[bumblewax]

The Twitter implosion has made me realize how I really used Twitter and what sort of alternative I'd join. Primarily a place where I can get a filtered list of news articles and posts from people I'm interested in what they have to say. Comments on posts are fine but it's more about getting all the content in the same place. HN is pretty close to that, but maybe a bit too niche.

[jader201]

There’s a big difference in Twitter and HN.

On Twitter, the filtering is done by you (mostly: you can’t choose what content is posted by those you follow, or the comments others post).

On HN, the filtering is done by others (mostly: you can filter by “Show HN”, “Ask HN”, new, etc.)

Twitter is like an RSS feed of specific people/companies/interests that you get to select and everyone’s is unique, where HN is a crowd curated — and dang moderated — list of links, and everyone sees the same list.

I don’t think HN is close at all to what Twitter is (for better and worse).

[Markoff]

> On HN, the filtering is done by others (mostly: you can filter by “Show HN”, “Ask HN”, new, etc.)

That's why I read HN via Serializer (disabled all other websites), because I don't really wanna curated HN homepage from certain brigades and I wanna choose what I read and what _I_ find interesting. You can also get your individual URL to share across devices, which I find very useful.

https://serializer.io/

[egberts1]

Implosion? 100M tweet per hour sure sounds like Twitter is already more than ready for the Qatar World Cup tweets.

[jader201]

Just because we’re not seeing the effects immediately doesn’t mean it’s not in the process of happening.

[idlewords]

I think the death of Twitter has been greatly exaggerated; notice that nearly all of the conversation around it is taking place on the very site that is supposed to be dying.

Departing employees are justifiably angry about the events of the past few weeks, but I think a desire to see Musk get his comeuppance has colored too many people's assessment of whether Twitter can stay running with a skeleton crew while they rebuild internal expertise. Working code can stay running on autopilot for an impressively long time.

[tptacek]

A piece of software like Pinboard can stay running on autopilot for a very long time, because it's simple (that's a compliment, not a dig). A piece of software like Twitter, comprised of a bunch of random interlocking services, is much less likely to stay up unattended. All the random stupid shit that might lock up Pinboard once a year (a full log drive, a run of block errors on a storage device, a network hiccup long enough to blow through a timer, &c) happens to all the services; most of these systems aren't aerodynamically stable: once something burps, the whole system oscillates and wedges until someone goes in and unkinks it.

(Maybe this has been my experience over the past 2 years because our team is just bad at this stuff, but when I relate it to other people working on software like this, I mostly get commiseration).

I'm not taking a position on whether Twitter needs 3000 more engineers to stand a chance of running. I think reports of the death of Twitter are also exaggerated, and I remember reading Dan Luu about bloat at Twitter long before Musk expressed an interest. I'm just saying: it's shocking that the service is running as well as it is right now. Some group of people on that team did a lot of stuff right.

[prawn]

"Working code can stay running on autopilot for an impressively long time."

Are you speaking from experience? I think just the other day people on here were wondering if you were still alive! ;)

[idlewords]

People here are always wondering if I'm still alive. They care so much; it's like my second family!

[prawn]

I can identify - I left one of my sites (a 20-year old sports forum) ignored while I went overseas for the last ten weeks, and received a few emails towards the end asking if I was OK.

[headsoup]

Why can't you do that on twitter?