It's pretty common that after a peak of new signups, most do not convert to long term active users. This doesn't even take into account that most "active users" tend to never post anything, they just leech. They still count as MAU. I'm sure that Meta has plenty of ways to boost that number in the long term but overall I find the entire thing underwhelming.
Threads is text-based Instagram. But not even that as you can very well include photos. It has exactly the same shallow culture as Instagram: commercial, flat, vain.
Meta has openly expressed that it's disinterested or even hostile to news/journalism making their way to the platform (which comes with a lot of political flame-wars), instead to focus on making it a "fun" platform. Quite obviously because advertisers prefer networks without controversy.
Users may self-censor as on Threads the link to your real name is not very far away. Many users may have a real name Insta account linked up which in turn is linked to your Facebook account. Even if not visibility linked to your real name, internally you should assume it's there. So who knows what happens to all those accounts when you step over the line in Threads?
Hence, it's not Twitter which is defined by the culture war taking the main stage. Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. It also produces quite a lot of original content, whether they be memes or otherwise. You'll find none of that originating on Meta networks.
As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost. There is no longer a "cultural network" where you push a message and get reach. None of the alternatives work for this purpose either.
I have no idea what will become of Twitter, but I do know to keep an open mind as we live in wild times. Just because Musk is a chaos monkey does not mean that it will not eventually rebound or even surpass old Twitter.
It’s hard to say. What I see is a lot of people in my network really scaling back or dropping Twitter and maybe playing with the alternatives but not really embracing them. I suspect that for many it will be a case of “Social media was nice while it lasted.”
I think that's an excellent point. Social media fatigue seems at its peak in this time of transition, further accelerated by the COVID era.
People are becoming aware of their over-usage and the largely minimal or even negative benefits that come from social media altogether. Or just bored and indifferent about it. The fatigue is further strengthened when they soon learn that the alternatives are worse or at best just moving the problem.
I'd advocate for people to stop rather than cheer for any new potential winner. Just uninstall the app and walk away. It was all a lie anyway. You're not in a "community". You do not actually have followers. You did not learn anything new that you couldn't learn elsewhere.
They are lies we tell ourselves as we play the slot machine. Throw it in the trash.
I’m so unable to relate to perspectives like this on social media. I have Insta and my connections on there are almost entirely my real friends, we all post stuff we’re actually doing in our lives, and send messages to each other, etc… as in, we actually use it for socialising. I follow a small handful of celebrity accounts, and browse reels occasionally, but the main reason I like using it is to interact with my friends.
That’s how I used Instagram in the first half of the 2010s. It seemed like the app was designed for that use case back then. Now it seems like it’s designed primarily for watching ads, so I text my friends instead.
This seems like a very peculiar attempt at gate keeping to me. It’s a social network application that we use to share the content that we’ve created with each other. That’s what social media is, and the use case I’m describing is basically what it was initially created for.
If all you're doing is keeping up with a tight-nit group of friends, you could use a million other services. Group SMS, I-message, discord, Hangouts, even plain old email.
Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?
The key difference is that all those other services you list have UX that is mostly centred around active use ("Check this out: Your friend Joe is doing a thing right now!"), while Instagram's UX is mostly centred around passive use ("Now that you have some free time, let's catch up on what your friend Joe did last week").
Ultimately they can all be used for the same purpose, sure. At the end of the day you're pushing the same bits around. But UX can make all the difference.
The mechanics of something like Facebook are that you have your “friends” and people can engage as much or as little as they like or dip in and out. I find I’ll occasionally post something that relates to overlapping friends circles but people can easily ignore stuff that doesn’t really involve them. It’s a very different model from a much more deliberate mailing list or SMS chat.
I do have some group chats and email threads but there’s a broader that extends beyond that which social media apps can be useful for.
> Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?
It’s the media bit… Insta is created to share pictures and videos with your _own_ selection of followers. You couldn’t do that in WhatsApp without creating some horrific cartesian product of different groups chats for every node on your social graph. Even then the UX is designed around messaging, not as a content repository.
