> Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing to Substack.
That seems to have accelerated the shift for some to Substack [1] (imagine if Google blocked searches for Bing or Brave!). Suppressing Substack makes the Twitter brand look weak and nervous.
I just shared an interesting fact that I learned while posting on Substack this morning. I don't know the reason, and generally I don't think of product changes in terms of good and evil.
I think that was because Twitter revoked their API access including breaking their Sign in with Twitter feature (at least that’s what I read a few days back).
prediction - substack goes nowhere, like they currently are.
Suppressing substack when substack is trying to advertise for a twitter competitor is just common sense. There's no need for twitter to advertise for a competitor. That isn't censorship, thats just normal business. If substack was depending on twitter for free data and free advertising they were the ones who were weak and nervous.
Twitter was supposed to be the "public square", even Elon said as much. Restricting which goods and services are sold or marketed in said square is a shift away from that mentality.
Twitter's another monopolist media company with a bunch of debt that needs to drown a potential competitor. I don't see Substack being able to become a direct competitor because the newsletter business is too good, and having closed twitter-like spaces that don't allow organized harassment is a good way for newsletters to build community and conversations. Twitter will remain the public version, where constant harassment from the ill and the covert has to be filtered out like spam.
That being said, maybe the important things will start being said in private spaces and only end up in "public squares" via screenshot ten or fifteen minutes later.
As I see it if you have a significantly superior product then a competitor advertising on your platform is a positive since it just make you look even better in comparison. And a social media platform with 200 million daily users should be significantly superior to an identical clone with probably 1 million on a good day. Of course if you think you don't have a better product or that people hate your product that much then it's time to build moats and prevent people from jumping ship.
none of this has anything to do with substack making a business plan off of sucking down twitter data and advertising on twitter. There's no reason twitter has to put up with that.
if you want to believe not directly contributing to competition that tried to take your data and advertise on your platform is fragile, thats of course your choice. To everyone else its just common sense. the fragility is the business plan that needs to steal its competitors data and space for advertising to have a hope in succeeding.
Many had already forgotten that before the so-called villain of the year called Elon Musk took over the blue bird site, there was a social network called Meerkat that Twitter actively suppressed and introduced their own alternative called periscope.
Twitter is within their right to cut off access to their competitors, future or present.
It's admitting that managing infrastructure for email newsletters is not a viable business. After all, you can't serve people targeted third party ads with just email.
It depends what you mean by viable. Substack newsletters have a paid option, substack can take a cut of that and the infra costs of sending emails is tiny.
If you want to bethe next massive aquistion/IPO, then maybe not.
I think it was a bad move by Elon to ban (and good move to reverse, though some damage already done), but I see why he was pissed: it's a straight-up Twitter clone.
Just a few days back, I was downvoted for guessing that this would be their "algorithmic recommendation" moment, because I was seemingly assuming malice about the developers' intentions.
Uh, no, I was observing how every other "social media" company has done this, and was guessing that Substack, having already told its users to write more frequently, would jump in with both feet.
For me, it's just an empty login form, and I'm not going to register an account just to see what's there.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of paying for content directly (I spend over $100/mo on Patreon), but I feel like Substack has cultivated a nasty branding issue for themselves. To me, and I know I'm not alone, Substack is where you go when you want to hear some 17-year-old who got high for the first time tell you what THE MANNNN doesn't want you to know, duuude. Greenwald and Taibbi and the like. I guess there's probably other types of content on there, but that's all I ever see from the domain.
Anyway I'm not going to register an account to see whatever's going on with Notes. Good luck, guys.
On the hand I know exactly what you mean about Greenwald and Taibbi (and so many other neoreactionary media folks), but it's also where I get great content from economists (Noah Smith, Claudia Sahm, Doomberg) and technologists (our own Simon Willison, Gergely Orosz, Molly White).
The media folks are clearly escaping scrutiny and playing to their base, but there are many excellent Substackers in other fields!
How are they escaping scrutiny? They hardly seem interested in hiding what they believe seeing as how they are both very active on Twitter. And whose scrutiny do you consider them anxious to avoid? Their opponents know very well what they are saying. This whole framing reeks of the kind of censoriousness which they both spend a lot of time railing against.
I believe you, but Substack is clearly trying to appeal to that same base[1]. I'm sure there's fine content on there somewhere, but Substack's brand is so unappealing to me I'm just not interested in supporting the company.
Personally I've always disliked Substack because their links used to only show a newsletter sign up form and a button that said "Let me read it first". I'm sure everyone who works at Substack knows no one wants to sign up for a newsletter before "reading it first" but they still put that form there in hopes some small percentage of people type their email not realizing they don't need to.
Curious how they plan to handle handles. Right now they're using full names for link text and having the URL as the unique identifier. Seems difficult to account for in the actual notes when you have multiple instances of the same name or full name (for example I'm @Zachary).
I got banned from Twitter for tweeting that I would commit suicide if I were still programming in Java after the age of 50. I appealed, and I got rejected by a bot (I know because my appeal was rejected instantaneously). So I think Twitter is stupid. Also, Elon is stupid.
It’s a start. Hopefully they’ll improve the reader experience. Having a single general-purpose forum (a “firehose”) doesn’t really work for me since it’s so random, but with so little content, it’s probably necessary for now.
Subscribing needs improvement. Subscribing to a hashtag might make sense? It seems like subscribing to someone’s notes and their blog should be independent, because maybe someone has a good blog but you don’t care for their notes, or vice-versa. Having them tied together also doesn’t work for people like me who use RSS. I don’t usually want email from blogs I read, so I only subscribe to blogs where I’m interested in the paid content and usually turn the email off.
I think this loses what makes Substack interesting, though, which is keeping the community for each blog separate, so you don’t care what people are saying on other blogs that you don’t read. Putting everyone in one community, or an unclear blob of overlapping communities, seems likely to be bad for the same reasons Twitter can often be bad.
I guess blogs need discovery, though, and maybe external sites aren’t enough?
(I think I’ll repost this as a note, since they need the content.)
> I think this loses what makes Substack interesting
I have the same concern. Substack creators are paid for highly engaging content as individuals subscribe to individual content creators. I don't see how that mechanism works with short form content; it could easily prove to be another platform where number of minutes of eyes on content is the metric that's optimised, rather than engagement with high quality content.
I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic decision to mess with substack links on Twitter. The site is clean and simple.
I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.
Counter anecdote: my personal experience is that the site is less entertaining. I've encountered technical bugs more, such as replies not loading without refreshing multiple times. The "for you" page doesn't show me anything I want to see. The checkmark thing remains super confusing to me. The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten more skuzzy.
Look at the details of that report. They're measuring by _number_ of tweets rather than impressions. Hate speech impressions are down. i.e. if you want hate speech you have to go out of your way to find it using bots. Normal users are seeing them less after the purchase.
It's really tiring to counter so much misinformation about this that flies about.
Hate speech IS up. The claim was "hate speech is up". Impressions being down matters to the impact of the speech, but the claim stands - hate speech is up. You can claim it doesn't matter (and I might agree with you, since impressions are down, people know what to expect now, and the increase is significant but not huge at this point), but you can't honestly say the claim "hate speech is up" is misinformation.
Edit: Actually, I had the claim backwards - YOU said it was DOWN, and you were wrong (according to the report). So to correct myself - the person refuting your claim was right, and spread no misinformation.
I'll retract my opinion that "hate speech is down" as it's apparently difficult to measure but I am going to continue to say that "hate speech is up" is at the very least "highly misleading" as it gives the impression that the platform is worse for minorities than it was pre-acquisition. The reverse is the truth, given the lower impressions of hate speech, it effectively means that those that would verbally attack minorities are being highly squelched versus the situation before the acquisition. That's all around a good thing.
Many people have left, including myself, due to imperious, chaotic, and plain mean mismanagement. Thus making it vastly less interesting and more trollish.
- People I follow have left. Most have moved to Mastodon so I can still follow them there. It's a constant trickle but some day the weight will be higher on Mastodon's side of the balance.
- Ads range from obnoxious to downright scams. I know some people used to block ad senders as a matter of routine, but I didn't, most of the time they were valid and I was happy to support the site via their ads. After Musk, most ads vanished and for a while all I saw was Nintendo and SpaceX (!?) ads. Now there's many ads, but I block 95% of them because I REALLY do not want to ever again see the kind of shit they're pushing.
- Search, and content outside of my carefully curated list of follows in my chronological timeline, has become complete hell. I used to be happy to search for "stuff that's happening" in Twitter rather than google or news sites, but now the stuff that comes out is not only irrelevant, but often disgusting.
I still use the site but in a very specific and controlled manner. In that way, the experience is still good (bugs aside). I suspect at some point Musk will force some algorithmic crap down my throat and that will be the end.
To be fair, many people don't seem to have these issues you mention. For FinTwit and CT (crypto twitter) it's business as usual. Maybe it happens for other niches though.
Yeah to me it's less that it's dead and more that it's clearly not sustainable without a new business model. Blue is a total flop, and you can tell from the ads they're running now that their ad revenue must be way down. And they needed to grow revenue significantly after the acquisition because of the debt structuring, but it seems like a certainty they've done the opposite.
So it's not that it's dead today, but how long can they make it like this?
I hope it doesn't. Because it essentially sets us up for a repeat. If Mastodon was 'just not the thing people were looking for' then at least it solves the problems that both Twitter and Substack have, which is that they are not federated. Better to fix Mastodon than to waste another decade on something that will ultimately blow up and with the way Substack has - in my head at least - been associated negatively with crap content it will probably be sooner rather than later.
Mastodon is never going to take off. I’ve been building SaaS applications for 15 years. I don’t think you understand the very low level of complexity required for mass adoption. Let’s just look at the signup process for a few minutes, using the UX convention of actions.
Twitter:
1. Search for Twitter.
2. Click on the first link.
3. Click sign up.
Mastodon:
1. Search for Mastodon.
2. Click the first link: mastodon.social.
3. Click create account.
4. Message modal pops up alerting the user that it is currently impossible to sign up to mastodon.social. But don’t worry, you can sign up on another server by clicking “Find another server.” At this point I’m confused. Why are there different servers? Will my friends be on the other server? Do we need to sign up on the same server? No explanation. I click the link.
5. Long page of options. No indication of quality or why I should choose one server over another. Now I am in choice paralysis. I click the first option (which has an anime figure on it). Surely - surely - the first option is the best option. The suggested option by whoever is running this application.
6. I land on a Korean language portal and I am done. I’m never coming back. Mastodon is dead to me. Forever.
You might think this is hyperbole, but I promise you it is not. I’ve been in charge of A/B testing and UX centric development for web applications just like this for a very long time. Mastodon’s sign up process is easily one of the worst I have ever seen. Not a single UX person has been involved in the creation of this protocol.
The fact Mastodon sites don't even load without JS is absurd, a huge not-talked-about barrier to entry (globally), and a betrayal of its "protocol-first" talking points.
Until that changes Mastodon isn't trying to be a serious player.
Because Mastodon has an open API, you don't need to use the official Mastodon web client. Twitter upset a lot of users when it limited access to its API because many alternative Twitter clients were rendered useless.
Twitter definitely does not load without loading several megabytes of Javascript. Nitter.net is a quick and easy substitute that loads instantly without it, though some video playback still requires Javascript (HLS video).
I can't do any objective measurements but there's a clear impact in battery life while browsing with Javascript disabled. The entire web becomes snappier and loading times instantly drop.
Doing so also breaks all web applications (and web applications posing as websites, i.e. React rendering) so it's not something I turn on permanently. I usually only disable JS when my phone is running low and I'm not near a charger, or when I'm trying to read something and the terrible website hijacks scrolls/taps/somehow makes my phone run hot doing stuff in the background.
