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Comment by seahorseemoji | Hacker News Reader

I wish I understood why the majority of the AI discussions happen on Twitter/X.

Network effect. Most people worth discussing with are already there, so more people join the discussion there, and so on.

but it's a really shallow form of discussion, as most tweets are the equivalent of short-form videos of tiktoks.

I think Pareto principle applies here: most discussions will be shallow, only occasionally diving deep — and Twitter acknowledges that reality, and builds around it.

The real problem is that places like HN and Reddit allow downvotes / reports to drown people out. Someone on Twitter will post on their page. They control it. It can be slop. It can be low quality. It can be their random thoughts but all that is irrelevant while you slowly build up your audience and the stuff you wanna work on. This generally takes time and is something that grows organically. Meanwhile on HN I will regularly see posts "flagged" where the account didn't actually say anything bad or against the rules. It just goes against the group think and it doesn't even take that much. It can be 1 or 2 people flagging your post and then suddenly it's hidden. This simply does not happen on Twitter.

So eventually people stop posting. I stopped posting on Reddit entirely for example even though I had dozens of very highly upvoted technical posts mainly because I would regularly see highly inaccurate information get upvoted while the real accurate information is downvoted.

HN has the same problem with Elon Musk overall and SpaceX / Twitter.

On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer" but on HN that is what passes for discourse.

I mean at least they tell on themselves but I would prefer a technical forum have actually smart people in it. Not just larpers.

I just can't take this discourse seriously.

Substack is about posting on your page. Twitter is about posting on other people's pages in the reply section.

> On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer"

You live in an algo bubble!

TONS of intelligent people with backgrounds in space, defense and technology say it all the time on Twitter.

And all of them are wrong.

He isn't. He has a bachelor in economics and physics.

You're an engineer as soon as you make an engineering decision. End of.

Train drivers blowing their own horns are only Engineers in the weakest possible sense.

I'm at the point where I think you people are just dumb. The amount of people I've worked with my in career who did things totally outside of their major in college or simply dropped out entirely. I'm literally sitting here thinking about how intellectually destitute the so called left has become and it makes me sad.

> the so called left

HUH?

When did that ever come up?

Doing engineering ≠ being an engineer.

Am I a doctor because I took my temperature and found I had a fever? Am I a lawyer if I represent myself in court?

At least where I'm from, you need to be licensed to practice engineering.

I don't think anything on twitter can really be called a discussion. The UI is designed for shouting into the void, anything else is an afterthought

Tells me how valuable they actually are.

Because obviously everyone who participates in a discussion has an account, so they don't feel this annoyance other than maybe when sharing a link to someone else.

A lot of crypto bro grifter crossover in AI.

Read Social and Economic Networks by Michael O Jackson.

why not?

Don't be obtuse. the reasons why not were spelled out in the GP.

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