I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells.
I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, but make me explore the field in a much deeper level. Three of the fields that I have gotten 'into' because of twitter are Urban 'renewal' sort of projects (citylab, atlantic cities, etcetera), the book reviews circle, and a certain subfield of computer science I won't mention, because I'd probably be the only intersection of those fields. : P
Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply mute them. Done. (This is however NOT a apology for all the awful harassment that does happen)
I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months, so it doesn't get out of hand, and it's worked perfectly for me. I can catch up with pretty much everything that appears on my timeline. I Like twitter because it doesn't 'curate' my content for me. The day it decides to get rid of the 'everything' timeline will be the day the 'decay' begins.
Perhaps my viewpoint is tainted, but in the past six years (that's how long I've been on it/using it), the number of twitter users has been growing (at least in terms of people I know), and their quality increasing. I realize harassment is still a huge issue, but despite that, Twitter is still a great community : )
Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”?
Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yourself. If Twitter had some technology tuned to solve your specific task for a freshly registered user, it could take the credit, but it's neutral and indifferent.
Also, I can't see much difference between good ongoing conversation and a good conversation that happened thousand years ago. Part of the problem, as described in the article, is that Twitter “community” matured and generally switched from using it for transitory chirps to gathering and organizing knowledge for a long term somehow. And, as we all know, Twitter is horrible in that regard. Enormous planetary-scale log file without tools to parse it is a giant step backwards.
Twitter and facebook serve completely different purposes for me. Facebook is where I mostly interact with people I actually know in real life. I use twitter like you do, to follow interesting things. Then linkedin is people I have worked with. Each network serves a different purpose. I'd never pay for any of them though. I guess I should say I'd rather pay with my privacy.
-->>I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells.
Bravo, Bravo. This can't be more true. I don't follow friends on twitter, just news sites twitter accounts and other interesting people that I don't know in IRL. Friends don't follow me on twitter, so I'm not trying to impress people with the latest family "staged" photo shoot.
I have always argued that Twitter is nicely organized RSS feed / generator.
Twitter, I believe is a very important in spreading news, in real time. Most of the time before main stream media. Remember the guy that inadvertently tweeted the Osama bin Laden operation? Finally, since it's only 141 characters, there isn't a lot of spin on news via twitter, just the facts. At that point you can chose which direction to go with the spin...
However the internet can be a cesspool, but I see twitter as the filter that cleans out.
This just sounds like a religious argument more than anything. I would have taken it more seriously if you said "I do not find Facebook to be useful for my needs".
Instead, you're actively angry about Facebook, which is really quite similar to Twitter in many ways.
I find value from Facebook and 0 from Twitter. I've tried many times over 5 years to find use out of Twitter, and I just can't.
That doesn't mean I want it to die in the hottest fires of hell. I just means I don't care.
Same here. I started using Twitter about a year ago. Before that I thought it was just silly status updates about what someone had for breakfast. I couldn't have been more wrong. It is the counterpoint to the decay of mainstream media, always my first stop when I want to know whats happening in the world.
I can understand why it doesn't have the same broad appeal as Instagram. My brother describes it as a bunch of people who take themselves too seriously ranting about some world problem or some academic concept that nobody understands. That's probably not far off, but that's also its appeal.
FYI - Twitter has already started adding tweets to the timeline from uses you don't follow. Seems like a curated timeline is inevitable.
>I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain.
The really interesting part of this problem is the network value, not the individual value. The fact that "the network is valuable enough to you that you would be willing to pay" is precisely because of the value provided by the other nodes. Many of those nodes are present only because they do not have to pay. Demand curves are downward sloping but the value of the network is some function of the total nodes, probably the square of the nodes.
Why can't you follow the experts in that field via their site or their online communities? The depth of which they would go into their chosen subject would be much more enlightening, surely. It sounds like you just use Twitter to bookmark the links and "soundbites" experts say. How much depth can a conversation that only allows 140 characters per response relay? They are meant to be "soundbites", only telling part of a story.
You could have easily gotten into those other areas via Google or following their conversations on their online communities, no?
And yes, your viewpoint is tainted, because, as the article says, it hasn't added active US users in 2015.