This has to be one of the most asinine takes I’ve ever seen.
Yeah you couldn't do it by whatsapp, but you could do it with discord, slack, teams, skype and a bunch of other services that you failed to mention to create a strawman.
That you get so defensive is really, and I mean REALLY, telling of the real reason.
You couldn’t create anything resembling the Instagram experience on any of those services, let alone using some of your other suggestion like email. If the only thing you think a substitute service requires is a way to send images, then you could replace Instagram with the postal service by that standard.
The most absurd part of this argument is that discord, WhatsApp, messenger, etc… are all also social media platforms. This is by far the silliest “well actually” I’ve ever seen on HN.
Discord is a social media platform. And you absolutely could. I’ve been in quite a few servers where channels were used as a dumping ground for whatever people were doing at a time and felt like showing off. It’s an extreme example, but one that works because ultimately Instagram’s ability to display this information is no different than anything else’s. You simply believe Instagram is some perfect solution that cannot be replicated and refuse to understand the basic definition of a social network.
You _could_ use email as an Insta replacement as well. But the suggestion that they deliver the same service or experience is rather contrived.
But that’s really besides the point, because as you said, they’re all social media platforms, and it’s social media when somebody posts content on them to their large public audience, and it’s social media when I post to my small audience of friends. It’s the suggestion that one of those scenarios is social media and the other isn’t that’s completely illogical.
Their point is that social media is an abstract concept that correlates with it's use; not the platform it's used on. What Kim Kardashian (as an extreme example) posts on Instagram/Twitter/etc is social media, because it's media broadcast out to be shared and commented on.
Having an Instagram account and messaging your friends is not social media, it's a social network using the same aforementioned platform.
In other words, a public Telegram channel can be as much social media as Instagram can be, and Instagram can be as much a social network as Telegram is. And exclusively inverse, as well.
We all produce content that we publish on the social media site platform (posts, stories, reels. Text posts now too if you count Threads…). This is quintessential social media content, and was the primary way that social media platforms were used in their early years. My content with a couple dozen likes isn’t somehow not-social-media-content just because my audience is limited to my actual social circle.
The point they were trying to make isn’t difficult to understand. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Since you admittedly have no understanding of what people are talking about when they refer to social media being toxic then you must not be in sync with the definition of social media that others have. Regardless of whether it makes sense to you, it makes sense to a lot of other people. It would be nice if you weren't so incredibly defensive about your need to express your conception of an idea so that you could try and understand what other people think as well.
What you’re talking about appears to be some particular subset of the content that appears on social media platforms, not the concept of social media itself.
Also before complaining about the toxicity of social media I’d suggest you take a look at the toxicity you’re choosing to contribute to this platform with how intentionally abrasive your comments appear to be.
Thanks for the personal attack but I haven't called anyone's perspective 'asinine' or treated people with outright disrespect on this thread, as you have.
Is there a reason you are so reactionary when people pose an alternative viewpoint to your own?
Why did you bother posting such a thing as "I don't understand why people think that social media is toxic" if you are just going to attack everyone who attempts to give a reason for it?
My impression as well. Though I'm biased, because it's also the case for me specifically, so I tend to see the world through that same lens.
In my case, I didn't give up social media entirely, but mostly shifted back to "web forums", which also seem to be experiencing some sort of renaissance (another data point). They have more of a local/semi-closed community feeling, as opposed to the "wide open sea" of major social media.
I consider HN to be one of those "forums", although it's more a bit of a hybrid between the two worlds, and of course it has been existing all along.
Lots of people used Twitter to keep in touch with professional peers and other non-outrage communities of interest. So that’s a cheap lazy take.
But I do think there’s some regret that is similar in nature to the Eternal September. Things were “fine” before the plebes and political interests found the platform.
I'll never deny being both cheap and lazy however the number of people injured each year walking across the street while looking at their phones suggests that social media like Twitter might actually be detrimental to one's health.
There are a lot of news articles about Twitter because journalists use twitter, and have come to depend on it to boost their readership.
