Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

See, this is where a car and a social network are fundamentally different.

I own a Tesla. It’s a good car (although I’m unhappy about how much I paid for the FSD package which was nothing of the sort — borderline advertising fraud). Next year I’m probably buying another car, and if Tesla is still the best for the money, I’ll get one regardless of my personal feelings.

But with Twitter it’s not an objective decision. The app doesn’t deliver quantifiable day-to-day value like a car does. Now that I’ve removed Twitter from my life, it’s very unlikely that I’d ever go back.

MySpace did a lot of product changes in 2008 to bring back the users who had defected to FB. Nothing moved the needle. That’s just how it is with these products. I’m surprised Elon pretends to be oblivious to this dynamic.

My 10-year experience with Twitter was one of frustration. I had almost 1,000 followers, I tweeted regularly, tried to be nice and occasionally witty, replied and retweeted mostly useful stuff. Yet I never got any engagement. A few likes on a tweet was the upper limit of interest. Every other social media platform is much better at rewarding regular users like me. But Musk doesn’t seem to want to address this; instead he wants to bring back Trump. Why should I stay?



Hard for me to say. What type of reward are you expecting to get out of Twitter or social media in general? Maybe you are expecting too much or the wrong types of rewards?


Jack would constantly email everyone internally that one of their jobs is to provide a Delightful Experience for Twitters users.

Currently when I load up twitter it's a stream of gloating jerks.

I think an internal model in Twitter has concluded the best way to drive engagement in my demographic is enrage me.

Correct I guess?


Why not avoid the algorithmic feed from Twitter and only look at what your chosen followed users are posting? Relying on a third party to provide both breadth of information and inoffensive posts is asking too much.

Just as in real life, not every person you cross paths with is worth your time. Wading into public spaces like Twitter requires some work on the users part to find gems of useful information … relying on the platform to do it for you is likely to never work perfectly.


Someone should have told Elon this before he purchased Twitter


If the social product isn’t rewarding to me, that’s entirely their problem, not mine. There’s no other reason to use it.




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

Search: