Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Ask HN: Do you believe there's really an alternative to Twitter?
28 points by andrewstuart on Nov 6, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 99 comments
Lots and lots of people leaving Twitter "for an alternative."

Personally I don't think there's any viable alternative to Twitter.

I think most people will do their rage quit and come back once they've cooled down and the news cycle has moved on.

But what do you think? Do you think there's any realistic alternative to Twitter as the world's "town square"?

Do you think any of the alternative platforms will actually take off and gain the critical mass of users along with the needed feature set to become a second or third Twitter?




> Do you think there's any realistic alternative to Twitter as the world's "town square"?

The concept of a "global town square" is entirely at odds with everything we know about how humans work, and I don't believe any sort of algorithm or content moderation or anything of the sort can make such an incredibly infeasible concept workable.

The alternative to Twitter should be building local community. Start having fire pit nights. Welcome (limited) alcohol and some pipes or cigars, and simply start talking to people, face to face, again - and then keep doing it on a weekly basis or so. Expand as needed, and when it gets too big, start another firepit.

We need to stop intermediating all human interactions through tech companies that are simply mining this data to then manipulate us as we're most susceptible to (which is what advertising is, though plenty of other things also piggyback on the data to try to manipulate us).

And turn off cell phones around the fire pit. They're actively harmful in every possible way.


I love how people went for the literal fire pit and pipes and started complaining about licenses and unusual items.

I'll rephrase a bit and hope the parent here agrees with me. That's not the point. If a fire pit and pipes are not your thing or not allowed by police or space, just do a beer gathering at your roof. A tea gathering at your place. Have a few beers on the park and offer them to people. Whatever you're comfortable (or maybe slightly uncomfortable) with, with the goal of finding a small group of people that are local.

They don't need to be your best friends. But speaking from experience, knowing local people helps. Especially if you're not from that place.

Hopefully the point is the same and this makes it easier for others to not get defensive, but open-minded and willing to try.


> Start having fire pit nights. Welcome (limited) alcohol and some pipes or cigars, and simply start talking to people, face to face, again

I know zero (0) people within a 5 mile radius[1]. And if you started a fire pit around here (local council estate)[2], alcohol or no, I can guarantee the police would need to be involved sooner rather than later.

[1] Exceptions: flat mate and one person who stays in London ~2 nights a week

[2] Also good luck trying to get a permit for that kind of thing.


> I know zero (0) people within a 5 mile radius[1].

That's exactly the problem to be solved by the suggestion above.

> [2] Also good luck trying to get a permit for that kind of thing.

It's a sad state of affairs when "oi bruv you go' a loicense for tha' firepi'?" is an actual concern.


> It's a sad state of affairs when "oi bruv you go' a loicense for tha' firepi'?" is an actual concern.

In the absence of someone hosting it in their garden - and within 200yds radius of here, there's maybe 20 gardens, none big enough for a safe fire pit - it would need to be in the community space which is controlled.

> That's exactly the problem to be solved by the suggestion above.

Have you considered that I perhaps don't want to know any of the people within a 5 mile radius since I already have a community of people I talk to?


> Have you considered that I perhaps don't want to know any of the people within a 5 mile radius since I already have a community of people I talk to?

Have you considered that maybe it's in your best interests to at least be acquainted with people in your local community? Unless you're in rural America or something (hell, even then), that's a lot of people you seem to have written off rather prematurely.

Like, I can't tell you how to live your life, but if you're truly that detached from your local surroundings then that seems like a problem in and of itself - not just from the abstract perspective of mental well-being, mind you, but also the tangible/pragmatic perspective of being able to negotiate for necessary (let alone desired) goods and services within society.

Put simply: having friends close by is invaluable. I guess if you're rich enough you can pay strangers to provide everything you need, but having friends to call upon when you need help with something is a lot cheaper :)

Besides, it's possible (if not highly probable) that there are people within a 5 mile radius of you who are part of your existing remote community. Wouldn't it be useful to know who those people are and at least have the ability to collaborate with them in person if need be?


> Have you considered that maybe it's in your best interests to at least be acquainted with people in your local community?

Yes. But in the last 4 years, I've heard the local community scream at their children, heard the local alcoholics shouting abuse at people walking past, seen the local shop attacked by a gang of kids 3 times, seen countless fireworks let off in the square and also aimed at people, seen the rubbish left behind after the community has used the square and park, and been kept up more nights than I can count by the noise.

I'm OK keeping my distance, thanks.

> also the tangible/pragmatic perspective of being able to negotiate for necessary (let alone desired) goods and services

We got a plumber recommended by and from the community to replace a shower. That kind of thing?

It took a couple of years and a few hundred pounds to get a stranger to fix what he messed up.

> Wouldn't it be useful to know who those people are

I'm reasonably sure I do know who those people are, yes. Perfectly happy to collaborate with them, if required, remotely.

