Ask HN: Where did the tech people on Twitter go?
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
I briefly scan X maybe once a week, but its a firehose of brainrot and view farming. My Bluesky feeds seem very politically angry and they talk about Elon more than people do on X. I feel for the anger, given the situation in the US, but it's just not mentally healthy. Mastodon is that, but worst -- share any non-mainstream thought and your replies are full of haters. I follow "famous" tech people and engineers, if it matters.
In many ways, I like it better this way. I'm forced to be bored more, and when I get the urge to check X or something, the mess that it is, curbs that pretty quickly.
I would LOVE to join a social media network that very heavily discourages political content and negative news. Just cool people who like to bond over shared interests and maybe meet up to chat once in awhile. Unfortunately that isn't what sells ads.
This may be a failure of the platform protocol. I wish the protocol was: each sentence written must be true. Grok ranking people's posts based on truth will be interesting.
I deleted Reddit, Instagram, and Bluesky off my phone last weekend (coming up on day 9 I think) and its been nice trying to readjust myself to being bored and not grabbing my phone.
The people, the moderators, the customizability, the owners, and the userbase play heavily into the quality of a "platform."
A lot of noise only works if you have a huge audience.
For more BuildInPublic/news/movies/music adjacent things it’s Threads.
> Where do you go for casual interactions with a broader range of tech-ish folk across disciplines?
I go here.
Meta's gemma team was on X recently looking for advice on MOE and reasoning for gemma.
Qwen announces on X: @Alibaba_Qwen or @JustinLin610
Basically all of linux and programming happens on X.
discord for sure has discussions. LM studio pretty much only exists there. Reddit is most just dead internet at this point.
Freenode's hostile takeover during covid pretty much ended irc. An official end to the IRC era.
>Where did they go? I have found a few, but not many, on Mastodon and Bluesky.
The USA dominates tech to be sure, so the USA political polarization would disproportionately impact this sure. But it was temporary as mastodon and bluesky declined and everyone seems to be back to X.
w.r.t. to Twitter - I was early on Twitter in 2007, deleted the account and just restarted my Twitter last week. Thankfully, got my old handle @cyrusradfar.
Folks shared there's a lot of tech folk on there. I haven't engaged yet but am building up the energy to try. Wish me luck :)