A mediocre existence is no longer in Twitter's future. It's a massively overvalued public company now. There's no longer an opportunity for Twitter to take on Twilio's business model. Twitter can't pivot into a model that drops its market cap by an order of magnitude.
Never really saw the benefit or value in Twitter. People I care about are not on Twitter most of the time, or if they post, they don't post stuff I care about.
In general I found 140 character sentences are not just good enough to have a discussion (it ends up sounding curt and snippy). For links and all I just follow communities on forums (reddit, hn, github, their own sites, mailing lists etc).
> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain
Well, given that I don't see a value in it, I hope they start that too, because I think it will accelerate its downward trend and it will just be over sooner ;-)
Twitter made $502.4 million this last quarter. Wall Street's problem with Twitter isn't a lack of revenue, it's a lack of growth.
> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain.
Twitter would make less than it does now if it switched to a subscription model. How many people would be willing to pay $50 a year for Twitter? Lets be ultra generous and say a million. That's only $50 million a year in revenue.
I'd really love to see Twitter implement something approximating the reverse of Google+ style circles. Sometimes people follow me because I'm a developer, but I feel guilty when I post stream-of-consciousness nonsense into their feed. It would be great if I could separate that out - subscribe to @me/dev and/or @me/nonsense.
Of course, such complexity might put off new users, which is the problem they already have.
That's a fair point. Facebook is very very related to the emotional/interpersonal side of things. There were groups devoted to more intellectual subjects but somehow I never felt it was a place for thoughts. Twitter can be 'topics' oriented. G+ has that too. I'm starting to think that it even appeared as a defect when compared to Facebook even though it's a bit 'apple to oranges'.
> I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells.
Both are useful, but Twitter is sticking to its domain, while Facebook tries to lure the user into dependency on as many levels as possible.
it's possibly unfair, but when twitter started exerting strong control over the platform and user experience i went from enthusiastic supporter to "enh, whatever". i will be happy for them if they succeed, and i am glad that they are supporting a lot of valuable use cases, but i no longer have any emotional investment in them as a "space". their ongoing failure to address harassment properly is just the final nail in the coffin; these days, i see it as exactly equivalent to facebook - i use it because that's where the people are, but if it goes the way of myspace i'll switch to whatever replaces it without a backward glance.
So much of this. Twitter has made me become interested in InfoSec, so I follow a lot of interesting people there. I discovered Hacker News thanks to Twitter.
For example, @thegrugq and @tqbf tweet a lot of interesing things :)
Recently, within the past month, someone I follow either posted or retweeted a link to a survey about paracetamol use in accident and emergency departments in the Uk, and how it was about as effective as opiate meds for most people.
Today there are stories on HN where that link would be relevant. I would have posted a link to the tweet, and a link to the study mentioned in the tweet. But Twitter's search is not good enough for this kind of thing. I have no way of finding this tweet apart from just ploughing through the twitter streams of the four or five people who might have posted / retweeted this link.
Filtering trolls and harassers is still too hard.
Controlling what's on my feed is a bit tricky. Some people post nonsense but retweet useful to me info. Others do the opposite - the stuff they tweet is useful but the stuff they retweet is nonsense. I have limited options, and I usually just unfollow.
I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me, my profile, my twitter stream, the people I follow, etc etc. I have no idea where Twitter gets information about me, but it doesn't seem to come from Twitter.
"I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me, my profile, my twitter stream, the people I follow, etc etc. I have no idea where Twitter gets information about me, but it doesn't seem to come from Twitter."
I am very interested in this ...
We did a (roughly) 6 month long experiment here (rsync.net) in advertising on twitter - on paper it seemed like a very good idea:
- Target very specific linux/unix/backup/ZFS keywords - really low volume, hyper specific stuff - and show our rsync.net sponsored tweet.
Two things happened:
1. Zero actual results - nothing at all that could be quantified.
2. TONS of garbage/fake followers/retweets/favorites.
We tried. We couldn't make it work at all. Not for real, targeted customer acquisition. If you're pepsi and you just need people to see the word "pepsi" I'm sure it's great, but if you need to pay X and get Y customers ... difficult to see how you make that work.
