For a social network, it's kinda important.
We should let social die. Our aggregate attention is too valuable to waste on such trivial things.
You know HN is a social site, right?
You know we're talking about social networks, right?
The network component.
The "more of... than" makes this sound less absolute.
HN is not a social network. It is a public forum used to aggregate news and foster conversation.
> Musk is slowly destroying Twitter
Which it is something you would only believe because journalists or your bubble repeats it over and over until it just must be true. Indeed, the early posts predicting the downfall of Twitter were associated with the large layoffs, ironically ignoring that Mastodon manages to run with just four developers.
Or, you can listen to Elon basically every day. What's Twitter worth now according to him? Significantly less than half now surely. He claimed 20 billion out of the 44 billion as of exactly a month ago, and April hasn't exactly been kind to the economy.
They lost almost 75% of their top 1000 advertisers. It's become a right-wing cesspool, with open bigotry commonly on display. To the point that even many right leaning moderates I know refuse to use it anymore. Not to say it was perfect before, but nowhere near this bad.
> ironically ignoring that Mastodon manages to run with just four developers.
And you are ironically ignoring the fact that Mastodon isn't "run" by four developers. There is no such thing as a "global Mastodon outage", or a central Mastodon authority that says blatant bigotry is disallowed.
There are currently 828 contributors. And Mastodon isn't responsible for what's certainly billions in hardware and infrastructure investment as Twitter is.
If I want to start a Nazi-themed hate instance that only allows white-people dressed like clowns, I can. But it will be a very silent echo chamber of myself and other like-minded bigots because no one will federate with me.
He's banned third-party clients, paywalled the API, made "verification" less than useless, destroyed the fact that Twitter is supposed to be a microblog, pushed algorithmic recommendation and made the algorithm pay-to-play.
And those are just the things I remember off the top of my head. If I saw a full list of dumb shit he's done ever since last autumn, I could probably find even more stuff that is completely destroying the service.
There seems also better support for freedom of speech now. Before Musk, accounts were often suspended for highly dubious reasons.
I can't comment much on the Twitter API now costing money, but was it even important?
Moreover, in the past the "verification" was not about verification. It was a way to split Twitterers into peasants and elite. Where the elite didn't just include celebrities and big organizations, but also random journalists for some reason. I'm also on Twitter for quite a while, and in the beginning nobody needed verification and nobody missed it. And now it doesn't seem necessary either. You can easily see whether a famous account is real by looking at the number of followers.
Have you actually ever used Twitter? That's literally the first thing that has existed in Twitter. It's the oldest part of the entire service. It has always existed.
And of course, third-party Twitter clients such as Tweetbot always gave you pure sequential timeline. Elon decided to ban all of them.
>There seems also better support for freedom of speech now. Before Musk, accounts were often suspended for highly dubious reasons.
Highly dubious reasons such as what?
Also, remember when Musk banned people for posting links to Mastodon? Where does this fall on the "free speech" spectrum?
>I can't comment much on the Twitter API now costing money, but was it even important?
Yes.
>Moreover, in the past the "verification" was not about verification. It was a way to split Twitterers into peasants and elite. Where the elite didn't just include celebrities and big organizations, but also random journalists for some reason.
In the past, verification was supposed to mean that if you had the name "Bill Clinton" and a picture of Bill Clinton, that it was actually Bill Clinton. And now it's about… Paying Elon Musk $10?
I don't know where the "split" part comes from. The checkmark didn't actually do anything. It was literally just "we checked that this publicly notable person is who they say they are". Elon is the one that is trying to split Twitter into the paying and the non-paying by making sure that the non-paying are made much less visible. Freedom of speech if you just fork over the $10?
And yeah, journalists were also verified because they tweet about a lot of news from their accounts, and you want to know that "@johndoe from New York Times" is actually John Doe working for the New York Times and not Sergei in St. Petersburg.
>You can easily see whether a famous account is real by looking at the number of followers.
And how does that work if a famous account is new?
In the beginning it existed, then they forced more and more other tweets into the timeline. So then it didn't exist anymore -- until Musk took over. Third-party apps may have never had other tweets in the timeline, but they weren't widely used I believe.
> Highly dubious reasons such as what?
For example reporting factual but politically incorrect crime statistics.
> Also, remember when Musk banned people for posting links to Mastodon? Where does this fall on the "free speech" spectrum?
He reversed course in just a few hours. The old Twitter management were fond of certain censorship for years. Not just in blocking accounts, but also by doing things like acting as a direct arm of the FBI and performing political censorship on the Twitter trends (this was in the "Twitter files" which were ignored by the media, because people on right were affected, while most journalists are on the left).
> I don't know where the "split" part comes from. The checkmark didn't actually do anything. It was literally just "we checked that this publicly notable person is who they say they are".
The meaning of the checkmark became "this person is notable". Not generally that this person is who it appears to be, because verification wasn't open to everyone. The meaning of the checkmark was determined by the thing it was correlated with, notability, not realness.
> Elon is the one that is trying to split Twitter into the paying and the non-paying by making sure that the non-paying are made much less visible. Freedom of speech if you just fork over the $10?
I think the visibility difference mainly comes up for the "for you" tab, not for "following". It seems some reasonable compromise. They have to earn some money somehow after Musk was forced to pay an inflated price for Twitter (after his initial offer the stock market including Tesla tanked, which made him poorer and Twitter worth less, but he had to pay the old now-inflated price, he wanted to back out, but the Twitter management didn't let him, even though they opposed the deal just weeks earlier).
> And yeah, journalists were also verified because they tweet about a lot of news from their accounts, and you want to know that "@johndoe from New York Times" is actually John Doe working for the New York Times and not Sergei in St. Petersburg.
In my experience journalists just post their opinions like everybody else, they don't post more news than others. They just enjoyed having the "notable" sticker, a very pleasant association.
> And how does that work if a famous account is new?
That almost never happens. They may endorse it from somewhere else. Im sure it's simply an imaginary problem. I've been on Twitter before there was any verification and it wasn't a problem then.
how many actively use it is another probably more useful metric.
The majority of people don't care about Mastodon and never will, Mastodon hasn't won, it's not even relevant.