• @Salvo@aussie.zone
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    992 years ago

    Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great. It isn’t advertising, or social manipulation, or exorbitant subscription fees and API charges. It isn’t restriction of speech or freedom of speech, it isn’t algorithmically controlled moderation and curation.

    It is the people that make a social network great.

    • HiramFromTheChi
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      2 years ago

      It is the people that make a social network great.

      You’re right. I say this every time these conversations come up. It’s the people that hold the power. Imagine how quickly things would change if everyone stopped using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, etc. overnight. From billions/millions to users, to zero. Can you imagine how quickly the companies would change/adjust/pivot/react?

      Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great.

      Disagree. They know. It’s just that they’re trapped in an unethical business model that will never allow them to make it great. This is because the platform’s interests are constantly at war with the user’s interests. This was a critical mistake in the earlier days of the internet.

      Google itself identified this in the early days in a paper that they wrote. They originally just wanted to organize the internet. But with an advertising revenue model, the interests of the advertisers was ultimately gonna be more important.

      Call it “enshittification”: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

    • @volodymyr@lemmy.world
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      62 years ago

      While it is true, there are also some factors which make people converge on some platforms. Factors beyond simply presence of other people. Like technical features.

      • HiramFromTheChi
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        12 years ago

        You’re not wrong about there being multiple factors, but I’d argue that this is often the least important factor. The technical features are easily replicated. (See: threads, stories, reels/tiktoks/shorts, etc.)

        Network effects, on the other hand, have a stranglehold like no other.

        You’re on Facebook because your family’s on there. You’re on Twitter because your favorite meme pages are on there. You’re on Instagram because the photographer you really like is on there. So on and so forth.

      • @Salvo@aussie.zone
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        22 years ago

        The biggest technical feature that draws users is the Interface. Twitter didn’t gain popularity (or even the Bird icon and “tweet” moniker) until Tweetie, Twitteriffic and eventually Tweetbot came along.

        Reddit was just a website for (no offence intended) “neckbearded basement dwelling incels” until RiF and Apollo made it more accessible.

        Mastodon usage soared when 3rd Party Twitter apps were killed and once once again when Ivory was released.

        I didn’t even know about Lemmy until I heard ‪@christianselig@mastodon.social‬ and ‪@gruber@mastodon.social‬ mentioned it on The Talk Show. I didn’t start using it regularly until I discovered wefwef and Memmy.

    • @rambaroo@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      They don’t care about making a great or even good product. It’s solely about making as much money in as short a time period as possible, regardless of the long term consequences.

      • @TechnoBabble@lemmy.world
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        72 years ago

        I don’t have access to Twitter’s balance sheet, but I’d wager a guess that they’re on financial life support in the short term, and they’ve got a stage 4 cancer diagnosis in the long term.

        The only thing Twitter has going for them over a competitor like Mastodon or Threads, is their name. And Musk has made sure their name is covered in shit and mud.

        Twitter was doomed before Musk bought them, and they’re super doomed now.

      • Obinice
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        132 years ago

        What consumers and products? I only see numbers on a spreadsheet going up and down!

    • Niello
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      2 years ago

      Wonder how much of it is because of Threads and how much of it is from making the site inaccessible without accounts and the rate limit.

  • Tygr
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    1352 years ago

    Good! Hope to see the same stories about Reddit and other major social media platforms that have taken steps to prioritize profit over the community.

    The users are your golden apple. Abuse them, the apple turns sour.

    • @necrxfagivs@lemmy.world
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      1102 years ago

      I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m barely using reddit/twitter and now I spend most of my online time on Lemmy/Mastodon.

        • HiramFromTheChi
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          22 years ago

          +1 to this. I’ve had way more insightful conversations on the Fediverse—with less followers/recognition/brand—than on any centralized platform.

          Love the discourse. Makes me think, allows me to learn, consider new perspectives, etc.

        • @illi@lemm.ee
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          92 years ago

          Yeah, I’m feeling this is more on Meta having excelent timing with Threads unfortunately

          • @EliasChao@lemmy.one
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            2 years ago

            Rather than excellent timing, I would bet that Meta saw the writing on the wall the moment Twitter started doing cuestionable things under Elon. I don’t think they would’ve launched Threads to compete against pre-Elon Twitter.

            Also, albeit small in overall users, there’s been a constant exodus of users ever since Elon took over, so they are trying to capitalize on that.

            No social network dies over night, but with Threads racing to become the mainstream text-based social media, Twitter will be slowly becoming irrelevant, until it dies.

            Edit: Grammar

            • @WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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              32 years ago

              I was curious about this. Turns out meta started talking about a Twitter competitor app in November, and started developing it in January.

              Threads is a direct response to Musk buying Twitter.