What all these suggestions seem to be missing is that some people (and I don't think it's a tiny percentage, either) do not have the burning desire to mingle with people at fire pits, roof beers, park beers, etc. and that remote communities, enabled by things like Usenet, IRC, Twitter, Livejournal, what have you, are how they prefer to interact.


> But in the last 4 years, I've heard the local community scream at their children, heard the local alcoholics shouting abuse at people walking past, seen the local shop attacked by a gang of kids 3 times, seen countless fireworks let off in the square and also aimed at people, seen the rubbish left behind after the community has used the square and park, and been kept up more nights than I can count by the noise.

And for every one of those, there are likely dozens or even hundreds of people not doing those things and instead living quiet, productive lives. Those are the people you're prematurely writing off, and those are the people who would be of value to you.

> We got a plumber recommended by and from the community to replace a shower. That kind of thing?

No, because that would just be a different stranger. If you don't actually know anyone in your community, how do you even know your community recommended that plumber? In all likelihood there are countless other people in your 5 mile radius with the exact same experience who could've warned you about that plumber and recommended a different one (perhaps even the very one you ended up hiring later) - but instead, you wrote them off, and in doing so made a rather expensive decision.

In attempting to refute my point you've proven it :)

> What all these suggestions seem to be missing is that some people (and I don't think it's a tiny percentage, either) do not have the burning desire to mingle with people at fire pits, roof beers, park beers, etc.

None of these suggestions are predicated on a "burning desire", no more than a burning desire to perform some other chore like participation in electoral processes or working for a paycheck. I don't like mingling with people, either - I, too, would rather stay at home all day chatting with Internet people if I could get away with it - but the point is that we can't get away with it, because whether we like it or not we live in a society and it's therefore in our best interests to participate in it.


If you need a permit for that, you are living in the wrong place under the wrong leadership.


Life got a lot better for me when I finally moved out of London.

I was fed up of living in a place where there was no cultural cohesion, where people constantly came and left, where ghettos naturally formed because melting pots don’t work in practice.

I now live in a lovely town in Kent where I know and love my neighbours, where the streets are safe and clean. The air is clean. The roads aren’t all 20mph limited (FFS, Lewisham!) and people are generally happier, more polite and more settled. Some people will wince at how “white and middle class” the area is. But I have no chips on my shoulder about race or class, so this doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

Leave London. There are much nicer places to be in the U.K., whatever age you are.


I find it funny you chose 'pipes or cigars'.

Not sure what country you're from, but now they've been banned from public places in the UK, you'd be considered a weirdo for suggesting that.

Pipes and cigars are loathed. People hate smokers now, they're considered pariahs now.


Good. If you're attempting to build a slightly counter-cultural, offline tightly knit social group, adding a cigar seems reasonable enough to me. And around an active firepit, the additional smoke isn't a big thing.

Practically, the reason I suggest a bit of alcohol and some cigars/pipes is to have "something to do with your hands," and something to do if you don't want to be part of the conversation at the moment. Since these events are ideally cell phone free, if a chunk of the conversation isn't interesting, or isn't something you care to participate in at the time for whatever reason, being able to sit back and focus on the pipe or cigar for a bit is a nice option. I've certainly had moments when someone is expressing a point I disagree with, where the best option is to simply let them talk and occasionally ask clarifying questions - sitting back, sipping on some whiskey, and working on a cigar makes it far easier to let them continue without feeling the need to dive into why I think they're somewhat insane, and that's half the point here - I may not agree with them, but I would like to understand where they're coming from.

At this point, though, I'd view the actively countercultural aspects of a pipe/cigar as a benefit to them in your situation. But, also, seeing the UK-centric parts of the discussion here, I'm so glad I don't live over there. It sounds worse than I'd expected - 1984 was not intended to be a government handbook.


The alternative to Twitter -- and all social media -- stares us in the face: don't use it at all. I know some people find it hard to believe but abandoning all of those pointless and toxic social media platforms won't leave you less informed or connected.

Your question seems like asking for a different kind of sharp stick to poke your eyes out with. Alternatively don't poke your eyes at all.


Currently Twitter is an intra-elite coordination system. So you may not be using Twitter, but Twitter may end up "using" you. I live in a pretty irrelevant second-rate country, and even here stuff from Twitter ends up in the news, or in the law in a couple of months.

I am not saying that using Twitter is the way to escape this, but going to the park won't save you from it either. And even if you don't use it, it's important to know the impact of those platforms.


As you say, Twitter is a platform for elites. That means you don't get to do anything on Twitter whether or not you join unless you're elite or lucky; the effect is a one-way direction. Twitter is good for notifications from elites but any elite is almost certainly on multiple platforms at once so you can always get your notifications elsewhere.

What kinds of trends or stories are you at at risk of missing out on?


>Twitter is a platform for elites.

This is why they're so over the top furious with Elon.


