The Decay of Twitter
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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 : )
My soccer team (in general, some overlap obviously) doesn't need to know about my ballroom dance plans or my BJJ tournament or my date this Saturday. And none of them need to know about my family reunion plans (zero overlap), though I may post some photos to the public channel.
If the adoption in my friend groups had been higher, G+ seemed perfect for this to me. FB with effort, making groups that I invite people to. But I want it to be transparent. I want you to see me, not me(soccer) and me(ballroom). If you happen to be in both, it's the same, not separate spaces.
My opinion is that real names policies mostly should die. Basically the idea that real names will cause people to behave is a fallacy for a number of reasons:
1. Trolls use fake accounts
2. Some people seems to honestly believe that "just nuke Iran/Syria/Israel/Gaza" is a smart comment
3. or they don't care about the consequences of posting dumb stuff.
The only people you stop with real names policies are those with dissenting opinions, who don't make fake accounts and who feel they have something to lose.
Twitter Rooms: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a
You'd have to find a way to sell this as something different than IRC, because I doubt the idea of "IRC on Twitter" has never crossed Twitter's mind. What differentiates it other than being hosted on Twitter?
If everyone would agree, we'd all be using https://app.net/.
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.
I think there are two groups doing making some money. Advertisers and reporters/data analysts. The fist wants more visibility, the latter wants analyzing tools. How you separate businesses from power users? Beats me.
Going the "premium account with premium price" route may work good for a while. But you are practically scripting how your competitor could overtake you. All they have to do is give that premium content for free. This happened here in Finland. We had popular service called "irc-galleria" which was quite close to facebook. You needed premium account to befriend people. When facebook came, irc-galleria took about year to fall into obscurity.
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.
Given that Twitter is overrun with trolls, especially women-hating gamergate-style trolls, it's rapidly losing its value. See, for example http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/132152537305/talking-publicly...
You don't get that on Facebook.
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...
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.
I get lost on twitter just to see what the world has to offer, and sometimes I find something amazing.
0) Your arguments seem to be targeted at social media in general (eg. why I can't follow them on their sites, etc). Don't want to get into a conversation on benefits/disbenefits of social media
1) There was nothing in my comment to imply that my friends were from the U.S (they are not), but as I said, the user growth could be just for me.
2) >Why can't you follow the experts... Twitter IS their online community. As everyone has mentioned, it's like RSS, where everyone is, and they let me know when their 'communities' are updated. Because I wouldn't want to check a hundred sites every day.
3) A tweet is 140 characters. All large tweeters post texts as images to get over the limit. People often engage in multi-tweet conversation. The 140 char limit is useful there because twitter shows how many tweets the user has in the conversation. If you're not interested, you don't encounter a wall of text: you see a tweet, and then bail out. Subtlety is lost in 140 characters, but if both parties are looking for a fair conversation, they usually engage in multiple tweets.
4) I do indeed use twitter to bookmark. I also use twitter as RSS. And to get to know people I don't know and follow them too. As a public social media. You could also have Googled 'arguments for and against twitter' and be done with this entire thing, but you chose not to. : ) Twitter is a community, and that's what people are there for.
As for point 3, text images seem like a poor way to digitise text, because it makes it very unsearchable and is prone to pixelation if you are writing a lot of it. It seems like a silly solution to something that was never a problem.
Actually, I sense a hostility in your response that I sense in Twitter users often when I bring up things I don't agree with. I am not at all attacking you, but rather find the way users use Twitter interesting, because it is something I no longer do. I know every single point you have made because I was a Twitter user for about 4 years -- I deleted my account last year.
Why would I Google arguments for and against Twitter when what I am interested is in your opinion? I would hate to put words in your mouth.
Yupp, text images are a poor way to digitize text. They're way backwards. And twitter has awful, almost non-existent indexing/search. And the bullying/harassment issue is out of hand. I still get utility from following people I follow.
I've been put in this position to defend twitter, and really man, I am not a particularly big twitter fanboy. It's a product that I enjoy using. I don't see a point in converting anyone ( I would, if it were MS vs Gmail argument). If you want to understand, just join in and follow people you aspire to be in conversations with. I follow popular professors, researchers, publications, celebs, etc, and I like it. You might too. That's all I can say.