> Others do the opposite - the stuff they tweet is useful but the stuff they retweet is nonsense. I have limited options, and I usually just unfollow.
There's a [good IMO] solution for this already in place, turn retweets off for those people/accounts. You can turn off Retweets for a specific user if you don’t like what they share. Select Turn off Retweets from the gear icon drop-down menu on a user's profile to stop seeing Tweets they've retweeted.[1]
> I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me
I have actually thinking about this and some ideas come up. If you don't mind me asking... What would be your ideal non-introsive ads mechanism? Maybe a relevant mention to you on a recommended tweet?
Here's the author's thesis, buried in the last paragraph with "little data to support" it:
In the final paragraphs of this article, let me assert something I have very little data to support: At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.” The public knows about conversation smoosh, and that constitutes, I think, a major problem for Twitter the Company.
I don't think I agree with the author's conclusions about "conversation smoosh" causing the decay of Twitter. Would love to hear any rethinkings/clarifications of the author's points, as I found them near inscrutable due to the convoluted structure and logic of the article.
Yeah, this was a poorly constructed article. Lost me at:
"To talk about Stewart’s theory, you have to first tackle the ideas of the 20th-century philosopher of media, Walter J. Ong."
No, you really don't.
That said, Twitter's never made it easy to digest its content. Sure there are lists, and now moments, but it's not always easy to find what you're looking for, and if you're not really careful about curating your own feed and follows reading twitter is like some sadist's idea of an exquisite corpse.
It could be that people don't feel comfortable with everyone having access to what they have to say. It could also still be as simple as not really caring what other people have to say.
I think the main point is that it is dangerous to engage in spoken-word type contexts publicly because there is no delineation between contexts that should be treated as conversational and those that should not. Conversations provide the context to say something dumb, realize it is dumb, and then learn from it without the public shaming and castigation. Tweets are eternal, whether through screens caps or similar preservation techniques.
The most compelling argument for me was about context collapse. Shifting between spoken-word contexts and written-word contexts is at the core of the issue that requires a feature like moments. Spoken-word contexts lack an explicit connection to the events they discuss and require manufacturing a context. I think moments has been great at doing this so far but its existence is a symptom of the bigger problem.
Why shouldn't Twitter have a feature common to other social media sites-like FB and G+ to allow selective followers to see each specific Tweet? Seems like a standard feature that wouldn't be too hard to implement.
Twitter is somewhat of a quantum state for me. It's a complete cesspool on the whole, but the academic community is absolutely outstanding.
I follow @Neuro_Skeptic, @StanDehaene, @practiCalfMRI, @sensorimotorlab, @davidpoeppel, among many others, and they certainly seem to squeeze a lot of insight into 160 characters.
In any case, everything I've been hearing relates to twitter not growing. I understand the pressure on investors, but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't need to grow. The niche is saturated, and there's no problem, per se.
I am being flippant here (see my other comment on this post), but giving out the people you follow on twitter would be an easy way to compromise your anonymity (assuming that those accounts don't have a large overlap of followers). Just wanted to raise awareness, and point out there are very likely companies that make money by identifying people by the accounts they follow.
Maybe it will seem as a dumb question, but how Twitter can be in the loss (in order of millions of US dollars) since day one, without (IMHO) clear path to profitability and not be bankrupt?
It is growing, but it still has huge losses. Do investors believe it will be hugely profitable 5-10 years from now?
Well, I think the recent 'Favorites' to 'Like' change is a bad omen with structural and community reverberations that will be felt over time. It's a gut instinct, but when 'established' brands and formats like Twitter or Reddit jiggle with the cords, there's backlash - deserved or not. It's the danger of making a tool for 'mobs of people' if you're okay with calling a user base that.
The "between a rock & hard place" I see happening is that the need to add new people tends to, well, bring out some bitterness from previous devotees. I saw it happen first-hand with Half-Life Deathmatch. Every patch that made significant changes (ex: tweaked splash damage, amount tau cannon could pierce walls, etc) seemed to favor getting more users to play the game, which did kind of breed a hostility from the 'old guard' to pillage, plunder, and destroy all the newcomers with abandon. After all, the changes were to make it easier, the learning curve smaller, and those who had made it to the next level(s) felt sold-out. It was a microcosm, and probably isn't too relevant, but it's about the best example I can think of that I witnessed first-hand.