Unfortunately, this perspective seems very head-in-a-bubble to me. It's a tiny tiny number of people who think the problem with Twitter and Substack is that they aren't federated. Federation isn't a feature people broadly care about. If it makes the platform work better, great! But I don't think that's the case for Mastodon or any other federated platform I've come across. It's the opposite, they make concessions on the experience in order to support federation. That would be ok if those sacrifices were for functionality people really want, but federation just ... isn't that.
I disagree. Federation is a feature people want, but they don't know about the concept.
When I show people that I can talk to Signal, WhatsApp, and Signal through a single app, they're pretty impressed. I wouldn't expect most people to set up a Matrix bridging system like I did, same with most Mastodon servers, but it's a feature people do generally want.
With Mastodon, most people first ask "but how do I follow people on Twitter", which often leads to pointing at bridges that may stop working at any point and have no official status, and often get blocked on small servers because of the overwhelming wave of moderation spam they cause.
Phone manufacturers back in the day used to have quite commonly used "social hub" apps that would combine various social media sources into a single UI, but they were all tied to their own brand that either got too difficult to maintain or lost the phone wars (HTC and Blackberry had quite well-received integrations if I recall).
The past years we've been stuck with a locked in ecosystem for so long that the mere idea of two different apps interoperating has become inconceivable to the mainstream.
I hope the DMA, which will force messenger apps to interoperate, will bring back the knowledge that it's possible to do so at the very least.
Federation is someone doing a cool card trick at a cocktail party. Does it look cool? Yes. Is anyone going to go out and buy a deck of cards the next morning and learn how to do it? No.
Federation is the core of the internet and that has taken off, so sure they do. Email and phone numbers took off, isolated ISPs all died out.
We're getting some form of federation of messengers and other technology companies deemed "gatekeepers" by the EU. Companies serving large user bases won't have a choice, so there's no need to go out am buy anything.
I think this has "because" and "despite" flipped. The internet took off despite federation, because it let people do things they couldn't otherwise do.
But reinventing something that everyone can already do (eg. tweeting) with federation is not a winning game.
> I disagree. Federation is a feature people want, but they don't know about the concept.
I think they want it, but by an order of magnitude more, they want simple UX. Everything else is a distant second. UX is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Without an excellent UX, the audience will forever remain niche. I tried to just sign up to Mastodon, and it was a clusterfuck of proportions so unbelievable that I can't believe it has as many users as it does - and it only has a couple million users.
>... essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms
I think it's a good thing in the long run.
Twitter was a gimmick in many ways. Here, throw a few words out into the ether and see who notices.
That simplicity attracted tons of people. Then it became THE place to reach a ton of people, even though it's format for such things is AWFUL for it. It's a TERRIBLE platform for meaningful information dispersal, but it's THE place to be, so you see a bunch of evidence of that.
Twitlonger, people chaining twitter posts, just about any conversation, etc. Worse it eliminated a lot of things that probably shouldn't have died. My personal pet peeve is the death of forums, most specifically for games. Pre twitter you could find old forum posts that were pinned about just about anything you wanted to get into seriously. Dustloop had character guides with a level of info that would justify a thesis on characters in games that were 8 years old and hardly ever played.
That level of information is still found now, but instead it's tied to a hashtag, and then vomited out...never consolidated. Right now i'm looking to mess with a new character in strive, and while the GGST_BE tag is nice for "oh that's neat" kind of tech discoveries, it's fucking awful for actually understanding how to play the character or what's useful from it.
To be fair, that's always the case with a brand new character, but in the old days it was somewhat easier to keep a running tally of what works and what doesn't in a forum discussion, while twitter just doesn't promote that, so picking someone up waaaay after the fact is miserable. Discord is the other spot these things are now heavily discussed (with similar issues to twitter, although the forum feature of discord has helped a bit) and the wiki's are in theory where the data is consolidated but it's just a much higher barrier to entry and thus often you have half completed pages with outdated information.
In short, i'm hoping the slow death of twitter (IF it dies. The number of people saying twitter is abhorrent...on twitter...is a sign to me it's not going anywhere) will finally lead to people realizing that we want a way to quickly spread information among those who want it, but we don't need it to be in this shallow, vapid, character limited style. Sure that works for "oh hey look at where I am today" but it drives me nuts every time i see some essay broken into 45 twitter posts.
RSS feeds are an alternative tech that's honestly quite close to being what most people want, but it lacks the discovery/aggregation effect of things like twitter in most cases (inoreader kind of has something like that), and thus mostly still relies on twitter for content (at least it did until they nuked the API).
I’ve seen “Elon ruined twitter”, but everyday I’m getting what I signed up for years back it hasn’t been ruined in any noticeable way. Fine they added the stupid views but who cares
I've been looking at Substack with the eyes of someone who has lived through the enshitment of Quora, Medium et al, and realized there are never guarantees with any such service. Apparently I owe them money and attention, and they owe me nothing. I will never get long term what I joined a service for, so today I simply do not commit. I never committed to Twitter, and I'm glad. I want to share content, I setup a ghost site. I want to read content, I use RSS and also read what I can for free. That's it.
> I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms.
I’m happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it’s a net negative for the world and we’ll be better off without it. This might be the only tech I’ve ever felt like this about (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates hate and division.
It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it was a gawker-style takedown with the intent to purposely destroy something in a lasting and permanent way as described in Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel’s purposeful execution of strategy to destroy gawker, https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holida...
PS- are there any other business/tech “case study” type books out there. I also liked Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg, John Brooks’ Business Adventures, Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift, and David Kaplan’s Silicon Boys. Looking for more of what I suspect is more common than I can find.
I really like those "case study" books about our industry, too. Off the top of my head, two more:
- "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton (published in 2014, about the early days of Twitter)
- "Super Pumped" by Mike Isaac (published in 2019, about the early days of Uber)
Neither of them go into great detail or nuance — they're made for popular consumption, so they simplify things and gloss over details. You won't find any extensive discussion of microservice architecture and organizational design. But they were still interesting reads.
I’m a little unclear on what subscribing means in the context of Notes + Newsletters. Does subscribing to someone in the Notes product mean I’m also subscribed to emails from the person? If so, that’s not a great dynamic — I’d like to follow 100s of people in Notes, but that doesn’t mean I want to subscribe to 100s of newsletters.
Social network must be a protocol, not a platform. That's the only way to gurantee free speech and cencorship resistance. Nostr[1] is proving to be a good first step in this direction.
No thanks. Social networks are non essential. Twitter and Substack Notes can go away tomorrow and no one will bat an eyelid. In these cases, people just want to go to a website or a mobile app, click around and have some foolish fun for sometime. Banking networks need protocols, not social media, which is intrinsically about dumb fun. That is why Mastodon and these things will never be as popular.
On one hand I agree with you on the "protocol not platform" ideal (and thanks for linking nostr, hadn't seen it before), but on the other I guess I still don't understand why so many are committed to the best way to go about that involving "relays" / federation.
RSS solved the "you fully own the content, everyone else can discover it via a well-known protocol" problem decades ago! Is it just that stuff like comments and reactions would be harder with just RSS?
On the contrary, I think there is a huge demand. I can find enjoyable community offline. Speaking for myself, freedom from censorship is in fact the main thing I want in a social network. Your values might differ.
I think you're missing the point. I understand that you value that. There is no question of that.
The majority of people however don't value it or actively desire it because no wants to live in a pigsty. There is a reason apps like Truth Social don't take off, and that 4chan never gained the mainstream popularity of other social sites.
There have been multiple reddit clones, multiple twitter clones, multiple social media clones all based on the false pretense that there is demand for a freeze peach social site, and they all fall flat. Mastodon is doing better than most and its gaining users because of Twitter catering to the alt-right and refusing to censor offensive or dangerous speech.
Yes, if you go back and take a gander at US history, you'll learn that there is a long history of restricting speech that is likely to cause another person harm.
I'm not looking at it from a 'legalistic' perspective. I was elaborating for you because you seemed confused or uncertain about what dangerous speech was.
I first heard about nostr last in November when Twitter tried to ban it. There's an incredible dev ecosystem developing — so much so that I decided to rebuild Satellite (https://satellite.earth) the social platform I'd been working on to become a client for the protocol.
The big downside with Nostr is it’s not built on the web. With blogs and webmention the feeds are websites. And there’s already a huge ecosystem for blogs. I’d prefer people build on that instead. Especially if the end result is more or less the same: blogs with comments.
Every time I have seen any form of social media/platform/forum/whatever put "free speech" and anti-censorship as their primary goals, it always ends the same way - hate speech, antisemitism, racism, sexism, etc.
Whether by design or because such sites just attract those kind of individuals, that's not good for a couple of key reasons:
1: Those kinds of interactions turn away many potential users
2: It makes advertising basically impossible (No potential advertiser wants to be associated with that kind of site)
There's a good reason that as sites like Reddit got larger, they started to clamp down on less desirable content.
And any form of social media with no advertising is always going to be very tiny and niche, and in general likely to die out quickly.
I kind of see this as the whole "Substack is trying to become Twitter before Twitter becomes Substack" kind of race. Twitter added long tweets and subscriptions, if you could do markdown formatting and inline images in your long tweets - why would Substack authors stay on Substack when they could post basically the same thing to Twitter and have more audience (or potential audience) exposure.
If Substack sees the above as an existential risk - which it might be if Twitter executes well, then Substack is replying by trying to do the reverse to Twitter.
> ”why would Substack authors stay on Substack when they could post basically the same thing to Twitter and have more audience (or potential audience) exposure.”
Because they wouldn’t have the followers’ email addresses, which is a big advantage to Substack.
They really needed this to exist about 6 months ago or whenever it was that Musk bought Twitter. There was a mass exodus then to Mastodon, and if they’d have brought this out then I reckon they would have done a good job of immediately dethroning Twitter as I reckon lots of journalists and writers would have jumped on board. Now they’re going to have to do it the long hard way and try and build the audience organically. I reckon they might be able to do it, but it’ll take them at least a few years because they missed the golden goose.
There was no mass exodus. The sports and celebrity people are still on twitter. Nobody cares about rando journalists and techies, who are a vanishingly small part of the platform.
Hard disagree with this. The majority don’t care about twitter, the only people who absolutely adore it are journalists and techies which is why it was such a big deal in the news and on forums and everyone in the real world just went about their business. The celebrities are only there for marketing and connecting with the journalists.
Substack has attracted so many shrill rightwing kooks (Greenwald being the canary in that particular coalmine) that when I see someone has a substack I roll my eyes.
So here's to them being a more pretentious rumble/truth/parler/etc...
I follow mostly techies, very few went to mastodon, and among them were none of the ones I cared about.
Seems like the people doing the most things in my field have no time for drama and are busy doing stuff, while the ones that actually accomplish little have the time and energy for this.
Counterpoint: most of the Cloud Native crowd I follow moved to Hachyderm.
> Seems like the people doing the most things in my field have no time for drama and are busy doing stuff,
Standing up for ethics isn't performative drama. I made my exit very quietly because I didn't have time for the drama of a petulant tyrant. I care that the tech I consume is open source or at the very least is guided by some principal of any good kind.
People spent months and a tremendous amount of energy discussing the state of a site that is a glorified animated wall of text, but it's not drama.
Sometimes I wish I could teleport this community to were I lived in Mali and force you to stay there for 6 months to re-calibrate your sense of what's important.
Most of the Python developers I followed are on Mastodon. "Techies" has lots of sub-cultures, so it could be C# or React developers are stuck on Twitter, for example, so if you are in those groups it might seem nobody has left.
I don't follow that much of the sports world, but the celebrities are definitely shifting more towards Instagram. I feel like Twitter is rapidly distilling down to LinkedIn type hustle-culture influencers.