I don't know what "intra-elite coordination system" means, but it probably doesn't concern me. I know stuff from Twitter gets on the news and maybe affects what some people do, but mostly the controversies that erupt on social media have to do with the social media platforms.

The biggest thing that ever happened on Twitter (which somehow contributed to Musk buying it) was Trump getting banned. That led to all kinds of earnest and serious-seeming "conversations" and "debates" about free speech and public squares and all that, but in the end what Trump tweeted all day long amounted to nonsense. Just like following what Kanye or the Kardashians do, it seems to mean something, it seems important, but think about it and all you have is spectacle and celebrity worship and gossip. Social media gives us a firehose of pseudo-events, spectacles that seem to mean something but don't. They occur only to get reported on and liked or repeated in the same social media sphere. Daniel Boorstin describes that phenomenon -- which predates social media -- in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Read that instead of Twitter or Facebook to learn how pointless and manipulative social media has become in our culture. That some people may find nuggets of value here or there in the dumpster fire doesn't make it a good thing.


I think you’re downplaying the significance of a private company in the West banning the democratically elected leader of the free world from reaching his supporters … while simultaneously allowing the Taliban to use the platform. Something was deeply wrong with the way Twitter was run.

Senior Democrats used the platform for years to create hoaxes about Russians helping Trump steal an election. No bans.

Then when Republicans do similar in response to an election with very dubious postal voting, those Republicans are banned. And for those claiming Trump incited violence - that’s a distortion of the truth. His last tweet on the platform was a smack down against rightwingers who’d been involved in political violence.


I don’t know if Twitter suffered from bad management or made what some perceive as poor decisions. I don’t use it and have no stake in it.

Trump never had a problem reaching his supporters. If anything the Twitter ban gave him even more free press and another phony grievance to rage about on Fox News and every other outlet.

Believe what you want. I didn’t comment to engage in political debates, or to defend Twitter. Don’t use it. It only has significance and power if we believe it does.


We have same situation in my country but with the Facebook. Twitter is practically non-existing here.


Exactly - is an hour of your time worth more to you when you use it on your own terms, or when an app takes it from you and donates it to advertisers under the guise of "interesting content"?


I've never used twitter and don't intend to.


twitter, much like most of the internet is as good as you make it


Yep, it's never been toxic for me, and certainly isn't useless.


I don't agree. Twitter (and all social media) involve interacting with all kinds of people, and just a few of them can make it terrible, completely outside of your control. You can stay and fight by blocking or arguing or whatever, or just do something else.

Balancing what little value I ever got from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. -- all of which I have used, sometimes for years -- against the waste of time and anger and frustration, the trolls and sociopaths, the nonsense and lies, I decided not participating in those fake town squares and social clubs would reduce my stress and wasted time without any downside. And I don't have to worry about how my personal information or reading habits or social interactions get harvested, aggregated, sold, and ultimately used against me.


Read-only, only linear timeline for people you follow, don’t read the replies.

This… isn’t hard?


I didn't say I quit because I found it hard to follow or read. I just never came across anything of interest on social media that I didn't hear about some other way. I don't have any interest in following celebrities or "experts." Anyone I care to have a conversation with I can reach by phone or email.

I was on Twitter for five years, LinkedIn since it started (quit two years ago), Facebook on and off for several years, Instagram for a while. I thought I would get useful information, job leads, and stay connected to my family and friends. Instead I got a lot of useless but seemingly urgent "news," endless spam and friend requests from people I don't know, and had to witness multiple fights about politics and religion and social issues that wouldn't have even started in person. I learned about bizarre conspiracy theories I wouldn't have known about, and got some strong opinions about things like gun ownership, gay and trans rights, and immigrants, but I can't say that any of that added to my life.

I have a friend who follows people like Sam Harris and tells me all the time what so-and-so expert had to say about some social or political issue. So what? How does what Sam Harris (or any "public intellectual" or "expert") thinks or says affect me, really? If I valued repeating what I read on Twitter to other people to make myself feel smarter or better-informed, or if I cared what Elon Musk had to say from his bathroom this morning, I would spend my time on social media I suppose.


But the main point I was making was that you disagreed with the GP that Twitter was "as good as you make it". Your stated reason for disagreeing with this was that "it involve[ed] interacting with all kinds of people, and just a few of them can make it terrible, completely outside of your control".

My point was that this was entirely inside your control, and it is relatively easy to avoid these parts, thus, "as good as you make it" is a relatively reasonable statement to make.

It sounds like you didn't get what you were expecting. It is perfectly possible to use twitter without treating it as a "fake town square and social club" (albeit, a lot harder if you only interact with the web site and not a third party client). You don't have to look at, or participate in the drama. I've used twitter for 13 years, and probably only ever looked at the "trending" topic, three times? I only see people I follow, and if they retweet stuff that I don't want to see, then I turn off their retweets.

I almost never tweet, except to attempt to helpfully reply sometimes. I delete my tweets after a few hours.

