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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

> I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great

I mean, it's extremely clear that current Twitter leadership doesn't understand that either. They're not competing with Twitter at its prime (or at least its peak influence; personally I preferred it when it was a lot smaller in the early 10s) from a few years ago; they're competing with a website that just went completely dark to the public internet and appears to be barely usable even if you're logged in.

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Twitter is monetized outrage. A lot had to fall into place for that to work. Of course they need a working website, but beyond that I believe they are way sticker than pundits claim. That unique combination of echo chamber plus the ability to reach across and mock, abuse, or become enraged by the other side, all while having a community, is not easily replicable.

> Twitter is monetized outrage.

I wonder, do you actually use it, or more to the point, did you pre-Musk? That's certainly a belief people have about the site, and it is certainly a facet of Twitter, but Twitter is (or was) only monetized outrage in the same way that Twitter is cat pictures or Twitter is porn or Twitter is celebrities. It was there, but unless you chose to engage with it you likely wouldn't see much of it (as the recommendation stuff started to break down under Musk, many people were surprised to see porn in the algorithmic feed; despite porn on Twitter being a huge deal, many users were surprised it was allowed because The Algorithm(TM) used to be good at hiding it from those who didn't engage with it).

I do think post-Musk that this effective auto-segmentation has become less of a thing, particularly for outrage/political stuff; the algorithmic stuff seems increasingly broken, and the auto-promotion of blueticks shoves all sorts of nonsense in your face. But for most of Twitter's lifespan, unless you were in that world, you didn't really see much of it.

I wonder if you used it, in order to think that it was not monetized outrage, Twitter for me was like the french revolution, one guillotine a day, without trial, where the population was judge jury and executor

I still use and barely see any outrage on it. I am just selective with who I follow and stay in the feed where I mostly see tweets of who I follow.

I agree with GP, it’s very easy to stay out of outrage sight.

Its even easier when you only get to see a few tweets a day.

In order to do this, you must assiduously avoid mainstream news as well. I think that’s the point where the two sides of this debate are talking past each other. There is the Twitter you see on Twitter (your customized feed) but there’s also the That that is reported on in the news, screencapped on Reddit, shared on WhatsApp and iMessage, etc. If the sense memory of those non-platform Twitter interactions is stronger than the on-platform ones, especially when it comes to negative senses like hate, it tarnishes the users’ experience with it.

That’s right. I avoid mainstream news completely (everywhere, not just on Twitter) for several years now

So you’re not having the twitter experience, you’re living in a twitter ghetto away from the public?

What? No, I follow people tweeting in public. I almost never tweet, but when I do it’s public as well.

To be honest I don’t know what you meant on your comment. Was it a mix of tautology with true Scotsman? You have to follow outraged people to say you are properly on Twitter thus if you are properly on Twitter the outrage is unavoidable?

His point is that you are not the average Twitter user.

You're an ivory tower inhabitant of Twitter :-)

A village is an analogy that I like more. And there are a lot of those villages around Twitter

True, but at least the public perception is that the carefully curated non hate, non garbage consuming Twitter user is a person living comparatively in a very small village.

Most people live in a huge metropolis of suffering.

BTW, there are many UX studies showing people don't change defaults. What Twitter recommends to them is what they read.

It's not a feature exclusive for Twitter to be sure but the fact that herd behavior on background of social animosity is much more important driver than cat pictures is pretty much established. There are number of studies on this account

I’ve used it before and during Musk. Twitter has always been outrage by default (at least since ~2014 or so) with some crude controls that allow you to opt out (like blocking/muting people, using curated lists instead of the main feed, and for the love of all that is holy never ever visiting the “for you” or “trending” links). Most of the people I’ve heard claim (as you are) that you have to opt-in to outrage on Twitter are using third party apps that don’t show the same timeline or recommendations as the official app/site (or they otherwise don’t steer users toward the outrage content the same way as the official UIs did).

Agreed that Twitter has improved a bit post-Musk, but it has a decade of ossified outrage culture baked in and that doesn’t change easily. Some notable improvements though include: “for you” and “trending” pages are no longer exclusively showing the worst representations of viewpoints I disagree with (still plenty of disagreement and idiocy, but no longer exclusively the most idiotic representations of the views I disagree with), Community Notes seems genuinely helpful at identifying mis/disinformation that pre-Musk Twitter would have happily boosted (even endorsed via Blue Check), and honestly even the “Blue Check no longer means endorsement but rather access to paid features” seems like a marked improvement. Twitter seems quite a lot more content-neutral without going full anarchy.

> is not easily replicable

What makes you think so? Twitter has no moat, the functionality is easy to replicate. It's all about the user base.

The user base is exactly what's not easily replicable.

And trying to "migrate" a user base from Instagram seems like a shot in the foot in this context, even if the whole mechanic of the platform is pretty much the same as twitter, the user base is already completely different

Having that community and culture is the moat. Even like things like “ratio” and “subtweeting” are part of the moat if you’re trying to create a clone.

However, that doesn’t mean there can’t be a next big thing out of nowhere like TikTok.

Incidentally, I feel like Twitter has done more recently to pivot away from outrage (though there is still plenty of only because the culture of billions of users doesn’t change overnight)—when I go to the “For You” page, I no longer exclusively see the most idiotic representations of the views I disagree with, for example—instead it’s mostly just “big conversation topics”, often still controversial and with plenty of idiocy from all sides, but no longer seemingly designed for provocation. Community Notes is probably the most visible example, and something that kind of opened my mind about possibilities for non-censorious forms of moderation (for those who don’t know, Community Notes allows the Twitter Community to collectively identify and label mis/disinformation—it works by finding consensus among people who normally disagree with each other, which seems quite a lot saner than leaving it to the judgment of Twitter staff and has worked out pretty well in my experience).

Casual twitter user here and have heard about 'notes' but not actually seen it in the wild yet? It sounds moderately reasonable; one of my concerns is that there's so much other upheaval going on that whatever effectiveness it might have will be lost in the shuffle or essentially impossible to measure well.

Yeah, I don’t know how you could reasonably measure it and there’s lots of other stuff going on. I was initially pretty “meh” on notes, but a lot of the content that would have otherwise been boosted by algos and endorsed via blue checks now gets cooled off pretty quickly because Notes set the record straight.

Having seen this in action a few times, I wish it were around for the 2015-2020 timeline. I could easily see it being more effective than outright censorship at addressing Trump’s election fraud claims or the various claims about policing in America (particularly egregious information a la Michael Brown “hands up, don’t shoot” stuff). Probably could have reduced a lot rioting and cooled a lot of racial strife / election denialism. Of course, this is all hypothetical speculation and I can’t prove it.

Just look up @HelpfulNotes, they post tweets that have been community noted. Some of them are fantastic.

Making a Twitter-like service profitable is difficult. To attempt it, you need

(1) Network effects

(2) Infrastructure competency

I think Facebook can provide these faster at a higher level than anyone else who is attempting it. For profit, things that would help include:

(1) No need for profitability

(2) Profit synergies with an existing business

Again, Facebook is a strong competitor here. They can start at #1 and integrate to achieve #2

To get people to switch from Twitter to your service it helps to have:

(1) Brand recognition

(2) Also be a social network

(3) A marketing budget

However, I think getting people to switch is the hardest part for any network; it's affected by many factors. There is also the consideration of getting them to switch, stay, and not be pulled away by a future competitor.

Facebook can provide network effects but by leveraging your existing social graph. To me it feels like there’s a risk they’ll just cannibalise social activity on their existing apps rather than create a lot of new activity.

Twitter with my Instagram friends won’t feel like Twitter.

If only a small % of Meta's users start using the app, it'll quickly become an audience too big to ignore. Anyone with Twitter clout will have to maintain a presence there, and being there on Day 1 is an opportunity for them to possibly get more clout.

I haven’t had any problem using Twitter recently (hardly “barely usable”). They had a technical hiccup that affected some users, but meh, Reddit serves 5XXs for up to an hour a couple of times a month and people don’t hyperventilate about its impending doom. The thing about social networks is that it doesn’t matter much if Twitter isn’t as great as it was in the early 10s, it still has the users and it’s obscenely difficult to pull users away en masse. Threads can probably carve out a big enough swatch to justify its own existence, but whether those users come from Twitter or other Meta properties (cannibalism) remains TBD and in any case I don’t think it will take enough users from Twitter to sink the latter. All of the doomsday prophesy about Twitter feels a lot like motivated reasoning, much like the smug certainty of the media running up to the 2016 election (and I say this as a someone with a “Trump for Prison 2024” yard sign). I’ve been hearing the same people saying (mostly on Twitter) for many months that it’s a sinking ship and they’re leaving and I’m still waiting for the big exodus.

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