This kind of feeling almost always turns out wrong. No one can predict when the big moment happens or if it already happened. Substack has benefited from the the Streisand effect. Also known as what ticked off Elon musk.
And there will be many moments in the future, when Elon musk will have upset more of its users. And substock will be there to benefit just like Mastodon is benefiting every day.
was there a "mass exodus"? What percentage of people actually left twitter forever to another system and stayed there? What percentage of audience or "influencers"?
Disclaimer - I'm not on Twitter, but my impression is that a few folks made a large amount of noise for leaving but most people shrugged. Other networks mat have seen a temporary large percentage Increase, but a) how much of that stuck and b) a large percentage increase of tiny absolute. Umber can be misleading.
Basically, every 4 years, half of America threatens to move to Canada, but here I am in Toronto and I ain't seeing it :->
Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman created mastodon accounts so I think there definitely was the potential for something else to take over if that something else was user friendly enough. Mastodon was never going to be it but there were no other real options.
I have to say, that doesn't sound remotely convincing to the 220M+ daily users of Twitter who continue to use the platform since there was no 'mass exodus'.
Right, but that's where absolute and relative come into play.
200k new users per week is... what, 0.05% - 0.1% of Twitter active user base?
Not saying one day it might not snowball, but it's been 6 months and I wouldn't call Mastodon an existential threat to Twitter just yet. I am tremendously enjoying and schadenfreuding the twitter melodrama, but even most people making fun of twitter/musk/socialnetworks, seem to be doing it on twitter.
My mastodon timeline has been growing pretty rapidly over the last year. With obvious ratcheting up happening whenever elon steps on yet another rake. 'Let that sink in' nearly doubled the amount of posts per day, 'hardcore mode' another, 'api shutdown' another...
Many people double-post right now. Though since twitter effectively killed it's API that basically gutted a bunch of tools that would automate that for you. Though maybe you could post to twitter and have a tool that is just plain webscraping your home timeline and reposting....
He's right you know. Don't forget the noncery and loli culture that is going on some of the largest Mastodon instances such as pawoo.net, baraag.net, mstdn.jp.
Totally illegal explicit content in the majority of countries, only found on Mastodon.
Twitter is the only mainstream social network that is absolutely inundated with hardcore pornography. Also, Twitter has no shortage of child sexual abuse material:
On Mastodon, each instance is able to restrict other instances based on their own policies. Unless you specifically choose to join a Mastodon instance that does not restrict pornography, your instance will not synchronize content from the porn-focused instances.
That's the first I heard about this, but I don't really follow the space (neither Mastodon nor CSAM). Is "SecJuice" a reputable source / how legit is the report?
The one instance I have any prior awareness of, the mastodon creator saying search is not desired due to negative social dynamics, everywhere else it was presented as a privacy and anonymity behaviour - crucially, both from those who agreed and disagreed (which makes intuitive sense; on one hand I dislike e.g. Facebook not being publicly searchable some of the time, at the same time I don't want my content crawled by randos all the time either). This is the first place I've seen that frames it as explicitly CSAM related.
The author is only speculating about Mastodon's search feature, and I see no actual evidence that the search feature is intentionally limited due to child sexual abuse material.
With so many sites designed to track activity (and per-user activity) on Twitter, I'd lean towards "no mass exodus" simply from the fact that I haven't seen any gotcha graphs/charts/data literally showing it.
However, anecdotally, my relatively static "following" count dropped from ~1k to ~600 over the course of the back-to-back Elon/Mastodon/Trump/etc events that were supposed to prompt mass exoduses. That could be 40% of the accounts I follow blocking me or getting banned, but deleting their accounts seems more likely in this instance.
I mean I kept my twitter account, I just don't use it nearly as much. When he killed the API it killed the only way I could use twitter and stay sane (tweetbot). Now I can go days without opening twitter dot com. Mostly only visiting it through links referencing specific tweets. So follower/following count might not mean much. I'm still following everyone I followed it's just that if they post I'm not actually seeing it.
While it would have helped jumpstart Notes, I disagree. A lot of content creators have their feet in both puddles, waiting it out - and with this and the non-stop Musk antics and tantrums, we are looking at an actual stampede away from that hellhole.
As a reader, I like it. It might nudge me to subscribe to a few more newsletters even if I don’t plan to read all emails, just to see Notes from that author.
Sure, I won’t subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, but a few dozen might create a good feed.
They raised a ton of money on a high valuation, spent 25mil to make 1 mil last year and are now scrambling to raise a new crowd sourced round because they don't want to get wiped out in a down round.
This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model and I'm guessing they think they have "influencers" on their platform to bring in a decent audience.
Only victims are the pension funds and sovereign funds and HNIs who fund VCs. Everyone else made money. Founders made money at every raise, employees made money with fat salaries, users “made” money with fat discounts.
They got to make more than 0.00% return for the last 10 years, their only mistake (for those that made it) was thinking the party would last forever and trees would grow all the way to the sky.
Imagine spending only 30% of your net worth and getting to experiment with buying and growing one of the most used and talked about sites on the internet.
If I spent 30% of my net worth I could buy a condo in the bay, possibly. Although odds are it would be worth close to that if I needed to sell it.
But many people spend 30% of their net worth trying to start businesses with almost no traction.
Musk spent 30% to buy something known internationally.
Definitely doesn't make it a good idea. But it's still interesting that he's playing with one of the most talked about sites on the internet without really affecting his finances at all. Of all the random things to do with your money, it's not even that bad of an experiment.
He's not a kid using his parents money. He's using his own and his personal name/reputation to secure money.
He's not hurting an ant. He fired people and let them go find other jobs which seems pretty fair instead of for example reducing their pay drastically and forcing them to quit, or paying them minimum wage and profit sharing. Which still would have been pretty fair IMO.
Not every ceo or company owners needs to be operating a charity like the previous Twitter CEO was.
Given he continues to talk with the man at times (he replied to one of his tweets the a few days ago) and there's no evidence to support the idea that he did it for monetary reasons, other explanations are much more reasonable. Namely that it was a simple mistake.
Some of us like sticking up for people of similar temperament to us. I'd stick up for the average person that gutted a company he bought and kept it running just like I would Musk.
I like Musk because he doesn't appear to be a woke tool. Is he a tool of a different kind? Probably. But I don't like woke, so I stick up for the non-woke. Is he perfect? No. None of us are.
What does woke mean? Elon seems like he’s always talking about woke stuff. Like trans people and pronouns. He might be denouncing those topics but he still seems to cover them a lot.
Why do you care? You’re here engaging all the same. If anything, he’s speaking the truth (no he did not mock anyone’s disability) and those attacking Musk are lying. Yet you question the person being factual. So why do you care?
1. I care pretty strongly about the truth. When I see people actively spreading incorrect information whether through malice or their own misunderstanding I think it’s important to correct it to prevent the deception of others, especially when it’s happened on such a wide scale. He himself doesn’t seem to understand that it’s important to correct this type of thing early so there’s no other option.
2. I care because a lot of the future depends on the success of Elon’s companies and people use tearing down Elon as an excuse to attack his companies. They’re doing amazing things for the future while being constantly attacked for it.
So it’s a double-whammy of self interest and my own internal mental obsessions.
He was certainly fine making accusations in public about this person. When he found out he was given misinformation why didn't he name the person and fire them? Why did he air it out in public in the first place? The whole saga is criminally ignorant and Musk is to blame.
When people make mistakes under him, he never names them and instead takes ownership of their mistakes. Naming and firing them would be in fact a bad sign and a sign of a bad leader.
Imagine spending only 30% of your net worth and getting to experiment with buying and growing one of the most used and talked about sites on the internet.
That sounds like one of the least interesting things I could do with $44bn.
With that sort of money I could fund 1000 Twitter rivals, and after a couple of years combine the successful and interesting ones into a single rival that would actually do something better than Twitter.
Rather missing the point that any of those are more interesting than "a thousand Twitter clones". But even on that point, Musk managed to do a lot with SpaceX and Tesla supercharger network which need various government support and approvals.
The economics on those deals look worse over time -- they're spending over $3 in guaranteed payments per $1 collected on those partner subscriptions, which meant partner subs went from being mildly profitable (gross) in 2020 to a $10mm cash sink in 2021. The good news is that overall the subsidized writers should be making enough for Substack to shut down the incentive payments (~$40mm in subscription revenue to writers vs $16mm in subsidies in 2021), so there's a good chance they can stop the bleeding. Still overvalued by at least 25x, though, and their OPEX is concerning; even if you ignore the $16mm in partner payments, they're still $6mm underwater on $10mm in revenue.
>This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model
The announcement for the feature on twitter[1] literally emphasizes the lack of ads, pointing out subs are their revenue source, so that would be some 4D enshittification chess.
A lot of the top writers have large guaranteed incomes and related incentive structures. The 20M is not all revenue, some of it is a cost for Substack.
I couldn’t reply sooner because I have noprocast on but my numbers were a bit off, I was repeating what I heard on a tech podcast. According to the numbers they had to release it was a bit higher https://www.axios.com/2023/04/07/substack-gets-writers-to-in...
> They raised a ton of money on a high valuation, spent 25mil to make 1 mil last year and are now scrambling to raise a new crowd sourced round because they don't want to get wiped out in a down round.
Sorry to get off-topic, but is there a read/book to understand funding, VCs, etc., from a holistic POV. I totally didn't expect that consequence of having to raise a crowd sourced round due to initial high valuation.
I don't have a resource for you (and will probably read whatever you get linked), but one intuitive way to think about it is that VCs/investors (and most of the startup ecosystem) are generally focused on "growth", not "performance".
You can be a stable, profitable, money-making machine with 90+% margins and amazing reviews, but unless you're doubling something (users, engagement, profits, etc) every single year, you go to the back of the potential-investment line.
A high initial valuation might be great for performance relative to other companies (or whatever reasonable metric you want to insert here), but it also makes it way more difficult to show "growth" YOY compared to a lower initial valuation.
- Their valuation is high because they raised during the recent bubble
- If you raise more money at a lower valuation than your last fundraise, it's highly dilutive. Investors paid $10 for 10% of a $100 valued company last round during the bubble. Vs. given current market conditions, new investors would only pay $10 for 20% of a $50 valued company this round. This second round would dilute existing investors, except...
- If you crowd source the funding, now you can raise at a $100 valuation again (less dilution), because these crowdsourcing investors don't know what they're doing
Having been in/around the game for a good few years, I can assure you it's not nearly as complicated as they try to make it sound.
The game works like this: the VCs want 100% of your company, and you want to give away 0% of your company. (Of course, 90%+ of companies will fail, so it doesn't really matter. But let's pretend we're all in that special 10%.)
If you do end up choosing to play that particular game, then you'll find some common numerical rules of thumb. They usually go like this: Each round should raise 12-18 months of runway, and each round's investors usually get about 20-30% of your company.
On one side of the game, you have the VCs, who basically play this negotiation full-time — and whose comp structure depends on extracting as much equity from you as possible. This is why we get the constant stream of "thought leadership" from VC bloggers, because they're trying to distinguish themselves as offering something more than capital. (And, having distinguished themselves, they can extract more % from you for less $.)
After decades of practice, VCs have plenty of hustles they can run. Some of the classics are the old "participating preferred" play, as well as the usual sound bite about how "it doesn't matter what the exact numbers are."
On the other side of the game, you have the founders, who basically want the maximum amount of money in exchange for the least amount of equity — but also for the least amount of time. Fundraising is a massive distraction, and VCs know it — which is why time always gets used against the founder, with long and drawn-out "fundraising processes" that (by total coincidence, of course) also happen to exhaust the founder and push them towards signing.