Just this week there was an article on HN front page about journalism school requiring twitter accounts, and pushing journalists to build "their own brand" by getting lots of followers.
These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related.
Most people of course are not on twitter at all (and could care less). Some use it as a group-chat service. Some use it as joke-of-the-day. But the biggest user base by far is journalists who have invested in it big time.
> These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related.
No, journalists hate that Musk took away the digital caste system that they took advantage of, where they (blue checks) were an elite ruling class. Now they are on equal footing as, and are forced to engage with, whom they perceive as the "Dalit scum" of the platform, who bought their way in for a measly $8.
Twitter was one of the most segregated societies on the planet, and Musk upturned its power structure nearly overnight and made it a more democratic society (albeit one with a benevolent dictator). Yet we all sat and watched while celebrities and journalists threw public temper tantrums, reminiscing about a time when life was better in their online universe, during the digital apartheid days, and their followers who sympathized. Talk about disruptive.
Yes, journalists confuse (or confused) Twitter with what "the people" are thinking.
A prominent case: A few years ago, J.K. Rowling wrote an article on gender bathroom policy. I'm pretty sure most random people, when given the piece to read, would have judged it to be some rather moderate opinion. But on Twitter the author encounterd a massive wave of accusations and hostility. The journalists were probably sympathetic with those people, and moreover thought them to be in the majority among the general population (because the JKR criticisms were in the majority on Twitter).
So the journalists went out and wrote news pieces casually describing Rowling as being a transphobic, as if this was an uncontroversial description of fact, like the sky being blue, when it was really a serious accusation by the journalist. Their Twitter filter bubble confuses them about which views are common and which are fringe.
Yep, also comms/marketing people. I once had to explain to someone that nobody outside of Twitter has ever cared about anything that has ever happened on Twitter. It is a pure bubble of unimportant drivel.
The only people who would even know are other Twitter users, most real people in real life don't use it and they are not interested or affected at all.
And loudmouths with outrageous opinions love Twitter because they know their precious tweets will eventually get caught by some semi-popular website one day.
I am a lurker. I have zero followers, and as such writing the nth comment on a Tweet with often n>100 is pointless, even before Musk took over.
I also don't have the time or the energy to put out quality content. It is draining to put out good content and have a handful of moaners criticise it in a toxic manner.
It is even worse if they criticise your content, because 3 years ago you said something about Musk/Tesla that wasn't 100% positive.
The joys of lurking or being a low-volume is when you follow some people and they do something interesting that you may have done, or you might have the little interesting data point. It sometimes happens you have published a paper on the exact topic but in another field, or you're wondering whether there's a connection to something you know.
It's an amazing way to reach very interesting people doing very interesting things and to be amazed almost every day (if you like to learn, or just like human ingenuity). It needs curating, and liberal use of blocking, muting... but having (or watching) a short conversation with a security expert, programming language warrior, database benchmarker, or HPC researcher is something I feel I couldn't do elsewhere.
You can block people replying to other people. You can have an account and be a lurker (which mostly can be reduced to 'read-only'). You're not participating in any conversation, just filtering the content that is presented to you.
Yep. Leeching is mostly used in the context of torrents. Generally, while you're downloading, you're "leeching." But also, if you don't seed a file after you download it, you can call that leeching.
Lurking is when you frequent a forum but never post.
To leech, leeching and to be a leecher has been around since people used to download warez. It far predates torrents.
I remember a local sysop in the 80s who ran an Apple II ASCII Express download site with two 5.25” floppy drives. You’d write him a text message and save it as a file. He was a cab driver and he’d come back home once in awhile and check the messages. If you were lucky he’d put your requested software in the second drive and maybe you’d check back in time before he fulfilled someone else’s request.
That sounds like such an awesome experience. As inconvenient as it sounds sometimes I wish I grew up in the beginnings of computers.
My uncle told me a story of when he was at his first programming job carrying a box of at least 500 punch cards across a factory floor on his 2nd or 3rd day. Someone opened a garage door somewhere and a gust of wind came and blew every single punch card across the factory. They were everywhere he said. My uncle was terrified of losing his first job meanwhile these factory guys are pissing themselves laughing and almost literally rofl.