Why can't you follow the experts in that field via their site or their online communities?
What's easier, entering your email address into every random person's website, or just clicking "follow" on their name on one website so you get notified when they post?
This sounds like the web service version of the "less space than a nomad" comment. Other people have different use cases, you know?
The depth of which they would go into their chosen subject would be much more enlightening, surely.
We've got this thing called hyperlinks - A headline and a URL easily fits in 140 characters. Of course nobody's reading academic papers on http://twitter.com, nor does anyone expect them to.
How much depth can a conversation that only allows 140 characters per response relay?
How much needs to be?
Twitter is not a primary communications medium - we have email for that. It's not meant to be a primary news medium, we have blogs for that. However, it serves very well as a pointer to those things. It's a centralized pub/sub notification system.
And if you want to have a "conversation" with someone on Twitter, you've got direct messages, which are not subject to the character limit.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
For example, @thegrugq and @tqbf tweet a lot of interesing things :)
Even with a few follows, it became entirely unmanageable. Plus the Twitter web UI sucks so much that trying to catch up is a nightmare. Clicking anything causes a saving throw vs bad engineering to determine if I'll be reset to the top of my stream. Plus it's slow (as in laggy UI).
Despite being super excited at first (hey, it's 2015 maybe I'll "get" Twitter this time around and find it as awesome as all these smart people do), I quickly ended up not using it at all.
Edit: I'll note that I think very highly of Thomas and Ken and other people I followed, and in other venues they seem to provide tons of reading value. Not that they should be obligated to do so on Twitter, of course! Just that if even high-quality folks don't make a compelling usecase for staying on Twitter, I'm not sure how I'd ever get value out of it.
Of course, such complexity might put off new users, which is the problem they already have.
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.
Certainly an exaggeration. The recording of the log file is itself a massive step forward. The tools can come later.
Archaeologists sure have tools and methods to reconstruct life in Pompeii, but it's still nothing like real-life observation (and it citizens would probably prefer real-time seismic data to becoming a part of history, too).
No matter how “trending” some bustle is and how big the hubbub it generates (and how unbelievably important media want to present it), after a few weeks you can't practically “rewind” to it. Heck, you can't even find out what user wrote at some point in time! It's considered unimportant. Twitter may be praised for its countless virtues all the time, but, no matter what you do, single message's value rapidly declines to zero after a short period of time. You can organize them any way you want and post information as valuable as you can bring forth, it all returns to nothing. That's why I compared it to transport protocol: it knows nothing about the importance of of payload and doesn't interact with it, and delayed data is of little use.
…Who said “screenshots”? Seriously, no one would believe all the tech support stories about silly people sharing desktop screenshots in Word files would result in it becoming the acceptable way of spreading information in 2015.
A lot has already been written about global turn of the Web from more and more complex schemes of data organization to concept of mindless, useless infinite “stream” of half-finished minutiae (presented in pastel colors with rounded corners).
P.S. Of course, NSA seems to have the solution for this problem. I wonder if its data will be available sooner than in, say, 50 years GULAG prisoners waited to see their own cases declassified.
I can justify: I do not have to 'actively' go out to seek for information that I might be interesting/relevant to me: it comes to me. It's better than reddit because I see posts only by people vetted by me, so that's my 'filter'.It's better than email, because it's open conversation, and it's better than RSS because it's a 'social-network'. The network effect brings in the 'celebrities' (or, cool people, as I see it)
Yeah, twitter search sx ba*s. I'm hoping they make an agreement w google to figure out some sort of indexing. Regardless, it's pretty nifty. Highly recommend. Specially considering a lot of academic CS celebrities seem to be active there. (I do not come from SV eng background, so it might be a different community.)
> If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter.
> Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply mute them.
> I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months
All of the above steps are time consuming, and a lot of people (including me) simply can’t be bothered or don't have the time, or both!