The twist is that this game isn't only for 1 round. Once you take your company into this game, you're stuck in it — you'll have to keep fundraising to keep fueling the growth that you've kickstarted using external capital. With the average IPO timeline being 7-10 years, combined with fundraising every 12-18 months, you can expect to play this game 5+ times on the way to IPO.
Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, the founder raises too much $ for too little %. You'd think this is a good move — but, since this is an iterated game, it's not all upside. Decisions in this round set the stage for the next round. If you can't live up to the growth expectations implied by the high valuation, then you're in for a "down round."
VCs have a standard "down round" playbook, too. They'll have their way with the cap table, of course — and it's also not uncommon to see some/all of the founding team shown the door. The press piles on as soon as they hear of it, which drags on employee morale as well as the talent pipeline, both of which then destroy product velocity and market positioning... it's very easy to have a single "down round" be the kiss of death for a company.
So that brings us all the way back around to your question. For this particular company — as well as for many others that raised during the "cheap money" era of the pandemic and pre-pandemic years — it sounds like they're facing this conundrum. Crowdsourcing the next round is a somewhat new way to tackle this situation — new regulations came out a few years ago, and founders sometimes go this route instead of risking the "down round" game with VCs.
You usually only see B2C companies making the crowd-funding play in the first place, since you need the name recognition and customer base to even try to raise money in this way. Because founders can essentially "divide and conquer" their investor base in a scenario where everyone's investing only four or five figures, the common scenario here is that the founder sets the terms to avoid the down round — and then they begin the fundraising. Since they&...
> The twist is that this game isn't only for 1 round. Once you take your company into this game, you're stuck in it — you'll have to keep fundraising to keep fueling the growth that you've kickstarted using external capital.
Why? What stops you from raising a $15m series A and only burning it conservatively until you hit neutral profitability. Investors only have 15-25% of your cap table and can't strong-arm you.
You would have had to mislead them right? Why would they give $15m to use slowly when they can give $15m to a company that will use it quick, assuming both companies are using it in a +EV way?
> there are early-stage VCs these days, which don’t pressure founders for quick growth
That's really interesting. Do you know how they make that work, exactly?
I feel like that's naturally opposed to the standard incentive structures that VCs have with their LPs. They need to show results in O(years) so they can raise their next fund and keep the overall VC firm going over O(decades). That maps down straightforwardly to the day-to-day pressure VCs put on all their portfolio companies to grow as fast as possible.
Unless early-stage VCs are doing something new with the terms they give their LPs, how could they prioritize anything other than growth?
Down the grapevine at least, a couple Micro VCs ik provide a pipeline for CorpDev teams at larger companies and early stage VCs (Series A-C check signers like Unusual Ventures) to choose pre-vetted companies. Mind you this seems to be more Enterprise/B2B Micro VC oriented.
If the startup is showing good growth metrics, they'd point them to friends at later stage funds. If they aren't, they'd give intros and help get the startup aquihired.
“Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer And VC” is pretty good. Used it when raising a round of funding.
“The Power Law: Venture Capital And The Making Of The New Future” is also good. It tells the story of the evolution of VC over the last 70 years. It is interesting that funding terms seem to be becoming more and more founder-friendly over decades.
What did they spend their $25 million on? What's the tech they have that costs this much to build? Their hard problems are a building a CMS or are otherwise solved by using fastly and sendgrid?
Just to mention one thing that isn't user facing (and therefore not so obvious): Social media companies dealing with user-generated content have to build their own enforcement mechanisms (abuse, copyright infringement, etc.), which is at least an order of magnitude harder than the user facing content engine itself.
"The ultimate goal on Substack is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. Because the Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, writers are rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences, not exploiting it like with ad-based social media."
"While Notes may look similar to social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. It’s social media with a heart transplant."
Because no company would ever lie about their intentions, or at the very least pivot to the exact opposite of their original point without a second thought.
"Because no company would ever lie about their intentions, or at the very least pivot to the exact opposite of their original point without a second thought."
No business would pivot to a dying monetization model unless it was their last option.
Advertising is not a solution for Substack; but rather a Trojan Horse.
As much as I wish this were to true, it’s objectively false. Digital advertising is a healthy industry that powers many profitable companies. Substack is not profitable and torching money even with a 10% claim on wroters’ subscription revenue
Dying monetization model? Is that why Microsoft, Amazon and Apple App Store are splattering their properties with them like a Jackson Pollock painting?
From your source, their 2021 net profit was -$6.5M and their 2020 net profit was $1M. They seem to be mixing the $24.6M in negative cash flow for 2021 with the $1M in net profit in 2020? Doesn’t make any sense.
Yeah sorry about that, I was just repeating something I heard on a podcast and it looks like they assumed that was top line revenue and took 10% of it.
I remember there was a time when people were excited about medium. Then medium needed some money so they started blocking readers behind login dialog boxes. Then come substack and everyone got excited about it. Sooner or later it will be on same path that medium took.
When will we realise that blogging websites (not personal blogs) are not sustainable in long run.
One could argue that social media is technically all "blogging websites"
Advertising works there because of the numbers. People will quickly consume enough bite sized content to drive traditional numbers.
Medium broke the things that made them appealing in an attempt to sweeten the advertising sell, but this made the platform unappealing. It was a self inflicted wound.
> Advertising works there because of the numbers. People will quickly consume enough bite sized content to drive traditional numbers.
To be more specific, advertising works there because of the feed algorithms. The platforms gather data about user interests and use that to tune what they choose to show the users, favoring things the algorithms suggest will get more "engagement". In turn, they sell ads on those favored items. On top of that, they charge both users and advertisers a premium to be featured on the favored topics.
Take away the algorithms that determine what content and ads to feature, and you get back to the basics of blogging websites. You get happier users, but no advertising money.
Medium broke things (by making people login) precisely because they wanted to charge money, because they did not want to use advertising (and AFAIK they still don't).
Imo, a blogging software company really does not need to be valued in the billions or make a ton of money. The tech can be maintained by a relatively small team of people - see all the independent blogging platforms and open source tools.
This is a classic case of VCs corrupting an industry with money that’s really not needed at valuations that really can’t be supported.
Easy to self host? We live in a world where Mastodon had to change their signup screen to de-emphasize "pick a server" because people had no idea what that meant.
It still blows my mind they can’t run this tiny operation profitably taking 10% of many multimillion dollar writers’ revenue. Is it a requirement that YC companies raise way too much money and then proceed to torch it any way possible?
Elon showing the number of impressions a tweet or reply actually got was an eye-opener for me. Probably about 1-2% of "Followers" -- not just mine but most people's.
Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.
Actually, this site is usually the best, and Facebook (the latter might reflect my audience).
Reddit subs tend to censor any attempt at self-promotion, which you can't blame them for, I guess. And StackExchange is the absolute worst. The level of asshole-ness there has to be seen to be believed.
Most of my readers come from HN, reddit or substack itself. Now it's mostly Python so it makes sense a tech oriented medias will be reading more about it.
Still, the ban on substack by twitter means that, while a #python tweet gets some view, the same with an article to substack tanks bit time.
I'm curious how you're dealing with Reddit: some of the mods don't even respond to a direct message; they just say "read the guidelines." And then their auto-mod deletes your post.
> Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.
It's always been very difficult to get people to leave Twitter. This is why their ad business is worth so little. Advertisers pay for clicks, and Twitter just doesn't deliver them very well.
Maybe I'm just "good at tweeting" but my average top-level tweets have at least as many views as I have followers. The "bad" ones are maybe around 15-25%.
However, if I link to an external article or something, the percentage of people who actually click on it is relatively tiny.
The point for me is that, at this moment, it has people that interest me without rage-baiting emotionally manipulative engagement farming bullshit.
That's all I want out of these platforms. I don't care about decentralization or who owns it. I just want to read interesting stuff and not get pissed off in the process.
I don't like it either. I use Substack (and previously Medium) when I want to read long-form content instead of tweets. If I wanted tweets, I'd use Twitter.
But Substack Notes allows for greater potential monetization (ick): TikTok style content, algorithmic recommendations, and ads. Especially ads.
If you follow any artists or writers or similar on Twitter you'll note that the biggest reason most of them cite for being there is because they have a conversational community that feeds into support for their art.
Substack has a perfectly good mechanism for publishing (paid and unpaid) to support people, but that conversation is missing. It's a pretty obvious move if you are engaged with the overlapping users of Twitter and Substack, and has potential to peel a lot of people out of Twitter if they're primarily there to follow their favorite authors, showrunners, etc.
it certainly seemed to me like there was a good portion of twitter that was just people promoting their substack newsletters, and most of the people they interact with are doing the same. it makes perfect sense for substack to try to bring that under their roof.
Notes linking to Substack Newsletters should convert better. Notes are networked "post summaries" that represent an improvement over the traditional blog homepage format. I see a play that could improve what they're cloning while also benefiting their core offering.
It has potential but the likeness of the clone is a bit off-putting for me.
Your post clarified my thinking on this. If I think of Notes as a Twitter clone then I'm upset because, like the parent poster, I want a much narrower subscription-base for long form content than I do short form content. However, if I think of this as merely a short form update from accounts I follow then it's fine.
That said, Substack showing writers adjacent to your subscriptions in Notes makes if feel more Twitter-like in a way that I'm not sure I like.
Agreed. I commented this on the announcement thread, but there's so much... Bluesky, T2, Hive, Post, now this. I'm not gonna jump to a new microblogging platform when 10% of my friends are on one, 10% on another.
If you are making a twitter clone, AP is the only way to go
please no. Substack Notes is a self-quarantine zone for the kind of self-promoting Twitter users who viewed the site as a place for them to engage an audience. despite its many, many faults, at least the Fediverse has real people hanging out and chatting with each other.
Mastodon lacks personalized sorting in its news feed as well as account-to-follow recommendations. A news feed that is strictly organized in chronological order becomes unusable when users follow more than 100 accounts. This can only be solved by having a centralized services like Substack.
If you subscribe to someone’s Notes you also subscribe to their email articles. No thank you, especially if aal their articles are behind a paywall. Not sure why Musk is so freaked out over Notes. Probably just general paranoia.
I love that it looks identical to Twitter but is orange.
I love that it's going to enrage Elon. He's going to realize that he paid 44 billion for something that's going to lose users to Substack's side project.
Even if that were true, what would you gain from that? If it makes you feel better that Elon Musk (or anyone else) failed at something, you may want to re-evaluate your life's loss function.
I think there are better ways to make the world a better place than wanting someone you don't like to fail. Besides, there's often an ulterior motive - not just for wanting that person to fail, but also for telling yourself that they are "bad for society".
Where one cannot love, one should – pass by.
- Nietzsche
Really? It's hard to imagine him doing anything at this point that would offset the good he's done for society.
He upset and tore down the military-industrial complex launch monopoly saving the collective US tax payers billions through starting SpaceX (and could soon revolutionize access to space for the average person within the next decade). (Also note that without SpaceX, we'd still be paying money to Russia to send US astronauts to space, which wouldn't be a good look during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)
He created an electrical vehicle revolution that's taking the world by storm, changing industries and pushing us much faster toward ending global warming than would have happened without. It's hard to imagine a few misguided political opinions could offset all of that. Let's be realistic here.
(Yes you can't attribute all that to him solely, as Elon himself says commonly, the praise should be given to the workers at SpaceX and Tesla, not him. But at the same time, without him, they would have never happened.)
This feels like some kind of the opposite of the sunk costs fallacy. Like a “past gains” fallacy.
None of those good things magically disappear if Elon fails in his Twitter purchase or changes. Those past gains have already happened.
If your argument was forward looking it would make more sense to me (if he fails with this Twitter program, he won’t be able to deliver Starship which would be bad because XYZ; or it would impact his ability to continue Tesla forward because ABC). I don’t know that I agree with the forward looking argument, but it seems more sound to me than the backward looking argument.