Turns out it's a prank they pull on everyone. There's only been a few that held onto the box and the cards are complete trash.
I've saw a prank like that on a small scale when I was a kid who liked to go play some old Trek game on a line-paper-printer-terminal — in a computer lab in a state college — that was dialed into a machine in a bigger city. Around me, meanwhile, were college students typing their programs into punch cards. I remember someone pretending to trip, spilling a stack, but then confessing that they were garbage.
I learned some English vocabulary with videogames. The first time I saw the word lurker was the lurker above in Nethack (or did rogue and hack already had it?) https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Trapper
> Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks.
Yeah, for the "chronically online". But twitter is also celebs and brands, and the "normals" following them. I think for those Threads will find an audience. It will be... Twitter, but for Instagram.
Twitter has always had an outside impact compared to it's actual userbase, mainly due to nailing the news media + politics segment. Threads could fail to pick up the same cultural impact, but still be a thriving business/website, especially if brands and advertisers prefer it over Twitter.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a deliberate strategy to lure only "normals" away from Twitter, so that the remaining faithful X users will be the loudest, edgiest, most politically polarized ones, speeding up the vicious cycle of X becoming nothing more than a toxic culture war battleground.
Hopefully a battleground that no one will care about because the normies got lured away. Twitter not being a cultural network is probably much better for society because these always online losers currently seem to have much higher influence on society than they should.
> As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost
People keep saying this, but I've been a daily Twitter user since long before the Musk timeline and if anything the platform's never felt more engaged. Perhaps particularly vocal complainers like Taylor Lorenz leaving the platform makes the exodus seem greater than it is, but in general it seems high-follower users are just as engaged as they were before.
The only exception seem to be characters like Lorenz whose conduct has been so poorly received by the community that they seemed to be looking for any good reason to leave while still saving face.
I'd say I'm surprised by the persistent pessimism regarding Twitter, but I'm not.
I don't think a sizable portion of people are even willing to entertain the idea that it might still having a place in the Internet ecosystem. Maybe not in exactly the same form as pre-Elon Twitter, but still a place.
Musk is using the For You feature to promote propaganda he approves of. My For You feed is full of paid climate change deniers, racists, mainstream far-right troll "journalists", and other people of questionable social value.
It's absolutely an example of political editorialising and narrative control.
I would argue that it was the other way around before. It was also people with non-progessive views actually being entirely banned from the site. What is worthy of banning can quickly turn subjective, when really there are limited things both sides should agree are not permissible on a platform.
It is achievable, but not always desirable. See, for example the ABC report of an ongoing firefight in Syria that turned out to be a gun range in Kentucky.
Random footage of some explosion is not useful news without accurate explanations of what you are seeing. It often takes time to sort out the facts of a story. Moving breathlessly ahead without facts is usually called gossip.
You make a good point and exactly why I would never in a million years sign into reddit with my Gmail account. I fear a cross platform ban somehow even if that is not how it works. My last account was banned for merely expressing my opinion and not doing so in an combative or nasty way just didn’t agree with the narrative and next thing I know I was permabanned.
…my last account was banned for merely expressing my opinion…
Nebulous anecdotes such as this always made him curious: opinion regarding what, precisely? “David Lane’s 14 words and 88 precepts, perhaps?” — he wondered to himself, unable to divert his eyes from their username.
Twitter might not be as important to the US as it is to a lot of other countries. A lot of content that is censored or blocked in countries by restrictive regimes rises on twitter organically. I think it plays a big role in dissemination of information from reporters etc. Take Pakistan for instance currently all the private channels are completely controlled by government it under quasi martial law. But because of twitter people are aware of 1000s of political prisoners including women and children, disappearances of reporters, harassment and threats by law enforcement to protestor families and relatives to control the protestors.
As someone who first created an IG account in 2010, then deleted it in 2019 after watching it decline, I like how simply this summed up my reasoning :
« commercial, flat, vain «
I just see a beat down not wild times. Meta is trying to clone twitter and the only win they have is the signup process and people seeing what the fuss is about.
