Here the human condition can flourish in a more localized way, with more participation (less lurking). No more winner takes all.
Digg to Reddit was a unique case, because Digg very specifically fucked up their site, badly, with the V4 update. Reddit was in a great spot to pick up users from Digg because of not only having a similar overarching purpose as a link aggregator, but additional features like subreddits which enabled more smaller and casual link sharing and comment sections. It was a clear upgrade from Digg V4. I do think that Reddit would have eventually overtaken Digg anyway, and V4 only sped up the process.
Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now. If you're on there to look at funny memes, cat pictures, celebrity news and pornography -- which encapsulates about 98% of Twitter use cases -- it still functions much better than the alternatives. The migrations are happening for meta reasons, either political or ToS-related (specifically, X claiming they can use images you post for AI training). This isn't a recipe for long-term success, it's a precursor for people making bunch of noise for a month and then heading back to Twitter.
As someone who doesn't really participate in these large social networks -- even modern HN is way too mainstream for me honestly -- I do think it's a good thing people get off them, though. Smaller communities are a good thing. Shouting your loudest, hottest political takes on Twitter so you can pat yourself on the back for 10k likes is a fast track to mental health issues.
The Bluesky app both performs better and uses much less battery than Twitter does. I think because it uses Google ads now, but not sure.
Twitter also has disk space leaks - I regularly find the app has gone up to 3GB or so. (And it's not from image caching, seems to be an SQLite db of all accounts I've seen posts from.)
The app is a bin-fire.
And Twitter didn't? They use the "nazis at a bar" metaphor for a reason. UX is not the only way to screw up a site. Ashley Madison didn't torpedo because of a bad UI redesign.
Even on a product level, the change to not hide tweets from blocked accounts may as well have been a Digg v4 for high profile people. There was no profit to be had here and no one to gain with this update. Purely ideaologically driven.
> it still functions much better than the alternatives.
in which ways? Genuinely curious. All these social media feeds, by design, all just blended into the Instagram/tiktok mush of infinite scrolling and predictive "you might like this!" sorts of algorithms to meximize engagement. None feel much easier/harder.
What you have in the modern internet is that left-leaning users avoid networks that aren't moderated in their favor (in a conscious attempt to prevent moving the overton window), which leads to right-wing takeover (and eventually death of the social network because there are only right-wingers, see the graveyard of reddit alternatives). This trend would have been reversed a decade ago.