I actually suspect that many people hate him not in spite of what he has done, but because of it:
They think if they acknowledge what people like Elon Musk have done in their lives, they'd have to loathe themselves, their own choices, values and weaknesses.
Which is, of course, quite silly. Each human being has their own path in life. Comparing yourself to anyone, no matter who, is going to cause misery. But with people like Elon, the threat to the ego is particularly great.
So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He, too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after all".
(The irony being that many of these people say that Elon Musk is self-centered. Though the question he is asking is "What do I believe is greatest good to humanity as a species", whereas they, by their very act of comparing themselves to him, are asking "How can I be greater than and more right than Elon Musk".)
I actually suspect that people who idolize Elon Musk are subscribers to the Just World Fallacy, believing that he represents the kind of person that they -- though in a temporarily diminished and embarrassing state -- can become. They can't wait for the time when they too have the consequence-free power to sneer at disabled people, spread lies about victims of violent attacks, and call people who mildly disagree with them "pedo guy".
(By the way, I don't actually agree with any of what I wrote above. It's just another example of a bad-faith argument like the one I'm responding to.)
I could never accomplish what he has. He is so many standard deviations away from a regular person that it’s ridiculous to to feel anything but admiration. He’s human and imperfect like everyone and that’s ok. He was born with certain abilities and drive and he has made the world a better place by using those gifts. He is not beyond criticism either and some of his fans are too eager to dismiss them.
Precisely put. I wouldn't attempt to ignore his work on SpaceX, Tesla, etc since those companies have kickstarted their own revolution(s); electric vehicles and Starlink, even though I think Tesla FSD is a dangerous scam. Without it, the cars are fine.
Before, almost all the techies here were dreaming and begging to work for Elon Musk. Then the blue bird happened, got bought out and gave them 'emotional distress' and Elon immediately became public enemy number 1.
> So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He, too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after all".
Hence that, the same techies who loved him are now eternally desperate for Twitter to be Elon's biggest failure as much as possible, giving 24/7 over-coverage about Twitter schadenfreude.
The manipulation of human psychology due to over-coverage and creating villains every month or year is just too easy to create a story out of that is guaranteed to attract eyeballs and clicks. It is an symptom of obsession.
Curious question I have. What makes you think FSD is a “dangerous scam”? It’s quite functional even if it doesn’t quite meet the advertising yet. Maybe slightly dangerous for now yes, but hardly a scam.
I tend to agree. By tearing him down as much as they can, and making his minor issues stick out more than his major good sides they can offset his "worth" per-se. Additionally there's the narrative that all people with lots of money are automatically assumed to be evil, so if they're not evil they need to be torn down enough that they fit with the stereotype.
A good reason to want self-absorbed bullies to publicly fail rather than publicly succeed is to discourage others from adopting similar attitude and methods.
If Elon was self-absorbed he'd be buying private yachts or private islands or massive mansions. He wouldn't be constantly talking about existential risks to humanity and trying to come up with ways of fixing them. Is Bill Gates self-absorbed? Much of what Elon Musk does is in a similar vein as the Gates Foundation, though often through for-profit companies.
I'm not sure what you're saying, but the source is actually him denying it.
> About the contention that he had a threesome with Ms. Heard and her friend Cara Delevingne, Mr. Musk said, laughing, “We did not have the threesome, you know. So I think people think these things are generally more salacious than they are.”
He's laughing at the reporter for even proposing the idea, followed by downplaying it in a way that makes it clear that this was the media being sensationalist for clicks again.
> If it makes you feel better that Elon Musk (or anyone else) failed at something, you may want to re-evaluate your life's loss function.
Unfortunately I haven't reached that level of enlightenment yet.
I root for Elon to fail in the same ways I root for Donald Trump to fail. He's destructive, self-serving, thinks he's above the law, and hasn't faced real consequences for his actions.
I'm rooting for him to fail because he constantly lies, about big and small things. An example: He claimed Substack is downloading Twitter user data to power their competitor. There's no evidence of this. He said this before backtracking because he knew he was looking bad.
I'm rooting for him to fail so folks, like the ones in this very comment chain, can come back to reality and see that he's a flawed human like the rest of us and stop the blind worship.
In this specific case, I'm rooting for him to fail because he's proven over and over he's unfit to lead Twitter and make it a better product.
Sure. If I had never heard of Elon, and suddenly saw his name everywhere, and bros who cheer and justify him and feel like they’re the chosen people… and Tesla this and Twitter that... I'd be turned off as well, call him a nuisance, and steer clear of anything that has to do with him. And yeah, maybe I’d even try to level the scales, so to speak, by publicly speaking against him simply because I couldn’t bear the hype.
Its not that. I want elon to fail, because he tried to ruin that cave divers life by claiming that he had a childbride in thailand.
I want elon to fail, because he gives voice to Russian war criminals, because he is a union buster, because he fired most of the twitter employees and made the rest work long days.
Elon paid 44 billion for twitter's existing users and wanting to overthrow the censorship regime that was defacto the standard before Elon bought twitter. Thank god Elon bought twitter and made it possible for other social media sites to be more open to free-speech.
'Censorship regime'? In the time since Musk took over twitter I've gotten right-wing tweets forced into my feed despite not following a single right winger and a ton of high profile people have been banned for speaking out about him.
Not to mention that old Twitter never hamfistedly censored people by straight up shadowbanning users for using the words 'mastodon' or 'substack' in their tweets.
Your “Following” feed only contains who you are following so the smooth brained right wingers shouldn’t show up there. If you see a smooth brained right wing tweet in the “For You” feed you can mark it as “Not Interested” and the algo will stop suggesting smooth brained right wing tweets.
Your snark isn't needed. I'm obviously not a user of the 'for you' timeline and still got those artificially promoted tweets from people I don't follow and were not retweeted by those that I do. It's why I stopped using twitter and I see no reason to change that.
Watching the increasing polarisation of the public's opinion of Elon as he's inserted himself into the culture wars has been such a bizarre experience.
I guess by now he probably appreciates people going off the deep end for/against him.
Yes, but Twitter was arguably doing a reasonably good job of that part of their mission. You can debate about the business side, it's not easy monetizing something like that but they showed rather a lot of restraint and if they messed up they fixed things.
The people that see this differently are typically the same people who believe that 'the Twitter files' were revelatory, when in fact they weren't. Strong overlap there with eternal Trump supporters and various complot theory proponents, I'm not sure what degree of evidence would be able to convince people like that.
Somehow Elon's Twitter is even worse for anything remotely queer. I run into the "sensitive content" click walls any time I follow a link to anything on furry Twitter these days, and it's never a tweet that remotely warrants it.
I wasn't expecting anything different from a company run by the archtypical techbro. Musk is doing a lot of damage in a very indirect way: plenty of people see in him their justification for being jerks.
Compare the two homepages without cookies [1][2]. The rounded buttons in orange instead of Twitter-blue. The footer nagbar. The similar navigation menu.
Following the whole banning-saga my impression was that Notes was a genuine extension of the Substack platform, but it being a frontend clone explains why such a tantrum was thrown by Musk.
Seems just like one of the many cookie-cutter Twitter clones out there. I don't think people would even be talking about Substack Notes had it not been for Musk's tantrum.
Substack is an "absolute free speech" app. They have gotten away with it so far because nobody could see the highly offensive content unless they actively sought after it and subscribed.
However now that Substack is becoming more like a conventional social media platform they will have a harder time being an "absolute free speech" app.
You make it sound like a bad thing. Being proud of harboring hate speech puts one in a very specific category of people, one I wouldn't be proud to be part of.
It's a good thing, I think. "Absolute free speech" is most often championed by people who want to build society around pure logic rather than empirical evidence. The slippery slope bogeyman they gesture to is laughably dated in a time when misinformation and misdirection are so much easier.
One thing that is often lost with the free speech argument is amplification. For example, no one is stopping most people from going and yelling on a street corner. But that doesn't mean that you need to be allowed to speak in a particular venue or platform. Our society is currently not one in which there is a right to "equal volume" on speech, and I think that's a good thing.
The entire free speech movement was a response to government literally throwing people in jail for even talking about a given topic. It was never about allowing minority opinions to be as loud as majority opinions.
Looking at Notes, I get why Elon is so mad about it. They totally ripped off the Twitter UI.
I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter. He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of Substack.
I didn't claim there was IP infringement. IG & lots of other companies stole the stories format from Snap. Makes it easier for users who recognize the ui, but it's still got to be galling.
Why? It's just a UI for something where there aren't many alternative ways to present it. Timeline, follower, following. That's it. The rest is styling and that is even less relevant.
I remember both MySpace and Facebook status updates actually being a copy of Twitter style updates. I don't think Facebook even had status updates as we know it today when Twitter released.
And it s not like twitter has some kind of optimal design. The heart button in the middle is bad for my fingers! the left sidebar is useless and search sucks. Both of these services should try to make good work instead of copying each other
I actually thought that a newsfeed would be a good fit for substack, but looking at this i dont think i m going to use it. It should be simpler, a timeline of things i ve subscribed, with some threaded, sane comments. The medium shapes the message, and twitter's medium is just not a good fit for substack's message
GitLab initially copied GitHub’s UI, virtually identically, and the CEO advertised GitLab in every thread that involved GH for over a year. It didn’t seem that many people on HN cared, because GitLab was “open source” and ethics didn’t apply.
Substack has been adding a lot of random features lately and it makes me worry that they will lose focus on the email
newsletter aspect of their platform, which is what I like about it.
There's a few reasons I'm skeptical. For one they have an equally spotty reputation for arbitrary editorial policy while claiming to be completely agnostic. And secondly there have been a few stories about their distressed fiscal situation. They spent a load of VC money from the zero interest era on prominent writers. Far more than they'd bring in as revenue in the hopes they'd juice the brand. Classic strategy of selling dollars for 75 cents to get traction. Only they'd paid disproportionate amounts to some controversial writers which is, in essence, an editorial policy that speaks in dollars. They've also punished critics.
My general belief is that we won't get a better Twitter from VC world. I also have zero confidence in the Fediverse because it has no business strategy.
Honestly, my confidence in the Fediverse is in part because it has no business strategy. The tooling behind it is at the moment pretty much universally AGPL (a license which I don't think is very good but it seems to keep away big businesses). It probably won't reach mass-appeal outside of gradually amassing tech nerds, but at the same time... maybe that's for the better?
I dunno, I think a lot of the enshittification[0] of social media companies comes in part because of their business strategies. VCs demand eternal growth or an eventual buyout. Fedi doesn't have that incentive. The worst that can happen to it is what happened to e-mail, where you get a few nebulously large providers but it's still more than possible (although with e-mail, rather aggravating due to an outdated tech stack that we've bolted a bunch of asterisks onto to try and make it more suited for general use) to live outside that bubble and interact with that big provider bubble anyway.
Wow, didn't exactly stick their necks out on the design did they? Almost zero visual differentiation from the noisy flamewars of Twitter this is supposed to be the antidote to.
Can gifski handle the initial recording (e.g. selecting an area of your monitor and recording)? Or is it just for converting other recordings into gif?
On macOS, you can use Quicktime which lets you also select a geometric region within the screen. Then, you can edit, crop and so forth in iMovie. Finally, you can use ffmpeg to convert to gif.
The following command works well:
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "fps=10" -loop 0 out.gif
To be clear, the loop 0 will make the gif infinitely loop. By setting a number n, it will set the gif to loop n times.
I've done this but I've still never figured out the magic sauce to get a gif with a good balance of file size and quality. And gifs seem to have some kind of trick I don't understand with framerate cause sometimes a 30fps gif I made will play in slow motion, and at first I think it's that it's just slowly loading, but even after it's fully loaded it still plays slowed down.
gifs just constantly remind me that they're not made for what we used them for these days
Minus the background color, the drop shadow is the same as how it looks when you do this in QuickTime > New Screen Recording > Capture Selected Window.
