Hacker News

And the irony is that we don’t even need APIs for social networks to drown in botspam.

Whats a credit?

Paris' subway and local train lines each have a Twitter account, and they are the only reliable source of information regarding outages. Phone apps (at least three official ones with different data sources!) and websites can be outdated. Displays in station too (though less often), have outages of their own, and (rarely) even incorrect updates.

A few recent examples: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/bessen... https://theprint.in/world/us-military-says-it-completed-late... https://www.reuters.com/technology/brad-lightcap-leaving-ope...

It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.

Last time my city had a water cutoff due to a broken main, the city hall posted on Twitter (and I think Facebook?) where and when to queue for drinking water sooner and much more often than on any other channels, their own website included.

They don't use Twitter, but my university exclusively uses Facebook for news and relevant announcements like scholarships, days off due to weather, etc. they won't even use their official webpage but for posting the official calendar...

Any big information fan out is pretty useful for JP twitter. Like yes, we’ll get notifications for flooding / earthquake and etc., but if you want up to date, on the ground videos and etc. it’s pretty useful. Not even talking about the train line scenarios as other commentators mentioned.

There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.

I don't know if it is still the case, but when I was writing some Wikipedia articles I discovered the British monarchy seemed to use Twitter exclusively for some purposes.

I don't know about crucial, but a recent amber alert went out last week. It contained a bit.ly link to the CHP's Twitter page and I couldn't see the information. I clicked on it because the alert was from my town, but light on the details.

Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.

Irish rail posts about train delays exclusively on Twitter

Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.

The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)

RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.

Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.

Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.

Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.

I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.

AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.

We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.

And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...

I was so sad when they’re acquired by the FB. It was a great platform

> What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at

This is some sort of absolute, fundamental difference between the early web and now, at least how I experienced it as a teen in the late 90s in Hungary. Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted. There was nobody else online from my friends, and I made new friends online. I actually found my age people on ICQ, within the same subculture.

This "oh my friends are there" approach is what destroys everything. More precisely the people who can't decide for themselves.

What would an average person lose if everybody used more open platforms?

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atrpoto is great technology but disappointing communities

most people in bluesky moved to bluesky driven by hate and fear instead of love and curiosity

i notice they talk bad a lot about other people's posts in other platforms

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In the early days of the internet it was a standard that people had different accounts on different sites and there wasn't any federation. We're doing it right now - my hacker news account doesn't work on mastodon or on reddit.

Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.

Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.

And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.

I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.

This was tried with clubhouse and that kind of failed miserably. I think those days are likely over.

The network is the people, the platform is the tech. Which do you need?

If you're engaging in discussions you need the network. If you're reading municipal weather warnings you don't really, it's just a data source that can be copied anywhere.

Likely the most astute observation in all 150+ comments.

People want to be on platforms where their friends already are. Its a hard problem to solve because how do you get their friends to move onto your platform when they're people too and have the same desire?

This is more or less the approach that the EU is taking with the DMA. As with most EU regulatory projects, it proceeds, ah, _slowly_ (Twitter isn't yet subject to it, for instance, apparently largely because historically it didn't have a high enough market cap, though the new entity where it's been tacked onto a rocket launch company and a racist LLM presumably now qualifies...)

This is the correct approach. If these American companies want to operate in our countries, and maintain their positions as our primary information channels, then they need to obey laws.

We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.

I really enjoy the "federated platforms are too difficult to use" voices on HN. Quite the hackers these guys!

I feel your pain, but what about "centralized but under control of a non-profit"? Could Wikipedia/Wikimedia serve as an example of such a model?

I would like decentralization (mostly for resilience in case of natural and human made disasters if anything), but for the control I am not sure it is better. Someone has to make a choice of what is shown. Someone has to moderate things. And I am not even sure who is the best to do that - am I capable to decide a good balance between in-bubble and out-of-bubble content; or decide about the difference between hate-speech and free-speech ? Who can I trust to do that? Would a communist/libertarian/etc. be better than an insecure wannabe dictator?

What you're describing exists: Its called AT-Protocol and runs Bluesky. See more: https://overreacted.io/open-social/

I find it hilarious that folks still consider Musk to be pro free speech.

He has shown time and again that the underlying philosophy is “free speech for me, but not for thee”…

…or more specifically “don’t tell me (and people who agree with me) what we can or can’t say”, while actively censoring opposition.

He does this without believing he is abandoning a “free speech absolutist” stance.

Blind hypocrisy? Unrestrained privilege? Both? Something else? Not sure.

This is true. Why would anyone not establishment liberal go to BlueSky? I'm playing with Nostr but these decentralized social media platforms are a no go for 90% of people. Now I'm wondering why we're talking about Twitter or political social media in general in 2026. That's long over with. Move on.

You’re an absolute helmet if you actually believe what you wrote.

There are instances full of actual Nazis on Mastodon - that we can choose to refuse to interact with those instances (yes, I've blocked a nazi instance on my instance) does not prevent them from talking amongst themselves or to people who want to talk to them.

Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen.

A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.

