Comment by andsoitis
12 hours ago
> seeking funding
What’s the purpose of Nitter?
Elevator pitch if you will?
And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
12 hours ago
> seeking funding
What’s the purpose of Nitter?
Elevator pitch if you will?
And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
> Elevator pitch if you will?
For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.
Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,
Let’s assume the analogy to town square holds, who do you think should control it? The UN?
I'm reminded of the phrase 天下为公, which is hard to translate exactly because 公 is doing some linguistical juggling that English has a hard time matching.
I don't think twitter in its current capacity should exist, the storage should be decoupled from the filters and the filters that everyone uses should be a free market with traditional competition dynamics. It may end up looking something like twitter, but without editorializing algorithms and a single walled entry. We can quibble who owns the database I suppose.
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the EU of course, the actually functioning UN
Can you stop with the 'just asking questions' routine?
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It was only a “town square” in the minds of Twitter users, no one else thinks that about a news media propped-up social network. If anything it was a comment section attached to nothing. And comment sections all get bad after a while.
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Can I just add too, it's why 'popularity' is an incredibly terrible metric for successfulness on the web
Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it
Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is
>What’s the purpose of Nitter?
To allow people to check X without feeling they are contributing to the success of the platform, by bypassing the account requirement.
Jut dont use it, either it's useful or not. X needs revenue to continue to bypassing it illegal and should not be done. Either use X or don't.
I don’t use it, but some government organizations keep doing it. Why on earth they do that, I will never know, but I’m not making an account to read a tweet.
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> X needs revenue to continue
I think that's the point
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You don't have a choice when cities, counties, or other government officials decide to make announcements on there.
what else is illegal? adblock?
This is just like the ad-blocker discussion and Nitter is just as fine as ad blockers. Sometimes official sources make announcements via services they should be prohibited by law from using, so you need to buy into the sour apple and read these announcements by other means, whether that means using an ad blocker or Nitter. There is no copyright infringement because X does not hold the copyright on the (vast majority) of that content.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
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The purpose is being able to read X in the browser without an account.
> And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
This comes across to me as a surprising question - why do you assume there's such a bio at all, rather than it being developed by someone anonymous, as is the case for many questionably legal privacy tools?
Freeing the bird from the shackles of X.
Would you contribute funds?
I just did.
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Let’s be honest, They won’t. The users won’t fund it, as they want to use it for free.
This is what happens when people say they will “donate” but will actually wait for others to do it and little to no one donates.
What you are seeing is the bystander effect. It is why projects like Nitter will end up raising capital from VCs as they actually have money.
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Can we skip to the moat?