Last time I created a new account I entered some basic details and in return a bunch of well-known Tweeters were offered up, none of whom I was actually wanted to follow. That was the sum-total of the on boarding experience and I was left with nothing useful. So what do I do? I start posting content and following people - adding more content almost randomly in a hope that something sticks.
Twitter absolutely nailed the input side of their user experience. Adding content is almost too easy, hence the amount of bullshit “here’s what I ate this morning” tweets. Imo their next mission should now be to help new and existing users discover high-quality content.
Reddit does a better job of this using their sub-reddit approach and it’s entirely because this curation is perfumed for me that I return there more regularly than Twitter.
Twitter provided the mechanism for the parent to access the information from those people. You might as well be saying the same useless thing about RSS or blogs.
It's hard to see how it's Twitter's, Wordpress', or ACME RSS reader's credit.
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.
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 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?
If the ad network is slurping all my data they should use that info to serve ads that have some relevance to me.
I'm happy for stuff to end up in my twitter stream. I'm not happy for anything to sound like it's come from me, or has my endorsement or recommendation.
Once you're given any control of your ad stream, your perceived responsibility for it increases.
Could have a sort of "tinder for endorsements" built into the platform, refreshed once every week maybe, that lets companies request your endorsement for a particular ad/message.
You flip through with an endorse/don't endorse (and some granularity around "I'll never endorse" this) and have that tied to a custom decay function where your endorsement expires and needs to be requested again.
Maybe you have a paid sub to opt out of this system entirely. And for those who don't want to pay or endorse, ok, let's see if the other mechanisms are enough to support them too.
It wouldn't even need to be particularly evil stuff: I'm convinced that my public profile would be enough to sell me e.g. half a dozen good books per year.
I am not the OP but the answer to question is very close to my heart.
The pinnacle of non-intrusive online ads have been the original Google search ads. They were out of the way, clearly marked as ads - and hence could be visually filtered out. They were pure text, so could be neatly included as elements on the rendered page. And they were always targeting an INTEREST. Not an individual.
So I would take that as the minimum acceptable advertising behaviour. Not implying that it's perfect, but it's a clear set of ground rules. With that in mind, _my_ ideal, non-intrusive ads mechanism builds on the following rules:
* Ads must never be inline to page content
* Even when clearly out of the way, ads must not be allowed to mimic page content; they must be clearly marked as ads
* Text only.
* I might accept an image within the ad, provided it was always served from the content provider's system.
* As an extension to previous point: if the served image size would exceed a notable fraction of the page size, it must not be included in the output.
* No user tracking of any kind.
* No third-party javascript. Ever.
* At most 15% of display real estate allowed to be used by ads. Including the padding in the UI. (Counts as space denied from content.)
* Not allowed to affect page content load times. Ad material must be included at the end of the page code. If your service pushes ads from internal and separate system, hard timeouts must be imposed: if the internal system cannot serve an ad within an allotted time, the frontend must never be forced to wait. You just missed an ad impression. Tough.
* If clicking an ad takes a user through a bounce page, all identifiable information from the user must be stripped. Bounce page or redirect must not impose any further page loading delay.
* No beacons
Breaking even one of the rules automatically disqualifies you.
If you, as an advertiser, find these rules unacceptable - well, then we are in mutual disagreement. I find your ads equally unacceptable and treat them as a form of cancer.
However, as a genuine service to the user... please allow the user to search for ads that have been displayed to them. Preferably by display context. I would be glad to return to a subject at a later date and search for something I remember seeing earlier.
The above is still not ideal, but everything that behaved according to it would at least be palatable.
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.
In all seriousness, I've had a lot of people say they keep seeing rsync ads on twitter and ask me if you're trying to poach my customers. I always tell them that you're a good guy and I'm sure you wouldn't do that.
We also have a lot of people who don't even know that there are sponsored tweets (ads) on twitter and thought we were blatantly spamming them ... so they blacklisted/ignored us and sent complainy emails.
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]
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.
"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.
Perhaps Buzzfeed type listicles are more your speed then? Every time there's an article like this posted on HN, there's inevitably someone who posts, "Fewer words! More facts!" (Bonus points for you for getting in a dig about them useless Humanities!)
