middle aged person who grew up with an early iteration of the world wide web for a decade to a decade and a half before Twitter even existed, both smart phones and social media mark a turning point for me from what the Internet "used to be."

Twitter, in my mind (and maybe this is perception and not reality), ushered in infinite scroll and short bites of information. Twitter is to forums what TikTok is to documentaries. I see Twitter and the "mobile revolution" going hand in hand (something that left me behind because I still dislike using a smart phone, generally, and rarely do compared to most other people).

But I guess if you're a great deal younger than me, and you grew up with an Internet where Twitter just always existed, then it might represent some earlier version of the Internet that is drastically different from what you consider to be "contemporary" (though, putting the TikTok mention aside, I'm still not sure what that view of the contemporary Internet is if Twitter is what we're comparing it to).

I guess I'm just so old that I still see Twitter as a relatively new phenomenon. Very different from the nostalgia that I feel for what the world wide web used to be when I was young.

It's gotten dramatically worse since premium started rewarding payouts for engagement/views, alongside zero moderation. Now there's an actual incentive to be a jerk, a spammer, and make repeated bad faith arguments / "just asking questions" -- people reply, your tweet is seen by more people, you get paid a share of ad revenue.

Then you have the regurgitated messages in replies (AI or otherwise) endlessly copied and distorted. Recently it's been 5+ pages until I see a real reply, while I have 3000+ accounts blocked by now. It's getting harder and harder to find the real person who wrote that witty reply, and not the endless blue check accounts who copy-pasted it to farm engagement on their visibility-boosted tweets.

Genuinely getting more and more unusable.

Tangential but there's my disappointment to AI in there: they haven't found a way to build convincingly human bots, let alone a procedural content creation system.

Both AI believers and doomers insist generative AI could surpass humans by every single metric that matters in social media. All we've got is first Nigerian, then Indian, and now increasingly Pakistani spammers desperately reply bombing trending posts made by 10 years alpha users, as if whoever behind it completely failed to do it and has been wasting gullible human spammer candidates faster than Aperture Science.

> they haven't found a way to build convincingly human bots, let alone a procedural content creation system.

The 'they' being the corporations that hired thousands of people from the very countries you're associating with spammers , to review, correct and train AI models?

Why not, um... stop using it?

Mastodon has a lot of great people, and a lot less of all this stuff.

Not parent, but I did use Mastodon for about a year. I ended up moving back to Twitter because:

1. I just couldn't vibe with the culture there. From my POV, Mastodon is made out of pearl-clutchers and politics.

2. So much drama. The FediSearch drama. The Raspberry Pi incident. It's just so tiring and you feel like you need to walk on eggshells all the time.

3. So much drama. You would just pray that your admin didn't get into a spat with another admin and get defederated. You could get a solo server, but that costs money and you might get blocked by a large server's admin anyway.

4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere. Solo, yes, but costs money.

At least with Twitter, the rules are sort of well known, and you can follow anyone there unless they block you personally.

I heard BlueSky is good, though. Haven't tried it yet. Nostr was also another one, to get around the admin drama issue, but it doesn't seem very popular.

>4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere.

I would have thought a well-designed decentralized system would allow you to, for instance, download/export all your posts, and then import them all to a new server, in case you have to move servers for some reason.

The server-oriented aspect of Mastodon was the second-worst decision ever (the first one was the name). Mainstream social media doesn't ask you to pick a server (nor deal with the consequences of it going down), its replacement shouldn't either.

As for the server-oriented aspect, what's the alternative? There's only two ways I see to run a social media service like this: centralized and decentralized.

The mainstream ones are centralized, of course: FB, Xitter, etc. You just connect to their web server and do everything there. Any centralized alternative would have be a well-financed corporation able to set up a huge IT infrastructure to accomplish the same task. But the whole idea of Mastodon is to not be a big, for-profit corporation, and to be in the hands of the users instead, which I don't think is possible with a centralized service.

So the only alternative is a decentralized service. But this means you have to have multiple servers, leading to the whole "federated" approach, so users can run their own servers and control things themselves, or use accounts on servers of their choice. This of course leads to all the consequences you named, and more: servers going down, servers defederating other servers, etc.

But again, what's the alternative? If the requirement is "not run by a single big for-profit company", I don't see one. If you think that having a decentralized service actually be competitive with a centralized one like Xitter simply isn't feasible, that's fair.

My prior complaint still stands though: if you want users to have freedom (of which server to put their account on, etc.), then why would you not have a way of migrating their account/data to another server, and force them to lose everything if their server disappears?

"But again, what's the alternative?" Blockhain based social networks would seem the obvious choice. The onramp needs to be easier I feel though. Make the ID-management, posting and global searching easy enough.

I agree about the name: they shouldn't have stolen the name of a great metal band.

I have a Mastodon account, a Bluesky account, and apps for both. Mastodon doesn’t replace the comedy part of Twitter, and Bluesky is great but 99% of local social media is still on Twitter. So I’m “trapped” on Twitter until they move to Bluesky, but they won’t because a part of that crowd is addicted to the revenue share off their political tweets.

This obviously varies person to person, but I don't find it to be that. I carefully maintain who I am following (about 600 people and companies, mainly in the infosec / natsec space) and when I start to see bad behavior/content I'm quick to unfollow people. Also, I only use the Following tab, never the For You tab.

It's intentionally engineered to be as emotionally provocative as possible, to drive engagement, to drive and revenue.

My For You feed kept turning into videos of public fights and Karen's calling the cops, etc. no matter what feedback I gave or what I clicked on.

Deleted it and haven't looked back. Won't click on a link from x.com either.

I never did much with Twitter until I took over the Carolina Code Conference, but it's been by far the easiest place to engage with different tech communities. Just the "Follow All" button that appears after I follow something like Gleam or Roc is hugely helpful.

I probably spend more time on Twitter now than I ever did before.

> It has the power to turn the most interesting and smartest people into bitter trolls.

There is tremendous value in having access to large quantities of data demonstrating the various failure modes of relatively intelligent minds. Nothing is being (publicly) done with this data so far, but this will not last forever.

This is something that has always bothered me about the /r/SSC community (and others): the "no culture war topics" constraint + moderators locking threads when the Rationalists start collectively behaving irrationally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com