I'm sure a lot of people had the thought or joke in mind, but changing the 'Star' to a 'Heart' might be pretty awkward if the company ever has to tweet out an announcement of a round of layoffs. These are minor edits, sure...but remember when Coca-Cola changed the recipe? That didn't go over so well.
I very much doubt that will work. People will just install ad blockers instead. You'd be surprised what lengths many people will go to in order to avoid spending even $1. It isn't poor people either: in my experience the well-off who have time on their hands because they aren't busy living hand-to-mouth are more likely to spend a pile of their time instead of giving you that $.
"As an information propagation device Twitter is peerless, but the Tragedy of the Commons - and in this case the commons is your time - is happening all over again.
When multiple individuals acting independently behave only in their own self-interest they will ultimately deplete a shared but limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen, as happened in the original Tragedy of the Commons over land usage".
Twitter never solved this problem and if you want to use it I'd suggest you have to spend a lot of time pruning who you follow and searching for people who are adding value to your life. Very time consuming....
I'm consistently disappointed at the (IMHO) mischaracterization of Twitter's woes by prominent writers. While I realize that they are experiencing some real stress, and yeah, it should get fixed, I think they're blind to Twitter's real problem.
Simply put: twitter is, for those without an audience, a strictly one-way medium. There is no social network or medium that is less interactive to the relatively anonymous, save perhaps a standalone blog. You're shouting into the vacuum, which is disheartening and eventually people just stop and eat their tweets.
The opposite of love is total indifference.
I would argue that twitter is actively encouraging this one-way-ness, which is going to be their downfall, because Twitter as a feed aggregator is high-noise and feature-poor. All of my "suggested friends" on Facebook (who got this right) are people who might reasonably care about anything I have to say. All of my suggested follows on Twitter are people who could not give one single fuck. (It's ok, I forgive you just this once Elon Musk. I'm not tearing your poster off my wall or anything. Although you're missing out on a goldmine here.)
It is a shame, because yet another news aggregator is highly unnecessary at this point in time, but number of two-sided social networks of Twitter's scope you could count on the fingers of one hand.
This article was trash. If the author thinks that Twitter's main function is finding out what your friends ate for dinner then he's an idiot and doesn't use Twitter. Twitter's problem is exactly this. The general Internet population thinks it's like Facebook but less useful and with a character limit. They have a branding problem
All the Twitter accounts I'd ever want to follow have fairly infrequent status updates so I just add them to my RSS reader and follow them that way instead of having to interact with Twitter's website or application in any way.
> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.
This is the key.
Twitter has a serious problem with abuse, and it's not the abuse that's usually talked about. At any point, anything you say -- no matter how anodyne -- can be ripped out of context by someone with malevolent goals and then used to trigger a global outrage storm. This has resulted in death threats or people even losing their jobs. I wouldn't post on Twitter any more than I'd take a shortcut through a dark alley in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. Why take the risk?
The only people who seem to be making money off twitter are journalists, who can now dash off a 1000-word "Thing trends on twitter" article in seven minutes without having to leave the office.
> In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation.
This seems to point to the main problem of Twitter: it's not clear who your audience is. Are you talking to your friends? To your family? To people with similar interests? To people you're trying to convince to agree with you on some position? Who? It's too... vague a medium to be useful for most kinds of communication.
You are completely right. In a sense, it is also what draws people to Twitter. There is a low barrier to entry if you want to make an account to just broadcast to your family, fans (if you are celebrity), advertise for companies, collect people for activism (whether political, economic, or social media activism), etc.
Then again, there are probably better mediums for this. If you want to talk to your friends, why not use Facebook? If you want to advertise your art, why not go on tumblr or Soundcloud? Nowadays, the only Twitter accounts that seem to get much traffic are celebrities and companies (I am thinking particularly Twitch as I don't go on twitter much) advertising.
About the only thing I have used Twitter for is writing topical one-liners related to the Comedy Central television show @Midnight's "Hash Tag Wars" segment.
It makes me think I'm funnier than I actually am. But I also have to sift through a lot of bad and mediocre humor in order to get a good laugh from all the amateur comedians that participate.