788 comments
[ 7.4 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadMaybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing to Substack.
That seems to have accelerated the shift for some to Substack [1] (imagine if Google blocked searches for Bing or Brave!). Suppressing Substack makes the Twitter brand look weak and nervous.
1. https://reason.com/2023/04/10/elon-musk-matt-taibbi-twitter-...
Suppressing substack when substack is trying to advertise for a twitter competitor is just common sense. There's no need for twitter to advertise for a competitor. That isn't censorship, thats just normal business. If substack was depending on twitter for free data and free advertising they were the ones who were weak and nervous.
That being said, maybe the important things will start being said in private spaces and only end up in "public squares" via screenshot ten or fifteen minutes later.
They can block whomever they want and I can say it highlights how fragile they view their own business position as.
E.g. an author writes content, people who are not affiliated with substack try to like/share.
That is not advertising, and this from the apparent free speech absolutist Elon.
Twitter is within their right to cut off access to their competitors, future or present.
If you want to bethe next massive aquistion/IPO, then maybe not.
https://substack.com/notes
Uh, no, I was observing how every other "social media" company has done this, and was guessing that Substack, having already told its users to write more frequently, would jump in with both feet.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of paying for content directly (I spend over $100/mo on Patreon), but I feel like Substack has cultivated a nasty branding issue for themselves. To me, and I know I'm not alone, Substack is where you go when you want to hear some 17-year-old who got high for the first time tell you what THE MANNNN doesn't want you to know, duuude. Greenwald and Taibbi and the like. I guess there's probably other types of content on there, but that's all I ever see from the domain.
Anyway I'm not going to register an account to see whatever's going on with Notes. Good luck, guys.
The media folks are clearly escaping scrutiny and playing to their base, but there are many excellent Substackers in other fields!
I intensely dislike both of them, but are they really considered NRx?
[1] https://twitter.com/lulumeservey/status/1511376638487019524
I don't like Twitter though, so I don't really care about Notes
Subscribing needs improvement. Subscribing to a hashtag might make sense? It seems like subscribing to someone’s notes and their blog should be independent, because maybe someone has a good blog but you don’t care for their notes, or vice-versa. Having them tied together also doesn’t work for people like me who use RSS. I don’t usually want email from blogs I read, so I only subscribe to blogs where I’m interested in the paid content and usually turn the email off.
I think this loses what makes Substack interesting, though, which is keeping the community for each blog separate, so you don’t care what people are saying on other blogs that you don’t read. Putting everyone in one community, or an unclear blob of overlapping communities, seems likely to be bad for the same reasons Twitter can often be bad.
I guess blogs need discovery, though, and maybe external sites aren’t enough?
(I think I’ll repost this as a note, since they need the content.)
I have the same concern. Substack creators are paid for highly engaging content as individuals subscribe to individual content creators. I don't see how that mechanism works with short form content; it could easily prove to be another platform where number of minutes of eyes on content is the metric that's optimised, rather than engagement with high quality content.
Elon's regexp for matching Substack links just got defeated.
I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.
This is my experience as well, and is the thing the higher ups at Twitter should be really concerned about. Low rent.
The content moderation is basically nil now so tons of racist content is propagated throughout the network.
Various technical bugs plaguing things - videos not playing, images not appearing, etc
The verification system has been destroyed which has allowed fake accounts to run rampant
The API has been wrecked, causing third party apps to stop working and massive amounts of research being done to be halted
It's really tiring to counter so much misinformation about this that flies about.
It's not just a one-time drop either, the impressions continues to go down. https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1613335965996810241
Hate speech IS up. The claim was "hate speech is up". Impressions being down matters to the impact of the speech, but the claim stands - hate speech is up. You can claim it doesn't matter (and I might agree with you, since impressions are down, people know what to expect now, and the increase is significant but not huge at this point), but you can't honestly say the claim "hate speech is up" is misinformation.
Edit: Actually, I had the claim backwards - YOU said it was DOWN, and you were wrong (according to the report). So to correct myself - the person refuting your claim was right, and spread no misinformation.
The visibility of hate speech on twitter is down.
- Ads range from obnoxious to downright scams. I know some people used to block ad senders as a matter of routine, but I didn't, most of the time they were valid and I was happy to support the site via their ads. After Musk, most ads vanished and for a while all I saw was Nintendo and SpaceX (!?) ads. Now there's many ads, but I block 95% of them because I REALLY do not want to ever again see the kind of shit they're pushing.
- Search, and content outside of my carefully curated list of follows in my chronological timeline, has become complete hell. I used to be happy to search for "stuff that's happening" in Twitter rather than google or news sites, but now the stuff that comes out is not only irrelevant, but often disgusting.
I still use the site but in a very specific and controlled manner. In that way, the experience is still good (bugs aside). I suspect at some point Musk will force some algorithmic crap down my throat and that will be the end.
So it's not that it's dead today, but how long can they make it like this?
Is that possible? Seems kind of difficult due to its nature, but I admit I'm just a very casual user of it and don't know much.
Signed up for the Substack thing. Seems worth a look - it's very similar to Twitter.
Twitter:
1. Search for Twitter.
2. Click on the first link.
3. Click sign up.
Mastodon:
1. Search for Mastodon.
2. Click the first link: mastodon.social.
3. Click create account.
4. Message modal pops up alerting the user that it is currently impossible to sign up to mastodon.social. But don’t worry, you can sign up on another server by clicking “Find another server.” At this point I’m confused. Why are there different servers? Will my friends be on the other server? Do we need to sign up on the same server? No explanation. I click the link.
5. Long page of options. No indication of quality or why I should choose one server over another. Now I am in choice paralysis. I click the first option (which has an anime figure on it). Surely - surely - the first option is the best option. The suggested option by whoever is running this application.
6. I land on a Korean language portal and I am done. I’m never coming back. Mastodon is dead to me. Forever.
You might think this is hyperbole, but I promise you it is not. I’ve been in charge of A/B testing and UX centric development for web applications just like this for a very long time. Mastodon’s sign up process is easily one of the worst I have ever seen. Not a single UX person has been involved in the creation of this protocol.
No one wants to waste their time connecting a constellation, they want to get to content as fast as possible.
Until that changes Mastodon isn't trying to be a serious player.
- Brutaldon: https://brutaldon.org
- Source: https://gitlab.com/brutaldon/brutaldon
Because Mastodon has an open API, you don't need to use the official Mastodon web client. Twitter upset a lot of users when it limited access to its API because many alternative Twitter clients were rendered useless.
Twitter definitely does not load without loading several megabytes of Javascript. Nitter.net is a quick and easy substitute that loads instantly without it, though some video playback still requires Javascript (HLS video).
Doing so also breaks all web applications (and web applications posing as websites, i.e. React rendering) so it's not something I turn on permanently. I usually only disable JS when my phone is running low and I'm not near a charger, or when I'm trying to read something and the terrible website hijacks scrolls/taps/somehow makes my phone run hot doing stuff in the background.
Not sure how to solve the HOA problem though…
When I show people that I can talk to Signal, WhatsApp, and Signal through a single app, they're pretty impressed. I wouldn't expect most people to set up a Matrix bridging system like I did, same with most Mastodon servers, but it's a feature people do generally want.
With Mastodon, most people first ask "but how do I follow people on Twitter", which often leads to pointing at bridges that may stop working at any point and have no official status, and often get blocked on small servers because of the overwhelming wave of moderation spam they cause.
Phone manufacturers back in the day used to have quite commonly used "social hub" apps that would combine various social media sources into a single UI, but they were all tied to their own brand that either got too difficult to maintain or lost the phone wars (HTC and Blackberry had quite well-received integrations if I recall).
The past years we've been stuck with a locked in ecosystem for so long that the mere idea of two different apps interoperating has become inconceivable to the mainstream.
I hope the DMA, which will force messenger apps to interoperate, will bring back the knowledge that it's possible to do so at the very least.
We're getting some form of federation of messengers and other technology companies deemed "gatekeepers" by the EU. Companies serving large user bases won't have a choice, so there's no need to go out am buy anything.
But reinventing something that everyone can already do (eg. tweeting) with federation is not a winning game.
I think they want it, but by an order of magnitude more, they want simple UX. Everything else is a distant second. UX is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Without an excellent UX, the audience will forever remain niche. I tried to just sign up to Mastodon, and it was a clusterfuck of proportions so unbelievable that I can't believe it has as many users as it does - and it only has a couple million users.
I think it's a good thing in the long run.
Twitter was a gimmick in many ways. Here, throw a few words out into the ether and see who notices.
That simplicity attracted tons of people. Then it became THE place to reach a ton of people, even though it's format for such things is AWFUL for it. It's a TERRIBLE platform for meaningful information dispersal, but it's THE place to be, so you see a bunch of evidence of that.
Twitlonger, people chaining twitter posts, just about any conversation, etc. Worse it eliminated a lot of things that probably shouldn't have died. My personal pet peeve is the death of forums, most specifically for games. Pre twitter you could find old forum posts that were pinned about just about anything you wanted to get into seriously. Dustloop had character guides with a level of info that would justify a thesis on characters in games that were 8 years old and hardly ever played.
That level of information is still found now, but instead it's tied to a hashtag, and then vomited out...never consolidated. Right now i'm looking to mess with a new character in strive, and while the GGST_BE tag is nice for "oh that's neat" kind of tech discoveries, it's fucking awful for actually understanding how to play the character or what's useful from it.
To be fair, that's always the case with a brand new character, but in the old days it was somewhat easier to keep a running tally of what works and what doesn't in a forum discussion, while twitter just doesn't promote that, so picking someone up waaaay after the fact is miserable. Discord is the other spot these things are now heavily discussed (with similar issues to twitter, although the forum feature of discord has helped a bit) and the wiki's are in theory where the data is consolidated but it's just a much higher barrier to entry and thus often you have half completed pages with outdated information.
In short, i'm hoping the slow death of twitter (IF it dies. The number of people saying twitter is abhorrent...on twitter...is a sign to me it's not going anywhere) will finally lead to people realizing that we want a way to quickly spread information among those who want it, but we don't need it to be in this shallow, vapid, character limited style. Sure that works for "oh hey look at where I am today" but it drives me nuts every time i see some essay broken into 45 twitter posts.
RSS feeds are an alternative tech that's honestly quite close to being what most people want, but it lacks the discovery/aggregation effect of things like twitter in most cases (inoreader kind of has something like that), and thus mostly still relies on twitter for content (at least it did until they nuked the API).
I’m happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it’s a net negative for the world and we’ll be better off without it. This might be the only tech I’ve ever felt like this about (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates hate and division.
It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it was a gawker-style takedown with the intent to purposely destroy something in a lasting and permanent way as described in Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel’s purposeful execution of strategy to destroy gawker, https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holida...
PS- are there any other business/tech “case study” type books out there. I also liked Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg, John Brooks’ Business Adventures, Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift, and David Kaplan’s Silicon Boys. Looking for more of what I suspect is more common than I can find.
I returned to Twitter recently due to great features like Community Notes. I don't see what people are complaining about.
> 1. Go to Settings on the web version of substack.com
> 2. Scroll down to you publications
> 3. Click into any publication you don’t want to get emails.
> 4. Deselect “Receive emails for new posts”
Hoping they improve the experience.
[1] https://nostr.how/
RSS solved the "you fully own the content, everyone else can discover it via a well-known protocol" problem decades ago! Is it just that stuff like comments and reactions would be harder with just RSS?
People want enjoyable communities far more than they want the 'freedom' to spam the n-word.
The majority of people however don't value it or actively desire it because no wants to live in a pigsty. There is a reason apps like Truth Social don't take off, and that 4chan never gained the mainstream popularity of other social sites.