It absolutely is what you make it.


Limiting whom you follow and not tweeting means you have some control over what shows up in your feed. It doesn't mean you made anything useful out of it, though I can understand how other people might think they have made something useful.

By analogy I can control the real-life interactions I have with people to some degree, but not completely. I can choose not to engage with family members who spout conspiracy theories, just ignore them, or not put myself in the situation in the first place. But I can't always avoid that in real life because I can't always control those interactions. With social media, though, I can choose not to participate at all, based on weighing the value I might get against the downsides of time waste and nonsense I have to read, skip over, block, unfollow. In my experience with social media the downsides always far outweighed the benefits, and that was before taking into account the platforms harvesting and selling my information. If something important happens in the world, or some new tool or technology comes out that I might care about, I will find out through some other channel (here, for example) that doesn't come with so many downsides. Other people will have different experiences.

I mainly want to push back on the idea that we have to use social media to participate in some imaginary "global town square," or that we will miss something vitally important if we don't pay attention. We don't, and we won't.


> I mainly want to push back on the idea that we have to use social media to participate in some imaginary "global town square," or that we will miss something vitally important if we don't pay attention. We don't, and we won't.

You've completely pivoted away from the thing that you were originally disagreeing with. Nobody was saying this in this thread.


Some much less noisier channels for expert insight are tech talks and podcasts. You can select the expert, the subject, and have a respectful monologue/dialogue.


I agree about talks and podcasts. I have found some useful material on YouTube, but I ignore the comments. I can also read books, magazine articles, book reviews, and web sites that don't have long comment threads that quickly spiral into meaningless arguments and toxic behavior.


as good as you make it implies it takes some effort, if it's worth it or not for you specifically is of course your call ...


Yeah I get your point. I tried for years to make social media into something useful for me, but the effort didn't pay off. I can't recall anything of significance ever coming across my Twitter or Facebook feeds, or on Instagram, or on LinkedIn. My wife uses social media to chat with her friends and share photos, but even that limited participation has led to arguments, and I don't get the value of seeing what someone had for dinner or learning that they got a new purse.

I freelance (programming and system admin) for a living. I had a customer earlier this year who wanted to screen me over a video call before committing to a project. He asked me for my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts so we could "connect." When I told him I don't use those platforms he expressed shock and asked how customers could find me if I don't use social media. I asked him "How did you find me?" Obviously not on LinkedIn or Facebook. In 15 years freelancing I never got a single professional lead through social media. I suppose some people find it suspicious when they run into someone who doesn't use social media -- what are we hiding? In any case I got the project and the customer communicated with me by email and phone.


I mean I hear this a lot, and I don't have the same experience, so I can only say that for my special case it seems to work very well, twitter is one of the rare internet hubs where normal discussions sometimes happen. I'm a philosopher that works as a software dev, I'm grew up on the internet and am very openminded and anti-ideological so I can't really get offended, but even so I don't think many have really tried. I use twitter mostly for philosophy discussions. I haven't really been a target of any noteworth toxicity except in the Trump erra, where I had to unfollow a lot of official professor's accounts that were just spamming anti-Trump articles 24/7, I guess some people thought I was the asshole as I have been blocked by a few but mostly without any interaction (I think just for following others that they don't like).

As for freelance jobs, I can't imagine where I would even look without Linkedin. There are some local forums that have job postings but nothing useful for a freelancer in EU.


My family and some of my friends went down the MAGA vs. anti-Trump path all over social media. I finally quit all social media during the Trump administration, but I had thought about it before then because I questioned what value any of it added for me. My day-to-day life really didn't change because of Trump, regardless of my opinions about him, or what anyone else thinks. The sequential social media outrages and controversies didn't change my mind and I doubt they changed anyone else's.

I can't say that what goes on in Washington has ever affected my life since the Nixon administration (ending the Vietnam war just before I reached draft age). Politics (at least in the US but I suspect in most places) long ago turned into mostly a series of pseudo-events, distractions intended to keep politicians and celebrities and "the elite" in the limelight, virtue signaling and "owning" the other side, while nothing that actually matters gets addressed.

Maybe I don't understand it or see the need because of my age. My kids all use social media, sometimes they get really upset about what goes on. They all grew up with the internet and social media, I date back to rotary phones and daily printed newspapers on the porch.

I stuck with LinkedIn for 12 years thinking it was a necessary and useful platform for "professionals." Never got anything out of it beyond recruiters contacting me about jobs that matched one keyword in my CV. I get work through an agency now, before that it was all word of mouth and referrals, and I still think that works better than trying to find work through online marketplaces and social media sites.

To bring it back around, I don't doubt that some people can get value from Twitter and other social media. I don't, but I don't project my experience on the rest of the world. My original comment in this thread intended to answer "I hate Twitter, what can I use instead?" Stop and ask what you expect to get out of Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn and then periodically check that you get that.

