Hacker News Reader

Comment by omeze | Hacker News Reader

There are so many alternatives, like Mastodon -- I never quite understood this complaint. Why don't these people just start using the alternatives instead of using Twitter? It's because Twitter has the audience. Why does the audience use Twitter? Because they want a moderated platform. Dealing with spam, showing recommended tweets (picking who gets amplified/distribution is another form of moderation btw), and ensuring harmful content isn't allowed to reach critical mass.

The revealed vs stated preferences here are so obvious that tweets of this genre seem to be likefarms...

View on HN

On the contrary, Twitter’s users generally seem to believe that Twitter’s moderation is abysmal, and they have clamored for years for it to be better than it is, on a variety of axes.

People largely haven’t moved off Twitter because the people they want to follow haven’t moved off Twitter; the people they want to follow mostly haven’t moved off Twitter because why would they move away from where their audience is?

>On the contrary, Twitter’s users generally seem to believe that Twitter’s moderation is abysmal

If that's the case why would anyone move to a platform that has less moderation?

Twitter is the bottom of the list when it comes to MAU among social networks (FB, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit all have a higher MAU). Sure Twitter is overrepresented in the tech world, but it's not that captive. There are larger audiences elsewhere. And, to be fair, almost every other platform has a heavier hand when it comes to moderation than Twitter. Twitter still allows porn!

Twitter, is probably the best product you can build when it comes to a text based, real time, social network. If there was a better product people would have moved. When it comes down to it, most complaints come down to "I wish the Twitter moderation rules applied to everyone else but me".

On Twitter, little guys with benign accounts will get randomly suspended over essentially nothing. And yet, you can get spammed by people constantly creating new/alt accounts calling you the N word in your replies and Twitter does jack shit to them even after multiple reports (happened to me personally). Meanwhile the big names, for the most part, get to say whatever harmful nonsense they want and have immunity.

It's the worst of every world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com