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Comment by marban | Hacker News Reader

Unless Bluesky or Threads tap into the Zeitgeist, Twitter isn't going anywhere. As much as whatever political side would love to see it falter, those invested in its downfall might have to temper their expectations. Twitter is a mirror of the human fabric — messy, contradictory, brutal. For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.

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It used to, now it's got a load of ads and heavy prioritization of accounts that pay money to use it. It's also locked down on technologies like the API that used to make it interesting.

All social networking sites seem inevitable till they fail, remember digg?

Bluesky and threads are building interesting sets of communities, and with the number of active users they have now, it's likely that they'll stay there.

There are 15k+ starter packs on the directory now https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs and just a quick scroll through them shows the diversity of groups using the platform.

Bluesky appears (for now at least) more open to API driven interaction and doesn't default to an algorithmic view, avoiding some of the more annoying things on twitter.

Now as they grow there will be inevitable problems with scammers/spammers and the rest but all popular sites that allow user generated content have to deal with that eventually.

> For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.

Is there such thing as accurately "reflecting society's pulse" within individual posts? Sure, maybe you can pull big data to understand public sentiment on certain topics or events. But the platform's goal is to present users with content they are most likely to engage with, so that they spend as much time on the platform as possible (and therefore view as many ads as possible). That content does not reflect society—it's often targeted ragebait. When users are goaded en masse by ragebait and engagement farming, some percentage are going to develop a distorted view of public sentiment, and their own engagement will further the issue.

The fact is that content discovery algorithms and moderation largely shape the tone and personality of a platform, both for a viewer and for a contributor (who is psychologically inclined to want to fit in).

Twitter isn't going to collapse and die overnight, but this could be the start of a 5-year trend where the "utility" of Twitter over other platforms gradually shrinks as reputable brands and public figures diversify their presence.

> For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.

Assume it’s true for a min, why does a society need a website reflect its pulse? It is useful for company and govt to harvest the data, but I failed to see any meanful way common individuals will benefit much from it.

I think the real problem on Twitter is the massive amount of spam that now exists. It's much worse than it was a couple of years ago. If all it consists of is bots and hucksters that pay to appear at the top of viral posts, it will cease to be a useful "pulse". That being said, this might just be the end of there being a single, central Twitter-like platform. There are already right-wing clones like Gab and Truth Social, it could be that more and more niche platforms pop up.

90% of the suggested posts are clickbaity threads people post for engagement. Its become very hard to navigate to real content.

I think it just comes in waves. Years ago, I'd see links to Twitter and replies full of crypto scammer. It has been a while since I've seen that problem to that degree, though there was a smaller wave of them a few months ago.

Meanwhile, my YouTube feed regularly gets attacked with AI generated crypto ads using the Tesla or SpaceX brands.

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