Thanks for the reasonable conversation. I only participate here on Hacker News anymore because most of the time I can find some interesting topics and the conversations usually stay civil and useful. HN can go into the weeds but I hold it out as an example of what good moderation and a respectful user base can create. I haven't found that anywhere else.


Twitter as a concept really only has a single novel idea: being able to (sometimes) directly speak to people that you would normally never have the status or prestige to contact (the president, a CEO, senators, customer support for a company that has terrible phone lines, etc)

If the world just got better about actually letting you talk to the people you want/need to (like a senator actually reading letters from his/her constituents, or a company actually providing quality customer service), twitter would become rapidly obsolete. And for good reason.

Social media fills a niche that otherwise lays unfilled. But while something like facebook can act as a "town square", twitter literally just fills in for the laziness of other platforms.


> like a senator actually reading letters from his/her constituents

In the US, at least, I think it’s fairly well-known that politicians or their staff will often read (and handle relevant actionable items) in letters from their constituents. Things like expressing opposition to some legislation or requesting their soft power for some bureaucratic situation (e.g. expediting a passport application) are quite standard. Especially if your constituency isn’t too large *, there’s often an individual response when necessary even if it’s through a staffer.

* Smaller than a million people or so? US Representatives and state/local legislators are a better choice in many cases.


> Twitter as a concept really only has a single novel idea: being able to (sometimes) directly speak to people that you would normally never have the status or prestige to contact

What? I've been on Twitter a long time and this is just nonsense. It's about being able to speak to people.

> customer support for a company that has terrible phone lines

How is this "never have the status or prestige"? It's "don't have the time or energy to sit on hold for hours" at best.


I do game development on the side, just fun small indie games. I like using twitter to follow other game devs and see what they are working on. It's fun tracking down new devs and seeing new and interesting projects, and it's fun sharing progress on my games and getting some positive comments from them.

What's not fun is the sheer amount of topics on twitter I have zero interest in invading my timeline. I don't like how much marketing spam there is, since every post is secretly hoping to 'go viral', which even for the indie devs I follow makes it fairly bland sometimes. Twitter is just so huge that it's not possible to have any small communities.

For all its warts, there's a fantastic twitter community around the FGC (fighting game community) - members in the community regularly post really interesting questions or statements on fighting games and/or their design, and it usually kicks of dozens of videos from other people I follow on that topic. The FCG's usage of Twitter is probably the best I've seen.

Personally, what I would like is something more akin to a mailing list or RSS feed I suppose, but with the ability to reply to threads, a bit like a forum. I want to be able to follow people I find interesting manually, with zero discovery in the app itself. I want to hear updates from them, and without any 'retweet' functionality there's less incentive for small players to spam the ever living hell out of their account in the hope of getting lucky.

I think that would be my dream app - something that works like an RSS feed, but without the technical overhead of actually setting up and publishing to your own RSS feed, with the ability to respond with comments on the posts without having to repost it to a site which does allow it (like HN or Reddit) with one shared identity. That would be cool.

Does Mastodon fill that role? Does anything? If so I'd certainly use it.


I'm not sure there's a general replacement for Twitter. _For the stuff I use Twitter for_, Mastodon is increasingly looking like it'll do; a large portion of the people whose stuff I like have moved.

And it appears that soon Twitter won't be Twitter, it will be a poorly thought out advertising platform (well, you could argue that it's already that, but moreso); see https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721 . I have no interest in seeing loads of stuff posted by people gullible enough to pay Twitter $8 a month; I can't see many of the people whose stuff I like doing that.


Twitter felt like screaming into a void… an impersonal broadcast to followers, kind of like gossiping. That never appealed to me so for me anything felt like a superior alternative.


The only real alternative would be an open protocol that allows free message broadcasting and redistribution, such that the server becomes a dumb relay, not the arbiter of truth. Kind of like email, but everybody can look at your mailbox. Some form of cryptographic identities would be required, so that multiple servers can host and distribute messages and it's the user that controls the keys.

Mastodon to me goes in the completely wrong direction, as it still keeps user identities locked to a server and gives the server admins way too much control. It's a bad copy of Twitter with even more censorship.

That said, I have little hope in this ever happening. All the money is made in controlling the user, so any protocol that actively works against that is pretty much doomed to fail.


Do you mean something like Deja News (before its mad pivot in 1999)? Maybe somebody could build a service that offers users an interface to create/consume content shared over a dedicated NNTP-based Usenet discussion group, archiving all those messages (respecting the 'X-No_Archive' message header!) and adding in some sort of 'blue tick' crypto id to messages from validated humans. Build in some message character limits, alongside # and @ functionality - not forgetting image/audio/video capabilities - to mimic current Twitter behaviours and this mythical somebody might have a "twitter clone" on their hands?

Of course moderation would remain a nightmare...


