how does grok even compare to the rest of llms? it seems like it was just Elon throwing up shit because he wants Twitter to be as big and bad as Google and Facebook, and even Google has been really fumbling trying to compete with Microsoft and openai, FB has been surprising with their more open approach open models and Mistral seemingly came out of nowhere with some great tech.
Is grok really noteworthy or is it just a nothing burger?
I still don't know why seemingly no one has been able to create a good clone of 2010-2015 Twitter. Mastodon is clunky, BlueSky was invite-only for so long that people lost interest, and any "free speech" version gets flooded by the "I want to say slurs without consequences" crowd.
I almost wished we lived in an alternate universe where the gist of the announcement was something like, "I'm coming back to twitter, and will work to make the platform decentralized and open sourced...like gnu social, mastodon, etc." Oh well.
Twitter could have been a much broader tool. There were all sorts of workflows that could have been built around Twitter with an API.
But unfortunately Twitter is now reduced to being a global version of your local coffee shop billboard, at best, and the crazy guy calling himself the next Jesus Christ in the public square.
That's why I think Twitter would've died anyway (or deflated).
It was quite hard to consume niche information without posts from outside the community to pop out. The solution to this was to only read tweets with hashtag you wanted to follow, and not what was 'trending', but Twitter interface got a bit in the way. The new Twitter version have a sightly better interface, but much worse content imho (on the hashtags I followed). Also I can't read discussions without login in, and that's just a killer point.
Twitter may be worse for developers (more's the pity, I was at Chirp in 2010), but it's a vastly better platform in terms of content discovery, curation and consumption. I fail to see how any amount of cohesion from the RSS community could have overcome that, even in a world of simple, ubiquitous pub-sub, or whatever ideal one might imagine for syndication technology. I'd be really happy to hear how that battle could have been won, though.
The same thing could of been said about twitter when it first came out. Recreating the feature set would of been very easy, but ultimately the feature set was not what made them successful.
Yes like GNIP around that time these firehose startups were amazing and it was a golden age of metadata and then Twitter Killed the Golden Goose. Bring back open data! Let Open Source and all the hackers from second order efforts give back value to Twitter's Value.
Pre-Elon Twitter was arguably the last major social media site that actually supported some subset of the "open web" people like to reminisce about here. Articles had the possibility of going viral because the old Twitter didn't downrank external links so heavily, and even encouraged it with the ability to view all quote tweets (another feature X just disabled).
And now it's gone. I think it's fine to mourn that.
They really needed this to exist about 6 months ago or whenever it was that Musk bought Twitter. There was a mass exodus then to Mastodon, and if they’d have brought this out then I reckon they would have done a good job of immediately dethroning Twitter as I reckon lots of journalists and writers would have jumped on board. Now they’re going to have to do it the long hard way and try and build the audience organically. I reckon they might be able to do it, but it’ll take them at least a few years because they missed the golden goose.
I don't think anyone is truly shocked by the notion that Twitter is over-staffed with a lot of fat it can cut. They were not exactly employing a lot of "builders", as they had not updated any new features for quite some time.
It was a reaction against Elon Musk, and the desire to find a Twitter-like social network that's more human focused with less news, etc. But it's very bare bones right now. You can't do a lot of the common things that made Twitter so good, such as searching to see if AWS us-east-1 is down by people posting tweets.
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