Hacker News Reader

Comment by llm_nerd | Hacker News Reader

There are many already. The code is not why people use those sites. In the case of Meta specifically, it's basically in spite of the user-hostile, garbage code.

The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.

I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.

View on HN

I think people try alternatives, turns out to be a ghost town, then they just go back.

And that's the power of network effects. Popularity because it's popular is a hard loop to break.

People really do not want to give up the reach once they have tasted it.

It’s a shame: I remember when people would be so excited to get 100 strangers visiting their blogs but in a month, but now someone blogging for an audience like that would seem a little crazy, maybe paradoxically even overly grandiose.

Also, the harm from using X is complex. It basically comes from endorsing the site and encouraging other people to come there where they’ll be exposed to a cesspit of bigotry and right-wing ideas. It’s easy to tell yourself that what you’re doing there outweighs the cons, and that other sites are just as bad, etc.

Or they just disagree with you.

I believe Musk might be a decent person. He is obviously smart, but perhaps he fears foreigners too much.

X is decent for getting the latest news. The comment sections are often filled with garbage, even more so than Reddit. Ads are hard to distinguish from normal posts. There is a lot of bots in the comments.

> Or they just disagree with you.

Sure, there is about 33% of the public that are vile, hateful, racist garbage. That's life. Those people all love Musk. He's their pied piper, and we can only hope he leads them all to Mars or whatever.

But among the general Twitter/X population, sentiment is overwhelmingly anti-Musk, or the pedophile kleptocrat groups that he supports. Yet they're all still there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com