There have been multiple reddit clones, multiple twitter clones, multiple social media clones all based on the false pretense that there is demand for a freeze peach social site, and they all fall flat. Mastodon is doing better than most and its gaining users because of Twitter catering to the alt-right and refusing to censor offensive or dangerous speech.
Is that something you are unaware of?
I first heard about nostr last in November when Twitter tried to ban it. There's an incredible dev ecosystem developing — so much so that I decided to rebuild Satellite (https://satellite.earth) the social platform I'd been working on to become a client for the protocol.
There's a bunch of other clients too. Someone started a directory here https://www.nostrapps.com/
I'm happy to answer technical questions about nostr if anyone is curious.
Whether by design or because such sites just attract those kind of individuals, that's not good for a couple of key reasons:
1: Those kinds of interactions turn away many potential users
2: It makes advertising basically impossible (No potential advertiser wants to be associated with that kind of site)
There's a good reason that as sites like Reddit got larger, they started to clamp down on less desirable content.
And any form of social media with no advertising is always going to be very tiny and niche, and in general likely to die out quickly.
https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-1446... I’d a good summary. I don’t want to subscribe to hundreds of newsletters to see tweet (sorry, notes). But if you change that setup, it really is a Twitter clone with no upside to writers.
If Substack sees the above as an existential risk - which it might be if Twitter executes well, then Substack is replying by trying to do the reverse to Twitter.
Because they wouldn’t have the followers’ email addresses, which is a big advantage to Substack.
Exactly. Exactly.
Good luck to Substack, though. I'm rooting for them in this scenario.
So here's to them being a more pretentious rumble/truth/parler/etc...
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR35o66A/
Seems like the people doing the most things in my field have no time for drama and are busy doing stuff, while the ones that actually accomplish little have the time and energy for this.
> Seems like the people doing the most things in my field have no time for drama and are busy doing stuff,
Standing up for ethics isn't performative drama. I made my exit very quietly because I didn't have time for the drama of a petulant tyrant. I care that the tech I consume is open source or at the very least is guided by some principal of any good kind.
People spent months and a tremendous amount of energy discussing the state of a site that is a glorified animated wall of text, but it's not drama.
Sometimes I wish I could teleport this community to were I lived in Mali and force you to stay there for 6 months to re-calibrate your sense of what's important.
And there will be many moments in the future, when Elon musk will have upset more of its users. And substock will be there to benefit just like Mastodon is benefiting every day.
Disclaimer - I'm not on Twitter, but my impression is that a few folks made a large amount of noise for leaving but most people shrugged. Other networks mat have seen a temporary large percentage Increase, but a) how much of that stuck and b) a large percentage increase of tiny absolute. Umber can be misleading.
Basically, every 4 years, half of America threatens to move to Canada, but here I am in Toronto and I ain't seeing it :->
Who?
I have to say, that doesn't sound remotely convincing to the 220M+ daily users of Twitter who continue to use the platform since there was no 'mass exodus'.
It was more like a leaf falling out of a tree.
Anyway, I think it's more relevant that many accounts are now also syndicating to Mastodon, which makes it a viable alternative for consuming users.
It's far from being an exodus, but they are averaging 200k new users per week, which seems pretty good.
200k new users per week is... what, 0.05% - 0.1% of Twitter active user base?
Not saying one day it might not snowball, but it's been 6 months and I wouldn't call Mastodon an existential threat to Twitter just yet. I am tremendously enjoying and schadenfreuding the twitter melodrama, but even most people making fun of twitter/musk/socialnetworks, seem to be doing it on twitter.
It looks like neil does quite a bit of boosting (retweeting) on masto: https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself
Why would anyone in any illegal content space want to have their content federated outside of it?
Totally illegal explicit content in the majority of countries, only found on Mastodon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/technology/twitter-child-...
On Mastodon, each instance is able to restrict other instances based on their own policies. Unless you specifically choose to join a Mastodon instance that does not restrict pornography, your instance will not synchronize content from the porn-focused instances.
The one instance I have any prior awareness of, the mastodon creator saying search is not desired due to negative social dynamics, everywhere else it was presented as a privacy and anonymity behaviour - crucially, both from those who agreed and disagreed (which makes intuitive sense; on one hand I dislike e.g. Facebook not being publicly searchable some of the time, at the same time I don't want my content crawled by randos all the time either). This is the first place I've seen that frames it as explicitly CSAM related.
The author is only speculating about Mastodon's search feature, and I see no actual evidence that the search feature is intentionally limited due to child sexual abuse material.
However, anecdotally, my relatively static "following" count dropped from ~1k to ~600 over the course of the back-to-back Elon/Mastodon/Trump/etc events that were supposed to prompt mass exoduses. That could be 40% of the accounts I follow blocking me or getting banned, but deleting their accounts seems more likely in this instance.
Sure, I won’t subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, but a few dozen might create a good feed.
This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model and I'm guessing they think they have "influencers" on their platform to bring in a decent audience.
If I spent 30% of my net worth I could buy a condo in the bay, possibly. Although odds are it would be worth close to that if I needed to sell it.
But many people spend 30% of their net worth trying to start businesses with almost no traction. Musk spent 30% to buy something known internationally.
That doesn’t make it a good idea.
I actually find it perverse.
Further he was misled by someone feeding him incorrect information and promptly apologized for the confusion. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633253950198624257
Given he continues to talk with the man at times (he replied to one of his tweets the a few days ago) and there's no evidence to support the idea that he did it for monetary reasons, other explanations are much more reasonable. Namely that it was a simple mistake.
I like Musk because he doesn't appear to be a woke tool. Is he a tool of a different kind? Probably. But I don't like woke, so I stick up for the non-woke. Is he perfect? No. None of us are.
1. I care pretty strongly about the truth. When I see people actively spreading incorrect information whether through malice or their own misunderstanding I think it’s important to correct it to prevent the deception of others, especially when it’s happened on such a wide scale. He himself doesn’t seem to understand that it’s important to correct this type of thing early so there’s no other option.
2. I care because a lot of the future depends on the success of Elon’s companies and people use tearing down Elon as an excuse to attack his companies. They’re doing amazing things for the future while being constantly attacked for it.
So it’s a double-whammy of self interest and my own internal mental obsessions.
Musk spent 30% of his net worth on it then immediatly burned 90% of the already questionable value it had.
What Musk did was just bad business.
citation needed
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65084254
[1]: https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1639737042828673024
That sounds like one of the least interesting things I could do with $44bn.
With that sort of money I could fund 1000 Twitter rivals, and after a couple of years combine the successful and interesting ones into a single rival that would actually do something better than Twitter.
You could fund The Manhattan Project ($21Bn).
And the Panama Canal ($13Bn).
And the Concorde project ($2.5Bn).
And the Hoover Dam ($0.8Bn).
And an Eiffel Tower, a Statue of Liberty, and a statue of Christ the Redeemer. ($100s of M)
Buy yourself a B52 Stealth Bomber (~$2Bn).
And a Hindenburg ($100M), and a Titanic ($400M).
And still have a couple of billion left over.
The announcement for the feature on twitter[1] literally emphasizes the lack of ads, pointing out subs are their revenue source, so that would be some 4D enshittification chess.
[1] https://twitter.com/hamishmckenzie/status/164362995302659686...
Guessing that’s now how they’ll pitch it to an acquirer once it takes off.
(I don’t think you’re wrong by a factor of 10, just curious where you got your number from.)
- Infinite scrolling feed w/ ads
- Video Substacks
- Infinite scrolling video Substacks w/ ads
Sorry to get off-topic, but is there a read/book to understand funding, VCs, etc., from a holistic POV. I totally didn't expect that consequence of having to raise a crowd sourced round due to initial high valuation.
You can be a stable, profitable, money-making machine with 90+% margins and amazing reviews, but unless you're doubling something (users, engagement, profits, etc) every single year, you go to the back of the potential-investment line.
A high initial valuation might be great for performance relative to other companies (or whatever reasonable metric you want to insert here), but it also makes it way more difficult to show "growth" YOY compared to a lower initial valuation.
- If you raise more money at a lower valuation than your last fundraise, it's highly dilutive. Investors paid $10 for 10% of a $100 valued company last round during the bubble. Vs. given current market conditions, new investors would only pay $10 for 20% of a $50 valued company this round. This second round would dilute existing investors, except...
- If you crowd source the funding, now you can raise at a $100 valuation again (less dilution), because these crowdsourcing investors don't know what they're doing
Was recommended to read this by VC friends to prep for Investment Associate interviews a couple years ago
The game works like this: the VCs want 100% of your company, and you want to give away 0% of your company. (Of course, 90%+ of companies will fail, so it doesn't really matter. But let's pretend we're all in that special 10%.)
If you do end up choosing to play that particular game, then you'll find some common numerical rules of thumb. They usually go like this: Each round should raise 12-18 months of runway, and each round's investors usually get about 20-30% of your company.
On one side of the game, you have the VCs, who basically play this negotiation full-time — and whose comp structure depends on extracting as much equity from you as possible. This is why we get the constant stream of "thought leadership" from VC bloggers, because they're trying to distinguish themselves as offering something more than capital. (And, having distinguished themselves, they can extract more % from you for less $.)
After decades of practice, VCs have plenty of hustles they can run. Some of the classics are the old "participating preferred" play, as well as the usual sound bite about how "it doesn't matter what the exact numbers are."
On the other side of the game, you have the founders, who basically want the maximum amount of money in exchange for the least amount of equity — but also for the least amount of time. Fundraising is a massive distraction, and VCs know it — which is why time always gets used against the founder, with long and drawn-out "fundraising processes" that (by total coincidence, of course) also happen to exhaust the founder and push them towards signing.
The twist is that this game isn't only for 1 round. Once you take your company into this game, you're stuck in it — you'll have to keep fundraising to keep fueling the growth that you've kickstarted using external capital. With the average IPO timeline being 7-10 years, combined with fundraising every 12-18 months, you can expect to play this game 5+ times on the way to IPO.
Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, the founder raises too much $ for too little %. You'd think this is a good move — but, since this is an iterated game, it's not all upside. Decisions in this round set the stage for the next round. If you can't live up to the growth expectations implied by the high valuation, then you're in for a "down round."
VCs have a standard "down round" playbook, too. They'll have their way with the cap table, of course — and it's also not uncommon to see some/all of the founding team shown the door. The press piles on as soon as they hear of it, which drags on employee morale as well as the talent pipeline, both of which then destroy product velocity and market positioning... it's very easy to have a single "down round" be the kiss of death for a company.
So that brings us all the way back around to your question. For this particular company — as well as for many others that raised during the "cheap money" era of the pandemic and pre-pandemic years — it sounds like they're facing this conundrum. Crowdsourcing the next round is a somewhat new way to tackle this situation — new regulations came out a few years ago, and founders sometimes go this route instead of risking the "down round" game with VCs.
You usually only see B2C companies making the crowd-funding play in the first place, since you need the name recognition and customer base to even try to raise money in this way. Because founders can essentially "divide and conquer" their investor base in a scenario where everyone's investing only four or five figures, the common scenario here is that the founder sets the terms to avoid the down round — and then they begin the fundraising. Since they&...
Why? What stops you from raising a $15m series A and only burning it conservatively until you hit neutral profitability. Investors only have 15-25% of your cap table and can't strong-arm you.
- VCs don’t want founders to own 0% of their company because founders need to be motivated to work hard to make it a success
- % of dilution usually goes down very significantly over funding rounds
- there is significant competition between VCs to fund good startups these days, which can translate to founder leverage
- there are early-stage VCs these days, which don’t pressure founders for quick growth
- founders talk to each other and a large portion of founders are serial entrepreneurs. Reputation among founders matters to VCs
- looking over the longer term of decades, typical funding terms are getting much more founder-friendly
That's really interesting. Do you know how they make that work, exactly?
