3740

Seems like communicating this sort of thing would be extra easy on a social media platform? I think the problem people are really dealing with is a slow, crotchety reluctance to leave the nest, pun intended. Leave. Delete your account. Redo the effort you went through fifteen years ago to find the people you want to “follow.”

3741

Sure if people were interested in doing it. I’m not a renowned First Amendment lawyer. It’s not like I can start telling them what to do or where to go.

That would require those people to be followable somewhere else. I could potentially find other people over the course of several years, sure. But that’s like saying “man fuck all your friends, just make new friends” in a way. I enjoy their personal insights and personalities. I can read AboveTheLaw or other various internet sites, but it’s not the same as picking the brain of someone who does it for a living and that might have a different view than I do.

There is also this. Most replacements are small, arcane, unstable or all of the above. Twitter is the biggest because they got it right. It also took them literally decades to get there.

Meanwhile:

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3742

You have to donate equally to both parties or you’re living in an echo chamber bubble and are against free speech otherwise you would want both politicians to win also you should also be more hardcore and you have a code review coming up in 3 hours I expect you to fly to wherever I am at that moment.

3743

Would it be over several years, though? It’s not like this is a grassroots campaign to leave twitter that’s doomed to fail, all the players want to get off of it, if we can orchestrate a mass giving-a-shit about a hundred things a year including the revelation that a fried chicken sandwich is really tasty, surely the cogs can organize a bit and move quickly and cleanly.

3744

Assuming I’m working from zero finding entirely new people? Probably. It took me years to find most of the people in question.

I’m not talking about Twitter dying or whatever, I’m talking about rebuilding what I had a month ago.
And I’m working from the assumption that I’m going to lose some of these viewpoints forever and would be focusing on mostly finding completely new ones.

Getting to where I am took… let’s say 6 years. I’ve been on Twitter for 8, but the first couple of years was following maybe 10 or 20 people. I currently follow 404 people. I could maybe lose a hundred of them and not care too much. Heck maybe 200. I don’t care that much about what Weird Al is saying at the end of the day. Trying to rebuild to an inferior version of what I had isn’t appealing.

I think you’re underestimating the scale. Twitter’s scale is beyond anything any of the alternatives could remotely handle. Hundreds of millions of people making 12 terabytes of data a day that has to be easily accessed by anyone at any time and backed up.

We have a roadmap, sure, but it’s also something that took years to become what it is (and probably more importantly, billions of dollars). Also that roadmap is probably IP of Elon Musk, so it’s not like you can just copy it and port everyone and everything over.

Let’s say Twitter dies tomorrow. Elon in a fit of rage drives a Tesla into the servers and they explode in a fire that can’t be put out for 2 weeks. Well… good luck? No one can take up the mantle except maybe Meta. Which is decidedly not an improvement. We have wait for all the alternatives to have a battle royale over the course of several years at the least and see who wins. That would be the fast track version. Twitter itself took the better part of a decade to be more meaningful than Instagram and that was with a unique niche and very little competition.

3745

Google could, if they chose to. Of course, they’d probably abandon it because someone ran through the room with sparkly lights two years from now, but you’d have a nice two years…

3746

If places like Google and Amazon aren’t rushing to put out Twitter clones I think they should be.

3747

Neither will.

Google is culturally incapable of making products fast these days (too many organizational scars), have failed at microblogging multiple times before, and are unlikely to be staffing high-risk low-payoff projects in this economic climate.

Amazon has tried cloning literally hundreds of successful consumer-facing products and platforms. All of them flopped. They’ve basically got a reverse midas touch when it comes to this stuff.

3748

Google struggled for years before Youtube became profitable, I don’t think they’d easily venture back into that realm again and I think amazon has just too much sense.

3749

I don’t think anything can win.

Twitter going down is going to leave scars, not just on the investor end, but on the product (us) end.

3750

Okay. I get why they particularly won’t. But surely someone with deep pockets should. Ground floor and all that.

3751

Part of the problem is that all the current Twitter “competitors” that people are flocking to now (Host, Mastodon, Post etc.) weren’t being developed to replace Twitter. They were all made to be different from Twitter. Better in some ways, but primarily not taking on the goliath that is Twitter because that way lay business suicide per the wisdom of the past few years. Fast forward to now, and people want Twitter, just not under Musk. They want Twitter in all but name, but no one was working on that product so it’s going to take time for someone to pivot to that.

3752

When you need a billion and a half dollars, make sure you set $200 million on fire and then piss on the people who were paying it to you publicly. It’s just smart business.

3753

Well, they want Twitter without the suck, but yeah.

(* where “the suck” has many defintions)

3754

So I don’t get notifications from Qt3. I just check it a lot because it’s one of about three places I check – Google News, Qt3, and ESPN.com. I could imagine just having the twitter addresses of the people I find interesting and just checking them now and then to see what they have posted rather than getting notifications every time they post. Even if Oscar Wilde was posting witticisms I don’t think I’d want a notification for every post. I don’t really understand the need for Twitter, but perhaps that is my old fogey viewpoint.

To be fair, I’m pretty anti-social media. So maybe it’s that too.

3755

I saw that movie

3756

So did I!

3757

I have to admit. I have wanted Twitter and Facebook to burn in hell for the divisive algorithms put in place to drive ad revenue, and what they have done to the political discourse in the US.

It would be hypocritical of me then not to applaud Elon’s activities, however repulsive I find some of his comments. So, enemy of my enemy is my friend it would seem. Go go Elon.

3758

While I could dive into the meat of your post as far as “Me old guy, me too!” and not feel too outre, you brought up a big point right at the start that I want to talk about.

Honest question, no shame in either answer: Who actually clicks “Yes” when the page prompts you? Personally I treat it like an Unknown Caller ID on my phone, at no point would I ever click Yes. Despite, I’ll mention, that it could be delightful on a site I actually cared about minute to minute like Qt3. I’m just never ever going to by training on the other 999 sites from which I do not desire notifications.

3759

anti-social media
or
anti - “social media”