There may be future conflicts between the people using Twitter for casual socialization and jokey-jokes and those using it as a serious platform for news distribution, public relations, political activism, or announcements.
There's just no good way to keep your vaguely prejudiced or non-PC attempts at humor away from the social justice warriors that will pick it up, sharpen it to a razor edge, and cut your throat with it. If you're at an open-mic night, you just get booed. If you're on Twitter, you might get fired from your day job, too. But there's an upside. If you Tweet one of your baby steps on the long road to beating cancer to your 6 followers before going to bed, you might wake up the next morning to a Harpo Studios production assistant ringing your doorbell.
No one is really listening to you on Twitter, but anyone could be.
Richelieu's maxim: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Twitter's corollary: "If you give me 140 characters from the most unremarkable of feeds, I will find in them an excuse to dogpile upon the author."
I've recently heard Twitter described in a way I believe is accurate.
It's a broadcast platform; most people use it broadcast OUT, but very few people use it to consume. Sure, there is some conversation, but primarily, people read their @ replies/notifications. I often will go several hours or a whole day without checking Twitter; the reality is that there are tons of conversations I missed that just disappear.
But if someone hits me with an @ message, I will see it.
> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.
Unfamiliar with Damocles [1], I had to look it up. It seems to be quite a vividly pertinent metaphor. The brevity with which statements are made on Twitter delivers shortcuts for others to react, acting as the single thread of the horses tail that holds the sword.
> At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.”
That's always been the point with Twitter for me. There are very few things that I want to discuss in front of potentially every person in the world. I wonder why it took so long for people to realize it.
Writing this here is not the same as writing on Twitter, different size.
[+] [-] benten10|10 years ago|reply
I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, but make me explore the field in a much deeper level. Three of the fields that I have gotten 'into' because of twitter are Urban 'renewal' sort of projects (citylab, atlantic cities, etcetera), the book reviews circle, and a certain subfield of computer science I won't mention, because I'd probably be the only intersection of those fields. : P
Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply mute them. Done. (This is however NOT a apology for all the awful harassment that does happen)
I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months, so it doesn't get out of hand, and it's worked perfectly for me. I can catch up with pretty much everything that appears on my timeline. I Like twitter because it doesn't 'curate' my content for me. The day it decides to get rid of the 'everything' timeline will be the day the 'decay' begins.
Perhaps my viewpoint is tainted, but in the past six years (that's how long I've been on it/using it), the number of twitter users has been growing (at least in terms of people I know), and their quality increasing. I realize harassment is still a huge issue, but despite that, Twitter is still a great community : )
[+] [-] ogurechny|10 years ago|reply
Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yourself. If Twitter had some technology tuned to solve your specific task for a freshly registered user, it could take the credit, but it's neutral and indifferent.
Also, I can't see much difference between good ongoing conversation and a good conversation that happened thousand years ago. Part of the problem, as described in the article, is that Twitter “community” matured and generally switched from using it for transitory chirps to gathering and organizing knowledge for a long term somehow. And, as we all know, Twitter is horrible in that regard. Enormous planetary-scale log file without tools to parse it is a giant step backwards.
[+] [-] johnward|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chad_strategic|10 years ago|reply
Bravo, Bravo. This can't be more true. I don't follow friends on twitter, just news sites twitter accounts and other interesting people that I don't know in IRL. Friends don't follow me on twitter, so I'm not trying to impress people with the latest family "staged" photo shoot.
I have always argued that Twitter is nicely organized RSS feed / generator.
Twitter, I believe is a very important in spreading news, in real time. Most of the time before main stream media. Remember the guy that inadvertently tweeted the Osama bin Laden operation? Finally, since it's only 141 characters, there isn't a lot of spin on news via twitter, just the facts. At that point you can chose which direction to go with the spin...
However the internet can be a cesspool, but I see twitter as the filter that cleans out.
okay, I got to get back to work...
[+] [-] rconti|10 years ago|reply
Instead, you're actively angry about Facebook, which is really quite similar to Twitter in many ways.
I find value from Facebook and 0 from Twitter. I've tried many times over 5 years to find use out of Twitter, and I just can't.