A thesis isn't right or wrong; it's presented and supported. It's an idea. This is literary journalism. Some people, myself included, enjoy it.
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.
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.
A friend of mine who wants to be a forensic pathologist follows a coroner who posts autopsy photos and asks people to guess the cause of death. She has something like 500k followers. It's amazing all the micro-celebrity that's possible, but as a user you have to know where to find it.
How is that even legal?
shudder
It's a meaningless platitude. Because people will migrate toward a more pleasant experience. They will choose things that require less effort.
Even in regards to Twitter, the "who you follow" myth is particularly ridiculous. Know how one negative comment in a stream of 100 positives can ruin your day?
One friend on a bender can ruin your whole Twitter night. One sporting event can drown out your favorite intellectual writers. "Scope what I read by username, sort by time" is a fun but flawed concept.
: )
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?
It is not as unreasonable as you might think. Look at how fast Facebook's earnings are growing in the last 2-3 years. Investors hope Twitter can replicate this, even if it is at a smaller scale. Whether they are right or not is obviously up for debate, and you can take part in this debate by buying/selling/shorting Twitter in the stock market.
Their problem isn't that they can't make money. It's that their valuation means investors expect them to make a ridiculous amount of money. So all revenues are plowed back into R&D.
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.
As to user backlash, this happens with every change to a social media site and it almost always blows over. There's nothing out there to threaten Twitter's place and I doubt this has or is causing people to leave the platform. No one's going to drop it because there are now hearts instead of stars.
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.
If they are from people you have actively chosen to follow then the source isn't twitter anyway and you can just unfollow those users if you don't like what they post.
If they are extra items in your display then there will likely be some marker to pick up on. Even if not then someone somewhere will start a service where people can report advertising tweets so subsequent the plugin can remove those from the feeds of subsequent users who use the service... Or perhaps Bayesian filtering as used for email? Not perfect in either case but someone will try and have at least some success.
Of course if the paid posts are truly unidentifiable then presumably that look like they were posted/shared by someone they were not posted/shared by, in which case the service is completely untrustworthy and you should just stop using it because nothing it tells you na be relied upon.
Caveat: I don't use twitter and aren't particularly likely to in future, so I have no particular axe to grind here but might misunderstand how things work.
Look at how many people buy stuff in Free2play games, and it works because it's dead simple (enter your appstore password, click "confirm" and be done - and you can even disable the password verification). Time to buy literally less than 10s if done well.
Now compare this to a typical micropayment on a desktop site:
1) Payment provider forces autocomplete off => remember which email you signed up with
2) Payment provider disables password pasting => manually type in your secure 32 char password
3) Two screens of confirmations, if you're extra unlucky you have a two-factor stuff in the loop, too
4) Redirect to the original content (compared to mobile, where payment is an overlay)
Total time wasted: minimum 2-3min.
To make stuff worse: PayPal e.g. demands 20ct of 1€ transferred, and German VAT takes another ~15ct AND corporate taxes (assume them at 10ct, and even then it's low) - which means you're out 50% of the payment value after fees and taxes. Not very profitable...
Oh, and another thing I forgot: often enough even paying for a newspaper/service doesn't get rid of all adverts! In my eyes that's outright fraud. And even if services DO disable all ads, I have yet to see one that also cuts the data-milking tracker services. I paid for the product, so I'm NOT the product any more.
"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....
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.
...except for the fact that he says the opposite in the article.
Twitter also removed direct RSS support for tweet feeds, and I did't like the hassle of having a third party in between.
It'd be really awesome if there was a tweet-ish open standard that anyone could implement, ala email or RSS (but supporting encrypted/password protected feeds). I feel like Google would be the perfect company to do it, but they decided they don't want to pander the nerds, and instead force G+ down our throats. (G+ I like. I just don't like how no one else is there)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
"chaining together multiple messages. 2/2"
The best thing about having to keep things within 140 characters is that everyone else has to keep things within 140 characters. If I wanted to read their blog - I'd go read their blog. If I wanted Twitter to be like Tumblr, I'd have a Tumblr.
You post your PGP key ID and fingerprint in your profile, but a key ID is just the last eight digits of the fingerprint.