There is no feature Twitter/X could bring to chat that would take users away from WhatsApp. It already covers 100% of it's users needs, is free, and has near complete market penetration in many regions. (If you are talking to anyone in Europe by text, you will always use WhatsApp)
Easy: End to end encryption that’s not controlled by Meta.
It could take a while, but look at all the social media messaging apps from the past: ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, My Space, GChat, Orkut, Tumblr, Snapchat, FB messages etc
They come and go. I sure don’t know what the ultimate chat/social media app looks like.
None of those services had even a fraction of the market penetration that WhatsApp has (in Europe and basically most places that are not North America.)
WhatsApp is used by teenagers, great-grandparents, businesses, everyone. When you give someone your number in Europe, they won't ask how to contact you, they will just send you a message on WhatsApp 100% of the time. Only tech nerds and small groups use Signal etc.
To be clear, I don't think this is a good thing. But it is simply the reality of the world. It's been like this for 10 years with no signs of changing. WhatsApp could of course die one day, but only if Meta does something categorically stupid or unpopular that forces people off the platform (eg, what Twitter is doing).
WhatsApp is not a social media platform and that's precisely why it is so universally used.
My 3 kids are teenagers. They don't use WhatsApp. They use iMessage or group chats on Instagram. No one I know uses WhatsApp, well they've never asked me for a WhatsApp username.
A super app presumably has a dedicated product manager with some sort of vision and control of what goes into what features are available. You could hardly say the same of iOS+AppStore or Android+Playstore.
Note that I'm not the least bit convinced we would benefit from a super app, but WeChat seems to fill a need for however many millions of users it has.
Could you elaborate on that? It sounds like you’re saying that Google and Apple have no product management and they’re just shipping random features every year, but that sounds bonkers so I must be misunderstanding.
Er, no, I specifically said iOS plus AppStore and Android plus PlayStore, as it's from there that users get the functionality that's not part of the core-OS, and even allowing for the apps Apple & Google publish themselves I don't believe there's any one product manager that decides what features the full set of such apps should offer.
That’s besides the point. Elon overpaid for a shitty social media company. So understandably he’s trying to make the money back. He’s not going to make it back just being another banal social media company.
Nothing has to be anything and I feel like I got down voted because people hate Elon now. I’m not asking you to like him. I’m only saying he’s going to try and create something and maybe it’s good.
What was good about Twitter before? Limited message size. Couldn't edit posts. Impossible to discuss anything with any nuance or civility. Full of echo chambers. Why was it better? Because they kicked off people you didn't like, and whose content you probably didn't follow anyway?
>At least it had a quite decent logo instead of as generic as it get X character.
It's just a logo. Companies come and go. Everyone needs to get over it.
Trying to duplicate WeChat is an objectively interesting strategy. At the very least, by integrating payments your social media platform doesn't have have to sell ads. You could buy items directly off a merchants Twitter/X page and Twitter/X can just take a merchant fee. You could have a market place with integrated payment methods rather than posting on Facebook and working out an intermediate payment method on the side.
oh.. I never personally liked Twitter. I was just thinking about the company itself rather than their products.
> It's just a logo
It also objectively sucks. I don't think we just handwave poor design instead of making fun of it and mocking it. The world is as already as ugly as it is..
> At the very least, by integrating payments your social media platform doesn't have have to sell ads
How much do they think they could get from these payments? 1-3%? Shopify's net revenue is lower than Twitter's was before they buyout and they are not even profitable. The interest payments alone on the debt Musk offloaded to Twitter as part of the acquisition are about equal to Shopify's quarterly revenue.
It's a very competitive field with basically no margins, I'm not quite sure what Twitters edge would be? They'd need to charge way more than their competitors if they wanted to use the revenue to fund the rest of the company after getting rid of ads...