That doesn't mean I want it to die in the hottest fires of hell. I just means I don't care.
[+] [-] mgalka|10 years ago|reply
I can understand why it doesn't have the same broad appeal as Instagram. My brother describes it as a bunch of people who take themselves too seriously ranting about some world problem or some academic concept that nobody understands. That's probably not far off, but that's also its appeal.
FYI - Twitter has already started adding tweets to the timeline from uses you don't follow. Seems like a curated timeline is inevitable.
[+] [-] phrogdriver|10 years ago|reply
The really interesting part of this problem is the network value, not the individual value. The fact that "the network is valuable enough to you that you would be willing to pay" is precisely because of the value provided by the other nodes. Many of those nodes are present only because they do not have to pay. Demand curves are downward sloping but the value of the network is some function of the total nodes, probably the square of the nodes.
[+] [-] pmlnr|10 years ago|reply
If everyone would agree, we'd all be using https://app.net/.
[+] [-] kafkaesque|10 years ago|reply
You could have easily gotten into those other areas via Google or following their conversations on their online communities, no?
And yes, your viewpoint is tainted, because, as the article says, it hasn't added active US users in 2015.
[+] [-] debacle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|10 years ago|reply
Never really saw the benefit or value in Twitter. People I care about are not on Twitter most of the time, or if they post, they don't post stuff I care about.
In general I found 140 character sentences are not just good enough to have a discussion (it ends up sounding curt and snippy). For links and all I just follow communities on forums (reddit, hn, github, their own sites, mailing lists etc).
> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain
Well, given that I don't see a value in it, I hope they start that too, because I think it will accelerate its downward trend and it will just be over sooner ;-)
[+] [-] onewaystreet|10 years ago|reply
Twitter made $502.4 million this last quarter. Wall Street's problem with Twitter isn't a lack of revenue, it's a lack of growth.
> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain.
Twitter would make less than it does now if it switched to a subscription model. How many people would be willing to pay $50 a year for Twitter? Lets be ultra generous and say a million. That's only $50 million a year in revenue.
[+] [-] untog|10 years ago|reply
Of course, such complexity might put off new users, which is the problem they already have.
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anunderachiever|10 years ago|reply
Both are useful, but Twitter is sticking to its domain, while Facebook tries to lure the user into dependency on as many levels as possible.
[+] [-] zem|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eloy|10 years ago|reply
For example, @thegrugq and @tqbf tweet a lot of interesing things :)
[+] [-] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
Today there are stories on HN where that link would be relevant. I would have posted a link to the tweet, and a link to the study mentioned in the tweet. But Twitter's search is not good enough for this kind of thing. I have no way of finding this tweet apart from just ploughing through the twitter streams of the four or five people who might have posted / retweeted this link.
Filtering trolls and harassers is still too hard.
Controlling what's on my feed is a bit tricky. Some people post nonsense but retweet useful to me info. Others do the opposite - the stuff they tweet is useful but the stuff they retweet is nonsense. I have limited options, and I usually just unfollow.
I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me, my profile, my twitter stream, the people I follow, etc etc. I have no idea where Twitter gets information about me, but it doesn't seem to come from Twitter.
[+] [-] rsync|10 years ago|reply
I am very interested in this ...
We did a (roughly) 6 month long experiment here (rsync.net) in advertising on twitter - on paper it seemed like a very good idea:
- Target very specific linux/unix/backup/ZFS keywords - really low volume, hyper specific stuff - and show our rsync.net sponsored tweet.
Two things happened:
1. Zero actual results - nothing at all that could be quantified.
2. TONS of garbage/fake followers/retweets/favorites.
We tried. We couldn't make it work at all. Not for real, targeted customer acquisition. If you're pepsi and you just need people to see the word "pepsi" I'm sure it's great, but if you need to pay X and get Y customers ... difficult to see how you make that work.
[+] [-] frostmatthew|10 years ago|reply
There's a [good IMO] solution for this already in place, turn retweets off for those people/accounts. You can turn off Retweets for a specific user if you don’t like what they share. Select Turn off Retweets from the gear icon drop-down menu on a user's profile to stop seeing Tweets they've retweeted.[1]
[1] https://support.twitter.com/articles/77606
[+] [-] pmelendez|10 years ago|reply
I have actually thinking about this and some ideas come up. If you don't mind me asking... What would be your ideal non-introsive ads mechanism? Maybe a relevant mention to you on a recommended tweet?
