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

> Twitter could have been a town square. But now it’s more like a drunken, heaving mosh pit.

Nitpick: every mosh-pit I've ever been to has been a safe and supportive place. If someone falls down, they're picked up. If they get hurt, the mosh pit instantly clears out a space so they can be helped. If someone's being an asshole, they're kindly escorted (cough) out of the pit, and likely out of the venue.

Interesting theory, but for me it does not hold up. The problem isn't people feeling abused in various ways - it is that people don't know what to do with Twitter. So they sign up, have a poor experience and churn. I don't have data on it, but I expect there is an enormous number of people who signed up, sent a single tweet and never came back.

Why the fuck is there a 420 kb image on top of the article? I really really hate this kind of modern minimalist webdesign. Just show me that article and don't include any unnecessary images.

> The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today. It is greater than censorship, regulation, or (ugh) monetization. It is a problem of staggering magnitude and epic scale, and worse still, it is expensive: it is a problem that can’t be fixed with the cheap, simple fixes beloved by tech: patching up code, pushing out updates.

Abuse = services being used in ways that are not intended, or approved of, or sanctioned by... someone. It is inherently hard to classify behaviour as either abusive or not, and for those who are sure, it's inherently impossible to reach consensus. Furthermore, "patching code", and "pushing out updates" should not be seen as being necessarily cheap and simple (that's kindof a lot of the hard part, on the contrary). The way users use a service stems from how it is designed (although perhaps not always predictably or even deterministically).

I'm skeptical that the core issue with twitter is abuse. It is certainly rampant and should be addressed. I'm skeptical an average users with 130 followers(a guess) experiences any abuse.

The on boarding of new users and the echo chamber effect seem like a much bigger issue.

In a nutshell, as these companies grew(number of users), the utility of the community started to decline.

Think about it: what's the main use of Twitter? It might have fostered a great community in the past, but it's become too broad and filled with fake users, shallow communities and users.

Not self-promoting, but I've written about how many companies are facing the same issue as Twitter.

http://tonomics.xyz/2015/09/28/Stay-for-the-tool.html

This is what Facebook are tackling with their real names policy. Now I like this policy, and have openly said so. I think anonymity on the Internet was fine back in the day when it was a small community of like-minded people with the unwritten but unbreakable rule "what goes online stays online". But it doesn't scale to the general population. And the most abuse I get on FB is when I say this, usually by friends-of-friends, whom I sort-of know IRL and what they really want is just to keep on using the same "gothic" nickname they had on IRC or LJ... I haven't reported anyone because that's not my style, but I'm getting a bit bored now of being called "transphobic" by someone who goes by a name something like "Prince Darkbat".

I flagged this article, since IMO, it's a tired, uninteresting, zero-evidence screed that pushes a discredited and dangerous narrative (i.e. that incivility is a bigger problem than censorship)

Literally everything about this is without merit. It's a polemic, not a thesis. This evidence free diatribe glorifies a non-specific past where 'abuse' and 'electronic violence' were apparently less prevalent, and raises 'abuse' above censorship on the list of things that threaten the web.

Where to start... Twitter, like all other such public blogging services, offers simple quick block and mute tools. These tools won't prevent brigading, but then luckily 'electronic violence', being imaginary, can't harm you. Smaller communities (such as subreddits) are free to exclude members on whatever basis they like - and hence overly sensitive web users can reside in their digital safe spaces to their hearts content. However, when you reside in the commons, you are open to public criticism.

To participate in the digital commons is to open oneself up to numerous confounding psychocultural narratives. Some of which are vehement to the point of incoherence. But to close oneself off from the possibility of discussion because of 'abuse' is to be so afraid of disagreement as to wilfully cut oneself off from the possibility of learning from disagreement.

Twitter certainly isn't growing at the same rate, but to describe it as 'dying' is ludicrously over the top. Further, to suggest a more virtuous, less 'abusive' past is to engage in a golden age fallacy. Certainly the intellectually and socioeconomically elite users of the early days of the web were more utopian. But to cite 'abuse' as the reason for the authors perceived decline, rather than censorship, balkanisation, advertising, and of course the 'eternal September' is absurd.

The kind of 'abuse' the author seems to be arguing against - i.e.: not threats, but vehement group criticism, can be upsetting. But it is of course 'trivial'. Since it can be escaped entirely by switching ones electronic device off, or simply logging off a given service for a few days. It's quite distinct on the one hand, from the relatively rare and extreme mass public shamming addressed by John Ronson's new book. And genuinely threatening harassment (already illegal everywhere in the West) on the other. The writer's solutions 'humility, gratitude, reality' are phatic, non specific and without direction or meaningful content. As is his critique.

Oh shucks. And here I was thinking about trying it. I guess my inertia has saved me from kilohours of wasted time and effort!