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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

That was the same spot I lost interest as well. Way too verbose.

That's the problem I have with many of these articles, the journalists try to make use of their philosophy degrees and make nothing into something.

It's as if they're paid by word count. If anything they should constrain word count, much like a certain micro-blog network.

>That's the problem I have with many of these articles

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.

I enjoy long-form articles, but I still prefer the concise over the verbose.

Damn journalists, using their education to write an informed article!

As someone who enjoyed the article and got some good insights, I think it's your loss that you "lost" yourself at that point. Maybe you don't like the writing style, but there were some fresh ideas in there that people don't normally talk about when they talk about Twitter.

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.

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