> Do you mean something like Deja News (before its mad pivot in 1999)?

Yep, the nice thing about Usenet was that you could refer to any message by a unique message-id. So the where and how you downloaded those messages was of no importance, the Usenet groups were held together by their message-id and a few other headers. The rest was just federated servers mirroring the content among each other. There was however a lack of security, so nothing would stop you from generating duplicate message-id, faking identities and such.

> Of course moderation would remain a nightmare...

What I would like to see is moderation made optional and transparent. Just give me a list of message-ids that a moderator deemed filter worthy, but leave it to me if I want to use that filter list or not. Such an approach would also allow third parties to do the filtering.


Can't dang just moderate Twitter and we can be done with it all?


That would save the world


Feature set? That's trivial. A high school student could write it in a weekend. A text area where you can enter a very limited soundbite-sized snippet of text, and a page where you can see what snippets of text other twits have entered. Then add in follow, @-replies, hashtags, and image/video embedding. All of those features are trivial. They're mostly just references and basic HTML.

What's not trivial are the scaling and moderation and support personnel to handle millions of users. And of course, building the user-base itself for those network effects. And those are the things that are currently being lost.

But the whole thing was never good. It was just what was there. So yes, there could certainly be a (much better) alternative, a blog network for instance, or just about any other social media site.

And the idea of it as "the world's town square" is just laughable to anyone that isn't a long-term twit addict. It's never been that, and never would be.


If there was an alternate social media, we would already know and use it.

The social network effects is just too powerful. Only a very few number of social media's broke through that and it's usually by being different from existing offerings.

Ie, tiktok with super algor feed that only shows 1 thing at a time. Fundamentally different from the rest.


Twitter was never the "town square". No single website, no matter how popular, has any realistic hope of being a "town square" short of maybe something owned by the UN or something. A website is, at best, a corkboard on the wall of some private business or domicile - and while some of those corkboards might be big and relatively lax in who can post what on them, at the end of the day someone owns it and will use that ownership to control what's conveyed on it.

The actual "town square" is the Internet itself, and every effort should be made to ensure it stays that way.


Everyone here saying that the alternative to Twitter is just not using social media at all because it's toxic and useless... have you considered that maybe you're just using it wrong or following the wrong people? Why is my experience so different?

I've gone to meetups, made new friends, gone to dates, found job offers, etc. all thanks to Twitter, Twitter has probably been the biggest kickstarter to my social life since I moved to the city.


People (including HN) are just bad at using SM.


> But what do you think? Do you think there's any realistic alternative to Twitter as the world's "town square"?

Nope.

So long as celebrities and politicians are on it the journalists will keep mining it for cheap clicks - it has replaced 'man on the street says' type of low quality reporting.

Whether at the BBC, Fox or CNN people sitting around doom scrolling in those offices are ordinary neophytes for whom FB/Twitter/Reddit essentially are the entire internet - regardless of political leanings every single news outlet weaves whatever narrative they want from it as there's always a Joe Schmoe (real or bot) with 4 followers to quote into 'people on twitter are saying X'.

It really doesn't matter if somebody builds a better twitter with more intelligent and useful discussions as that won't be useful fodder for media.


For this answer, we first have to ask what do people get out of Twitter?

This answer is likely going to be different for different people. Some come there for hot-takes on the latest news, some to find like-minded people and communities and some, maybe most, go there to hit on the other side.

I think the answer would likely be different for each person and group. Anybody looking for a community is much, much, much better of on Reddit, but Reddit's discovery system is worse than their search.

I will also say that if you poll a random Twitter user, they are not likely to have powerful feelings about the Musk takeover. This is being blown out of proportion by a few blue checkmarks.

Blow out of proportion by a few blue checkmarks is, incidentally, peak Twitter.


IMO Twitter was unique before smartphones, when one could use SMS (140 characters) to post from a press event or when just witnessing an event. Then you would be the first one to break the news (is this why is it popular with journalists? idk).

The term then was real-time internet or streaming internet or something like that.

Now, again IMHO, Twitter is valuable only because of popularity (network effects), and any other app could take its place, since most people have smartphones and can share a thought immediately.


IMO real value of twitter is in the network it holds currently & not necessarily specific features. even if somebody were to come up with a platform with half the features as twitter but somehow convinces a big percentage of current users to switch that would be enough to initiate a mass migration.

Mastodon would provide a good infra to create a platform like that but it need somewhat deep pockets (and trust on the founders) to keep it alive for the transition period. the only un-maligned patron I can think of of is craigslist guy. maybe if they can create a barebones 'chipper' that looks like CL and charges minimal fee to keep it ad free it might take off.


I don't think so, but I hope web3 can produce something like that. There are some alternatives that are just smaller twitter clones, but this isn't how progress works, the alternative has to be decentralized and also much better to take off.


