If Twitter goes belly up....options?

[Warhawk]

Hi all - I got on Twitter a while back just to follow Kings news. Over the years it has turned into a primary source of breaking news and information on sports and just about everything else going on in the world.

Not to get into the details (or politics, etc.) of why (and such posts will be deleted), but if Twitter does go belly up at some point soon, any suggestions for what the best alternative might be? I guess that will sort itself out to a certain extent, but my current online presence in social media essentially consists of Facebook and Twitter. I have no real idea what other options can be used for breaking news, etc., or which might be the most promising Twitter "substitute". Thoughts from those more tuned into this than I?

 

[Insomniacal Fan]

I think Twitter has a bunch of different use cases

- subscribing to realtime news from a personally curated set of sources
- forming communities of common interest, networking, discussion
- establishing a personal brand, publishing
- cyberbullying public figures, engaging with celebrities
- signal boosting for topics of interest

One may find some alternatives more satisfactory than others depending on how one currently gets value from Twitter.
---
I'm fond of Mastodon, which in my mind embodies the spirit of what Twitter should be. The controversial part of Twitter has been content moderation policy. Mastodon tries to solve this by having a federated architecture, allowing each server to have its own moderation standards.

- The downside is, onboarding is slightly harder as people need to choose a server right off the bat, which is a weird decision to make without any information. The good news is that this isn't permanent, and it's easy enough to migrate from one server to another later on.

- The other downside is, maybe your favorite celebrities or journalists aren't on Mastodon yet, so nobody to yell at.

https://joinmastodon.org/

 

[macadocious]

twitter isnt going anywhere, it just may change a bit. You don't pay 44B for something and let it die in a month. He will figure it out.

 

[Insomniacal Fan]

twitter isnt going anywhere, it just may change a bit. You don't pay 44B for something and let it die in a month. He will figure it out.

Given the mass exits, it will be quite difficult for Twitter to make changes without losing data and causing outages. It will float around for a while if it's left alone, but if somebody starts pressing buttons and unplugging things, it's possible some things will get irreparably broken and data will be lost.

 

[Warhawk]

twitter isnt going anywhere, it just may change a bit. You don't pay 44B for something and let it die in a month. He will figure it out.

Yeah, I don't know. It sure sounds like Twitter is going to be broken soon based on rumblings from employees that have left. Advertisers are leaving (at least temporarily) and large swaths of the technical folks that ran it are now just gone. I don't know how long Twitter can survive on "cruise control" with whatever remains of the technical folks forced to come to the office, then locked out, then told to work from home, then jerked around some more. I don't even know what the latest is on all that. And that's also assuming that the technical side is the only thing that can "break" - financial, political, and other concerns regarding changes to Twitter may cause disruption or shutting down, at least in some countries.

Given what we've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if he bought it to intentionally break it (again, this is as close as we are getting to anything political or similar about this). You couldn't do a better job pretending to want to keep it running while sabotaging it at the same time. He's taken something great and appears to be on the verge of destroying it, or at least this iteration of it.

 

[macadocious]

Sorry, I don't buy it. You don't need 3,500 software engineers to run twitter. Way more technical sites do it with less than a 1/4 of the man power.

Elon is for sure effing this all up, and people are pissed and leaving and getting fired and all that. But other people will line up to take those jobs.

It is really messy though.

 

[Warhawk]

There's things like this are cause for concern:

Opinion | What’s Twitter’s Future? The Former Head of Trust And Safety Weighs In - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Advertisers have played the most direct role thus far in moderating Mr. Musk’s free speech ambitions. As long as 90 percent of the company’s revenue comes from ads (as was the case when Mr. Musk bought the company), Twitter has little choice but to operate in a way that won’t imperil the revenue streams that keep the lights on. This has already proved to be challenging.

Almost immediately upon the acquisition’s close, a wave of racist and antisemitic trolling emerged on Twitter. Wary marketers, including those at General Mills, Audi and Pfizer, slowed down or paused ad spending on the platform, kicking off a crisis within the company to protect precious ad revenue.

Marketers have not shied away from using the power of the purse: In the days following Mr. Musk’s acquisition, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a key ad industry trade group, published an open call to Twitter to adhere to existing commitments to “brand safety.” It’s perhaps for this reason that Mr. Musk has said he wants to move away from ads as Twitter’s primary revenue source: His ability to make decisions unilaterally about the site’s future is constrained by a marketing industry he neither controls nor has managed to win over.

