The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.
Twitter now has daily outages where parts of it just don’t function and no one knows when we’ll experience a more serious one.
It serves the daily/hourly whims and mood swings of a single person who has proven to be petty, vindictive (to his employees), and devoid of integrity.
At least three times in the last two weeks I was unable to load images or threads or like tweets or post tweets. That’s three separate days where this functionality was unavailable. Using the official Twitter client. I’m in Southern California.
I use Twitter once a day and not every day.
I don’t have a monitoring service so this is the best citation I can offer.
In the last month I have experienced more issues than in the last four or five years if similar use.
Grown in popularity is not really a metric. A normal tuesday and the day half the company's staffers got fired aren't going to be the same in popularity. Doesn't mean one is better. Twitter is definitely more popular for all the mess they've made, yes.
The "narrative" was right. There are actual outages now unlike earlier. It's not like twitter engineers were holding up the servers to the light for there to be outages the moment they're gone. Systems run on their own just fine, until something does go wrong. And if there's nobody there to fix it, something usually small blows up. Enough of these and users start to notice degraded performance and outages.
All the Apple ecosystem developers left, all the neo-Nazis were unbanned to add subscriber numbers, I see 1-2 ads a day because all the respectable advertisers left due to the Nazis[0], and the For You page now regularly does things like show you tweets from locked accounts, circles you're not in, and people who've blocked you.
Elon seems to have given up; he's just doing jokes now like changing his name to Harry Ballz and replying to fake news from the fake news accounts he unbanned.
Search breaks for me all the time, and I need to manually refresh the site at least once a day. Also, I can only scroll on Musk’s twitter profile to his tweets from September.
I think it’s due to more aggressive VPN blocking, but I’m not sure about it.
I'm surprised to see people that can't see this (or are just Musk apologists)
The "Following" tab is showing only a fraction of your timeline tweets. Go to the "For You" tab and see an endless firehose of unrelated stuff together with some of the tweets of people you were following and were supposed to show up on the "For You" tab but didn't.
Not to mention tweets in private circles being shown in the "For you" tab
"twitter is working fine" is a bad take. It looks like it is working fine if you look at it for 30s, that's it.
Anecdotally it seems so. Further anecdotal, but I think I've seen one ad that was from a company I recognized that wasn't weird dropshipping stuff in the last few months.
It definitely feels less active and the conversation largely dominated by small accounts that are paying the $8.
My post will sound like a stupid gotcha but… what’s a thought leader, how do you measure them? Is it possible that the twitter crew skews more toward talking than doing?
Maybe their audiences are smaller. People that depend on their large reach on Twitter are going to be much slower to move on than those without audiences.
That's fine and valuable, but it doesn't sound like much of a moat. Those thought leaders used something else before Twitter - even if it takes a while, it's not a crazy idea that they'd eventually move somewhere else if the grass is greener.
What is this "something else" that you refer to? In fact, this kind of short-form, global conversation wasn't happening before Twitter, at least not on their scale.
I'm sure MySpace thought the same thing about their never-before-seen accomplishments. I suspect very few people knew what "something else" was in that case, either.
I just resigned from Google. There’s no future with current leadership. I was a at high level (6), with an incredibly broad scope of responsibility, making an absurd amount of money. But life is too short to spend my days propping up a dying monopoly when there’s bigger game to chase.
It’s also institutionally arrogant, they really think they are the best, Jeff Dean and Urs are Gods, and no other company can do what Google does. OpenAI just destroyed that myth, yet on the inside they haven’t woken up to the change.
Hey, myself and an ex-microsoft dev (like 2007-2008, not recent), with some VP experience have teamed up. We're working on memory solutions for AI, as well as creating better agents, workflows, etc... In the early days it'll mostly be a GUI over langchain/autogpt/babyAGI, eventually it might morph to creating our own in-house brain-like database, something beyond vectors (or built on top of them w/ a better ranking/indexing based on frequency/recency). Hit me up, if you'd consider partnering up.
The fear of investors and, to some extent, Google, is that LLMs will supplant traditional search and by the time enough people are catching on to affect metrics the momentum will be too great to stop. My experience with LLMs has not led me to believe that is all that likely but opinions differ there.
Just like how it is hard to fact-check Wikipedia now that it's used a reference. A thought came to me - perhaps it's Wikipedia that should be worried that it'll be supplanted by LLMs.
The phenomenon they're referring to is when something spurious is posted on Wikipedia with no or poor citations, then used as the source for a "reputable" article (without citations), then the article is cited by Wikipedia, making the spurious information look more trustworthy.
The user experience with ChatGPT is pretty good. No ads, no spam results. There are downsides too of course: the hallucinations, and the way the ChatGPT site wants me to log back on now and then.
I was very happy with Google but recently on my iPhone the Google website started nagging me to log in every time I do a search. This is a poor experience, add to that the ad results that have gotten harder and harder over time to distinguish from real results.
People here are praying very hard for Twitter to fail. Nearly any social media post nowadays has 50-100 comments predicting Twitter's failure and ranting about Musk. He is living rent-free in many heads now.
Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.
Many bigots are revealed as self-hating closet cases and fetishists, so I could see a naïve analysis attempt to flip it around and assume it must go both ways.
I actually think the "living rent free in heads" peaked awhile ago. At this point it's just clear in a more pedestrian way that things aren't going well over there.
It reminds me of the Trump thing, it seems people really lose all rationality when they are faced with a man who publically doesn't care and does whatever he wants and is successful at it. I wonder if we will one day have a psychological name for this. It must be related to something in the human brain that touches on social repression and decades of instilled moral codes like "Don't say this, nobody will like you" and then when somebody does it anyway, you feel like it's an invader from a different tribe or a tribe member violating the fabric of what holds together the tribe. When really, he's not doing much different at all and they'd privately do the same exact jokes as a kid like "Twitter is Titter! haha! Like titties get it?" I bet lots of people had such a dumb thought but repressed it and when a supposed adult and major social figure acts like that, it evokes anger that the tribe is in danger.
I’d argue that one of the reasons Tesla and SpaceX are successful is not just because Elno is a “visionary” (or functional equivalent). It’s because he was/is supported by a cadre of “true believers” (eg that we must disrupt the auto industry in order to do something radical about climate change). Those true believers (like all true believers), are willing to put up with lots of strange behaviour in the name of that belief.
Twitter on the other hand was bought with a management layer that could fairly be characterised as the opposite of true believers in whatever Elon is selling. Hence the implosion.
Yeah you're right about this, but it isn't irrational. Human societies have been as successful as they have because of social contracts. The phenomenon you're highlighting here is just society's immune system to protect itself against violators of those contracts.
When Chrome launched, it only launched with ~2-3% market share in the first week compared to Firefox. Everyone thought that Chrome wasn't that good and Firefox would be fine. However I knew on day one that Firefox was in serious trouble and I switched browsers immediately. But what I didn't know is that Firefox would do nothing to compete for 10 years.
How many of the companies with the largest market cap (top 15) were also in the top 15 20 years ago? Why do you think Google will be an exception to this reality?
I think the answer is network effect. As soon as there appears a properly working easy accessible alternative (not Mastodon), people with will start moving to it. At first it won’t be visible in twitter’s popularity, but when the new service reaches some critical mass of users - the popularity will start falling quickly.
Let’s see if Notes is this alternative.
Google wanted to be an Answer Machine before ChatGPT hence "I'm Feeling Lucky" button but road to there is long and hard. I think the biggest Google's problems are SEO spam often coupled with scams and fraud and last but not least, lack of transparency on how exactly they rank their search results.
I don't think we should pretend that google doesn't have the power to crush spam today if it wanted to. They have chosen to let scrappers have top spots in their search results and their reputation is dying as a result.
> For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts
There are tons of free custom UIs to chatGPT by now, all vastly superior to OpenAI’s. No captchas or login screens, just paste your API token once and it gets stored in local storage.
Thanks for mentioning this. I'd assumed this was the case, but I'd been wary of using them because I wasn't sure which of them would be reliable and non-sketchy. Your comment made me take a second look, this time specifically for FOSS custom UIs, and https://chatwithgpt.netlify.app/ seems pretty decent (and is FOSS).
I'd pay Microsoft monthly if they'd just give us untethered gpt-4 access, the same from the API, for those of us on the waitlist. I don't care if it wants to marry me, haha - I think being able to maybe full around with the settings could make it play nicer too.
I have access but don't have a box with Edge running on it nearby to use it. What about it was worse? A few friends tell me that uniting chat with the LLM makes it hallucinate a lot less and makes it easier to check its work, but they only used it a couple times.
I tried Edge and bing, God awful. You just feel their desire to take control of your experience of the web.
On the flip site, made me see how much Google own us all.
+1 for Kagi. It's been my default search engine since Jan '22 and I'm very happy with it. On the rare occasions when I use Bing or Google I'm reminded all over again why I'm happy to pay for search.
What's wrong with Edge? I started using it when Chrome started eating my RAM, it's been mostly unobtrusive and unnoticed, like a good browser should be.
It immediately took over my whole screen, in a completely weird way that no native Mac app ever did before (in my experience, though I don't use that many Mac apps).
It is classic microsoft behavior. They don't create apps, they create traps. The end goal is just to make people slaves of their software. The software they create is just "leverage" so they can trap more and more of you or your business.
This is indeed a theme for large software companies, but Microsoft has perfected it over the years. The way they turned open source and web technologies to further their goals is just another reminder. Many companies are now entrapped into Azure-related software that can only survive in a Microsoft world.
Can't speak for anyone else, for me I've mostly liked it. But I use a separate password manager (bitwarden) and disable most of the embedded addons (shopping, etc). So it's a bit mixed.
I actually just switched all our default search engines to Bing yesterday. Google is showing "Sponsors" that link directly to a full screen page with tons of warnings telling you to call some 800 number so you can get scammed. And that's after nearly downloading a fake Blender install a few weeks ago. I'm done with it.