> integrated payment methods rather than posting on Facebook
The lack of an integrated payment processor is not the reason Facebook Marketplace doesen't support direct payment payments. That's an insignificant problem compared to all the other stuff they would need to handle with huge costs due to significant overhead (just like at what Ebay does, also they charge 10%+ and they are not that profitable either).
Care to expound on that? Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics. Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.
> Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics.
Not at all. "Journalists" are as biased as they come. They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them. That hand is most often advertisers but may also be governments. Chances are the articles they produce are actually hidden advertisements or propaganda. How could anyone with such massive conflicts of interest bring credibility to literally anything? I want access to real information posted by real people, not agenda-pushing "credible authorities".
> Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.
What makes you think these "journalists" aren't just randoms themselves? They're not really any better than any person on this site. Their particular brand of hot take is not automatically more valid than anyone else's. As far as I'm concerned their only purpose is to generate material for us to comment on.
There is exactly one site in the entire internet I have enough respect for to call them true journalists: LWN. It's just excellent in every way and they don't need to posture as authorities for everyone else to believe it. Everything else ranks lower than HN's comment sections to me.
I think a lot has to do with provenance. For journalists this is their day job, they post with their real name and usually under some larger entities name. They are perhaps as biased as everyone else, but it's easier to figure out the biases.
I probably misunderstand your point, but if your point is that a given journalist can never be reliable then I agree, but that is also not the idea perhaps. We cannot hope to have only unbiased views, we can only average them out by consuming from multiple sources with known biases.
This is a kind interpretation of what I meant. They all have some kind of bias angle, maybe by researching enough data can we hope to achieve a measure of accuracy.
If 50% of journalists are as you describe, does that mean effectively they are all as you describe? What about 30%, if 30% are as you describe is that the threshold where none of them are worth a damn?
There used to be a time where as a rule journalists were below that threshold unless they were specifically working for The National Enquirer writing stories about Elvis still being alive, but whatever the threshold is, we damn well got closer to it.
It's a fair question to ask, what's the threshold and where we stand regarding it. You cannot say they're all like that, but you can say TOO MANY journalists are like that. I'd even agree with the latter statement. Would the remaining journalists be more or less likely to be out there on Twitter, mostly unheard? How about after Elon Musk's takeover? My sense is that Elon is more likely to get rid of the good ones when they correctly call him out on his nonsense.
> What makes you think these "journalists" aren't just randoms themselves? They're not really any better than any person on this site.
It's pretty ridiculous to compare someone who has a university degree, years of training and experience, professional qualifications, and maybe a strong reputation, with a "random" posting on an internet forum.
So, you got any other account posting behind a pseudonym, being more unbiased than a journalist posting to Twitter/X using their professional name and attached to their organization? At least with the journalist, you gain some insight into what their biases might be.
> They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them.
You say that as though every dev working professionally on HN is 100% of the time working on projects they want to work on, writing the features they want to add, and releasing on a schedule that ensures the code is at a quality that fully reflects their talent.
I'm not the previous commenter, but I certainly agree with it provided a small clarification: journalists leaving Twitter is an improvement for journalism.
Threads is text-based Instagram. But not even that as you can very well include photos. It has exactly the same shallow culture as Instagram: commercial, flat, vain.
Meta has openly expressed that it's disinterested or even hostile to news/journalism making their way to the platform (which comes with a lot of political flame-wars), instead to focus on making it a "fun" platform. Quite obviously because advertisers prefer networks without controversy.
Users may self-censor as on Threads the link to your real name is not very far away. Many users may have a real name Insta account linked up which in turn is linked to your Facebook account. Even if not visibility linked to your real name, internally you should assume it's there. So who knows what happens to all those accounts when you step over the line in Threads?
Hence, it's not Twitter which is defined by the culture war taking the main stage. Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. It also produces quite a lot of original content, whether they be memes or otherwise. You'll find none of that originating on Meta networks.
As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost. There is no longer a "cultural network" where you push a message and get reach. None of the alternatives work for this purpose either.
I have no idea what will become of Twitter, but I do know to keep an open mind as we live in wild times. Just because Musk is a chaos monkey does not mean that it will not eventually rebound or even surpass old Twitter.