Is it lack of adjectives and positive or negative extensions that throws you of? This is hacker news, I'm talking about technical things. And you want me to limit myself to user experiences rather than back and forth on nerdy technicality?

Edit to reply to the the reply below, apparently speed is frowned upon in HN:

> Maybe this analysis helps:

This is hyperbole :)

>> Generally don't like AJAX

> Not quite sure what AJAX has to do with this - I don't think Mastodon differs from Twitter here? In the sense that it has webpages that make requests to servers without reloading the page.

AJAX is said to be an improvement, exactly why?
The implications is that it "improves" the platform.
The reason why is well, pun intended, objectifying "documents".

>> it's JS and XML

> This is confusing as well. You refer to XML, which is probably due to the first method of sending HTTP requests without a full page request being the XMLHTTPRequest DOM API. I'm not sure if XML was necessarily involved when that was the only method, but I'm quite sure no XML is involved at all in Mastodon. But even if it was, it's not quite sure what the problem of that would be for you as a user.

Let's perhaps agree that hashtags suffice. Value add for opportunities in the backend does nothing for the users. For it's the enforce "internet bubbles".

>> Twitter services don't require Stylesheets or XLS as it's called

> This one is really hard to parse. My intuition would be that you're talking about Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), the method commonly used to define what a webpage looks like. But then you also mention XLS, which I assume does not refer to Microsoft Excel's file format, but I'm not quite sure what it does refer to - maybe you meant XSLT? But both Mastodon and Twitter use CSS (and I can't imagine you being against that), and neither uses XSLT?

XML is in a family of initiatives for preserving text an data across platforms and formats. Stylesheets allow you to EXPLAIN in a parseable way what that tagged data is supposed to look like as presentable information.

>> XML is bloated and creates metadata for sale.

> As far as I know XML only contains the data the developers put in there, and the same would be true for alternatives such as the more commonly used JSON. And again, there's no XML in Mastodon.

It's tagged data and information, as in metadata and widely abused in the "semantic web" that mostly has value to those that sell user data for-profit. Try and follow the thought train from the premises in the technology and the industry of today.

>> In addition to AJAX allowing Orwellian advertisement influence.

> So I guess your point is that somehow there's more advertisement influence at Mastodon than at Twitter? Again, it's entirely unclear how that would be the case.

Because of these technologies, it can be sold to investors as such. It may just be there for being told it is better due to to easier route to as a paid-for service.

> To sum up: it's probably downvoted because there doesn't appear to be reasonable criticism in here, and in fact, there doesn't really seem to be any content that one could even technically criticise.

Really?

> I hope I at least made clear why I was unable to understand your post, or even to criticise it. I might have misunderstood, in which case do enlighten me, but it can at least explain why people downvote you. Hope that helps.

Not in the slightest, but this dialogue is far more useful than having to ask why something is down voted prior to there being an exchange of arguments.