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Comment by literallyWTF | Hacker News Reader

The minute Twitter starts sounding like Gab, /pol, etc., there will be an exodus.

As if people ever leave their social media. First, Zuckerberg has given people a reason to leave facebook time and time again, but hardly anybody left. Second, twitter's main attraction is that all the media, most importantly, the established and influential media, see twitter as a source of press releases and hands the most raucous twitterers an enormous extra platform. They, and their followers and foes, will not give that up lightly.

"As if people ever leave their social media."

Friendster, Orkut, Google+, MySpace, Vine, Flickr, Friendfeed...they absolutely do.

Who left Friendfeed? I don't remember people leaving it. I remember people not joining it (after its glory days) and then Facebook closing it. Idem for Orkut (mostly only popular in Brazil IIRC).

If you thought of an exodus after investors meddled in, mentioning Digg v4 (to Reddit) would have been à propos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4

"I remember people not joining it (after its glory days) "

That's just the obverse of leaving isn't it? The site loses any momentum, becomes stagnant, and peters out, or in the case of Friendfeed, became ripe for acqui-hiring, then effectively spun down.

Orkut actually kept growing for a while, but in secondary markets (not just Brazil, but that was its biggest geo), until started to stagnate then decline.

Digg is a great example as well.

No one really left Google+. Mainly because no one really went to Google+.

Facebook is slowly dieing, it's just everywhere so it's hard to actually close your account. That doesn't mean it's in use as it used to be

I suspect/hope that many (socialist) political leaders around the globe are going to be forced by their supporter to re-asses their usage of Twitter.

Yeah but to where?

mastodon, I guess? maybe this will put some wind in mastodon's sails.

Mastodon, apparently. That has been a popular proposed alternative.

I've seen prolific Twitter users "move" to Mastodon for years, but they always come back. It's not the same thing on the other side. A fraction of the followers and activity, but there's also an interesting psychological effect.

Due to the distributed nature of mastodon, you'd likely create or move into a "community" of your liking. Where you'll meet friends and like-minded people. A little happy bubble.

You'd think it's a utopia where people can finally leave behind the "hell" that is Twitter. Turns out they need the hell. They've become addicted to continuous outrage and their counter rage is what was holding the bubble together.

As it comes to media and social media, it seems to me it can't exist without rage, division and hate.

Imagine social media updates like this: "Had a pretty good day at work. Ran into my conservative neighbor, we shared a drink, and agreed to disagree on a few matters. To each their own I guess."

Or news channels and papers largely reporting on things going pretty well and reasonable, which is like 99% of reality.

Nobody would want to consume that, it's super boring. Not at all "engaging". Happiness sucks. Even our escape of reality, entertainment, largely consists of even more suffering. Imagine a movie where nothing traumatic happens to the characters. What is the point of even watching it?

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