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Ask HN: Twitter Competitors?

6 points by Vervious ↗ HN
Aside from Mastodon, are there alternative platforms to twitter? Is anyone building one? In particular, with:

  1) Blue checkmarks for real people
  2) Enough community traction with people I want to follow
  3) Enough moderation to limit fake accounts
I'm beginning to think that Twitter will still have a great product even post-takeover. As long as they don't get rid of verification and have decent uptime, for lack of a competitor, I think the company will survive. Points (1) and (2) above make Twitter incredibly useful.

I'm also worried that this might reduce the value of software engineers across the industry, if Twitter succeeds despite longer hours with worse compensation. If 9-9-6 culture works in Silicon Valley, would everyone else follow suit?

14 comments

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matai_kolila
I bet if you never thought about Twitter again, you'd be just fine.

There is no 9-9-6 culture shift, there is no value shift in software engineers across the country, there is no need to build a Twitter competitor, none of this actually matters.

Vervious
The half billion monthly active users and $5B annual revenue beg to differ. And it trickles down in the form of paychecks — does that matter?
Finnucane
The world will move on.
Vervious
What an impotent philosophy. The world moves on from everything. Why bother stalking hacker news if this is not the sort of thing that interests you?
Finnucane
More like a recognition that in a macroeconomic sense, Twitter really does not matter. In a cultural sense, we are better off without.
krapp
This forum is about satisfying intellectual curiosity, not chasing the bag.
matai_kolila
No, it doesn't matter. Twitter is unimportant to this world.
bobkazamakis
one planned but no solution for fakes; problem is NP hard.
miguelmichelson
why not reddit?
Vervious
There’s no verified journalists or faculty or domain experts, etc, on Reddit.
Bubble_Pop_22
Twitter competitors are not other social media platforms, they are reality shows, for Twitter is 90% nade up of people dunking on each other, backstabbing and getting revenge. It attracts narcissist at every level ranging from people having millions of followers down to those who hangon to their 10k. Nobody uses Twitter to catch up with their friends or communicate.

It's the reason why the platform has failed to make money in the first place. If you add the character limit to what I said above, you get the worst possible format and environment for pushing commerce, which is the way these big platforms finance themselves.

People are constantly in fight or flight when they use Twitter, it's the opposite for Facebook, Instagram and now TikTok. Those are environments crafted to lubricate and push commerce/branding and it shows.

Vervious
There are a number of mature and thoughtful communities on Twitter.

For example, the academic community - from theoretical CS to systems to healthcare to biology to economics. I think probably 1/3 of faculty at top universities under the age of 40 have a twitter presence and tweet very useful things.

I have also found the journalistic and sports sections of Twitter to be very useful. For instance, where else does one get the latest football injury news, or line changes made on the san jose sharks?

Bubble_Pop_22
> For example, the academic community - from theoretical CS to systems to healthcare to biology to economics. I think probably 1/3 of faculty at top universities under the age of 40 have a twitter presence and tweet very useful things.

These people just don't buy stuff. Instagram and TikTok get the product in your face given that they are photo/video centric, whereas 90% of twitter images are memes which don't push any commerce. It's impossible to push influencer marketing on twitter because the platform never really embraced video/images.

> I have also found the journalistic and sports sections of Twitter to be very useful. For instance, where else does one get the latest football injury news, or line changes made on the san jose sharks?

I don't doubt that it's great for the dedicated user who takes time to curate their feed, but discussing about the flow of $ to buy eyeballs, Twitter is mediocre.

Vervious
We have statistics to talk about this sort of stuff. And Twitter revenue, whilst a fraction of that of Meta, is growing, and is currently $5B/yr.

To put things into perspective, Tiktok's revenue is only 2x of that of Twitter's, $10B/yr. Clearly Twitter gets enough eyeballs (like mine) that people want to pay for it.