> Elevator pitch if you will?
For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.
Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,
Let’s assume the analogy to town square holds, who do you think should control it? The UN?
I'm reminded of the phrase 天下为公, which is hard to translate exactly because 公 is doing some linguistical juggling that English has a hard time matching.
I don't think twitter in its current capacity should exist, the storage should be decoupled from the filters and the filters that everyone uses should be a free market with traditional competition dynamics. It may end up looking something like twitter, but without editorializing algorithms and a single walled entry. We can quibble who owns the database I suppose.
Would 'regulated utility' be a good fit for what you are describing?
[dead]
the EU of course, the actually functioning UN
Can you stop with the 'just asking questions' routine?
> Can you stop with the 'just asking questions' routine?
This combative response caught me by surprise.
I have nominal awareness of what Nitter stood for in the past.
Asking people for money given the legal precariousness AND not having a more strategic business model seems sketchy to me. Even bordering on scam.
Hence my genuine curiosity about whether there's something more substantial in the works.
It seems like a reasonable question to ask and I'm surprised to see you, in particular, take this point of view.
I could argue that due to the New York Times being the "newspaper of record" they should post my manifesto because, after all, it's very important. The obvious objection to this is that the NYT is privately owned, and despite having made itself very important, I don't have the right to tell them what to do.
This is the obvious objection to "Twitter is important, we should get to tell it what to do" as well, and you're old enough to know that Twitter kneecapping third-party apps is not at all new to the Musk chapter of the company, either.
Is it different, though? If so, how? Granted the jibe about the UN was sarcastic, but it's the same question, and, you know it.
Your NYT analogy seems to be specific to posting things, not reading them.
When it comes to reading, I think you could indeed make a reasonably compelling argument that the NYT must not refuse to provide a subscription to anyone who asks. That would be similar (but obviously not exactly the same) to the way common carriers are treated.
As to publishing, even then your analogy doesn't really fit because NYT has always been extremely selective about what they publish (ie they are curators) whereas twitter was fundamentally based on the polar opposite.
There is no way someone who is on HN for any amount of time is not aware of what Nitter is.
I legit did not know. I have seen it before, I've never really understood what it was, and didn't really have any reason to dig further into why people were linking against it instead of actual twitter/x until today. I've been here about a year less than you.
That's impressive :)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It was only a “town square” in the minds of Twitter users, no one else thinks that about a news media propped-up social network. If anything it was a comment section attached to nothing. And comment sections all get bad after a while.
There are a lot of public institutions using twitter for their communications.
There are a lot of public institutions not using Twitter for their communications too. Are those institutions not in the “town square”?
And they should be utterly ashamed of it. They give it a legitimacy that it has not deserved for years now.
Completely agree, feel the same about facebook et al too.
Can I just add too, it's why 'popularity' is an incredibly terrible metric for successfulness on the web
Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it
Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is