[+] [-] roymurdock|10 years ago|reply
In the final paragraphs of this article, let me assert something I have very little data to support: At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.” The public knows about conversation smoosh, and that constitutes, I think, a major problem for Twitter the Company.
I don't think I agree with the author's conclusions about "conversation smoosh" causing the decay of Twitter. Would love to hear any rethinkings/clarifications of the author's points, as I found them near inscrutable due to the convoluted structure and logic of the article.
[+] [-] hissworks|10 years ago|reply
"To talk about Stewart’s theory, you have to first tackle the ideas of the 20th-century philosopher of media, Walter J. Ong."
No, you really don't.
That said, Twitter's never made it easy to digest its content. Sure there are lists, and now moments, but it's not always easy to find what you're looking for, and if you're not really careful about curating your own feed and follows reading twitter is like some sadist's idea of an exquisite corpse.
It could be that people don't feel comfortable with everyone having access to what they have to say. It could also still be as simple as not really caring what other people have to say.
[+] [-] knoble|10 years ago|reply
The most compelling argument for me was about context collapse. Shifting between spoken-word contexts and written-word contexts is at the core of the issue that requires a feature like moments. Spoken-word contexts lack an explicit connection to the events they discuss and require manufacturing a context. I think moments has been great at doing this so far but its existence is a symptom of the bigger problem.
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omginternets|10 years ago|reply
I follow @Neuro_Skeptic, @StanDehaene, @practiCalfMRI, @sensorimotorlab, @davidpoeppel, among many others, and they certainly seem to squeeze a lot of insight into 160 characters.
In any case, everything I've been hearing relates to twitter not growing. I understand the pressure on investors, but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't need to grow. The niche is saturated, and there's no problem, per se.
[+] [-] samsolomon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benten10|10 years ago|reply
: )
[+] [-] trymas|10 years ago|reply
It is growing, but it still has huge losses. Do investors believe it will be hugely profitable 5-10 years from now?
Is this new normal in business?
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|10 years ago|reply
The "between a rock & hard place" I see happening is that the need to add new people tends to, well, bring out some bitterness from previous devotees. I saw it happen first-hand with Half-Life Deathmatch. Every patch that made significant changes (ex: tweaked splash damage, amount tau cannon could pierce walls, etc) seemed to favor getting more users to play the game, which did kind of breed a hostility from the 'old guard' to pillage, plunder, and destroy all the newcomers with abandon. After all, the changes were to make it easier, the learning curve smaller, and those who had made it to the next level(s) felt sold-out. It was a microcosm, and probably isn't too relevant, but it's about the best example I can think of that I witnessed first-hand.
I'm sure a lot of people had the thought or joke in mind, but changing the 'Star' to a 'Heart' might be pretty awkward if the company ever has to tweet out an announcement of a round of layoffs. These are minor edits, sure...but remember when Coca-Cola changed the recipe? That didn't go over so well.
[+] [-] mschuster91|10 years ago|reply
Offer your users a cheap way to opt out of ads (1$ a month) and you'll make far more money than you could ever do with ads.
[+] [-] dspillett|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olivermarks|10 years ago|reply
"As an information propagation device Twitter is peerless, but the Tragedy of the Commons - and in this case the commons is your time - is happening all over again.
When multiple individuals acting independently behave only in their own self-interest they will ultimately deplete a shared but limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen, as happened in the original Tragedy of the Commons over land usage".
Twitter never solved this problem and if you want to use it I'd suggest you have to spend a lot of time pruning who you follow and searching for people who are adding value to your life. Very time consuming....
[+] [-] warcher|10 years ago|reply
Simply put: twitter is, for those without an audience, a strictly one-way medium. There is no social network or medium that is less interactive to the relatively anonymous, save perhaps a standalone blog. You're shouting into the vacuum, which is disheartening and eventually people just stop and eat their tweets.
The opposite of love is total indifference.
I would argue that twitter is actively encouraging this one-way-ness, which is going to be their downfall, because Twitter as a feed aggregator is high-noise and feature-poor. All of my "suggested friends" on Facebook (who got this right) are people who might reasonably care about anything I have to say. All of my suggested follows on Twitter are people who could not give one single fuck. (It's ok, I forgive you just this once Elon Musk. I'm not tearing your poster off my wall or anything. Although you're missing out on a goldmine here.)
It is a shame, because yet another news aggregator is highly unnecessary at this point in time, but number of two-sided social networks of Twitter's scope you could count on the fingers of one hand.
[+] [-] luisjgomez|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avens19|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] korisnik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 13thLetter|10 years ago|reply
This is the key.
Twitter has a serious problem with abuse, and it's not the abuse that's usually talked about. At any point, anything you say -- no matter how anodyne -- can be ripped out of context by someone with malevolent goals and then used to trigger a global outrage storm. This has resulted in death threats or people even losing their jobs. I wouldn't post on Twitter any more than I'd take a shortcut through a dark alley in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. Why take the risk?
[+] [-] hugh4|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdegutis|10 years ago|reply
This seems to point to the main problem of Twitter: it's not clear who your audience is. Are you talking to your friends? To your family? To people with similar interests? To people you're trying to convince to agree with you on some position? Who? It's too... vague a medium to be useful for most kinds of communication.
[+] [-] SpaceManNabs|10 years ago|reply
Then again, there are probably better mediums for this. If you want to talk to your friends, why not use Facebook? If you want to advertise your art, why not go on tumblr or Soundcloud? Nowadays, the only Twitter accounts that seem to get much traffic are celebrities and companies (I am thinking particularly Twitch as I don't go on twitter much) advertising.
[+] [-] logfromblammo|10 years ago|reply
It makes me think I'm funnier than I actually am. But I also have to sift through a lot of bad and mediocre humor in order to get a good laugh from all the amateur comedians that participate.
There may be future conflicts between the people using Twitter for casual socialization and jokey-jokes and those using it as a serious platform for news distribution, public relations, political activism, or announcements.
There's just no good way to keep your vaguely prejudiced or non-PC attempts at humor away from the social justice warriors that will pick it up, sharpen it to a razor edge, and cut your throat with it. If you're at an open-mic night, you just get booed. If you're on Twitter, you might get fired from your day job, too. But there's an upside. If you Tweet one of your baby steps on the long road to beating cancer to your 6 followers before going to bed, you might wake up the next morning to a Harpo Studios production assistant ringing your doorbell.
No one is really listening to you on Twitter, but anyone could be.
Richelieu's maxim: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Twitter's corollary: "If you give me 140 characters from the most unremarkable of feeds, I will find in them an excuse to dogpile upon the author."
[+] [-] silverbax88|10 years ago|reply
It's a broadcast platform; most people use it broadcast OUT, but very few people use it to consume. Sure, there is some conversation, but primarily, people read their @ replies/notifications. I often will go several hours or a whole day without checking Twitter; the reality is that there are tons of conversations I missed that just disappear.
But if someone hits me with an @ message, I will see it.
[+] [-] decisiveness|10 years ago|reply
Unfamiliar with Damocles [1], I had to look it up. It seems to be quite a vividly pertinent metaphor. The brevity with which statements are made on Twitter delivers shortcuts for others to react, acting as the single thread of the horses tail that holds the sword.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles
[+] [-] jmadsen|10 years ago|reply
That only lets you hide images, mute hashtags, etc on mobile, not from a regular browser?
Where every answer to "why doesn't this work normally?" is suggestions to go buy a third-party tool?
Twitter is unfortunately "annoyingly useful" but I would love to see a different, open source solution gain decent traction
[+] [-] pmontra|10 years ago|reply
That's always been the point with Twitter for me. There are very few things that I want to discuss in front of potentially every person in the world. I wonder why it took so long for people to realize it.
Writing this here is not the same as writing on Twitter, different size.
[+] [-] edandersen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patsplat|10 years ago|reply
Presently it provides a less spammy equivalent to linked-in groups. Sort of like delicious in it's hey day.
Discussing media theory is challenging. Something of the OP's point is demonstrated by personal example. But it's never a simple conversation.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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