But even if Mr. Musk is able to free Twitter from the influence of powerful advertisers, his path to unfettered speech is still not clear. Twitter remains bound by the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates. Amid the spike in racial slurs on Twitter in the days after the acquisition, the European Union’s chief platform regulator posted on the site to remind Mr. Musk that in Europe, an unmoderated free-for-all won’t fly. In the United States, members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have raised concerns about the company’s recent actions. And outside the United States and the European Union, the situation becomes even more complex: Mr. Musk’s principle of keying Twitter’s policies on local laws could push the company to censor speech it was loath to restrict in the past, including political dissent.

There is one more source of power on the web — one that most people don’t think much about but may be the most significant check on unrestrained speech on the mainstream internet: the app stores operated by Google and Apple.

Failure to adhere to Apple’s and Google’s guidelines would be catastrophic, risking Twitter’s expulsion from their app stores and making it more difficult for billions of potential users to get Twitter’s services. This gives Apple and Google enormous power to shape the decisions Twitter makes.

Apple’s guidelines for developers are reasonable and plainly stated: They emphasize creating “a safe experience for users” and stress the importance of protecting children.

In the longer term, the moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online. Twitter will have to balance its new owner’s goals against the practical realities of life on Apple’s and Google’s internet — no easy task for the employees who have chosen to remain. And as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun.

I also read a great Twitter thread yesterday morning about detailed concerns with ongoing operations but I can't find it now (Twitter won't let me scroll back far enough to find it).

 

[Insomniacal Fan]

Sorry, I don't buy it. You don't need 3,500 software engineers to run twitter. Way more technical sites do it with less than a 1/4 of the man power.

Elon is for sure effing this all up, and people are pissed and leaving and getting fired and all that. But other people will line up to take those jobs.

It is really messy though.

If all software engineers were fungible, maybe you'd have a point, but a lot of what drives staffing bloat is extreme specialization. One software engineer could be the only guy in the company that knows how to develop a particular software component. The company builds a team to increase the bus factor on the component. Elmo comes around and fires the whole team, and the component lasts as long as it lasts.

What's happening at Twitter is like Hinkie starting "The Process", but without the benefit of the NBA Draft.

 

[Warhawk]

Sorry, I don't buy it. You don't need 3,500 software engineers to run twitter. Way more technical sites do it with less than a 1/4 of the man power.

Elon is for sure effing this all up, and people are pissed and leaving and getting fired and all that. But other people will line up to take those jobs.

It is really messy though.

Are they? I read from several that the good ones won't. The reason to work insane hours for a startup is to get equity in the company and then cash out later. Elon isn't doing that; he's not "sharing that wealth", and most don't seem to see the benefit in killing yourself for the company without the possible financial benefits down the line outside a straight salary.

He has apparently stated he hates advertising. But if you drive off the advertising $$$ you are already getting, how do you recoup your insane, egotistical $44 billion purchase?

Twitter had over $5 billion in annual revenue for 2021 (up 37% for the year). It was on the right track.

So, if you don't want advertisers and you are actively driving those you have away already, how do you make money? I know I'm not paying for Twitter, or any other similar social media for that matter. The $8 monthly "verification" system was already shut down, and the VAST majority of non-bots weren't paying for that either.

Every other social media platform seems to make enough money from other sources (predominantly advertising, with Twitter's # at 90%) to provide their product for free. Twitter appeared to be on track to keep improving the financial side of things if it carried on like it was with incremental revisions/improvements.

This is getting a bit off track from my original question though - if Twitter does die, or become something other than what it is now and no longer useful for up-to-date news, etc., what are the most likely options for replacement?

 

[Chupacabra]

Twitter has lost over 85% of it's employees, the possibility of it dying off is real. Truth Social and Parlor are the most likely replacements.

 

[macadocious]

Twitter will make money selling user data like every other app out there.