I feel like that's naturally opposed to the standard incentive structures that VCs have with their LPs. They need to show results in O(years) so they can raise their next fund and keep the overall VC firm going over O(decades). That maps down straightforwardly to the day-to-day pressure VCs put on all their portfolio companies to grow as fast as possible.
Unless early-stage VCs are doing something new with the terms they give their LPs, how could they prioritize anything other than growth?
If the startup is showing good growth metrics, they'd point them to friends at later stage funds. If they aren't, they'd give intros and help get the startup aquihired.
“The Power Law: Venture Capital And The Making Of The New Future” is also good. It tells the story of the evolution of VC over the last 70 years. It is interesting that funding terms seem to be becoming more and more founder-friendly over decades.
It's not. Substack is very clear about that. https://on.substack.com/p/notes-faq
"The ultimate goal on Substack is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. Because the Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, writers are rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences, not exploiting it like with ad-based social media."
"While Notes may look similar to social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. It’s social media with a heart transplant."
Would they?
No business would pivot to a dying monetization model unless it was their last option.
Advertising is not a solution for Substack; but rather a Trojan Horse.
Source:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783191/000167025423...
I’d edit the post but it’s too late to do so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35534035
When will we realise that blogging websites (not personal blogs) are not sustainable in long run.
Substack is already far, far more paywalled than Medium ever was. Subscriptions are the business model.
Advertising works there because of the numbers. People will quickly consume enough bite sized content to drive traditional numbers.
Medium broke the things that made them appealing in an attempt to sweeten the advertising sell, but this made the platform unappealing. It was a self inflicted wound.
To be more specific, advertising works there because of the feed algorithms. The platforms gather data about user interests and use that to tune what they choose to show the users, favoring things the algorithms suggest will get more "engagement". In turn, they sell ads on those favored items. On top of that, they charge both users and advertisers a premium to be featured on the favored topics.
Take away the algorithms that determine what content and ads to feature, and you get back to the basics of blogging websites. You get happier users, but no advertising money.
This is a classic case of VCs corrupting an industry with money that’s really not needed at valuations that really can’t be supported.
One can post a note without having a newletter, and you can "see notes" from a user without subscribing.
Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.
Actually, this site is usually the best, and Facebook (the latter might reflect my audience).
Reddit subs tend to censor any attempt at self-promotion, which you can't blame them for, I guess. And StackExchange is the absolute worst. The level of asshole-ness there has to be seen to be believed.
YC/Reddit/SE being good/bad/worse for self-promotion seems to be 100% in line with the intended use of these sites.
Most of my readers come from HN, reddit or substack itself. Now it's mostly Python so it makes sense a tech oriented medias will be reading more about it.
Still, the ban on substack by twitter means that, while a #python tweet gets some view, the same with an article to substack tanks bit time.
So when I post it, it's congruent.
Basically, either you find a way to cheat, or you climb the ladder. I'm terrible at cheating.
It's always been very difficult to get people to leave Twitter. This is why their ad business is worth so little. Advertisers pay for clicks, and Twitter just doesn't deliver them very well.
Most other advert platforms try to say “hey mate over here, stop your trail of thought and look at this…”
TV and radio says “ha gotcha now let me force this ad down your throat”
However, if I link to an external article or something, the percentage of people who actually click on it is relatively tiny.
That's all I want out of these platforms. I don't care about decentralization or who owns it. I just want to read interesting stuff and not get pissed off in the process.
There's an option to just subscribe to notes and not newsletters on desktop, apparently, under the three-dots menu:
https://substack.com/profile/34072171-katie-substack/note/c-...
That UX is awful, but I'm sure they'll work it out in the coming weeks.
But Substack Notes allows for greater potential monetization (ick): TikTok style content, algorithmic recommendations, and ads. Especially ads.
I think it does add some confusion to the product if notes become more popular than articles / comment sections on articles.
Substack has a perfectly good mechanism for publishing (paid and unpaid) to support people, but that conversation is missing. It's a pretty obvious move if you are engaged with the overlapping users of Twitter and Substack, and has potential to peel a lot of people out of Twitter if they're primarily there to follow their favorite authors, showrunners, etc.
it certainly seemed to me like there was a good portion of twitter that was just people promoting their substack newsletters, and most of the people they interact with are doing the same. it makes perfect sense for substack to try to bring that under their roof.
The phrasing is weird though: “You’ll then start seeing more of their notes in the Home tab.”
More? Not all? Odd.
Notes linking to Substack Newsletters should convert better. Notes are networked "post summaries" that represent an improvement over the traditional blog homepage format. I see a play that could improve what they're cloning while also benefiting their core offering.
It has potential but the likeness of the clone is a bit off-putting for me.
That said, Substack showing writers adjacent to your subscriptions in Notes makes if feel more Twitter-like in a way that I'm not sure I like.
Substack will need to decide if they view Notes as a search engine with an RSS feed or a standalone social network.
Edit: I don't think their positioning is obvious yet.
If you are making a twitter clone, AP is the only way to go
You can also post notes without even having a newsletter.
I love that it's going to enrage Elon. He's going to realize that he paid 44 billion for something that's going to lose users to Substack's side project.
Where one cannot love, one should – pass by. - Nietzsche
He upset and tore down the military-industrial complex launch monopoly saving the collective US tax payers billions through starting SpaceX (and could soon revolutionize access to space for the average person within the next decade). (Also note that without SpaceX, we'd still be paying money to Russia to send US astronauts to space, which wouldn't be a good look during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)
He created an electrical vehicle revolution that's taking the world by storm, changing industries and pushing us much faster toward ending global warming than would have happened without. It's hard to imagine a few misguided political opinions could offset all of that. Let's be realistic here.
(Yes you can't attribute all that to him solely, as Elon himself says commonly, the praise should be given to the workers at SpaceX and Tesla, not him. But at the same time, without him, they would have never happened.)
None of those good things magically disappear if Elon fails in his Twitter purchase or changes. Those past gains have already happened.
If your argument was forward looking it would make more sense to me (if he fails with this Twitter program, he won’t be able to deliver Starship which would be bad because XYZ; or it would impact his ability to continue Tesla forward because ABC). I don’t know that I agree with the forward looking argument, but it seems more sound to me than the backward looking argument.
I actually suspect that many people hate him not in spite of what he has done, but because of it:
They think if they acknowledge what people like Elon Musk have done in their lives, they'd have to loathe themselves, their own choices, values and weaknesses.
Which is, of course, quite silly. Each human being has their own path in life. Comparing yourself to anyone, no matter who, is going to cause misery. But with people like Elon, the threat to the ego is particularly great.
So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He, too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after all".
(The irony being that many of these people say that Elon Musk is self-centered. Though the question he is asking is "What do I believe is greatest good to humanity as a species", whereas they, by their very act of comparing themselves to him, are asking "How can I be greater than and more right than Elon Musk".)
(By the way, I don't actually agree with any of what I wrote above. It's just another example of a bad-faith argument like the one I'm responding to.)
Before, almost all the techies here were dreaming and begging to work for Elon Musk. Then the blue bird happened, got bought out and gave them 'emotional distress' and Elon immediately became public enemy number 1.
> So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He, too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after all".
Hence that, the same techies who loved him are now eternally desperate for Twitter to be Elon's biggest failure as much as possible, giving 24/7 over-coverage about Twitter schadenfreude.
The manipulation of human psychology due to over-coverage and creating villains every month or year is just too easy to create a story out of that is guaranteed to attract eyeballs and clicks. It is an symptom of obsession.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WX_mgnAFA0
> I think people think these things are generally more salacious than they are.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/style/elon-musk-maureen-d...
> About the contention that he had a threesome with Ms. Heard and her friend Cara Delevingne, Mr. Musk said, laughing, “We did not have the threesome, you know. So I think people think these things are generally more salacious than they are.”
He's laughing at the reporter for even proposing the idea, followed by downplaying it in a way that makes it clear that this was the media being sensationalist for clicks again.
Unfortunately I haven't reached that level of enlightenment yet.
I root for Elon to fail in the same ways I root for Donald Trump to fail. He's destructive, self-serving, thinks he's above the law, and hasn't faced real consequences for his actions.
I'm rooting for him to fail because he constantly lies, about big and small things. An example: He claimed Substack is downloading Twitter user data to power their competitor. There's no evidence of this. He said this before backtracking because he knew he was looking bad.
I'm rooting for him to fail so folks, like the ones in this very comment chain, can come back to reality and see that he's a flawed human like the rest of us and stop the blind worship.
In this specific case, I'm rooting for him to fail because he's proven over and over he's unfit to lead Twitter and make it a better product.
Not to mention that old Twitter never hamfistedly censored people by straight up shadowbanning users for using the words 'mastodon' or 'substack' in their tweets.
I guess by now he probably appreciates people going off the deep end for/against him.
The people that see this differently are typically the same people who believe that 'the Twitter files' were revelatory, when in fact they weren't. Strong overlap there with eternal Trump supporters and various complot theory proponents, I'm not sure what degree of evidence would be able to convince people like that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
Following the whole banning-saga my impression was that Notes was a genuine extension of the Substack platform, but it being a frontend clone explains why such a tantrum was thrown by Musk.
[1] https://twitter.com/
[2] https://substack.com/notes
Here's a side-by-side comparison for anyone that doesn't want to go through the same process:
https://i.imgur.com/On0RZG8.png
The fact that Musk is known to be thin-skinned and prone to internet outbursts explains why he threw such a tantrum.
However now that Substack is becoming more like a conventional social media platform they will have a harder time being an "absolute free speech" app.
The entire free speech movement was a response to government literally throwing people in jail for even talking about a given topic. It was never about allowing minority opinions to be as loud as majority opinions.
Never using that shit :)
If so, I don't really see this taking a notable chunk out of Twitter until this happens.
I see a Substack Reader app, but it's more or less read-only.
I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter. He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of Substack.
I wasn't aware of any IP protection of Twitter's UI, which in one form or another has been done 100's of times.
I've been saying it since Twitter launched, but Twitter was/is just some folks stealing Facebook's status update.
I actually thought that a newsfeed would be a good fit for substack, but looking at this i dont think i m going to use it. It should be simpler, a timeline of things i ve subscribed, with some threaded, sane comments. The medium shapes the message, and twitter's medium is just not a good fit for substack's message
My general belief is that we won't get a better Twitter from VC world. I also have zero confidence in the Fediverse because it has no business strategy.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/17/23309877/substack-forever...
I dunno, I think a lot of the enshittification[0] of social media companies comes in part because of their business strategies. VCs demand eternal growth or an eventual buyout. Fedi doesn't have that incentive. The worst that can happen to it is what happened to e-mail, where you get a few nebulously large providers but it's still more than possible (although with e-mail, rather aggravating due to an outdated tech stack that we've bolted a bunch of asterisks onto to try and make it more suited for general use) to live outside that bubble and interact with that big provider bubble anyway.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
HTTP also has no business strategy. Any number of sites that use the protocol can have different strategies, profit-oriented or otherwise.
* Make it look exactly like Twitter in every way
END OF DOCUMENT
The following command works well:
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "fps=10" -loop 0 out.gif
To be clear, the loop 0 will make the gif infinitely loop. By setting a number n, it will set the gif to loop n times.
A lot of the time I find this preferable because iMovie is not very flexible with video aspect ratios/resolutions
gifs just constantly remind me that they're not made for what we used them for these days
https://gif.ski/
gifski --fps 10 --width 320 -o anim.gif video.mp4
Or Command + Shift + 5
Even with all the other options, my favorite is still ScreenFlow. It has a lot of editing features… basically uMovie for screen recordings.