          • @iod@lemmy.ml
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            172 years ago

            ugh don’t remind me… i get your point but i still wish for the Fediverse to become more accessible

            btw there is a Tiktok clone for the fediverse called Goldfish, although i haven’t tried it lol

            also, nice username

            • @vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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              12 years ago

              Its entirely possible tiktok will be banned by the feds here in the US sooner or later which will most likely nuke a large chunk of anglosphere content. So we may see a shift away from it sooner or later.

        • @NightOwl@lemmy.one
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          222 years ago

          That’s fine. The user base doesn’t need to be in the nine or ten figures to have a community that has decent activity. Even with the thousands activity has been impressive, and that’s with all this fragmentation across instances too.

    • @sauerkraus@lemmy.world
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      72 years ago

      I thought the proverb was: cook a golden goose and you’ll eat for a day. Teach the golden goose to lay eggs and you’ll eat for a lifetime.

      Gold is edible btw. Or at least inedible and non-toxic. It passes through without chemically reacting.

      • @bighi@lemmy.world
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        122 years ago

        Give a man a fire, you’ll keep him warm for a night. Light a man on fire, you’ll keep him warm for the rest of his life.

      • Tygr
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        12 years ago

        Mine was just made up on the fly. Been playing Zelda Tears of the Kingdom lately and had to round up some golden apples for something, lol

  • dakar
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    2472 years ago

    Turns out forcing people to use Twitter less makes people use Twitter less, what a discovery!

    • GunnarRunnar
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      1642 years ago

      But have you considered paying $8 a month to use features that used to be free and also associate yourself with far right?

  • ntzm [he/him]
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    1362 years ago

    The fact that people who have paid get to have their replies appear first means that you see the people with the worst opinions (people who are fine with giving Musk money) most of the time, just makes it a very un-fun experience.

  • Jaysyn
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    1742 years ago

    If you’re still on Twitter, you’re part of the problem. I don’t care about your excuses.

  • fearout
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    332 years ago

    To the surprise of no one besides Musk, probably

  • YMS
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    312 years ago

    On a side note: Why is this image (from Threads, don’t know the version accessible on Twitter, as it’s not accessible to me) a JPEG, and a very much compressed one, too? You see non-tech people sharing screenshot JPEGs all the time, but they are usually in okay quality and only degrade when shared and edited a lot. This one is basically unreadable from the beginning, and it’s posted by a guy who studied computer science and leads a leading tech company since 14 years. Or is it really Threads transcoding and downgrading images so much?

    • YMS
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      2 years ago

      In the meantime I remembered the existence of Nitter (and that it still works!), and there the screenshot is a JPEG, too, but in much better quality (https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF0mvPmYaYAEUxU9.jpg). So it seems like, yes, the tech CEO publicly posts graph images as JPEG, but he does it in good quality, and it’s the photo sharing community’s microblogging service that kills the image uploads there by compressing them to death.

      EDIT: In the next meantime, Threads itself seems to be dead, at least the embeeded tweet (or thread, or whatever they call it) in the Verge article has been replaced by a “View on Threads” button which leads me to an absolutely blank page.

      • Excel
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        62 years ago

        Instagram completely mangles image quality, and Threads seems to be tied into Instagram stuff on the back-end, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s happening here.

  • tamas
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    -222 years ago

    I’m here for the schadenfreude, but it’s horrible PR for Cloudflare to post the traffic graph of one of their customers tanking. And their CEO doing it, no less.

    • @addie@feddit.uk
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      12 years ago

      If I were Akamai, I’d be sure that my sales team knew to bring it up casually in conversation with every customer. Can’t buy trust, have to earn it, and you can squander it all so easily.

    • trafficnab
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      162 years ago

      It’s free widespread advertisement for cloudflare, we’re even talking about them right now

        • Maiznieks
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          62 years ago

          The opposite, they do great things abd they have awesome products. Yes, they are expensive, but good too and you can get good stuff for free too.

    • Neon
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      492 years ago

      It’s not a graph of their protection product(s), it’s a graph from their DNS-service.
      They don’t get the Data from Twitter, they get it from the Users

    • nefarious
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      242 years ago

      I’m not sure Twitter is a Cloudflare customer. There’s no Cloudflare infrastructure referenced by the DNS entries for twitter.com.

    • flipht
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      2 years ago

      A random online estimator told me about 27m for a high school in the US. So like 1466 if you round that up to 30m for easier math.

      • Trebach
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        162 years ago

        They built a new elementary school down the road a few years ago. It cost $63 million, so about 700 of those.

        • flipht
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          62 years ago

          Might make sense. Cost seems to be 250-800 per square foot depending on construction method and quality.

          The example I looked at was for a two story 130,000 sqft I think. But some districts shovel all students into one mega school, so they would be huge and much more expensive.