 

[pdxKingsFan]

I'm not sure twitter will die. I think there's a good chance it will break temporarily, and it may lose a lot of it's userbase, especially low value users. But I do think when they fix it, the breaking news type content will be one of the things that stays. If it loses its status as a social network it won't be the worst thing. I keep seeing people cite "I learned so much from experts" as it's in the death throes this week. No, you read a lot of garbage by people purporting to be experts, and some of it was real.

Biggest value on twitter to me remains that occasionally I get to interact with public figures I admire and replyguy a few I detest. Fair chance the former may be lost.

 

[GWD]

What is Twitter? From the posts just on here it appears to be a factor that we all can easily do without.

 

[Warhawk]

I think Twitter has a bunch of different use cases

- subscribing to realtime news from a personally curated set of sources
- forming communities of common interest, networking, discussion
- establishing a personal brand, publishing
- cyberbullying public figures, engaging with celebrities
- signal boosting for topics of interest

One may find some alternatives more satisfactory than others depending on how one currently gets value from Twitter.
---
I'm fond of Mastodon, which in my mind embodies the spirit of what Twitter should be. The controversial part of Twitter has been content moderation policy. Mastodon tries to solve this by having a federated architecture, allowing each server to have its own moderation standards.

- The downside is, onboarding is slightly harder as people need to choose a server right off the bat, which is a weird decision to make without any information. The good news is that this isn't permanent, and it's easy enough to migrate from one server to another later on.

- The other downside is, maybe your favorite celebrities or journalists aren't on Mastodon yet, so nobody to yell at.

https://joinmastodon.org/

Just ran across this. Might come in handy?

https://twitter.com/statuses/1593396595101417476

 

[Warhawk]

Twitter has lost over 85% of it's employees, the possibility of it dying off is real. Truth Social and Parlor are the most likely replacements.

That’s…not happening (the replacements you mentioned). And that’s as far as we go on those two.

Edit - In retrospect I realize you were joking - but I'm leaving this up anyways.

 

[Sluggah]

In terms of alternatives (feature and use case parity), I don’t think a clear winner exists. For me, as Twitter’s site reliability & experience degrade, I’m counting on the realization that it was never really that important to me in the first place (like all the other social media I’ve abandoned). Tetsujin posts notwithstanding.

For breaking news & sports I still rely heavily on RSS feeds and use Feedly as the aggregator. Lately I’ve been surprised at how well TikTok serves as a source of what’s trending / pulse taking (though obviously a completely different medium and consumption pattern, not without its own problems, and took years of curation and algorithm tuning to serve this purpose).

 

[pdxKingsFan]

Yeah if twitter does die for news RSS is probably the next best thing. Although I assume that even if it just has a mass exodus that established news people will stick with it until the bitter end. They are slower moving than Gen Z.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

Yeah if twitter does die for news RSS is probably the next best thing.

I mean, not to be "that dude", but anybody who loves RSS is probably not involved in curating the Kings News Links forum, thatsallimgonnasay.

 

[Warhawk]

Yeah if twitter does die for news RSS is probably the next best thing. Although I assume that even if it just has a mass exodus that established news people will stick with it until the bitter end. They are slower moving than Gen Z.

My concern is more about a quick demise than a long, drawn-out decay. I hope that Musk grows a brain and reverses course on a lot of his destructive actions regarding Twitter (in general it is a great tool), but I'm not holding my breath. He's impulsive, impetuous, vindictive, and ultra rich (so he can largely act with impunity on the previous characteristics). I don't see any of that changing any time soon.

Edit - he's done some things to Twitter and Starlink both that have really pi**ed me off. I'm expecting a Twitter meltdown at some point. I joined Starlink a few months ago but will probably migrate off that as soon as a reasonable alternative is available. The service is generally somewhat better than my previous wireless broadband, but if Verizon 5G home internet becomes available where I live I'll probably switch, as I already have Verizon cell service and the additional cost is very low for home internet.

 

[Warhawk]

I'm fond of Mastodon, which in my mind embodies the spirit of what Twitter should be. The controversial part of Twitter has been content moderation policy. Mastodon tries to solve this by having a federated architecture, allowing each server to have its own moderation standards.

- The downside is, onboarding is slightly harder as people need to choose a server right off the bat, which is a weird decision to make without any information. The good news is that this isn't permanent, and it's easy enough to migrate from one server to another later on.

