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Comment by hunterb123 | Hacker News Reader

Sure you can! Michigan has a ban on smoking indoors and business grew for just about every bar and restaurant! Just gotta ban the right people. From what I can tell Twitter is doing that; but their business model is terrible and the platform is clunky. Their lack of growth has nothing to do with banning people.

> Their lack of growth has nothing to do with banning people.

Doesn't seem like that as their competitors that have sprung up are solely from conservatives being banned.

Banning smoking !== banning dissenters, your analogy has a false equivalency for multiple reasons, I wouldn't use them for debates if I were you, just teaching.

- edit because of post limit -

@cheriot: Enough users for you to know about them. Competition starts somewhere. But yes I agree Twitter has a monopoly right now, my point is that monopoly is cracking due to censorship.

@ketzo: So you know of their future competitors? That's a start. Maybe Twitter's monopoly will be dethroned one day. Conservatives make up nearly half of the US, I'd say it's a good guess.

@ribosometronome: HN and Twitter are two different entities. Twitter is used as the defacto communication medium to interact w/ official government accounts, corporations, etc. It's supposed to be for all. Hacker News is a small news aggregator and discussion community.

@shrimp_emoji: har har har JS is bad amirite guys?!

@JaimeThompson: guess conservatives are mad for no reason I guess, they are imagining being banned. Maybe if Twitter had open mod logs we'd know for sure, but there's plenty of prominent people that were banned.

Do you think HackerNews would be a friendly place for the type of behavior that has resulted in folk being banned from Twitter?

Their competitors (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, etc) are all moderating the same people to about the same extent.

Are you talking about their clones, like Parler and Gab? They’re fulfilling their role fine as a platform for a niche user base, but they have no shot at competing with Twitter.

Those aren't competitors to Twitter. You have to realize that social media is an umbrella for multiple services that barely compete with each other.

Youtube = long form video clips, how to / knowledge resource

TikTok = short form video clips, successor to vine

Snapchat = direct video messages, ephemeral talking

Facebook = contact book, classifieds

Instagram = living photo album

LinkedIn = living resume

Pinterest = living recipe / idea book

GitHub = living portfolio, giant forum of repos

Twitter = communication medium, broadcasts

The main FUTURE competitor to Twitter I think is Mastodon. Gab, Truth Social, and a few other services are built upon it. Eventually when a platform comes along with the interface and the will of the people generates a network effect like MySpace to Facebook, Twitter will be done.

>Conservatives make up nearly half of the US, I'd say it's a good guess.

Lots and lots of conservatives on Twitter so can you give examples of those who got banned simply for being conservative?

The only thing that offends me here is the !==.

How many active users do Gab and Parlor have?

Are we calling Gab/Parler “competition” now? Do they even have revenue, let alone profit?

Seems like a big reach, bordering on disingenuous, to attribute Twitter user growth/revenue slowdown to conservatives mad about being “unfairly censored”. Twitter

The revenue model for ads would be akin to the restaurants giving away the food and charging others to promote stuff to you while you're eating. When you're paying for the product, it's all different.

As far as I can tell, people are still allowed on Twitter.

A distinction without a difference.

If you repeatedly smoked in a restaurant even after being told no, the next time you won’t be allowed in.

That’s exactly what Twitter does. If you keep breaking their rules they ban you.

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