> You should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent.
"You should look up global search volumes and Yahoo's share of it. There’s no dent" was once a valid statement. Same for Altavista, MySpace, etc. You can go from on top to the bottom very fast in this realm.
Key difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be default search provider. The US Department of Justice is going after this.
Once Google can’t pay-to-play in Safari and iOS they are in very deep shit. This is the classic thing with monopolies: eventually the “innovation” is just leveraging market power to deepen the moat by burning cash.
This is what happens when the CFO runs the damn company. Sundar has no vision, at all, and Ruth’s vision is the same boring Wall Street play book that put a hundred tech companies in the ground.
> Key difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be default search provider.
Yahoo used to pay for that, and to package the Yahoo Toolbar pretty much everywhere. I remember when it used to try to install itself with MySQL. I'm sure it helps, for a while, until it suddenly doesn't.
People have no idea how quickly the house of cards can collapse. It’s a very dangerous path to juice profits by paying to be a default. Basically a self-made Ponzi scheme.
Well, it means it could go either way. Which with respect to Google and search is quite a novelty, as Google has been on top for 20 years, without a serious competitor for most of that time.
I switched to edge on all my devices (in hopes of getting early access to Bing Chat), and honestly there's a lot more features and it performs better, so they won't get anything from me except whatever they can milk from gmail. I haven't searched using them in over a year, used to use Brave Search, and You.com for awhile.
A lot of "legacy" companies had businesses that were doing very well but missed the boat one or more times as new things arrived. Microsoft is a good example. Windows and Office was absolutely, positively printing money. They whiffed on mobile so hard it was comical. Going back further in time, IBM got mauled in the PC business over time, even though mainframes and PCs were keeping the lights on for decades.
I disagree with the assertion that in 5 years these companies may be heavily disrupted but these darlings that preyed on the fact the incumbents were ossified, large and slow are now themselves ossified, large and slow. The cycle continues on.
In the particular case of Twitter they're being actively driven into the ground by a guy who seems determined to wake up each day and not go to bed until he's made some very poor decisions so who knows, maybe they will crash and burn quickly.
Twitter has suffered financially but I’ve seen little evidence that they’ve lost substantial numbers of users — Twitter posts are still in news articles and sites like HN as if it’s still serving it’s original purpose despite the noise.
I use Facebook more than ever these days but oddly for none of things I used to use it for. It's now got some obscure technical community groups that are too niche and too small for reddit or discord. Facebook Marketplace has replaced craigslist. My friend feed is totally incidental to my use of Facebook.
Personally in my circle I still use Facebook messenger service - my extended family has a group chat and some of my friend groups still use messenger chats (I'd say post pandemic discord is used more then messenger now) my parents use messenger to video chat with their grandkids. It's essentially become skype. The actual facebook.com friend feed etc. is essentially dead for me at least.
And so is googles, Facebook are spending more than $10B a year on VR. For context that is more than Nvidia's quite large R&D budget, which they have ramped up on consistently over years. Facebook has gone from 0 to 10B real fast.
Relatively happy to see it... though I do tend to lean towards the free speech side of the coin, and kind of miss the relative wild west that was IRC in the 90's. I feel like centralized social media is a blessing and a curse. What's old is new again.
But there wasn't the equivalent of Mastodon culture of "hello server admin, nice instance you have here, it's a shame if it were to be defederated simply because you chose not to defederate the people we tell you to".
No, but rather that Musk has been using it in bad faith (I’m assuming “I support free speech” was meant to qualify the criticism of Twitter under Musk’s leadership).
Yeah, Musk's definition of supporting free speech wasn't much to speak of... better than the old guard, but really weird in ways too. For me, short of threats or calls for violence I'm pretty open to whatever... As long as you're able to as an individual block/filter. Though the NSFW content on Twitter can be pretty bad and wouldn't mind being able to selectively filter that as a user too.
I don’t think it is better than “the old guard” at all. I would agree with this piece (which contains examples to make the point), that all he’s done is boost ideas he likes hearing and suppress ones he doesn’t in nakedly partisan fashion: https://apple.news/ANuPT612pRca2DdolgCyu1g
And it does neatly summarize what I meant about the term “free speech” being abused: “ For them, free speech is when they can say what they want, and when you can say what they want.”
I'm guessing you also don't participate in more conservative circles either... The before and after is a stark contrast to say the least. I don't always agree with conservatives, but do follow a lot of anti establishment libertarians and conservatives.
What do you think those 16-core Neural Processing Units that ship in every Mac are for? They're not waiting to see, they're waiting for everyone to discover their lunch has already been eaten.
How do you get around privacy concerns for using the big AI models? Run your own. How do you get around the compute requirements for training? Push to the leaf nodes. How do you solve for personalizing AIs? Have personal AI models running locally... And wouldn't it be nice if there was some dedicated hardware those AI models could inhabit...
With umptillion gigs of shared memory, too. Really the only reason I'm entertaining moving up from an mba to an mbp, but I haven't convinced myself it's worth the splurge yet.