- The other downside is, maybe your favorite celebrities or journalists aren't on Mastodon yet, so nobody to yell at.

https://joinmastodon.org/

I've heard of some others joining Mastodon as well, so I created an account for the heck of it. I'll play around with it more later.

The server thing is...interesting. A couple of the "most popular" general-type servers are not taking new registrations, so I created my account with the San Francisco Bay Area server (nothing popped up for a Sacramento server). Not that it matters, but for now I'll just keep it "local" and general.

 

[Warhawk]

I've heard of some others joining Mastodon as well, so I created an account for the heck of it. I'll play around with it more later.

The server thing is...interesting. A couple of the "most popular" general-type servers are not taking new registrations, so I created my account with the San Francisco Bay Area server (nothing popped up for a Sacramento server). Not that it matters, but for now I'll just keep it "local" and general.

Yeah, so there are a grand total of 3 folks I follow on Twitter that have a Mastodon account publicized in their Twitter info that I found using the following tool:

https://fedifinder.glitch.me

A search for the "Sacramento Kings" turned up a grand total of 2 posts by others with that hashtag. The community appears to be tiny at this point, but let's see if it grows over time. I doubt this will ever turn into a mecca for sporting/general news, though.

 

[Pacboy]

I think I’ll rely on Tetsujin to find a new way to curate basketball news and I’ll go to kings fans for update

 

[ESP47]

The propaganda is out in full force here.

 

[pdxKingsFan]

I mean, not to be "that dude", but anybody who loves RSS is probably not involved in curating the Kings News Links forum, thatsallimgonnasay.

Twitter isn't exactly known for its signal to noise ratio either.

 

[Warhawk]

The propaganda is out in full force here.

In what way? If you haven't seen what's happening to Twitter over the past few weeks you aren't paying attention.

 

[Insomniacal Fan]

Yeah, so there are a grand total of 3 folks I follow on Twitter that have a Mastodon account publicized in their Twitter info that I found using the following tool:

https://fedifinder.glitch.me

A search for the "Sacramento Kings" turned up a grand total of 2 posts by others with that hashtag. The community appears to be tiny at this point, but let's see if it grows over time. I doubt this will ever turn into a mecca for sporting/general news, though.

Yeah, some communities are more developed than others. I sort of expect someone to create an instance around sports discussion at some point. There might even be a Sacramento Kings fans instance someday.

Mastodon is more oriented towards peer to peer conversations. I often use Twitter to follow professional journalists; I think that Substack is trying to entice those creators (with money.) They're rolling out a new chat feature https://on.substack.com/p/chat for audience engagement. I think if they're able to convince enough creative people, that will probably where a lot of the community will go.

 

[Insomniacal Fan]

In terms of alternatives (feature and use case parity), I don’t think a clear winner exists. For me, as Twitter’s site reliability & experience degrade, I’m counting on the realization that it was never really that important to me in the first place (like all the other social media I’ve abandoned). Tetsujin posts notwithstanding.

For breaking news & sports I still rely heavily on RSS feeds and use Feedly as the aggregator. Lately I’ve been surprised at how well TikTok serves as a source of what’s trending / pulse taking (though obviously a completely different medium and consumption pattern, not without its own problems, and took years of curation and algorithm tuning to serve this purpose).

I'll quickly point out that Mastodon serializes all conversations to RSS for interoperability's sake, https://mastodon.social/@nocontexttrek -> https://mastodon.social/users/nocontexttrek.rss

 

[pdxKingsFan]

Yeah, so there are a grand total of 3 folks I follow on Twitter that have a Mastodon account publicized in their Twitter info that I found using the following tool:

https://fedifinder.glitch.me

A search for the "Sacramento Kings" turned up a grand total of 2 posts by others with that hashtag. The community appears to be tiny at this point, but let's see if it grows over time. I doubt this will ever turn into a mecca for sporting/general news, though.

I will set up another account when people decide. I'm too old to try to lead the way on this.

 

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

I think I’ll rely on Tetsujin to find a new way to curate basketball news and I’ll go to kings fans for update

Are we even certain that @Tetsujin exists outside of Twitter?

 

[Warhawk]

Are we even certain that @Tetsujin exists outside of Twitter?

Yes.

Stephen Tetsu | Rambling Musings from Japanese Showbiz (Kinda.)