The "free speech" on X made it so that I had to self-censor, though. Any post about wanting cycle infrastructure in my city was met with death threats and abuse from right wing bluecheckmarked lunatics. Is that really what free speech is about?

We're talking about the "free-speech platform" that bans words like "cis" and "cisgender"?

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-whim-x-now-treats...

The platform that randomly banned journalists for using Substack?

https://newrepublic.com/post/179067/twitter-files-matt-taibb...

The same platform that banned left-wing journalists because they were criticizing Musk?

https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-journalists-f...

I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.

The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side.

When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.

If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.

Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.

Nothing in that comment mentions force?

Figuring out how to make people actually care, and also figuring out how to make migration easier would both be a big deal.

Maybe forcing the platforms to make it possible to make followers/following portable would be worth it though.

Well, considering that never actually happened...

He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.

One thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.

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Unserious comment: The big company will spin up swarms of agents whose job is to overwhelm your AI agents with legal requests / correspondence, still with the goal of making you run out of money (but now via AI spend).

AI is good at volume, bad at accuracy and nuance. Of all the tasks to go through with a fine-toothed comb (ie, manually) legal is one.

> The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf.

Someone's name needs to be at the bottom of the paperwork, and those court filing costs would also add up.

Latter is probably a factor, because merely being right doesn't mean you won't run out of money while defending yourself from lawyers

Look I wanted to like bsky but the fact is that their userbase has been doing as much rage and culture wars and engagement bait as any other. I mean look at what just happened the other day with the paint.net guy

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what is termux ?

Anna's Archive has huge data stores behind it, Nitter doesn't and is easy to replicate. You, yes you, can and should set one up right now. They can't get all of us. If you post it to #nitter:matrix.org it might even get included on the public instance lists.

You presume opposing counsel isn't using GPT-6 and other, legal-specific models trained on data ChatGPT will never gain access to. Hint: they are.

Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.

Have citations of case law that doesn't exist been addressed? It seemed like that kind of outcome being punished might make people less likely to try relying on LLM output for legal situations without an expert human performing a review.

A problem right now is that GPT-6 is just a chatbot, and wouldn't be able to file any counterclaims (which involve human lawyers and billable hours) when fElon decides to wage a battle of attrition in the courtrooms.

Optimistically assuming you can do a lot of stuff well with GPT-6 in the legal space, its still going to be a lot of money - 1. Various court fees may still be thousands 2. You still will likely need to have at least _some_ legal representation. Not as much as before, but still thousands of dollars worth 3. You need to pray that your non-legal brain can catch any issues, both strategic & tactical, that GPT-6 produces because X's lawyers will be happy to pounce.

Advice? Maybe ballpark quality if you can avoid hallucinations. The legal connections that will help net you a win, certainly not.

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I never bothered with nitter until elon made the site unusable for people not signed in. If he undid the changes and then sold the company I’d probably a bother to update the url the next time my nitter redirects stopped working.

Interesting, well too bad. Personally I find Nim more useful and productive than ever with LLMs.

Nitter uses Jester which seems dead for sure, but doing static binaries is easy. Personally I just forked Mummy to continue as MummyNG since I prefer threaded servers so things like JSON parsing doesn’t cause latency issues.

Though that being written over a year ago it’s either not a high priority or harder than it seems. I’ll be curious to see which. LLMs make it easier than ever for others to contribute or to fix up deps.

Honestly seems like a good move. It also isn't likely to be very difficult with the help of LLMs.

Keep in mind that trademarks are registered independently in different jurisdictions, so IP offices and courts are likely to not align in different countries on that point.

That means not even the court cares what Elon says anymore.

Twitter has a history of tracking down leakers by watermarks.

https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/

Nitter might want to make sure that their scrapes are bit-identical to other accounts to defeat this.

Actually i think you submitted a minute or so first.

X already knows who the maintainer is and could easily go after him.

That was a case of scraping explicitly public data that was already available to the general public without any extra effort.

I think that this is different because Nitter uses real X accounts for scraping, rather than publicly available data.

I think the friction is higher than that. With few exceptions I basically won't use any new service that requires me to create an account. I do all my online shopping on sites that offer guest checkout. Zero chance I'm creating any new social accounts at this point.

That doesn't really explain why people went there, only why they stay. I remember back in 2006 when Twitter was new and I still couldn't figure out why anyone wanted to use it. So I never did, to this day.

I left reddit a few years ago now specifically because of the confederated moderators pushing their own censorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet

Turns out only one of the major platforms banned this account…

X doesn't let people share their opinions and are very ban happy, too.

> The masses will never use HN

That's a feature I'm thankful for.

> they are control freaks over speech - they don’t let people share their opinions and they are too ban happy.

I constantly shit on capital interests here, and am thrilled they tolerate it considering what YC does as a company. This place has extremely fair moderation compared to basically all other platforms, including X (don't forget about rampant dark patterns).

> A guy like Dang will never make anything people want because he gets off too much on shutting people down.

I don't know him, but that seems absurd based on all posts I've seen by him. Also, if you want something so bad, build it yourself or stfu.