A solution I envisioned around 2018: Email re-skinned as a social network [1]: consider a social network that uses email as its communications protocol and regular mail servers as the “cloud”. There is no “platform”, but an app which is basically a re-skinned mail client with certain features disabled or abstracted. There is no advertising.

https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-netwo...


> Email re-skinned as a social network

Am I right in thinking that only allows communication between bi-directionally connected people (because you need someone's public key to send to them)? Because how would that work for, e.g., people with huge followings? Are they supposed to 'friend' everyone that wants to consume their output? (Which is one of the good things about Twitter - it allows uni-directional 'friend's.)


This would be pretty much Usenet/mailing lists. An improvement would be user profiles that aren't a predefined set of fields to fill out.


Today, there is no viable worthy alternative to Twitter. The only alternative is to delete all of it, but those that have claimed to leave Twitter have not deleted their accounts.

> I think most people will do their rage quit and come back once they've cooled down and the news cycle has moved on.

The whole news on this is itself fuelling outrage and extreme emotional reactions for many to 'quit' Twitter in rage on to alternatives without closing their Twitter accounts.

They will calm down, and move back onto Twitter after the outrage is over.


> Today, there is no viable worthy alternative to Twitter.

I'm really curious why you think so. On twitter you can read through the feeds of ~300 million monthly active users. You can read their opinions about current events, jokes, whatever thought popped into their head, etc.

So how many monthly active users would be needed in order to get approximately the same level of information/inspiration/entertainment?

E.g. Telegram has ~50 million MAU. Is that not enough? Is the range of opinions expressed by the 300 million so much bigger that you would be impoverished moving to a network that had only 50 million?

Perhaps if you have extremely esoteric tastes, like Baluchi newlywed cooking recipes, but for most views/interests, 50 million is more than enough. Really 10 million is more than enough. This is my version of Gates' Law: No one needs a social network with more than 10 million users, because no one is that unique in their outlook, temperament, knowledge, or life experience.

But if you need huge numbers, there is also Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, wechat, etc.

This reminds me of some conversations where a friend insisted that they needed to live in a big city, because they wouldn't be able to find anyone to relate to in a smaller city. And I thought, how many thousands of people need to live in a place before you can find a group to relate to? Do you really need, say, 5 million people in order to find some kindred spirits? 1 million wont do?


I moved off Twitter 2+years ago and deleted my account.

I moved off Facebook (many years ago) and deleted my account.

I moved off WhatsApp and deleted my account.

I moved off Instagram and deleted my account.

Life is better out here. Less rage, less FOMO, more reality.


Reducing the percentage of active accounts is an effective form of protest.

No comment on merits of alternatives or social media itself.


even if you don't log off do houseclean your old tweets with tweetdelete.net (not affiliated in any way, feel free to use an alternate)

I do not trust Elon to use my posting history responsibly, period. with so much pressure on monetization who knows what gets sold to which advertiser.


No. Not Mastodon either. It's like how some say "linux is an alternative to windows", as much as some people wish it was, it's simply not.


> "linux is an alternative to windows", as much as some people wish it was, it's simply not.

But it is? Simply just saying something isn't, doesn't make it so.

If I along with millions of others in 2022, can use Linux for all my needs and not touch the spyware that is Windows, Linux is as much of an alternative as iOS is to Android.

I think what you'd want to say is, Linux doesn't have as big of a marketshare as Windows, which is true but how does it not make Linux an alternative?

If millions of people can use Linux based Chromebooks and not think about Windows or MacOS, it is already a viable alternative. Maybe not for you, maybe not for someone else, but it is a real alternative whether you like the fact or not.


> But it is? Simply just saying something isn't, doesn't make it so.

I think that sometimes when people say "X is/is not an alternative to Y", they're actually meaning "replacement". Such as the current "Is the Fediverse an alternative to Twitter?" Obviously, yes. Is it a replacement? Obviously, no, and it could never be since it doesn't implement a whole bunch of Twitter features!

Same with Linux - "Is Linux an alternative to Windows?" Yes. A replacement? Probably not but it would depend on what you're wanting to do, surely.


Linux Desktop can be a replacement but like you said, it depends sometimes. Adobe and a few other creative software are not available on Linux, which means the only remaining alternative is MacOS. But I believe for the rest, normal daily usage, Linux Desktop is the perfect and the most pro-consumer software out there.


For me Twitter does two things. 1. The aspect I enjoy the most is finding useful information about areas of interest from the experts. 2. The aspect that gets my attention the most is the rage-inducing posts from random people.

I think Mastodon does 1 well, and doesn't do 2 much. I don't want 2. So it's almost a perfect platform once enough of the experts have a presence there.


Can you train yourself to ignore the rage-inducing posts? My eyes scan over them just like with banner ads, and almost entirely subconsciously.


Even if you unfollow everyone who occasionally shares outrage posts, there are still a lot of interesting people to follow. That seems to work for me.


