Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn from It) – Bad Words | Hacker News Reader

Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn from It) – Bad Words

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10 pointsawjr4 comments

I think the article makes two distinct and contradicting points. On the one hand, Twitter is home to cliques. These seem to be closely knit communities that amplify each other's voices (like activists, gamers, feminists, and academics). On the other hand, Twitter is full of abuse. Which one is it? The cliques (or the "ists" in the author's lingo) clearly find enough value in the platform to remain. Presumably they do not abuse each other within the group. "Everyone else seems to have left in a hurry." So we are talking about some kind of unaffiliated audience that gets abused by small cohesive communities? It is a strange logic that is not spelled out clearly.

TL;DR I don't like that people can say mean things on twitter

Well gosh what a negative nancy you are, summarising things up like that!

Umair has, I feel, a completely valid point. Twitter is a big open service for snippets of comments. Anonymity is pretty good (excluding privileged access, e.g. law enforcement requests) so it positively encourages any and all participation, even absolute shit talking.

And sadly that kind of thing happens again and again, and twitter took so long to publically appear to address it that it certainly gives the impression it wasn't something they were either anticipating or didn't have a way to easily deal with.

I think his argument is fairly compelling. Unrestrained abuse of a social service will drive people away. The daily vitriol generated by gamergate (on both sides of the argument) is a pretty obvious point of reference. There are a lot of people out there that have zero interest in any sort of meaningful dialogue and why would anyone want to have to sit on the receiving end of that should they find themselves unlucky enough to be caught in those crosshairs?

My summary is the sole reason that this guy thinks twitter might be dying. Nothing about problems making a successful business out if it (which seems to be the main topic of this place). Don't get me wrong, I hope it does die. I hate the modern web and it consolidating content into a few silos.

"Meaningful dialogue" is not a feature that twitter is capable of providing. Not just because it's limited to 140 chars. Allowing arbitrary length tweets is pointless. It would degenerate into any other blogging platform.

If abuse is such a huge problem then it cannot be solved with the current architecture. Everyone has a block button but I can see that endless new accounts get around that. What each person needs is their own filter. Problem is that twitter would never allow that. People would use it as an ad filter which defeats the entire point of the platform.

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