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T2_t2 | 6 years ago
IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy.
Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives.
How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants.
But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.
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