Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rsaz 362 days ago
Social media is relied on by a lot of people for official notifications. When I was in high school, my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days. I'm sure there are lots of valid reasons for schools, hospitals, emergency services, garbage collection, official media networks etc. to have social media accounts, and for regular people to follow them.

I've always thought it would be a good idea for governments to run their own mastodon servers for this, but something else with accounts (not publicly) tied to real identities could be interesting.

1 comments

> my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days

Believe it or not, they post that on their own websites.

We had to turn on the TV and watch the marquee they would add to all shows. If you missed your school you had to go to another channel to see where in the alphabet they were.

You have not made a convincing argument. Social media has specifically moved away from synchronous time-prioritized posting in favor of algorithm engagement. So I can’t accept “notifications” as a legitimate use.