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Comment by edude03 | Hacker News Reader

Around when Elon bought twitter he said (paraphrased) that twitter was the realtime news platform. It’s something I feel like is true in a way that should be true for other social media platforms but isn’t.

For example, say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401 might in this example surface tweets from other drivers on the highway talking about traffic and/or posts about an accident they came across.

Nothing about this sort of interaction is baked into the protocol as far as I can tell yet FB insta snap etc don’t work this way.

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It’s because it’s okay to post mundane things on Twitter/X. It’s because tweets are short and are very fleeting.

An Instagram post takes up my whole screen and a picture is expected. Each post is given so much real estate and it makes you want to dress it up.

In the end, those different amounts of “friction” lends to posting different kinds of content.

It’s a vibe of a high end dinner establishment vs. a quick pickup place. They have their own lanes.

I want to piggyback to compare TikTok and YouTube. It is so much easier to post a quick fifteen second clip on TikTok on their mobile app. Compare to the same on YouTube, I feel a lot more friction. I don't know if it is justified but maybe I haven't used TikTok enough to be afraid there. For example, I learned early on that a video of a party with music playing in the background is a bad idea™ on YouTube.

Yeah I think it comes down to two things

1) the low friction leading to more mundane things being posted 2) the norm being text content not from people you necessarily follow / people who aren’t “celebrities” so mundane relatable things tend to bubble up.

I do wonder if one day video understanding LLMs will be able to understand what a photo/video is about and show you content that’s relevant to you

Twitter can’t be a news platform when tweets with links are suppressed

You mean it can't be a link platform.

Maybe thats a good thing. It forces content to be posted to X directly instead of click baiting you into ad infested, paywalled, dark pattern websites.

The only losers here are legacy media.

Links are incredibly useful. Leaving aside the dubious benefit of the idea that we want everything to "be inside the same app" (an idea that is essentially 'platform lock-in rephrased as a feature'), a huge amount of useful content is already on web pages with URLs. The ability to share those resources quickly is essential. There's zero benefit to forcing users into copying and pasting existing text into a medium with extreme formatting limitations and no ability to handle dynamic content or inline images. And there is negative benefit from moving content from the open web to a site that requires a login.

This doesn’t really make sense without a well reasoned out argument.

How can your opinion outweigh that of the various decision makers who originally agreed to implement it…?

> Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, chose the name “World Wide Web” because he wanted to emphasize that, in this global hypertext system, anything could link to anything else

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/01/why-the-web...

The net is fundamentally about linking things together.

> How can your opinion outweigh that of the various decision makers who originally agreed to implement it…?

Through subjectivity, of course.

there’s just one decision maker in Twitter

Now there is. Didn't used to be, and it cost a startling amount of money for that to be the case, and it was done to achieve a purpose rather than to make Twitter better at being Twitter. Something of a pyrrhic victory, that.

>This doesn’t really make sense without a well reasoned out argument.

It seemed well reasoned to me... ?

You really want all information to be locked up into a proprietary platform controlled by Musk?

And Twitter is the ultimate “dark pattern”

“Good thing” doesn’t have to mean good for you. It could mean good for the platform.

I think the numbers and the ad revenue tell that story.

Some things already exist on other sites, and are worth pointing people to.

Also, Twitter isn't a great format for longer posts. And trying to prevent people from leaving your site is itself a user-hostile dark pattern.

Btw, what ads? Is that some nonsense that silly people without ublock origin have to deal with?

the funny thing about your post is that twitter itself is now an ad infested, paywalled, dark pattern website/app.

If you think it isn't paywalled you're thinking about it too superficially, you are paying by volunteering to be the product in the form of having an active account, and without an active account the site/app is effectively completely useless for about a year now.

This might've been true when Twitter was still Twitter, but now it's X, it has dropped below the average - it IS the ad-infested, paywalled, dark pattern website. Linking out is (even more of) a positive.

If you suppress posts where people include the source you are effectively promoting posts that do not include their sources. This gives more power to people who post opinion as fact and outright trolls. It is the fundamental problems with Twitter today, shitposters get amplified while people who try to refute with sources get suppressed.

> Nothing about this sort of interaction is baked into the protocol as far as I can tell yet FB insta snap etc don’t work this way.

Neither does Twitter.

Its search is frequently broken to push whatever the new version of their algorithm decides to push. If Musk so wishes your entire feed will be just his rants (something I experienced a few weeks ago).

Pre-Musk and pre-algorithm Twitter was a good source of news, as it was near-realtime, and relevant to you. Now? No.

Can you see profiles without logging in again?

Something that really pissed me off is how much of a "support channel" it became for things like my internet provider. If the internet went down their twitter was often the only place you could get info.

Yeah I hate that kind of "Well, everyone uses it", whether it's Twitter or WhatsApp or anything. Even POTS and email are pretty shit in their own way

It's hard to communicate without first agreeing on the medium of communication.

When joining a group its easiest to simply adopt the choice the group has already made.

Companies chose Twitter because lots of people (their customers) already used it. If their customers move, and indicate a preference, they'll happily move too.

Personally I don't use Twitter. Lots of businesses post on Twitter, and they're welcome to do so.

I do use WhatsApp. Which has traditionally been business unfriendly. The odd business will connect with me that way, but that's rare.

Email, web, phone, IRL - these all seem to be working well here, but your mileage may vary. Hopefully you have some choices.

The thing is that one did not need to be Twitter user to check updates from company on Twitter when needed. This is no longer that easy. That is why some companies (in my country, like train company) move to platforms that can be viewed without account. There are no many users there but anyone can follow link there when he needs it.

Yet Twitter now X is just our modern day 4chan owned by the richest man in the world.

Never have ever seen such insane things (people shot point blank in the head & the gruesomeness of it) I didnt need to see (scrolling thru) and all thanks to X.

> Nothing about this sort of interaction is baked into the protocol as far as I can tell yet FB insta snap etc don’t work this way.

It's baked into the UI. Public by default.

Facebook is personal by default. You post stuff on 'your feed', you view 'your friends' updates.

Late in the game Facebook realised this was a problem and has tried to cram other stuff into people's feeds - viral content. And people hate it. People want their Facebook feed to be stuff from people they know and they see the other injected content (meme groups, assorted interest groups, comics, etc) as little more than extra adverts.

Contrastingly Twitter was always the public firehose and so while many people do not care for it, those that do, are opting into it, not trying to opt out.

What's amazing is it seems nobody (big/public) is trying to really make a thing which is personal as you describe. It's all twitter rip-offs, microblogging narcissistic megaphone attempts.

I don't care a bit about bluesky, and while I check on my Mastodon feed a few times a week I don't interact there much either. This "look at me, whole world!" phenomenon is of very little interest to me. I despise what Meta has become, but I don't see an alternative yet to FB.

> What's amazing is it seems nobody (big/public) is trying to really make a thing which is personal as you describe.

The problem is the monetisation of it.

> For example, say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401 might in this example surface tweets from other drivers on the highway talking about traffic and/or posts about an accident they came across.

The problem I have on Twitter now is that folks hijack that and post tweets about totally unrelated stuff (usually crypto). Take you example that there is a huge wreck on the 401 and you want to find out what's going on. Go on Twitter and the top post will be something like:

"Get your Airdrop to $NEWCRYPTO Today. iPhone 12, 401 Crash, Cute Cats"

And when he bought it, it was

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