I see the outrage posts as a kind of meta-study on human nature. Like, "oh, that's what attracts people's attention these days, noted, next.." type thing.


I think you’re right, little dopamine hits from attention or feeling self righteous. But I doesn’t seem to work on everyone, and that’s the part of tech Twitter I follow.


Me too


Well I pretty much ignored twitter until the current brouhaha and consumed news via RSS feeds using inoreader. I expect I will go back to that once the novelty of watching Elon at work wears off. I would like some kind of filter of twitter that just shows the good stuff - "top" shows too much for my taste. Maybe AI will soon fix that.


Twitter is not a global town square. You can’t scroll two screens without logging in. The town is not in charge. The town square is unique for each of its users. This is the mistake media and politicians make: you can’t poll Twitter or read your timeline to know what people generally think unless you statistically represent a global audience.


An alternative... It's an interesting question. Twitter seems to be the only place where individuals voices are emphasized. Most other platforms focus discussion around news articles. Twitter doesn't follow that format.

It really does feel like one of the only places you can just speak without that speech being attached to another topic.


Nothing is a better alternative than Twitter.

I mean that literally: "Nothing" is a better alternative than Twitter.


I think the "unbundling of craigslist" is going to happen to twitter, where alternatives for niche communities will be created with functionality specific for that niche (for ex: stocktwits and linking to stock symbols, etc)


Old geezer quip: Sounds like the kids want to re-invent Usenet News.


I don't, nor do I think there needs to be an alternative. In the same sense, there were no alternatives to Myspace. Other, different things emerged instead.


Similar to how every change is not a full replacement. Your timeline will be gradually redistributed. Many people have already moved on or never started on Twitter.


I quit Twitter long ago because it seemed like a place you’d get verbally assaulted and there wouldn’t be a button to defend yourself.

But now I signed up again, just because.


I believe there’s no need for a real alternative. Twitter is much less important (collectively) as remaining obsessive Twitter users assume.


Do you think there's any realistic alternative to Twitter as the world's "town square"?

Elon, and possibly Trump before him, are the only people who actually reached the world on Twitter. For vast majority of people Twitter is a small, local (not necessarily geographically; it can be local to a belief, or an interest) platform, and they never break out of their small bit no matter how hard they try.

There isn't an alternative to Twitter in the sense of another platform that replicates everything Twitter does, but for any individual there are loads of ways of replicating the functionality of Twitter that you use.

When someone says they're leaving for an alternative they mean the second one.


The idea of Twitter as the world's town square always seems odd to me because the level of discourse there is consistently horrible. Twitter is a digital theatre, not a town square.

The alternatives would depend upon what you’re trying to get from the platform, but they would include anything from other social media (for the more fun use cases) to traditional news websites (following political events) to HN/newsletters (tech news) to whatever else. Or just keep using it since the product matters more than the owner.


What people are looking for right now are echo chambers. They’ll get bored after a while and return to Twitter.

A more effective solution is to opt out.


If that’s what you want then there will have to be because it’s not going to be there in two years. At least not in it’s current form.


I'm not sure about this "town square" metaphor. Imagine walking in the town with all these craze people screaming.


When Twitter started overtly censoring conservatives a few years ago I tried to break my addiction to the platform. Lefties said “if you don’t like Twitter, start your own platform.”

Gab and Parler popped up. Predictably, they picked up some unpleasant fringe elements of the Right (just as Twitter hosts unpleasant far-Left accounts).

And then the Left went on the attack against Gab, Parler etc, cancel culture activism against advertisers, cloud hosting, payments, app store listings etc. Aside from the obvious problem of Twitter’s network effect, it seemed futile for right-of-centre people to create their own networks due to insidious attacks on those networks by the Left.

I had high hopes for decentralised social networks like Mastadon — in principle — but the user experience was 5-10 years behind Twitter, and the Mastadon founder also had some questionable leftwing/pro-censorship ideas too. I didn’t spend long there before begrudgingly returning to Twitter. I asked my wife to password-protect app limits on my iPhone to prevent me spending more than half an hour per day on Twitter. Why waste my time in a place where people with my political leanings are systematically suppressed?

Then Elon came along and I feel there are brighter days ahead. He wants to make the far left and far right equally unhappy. And he wants the limits of free speech to be dictated by law (created by democratically elected governments) rather than by opaque private companies with inevitable corporate/political bias. Good luck to him.


I think it's irrelevant, it's just a messaging platform. Nothing lost.


As someone that as never has a facebook or twitter, this is funny.


Currently? No, I don't think there is a legit alternative.


I find even Nextdoor is more valuable to me than Twitter.


We could choose to not have Twitter.


Twitter is popular because it solves TL;DR: (at least temporarily) and it gained a following amongst the movers and shakers. Reddit is superior in some ways, but getting a critical mass of blue badge twits over there won't happen.


The alternative to Twitter is the absence of Twitter.


No i think. What i love about Twitter is no ad.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: