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Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”?

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.

> 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.

I doubt Twitter is going to share its database with anyone for free. Either way, it is still subject to the same rot everything else on the Net is (hardware failures, purged, deleted and reclaimed accounts, “private” data visibility, etc.)

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.

That is a ridiculous hyperbole, haha. I'm rolling my eyes.

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.)

> a lot of academic CS celebrities seem to be active there Would you mind sharing the list? I might start using Twitter to follow those people.

Twitter does not do a good enough job of curating the huge amount of high-quality content it holds for new Twitter subscribers. You said it yourself:

> 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.

For the same reason we never see the phrase "TCP/IP made me a lot of money", true as it may be.

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.

“X's twitter made me smarter”, “Y's blog made me smarter” and “Z's RSS made me smarter” are OK.

It's hard to see how it's Twitter's, Wordpress', or ACME RSS reader's credit.

Twitter and facebook serve completely different purposes for me. Facebook is where I mostly interact with people I actually know in real life. I use twitter like you do, to follow interesting things. Then linkedin is people I have worked with. Each network serves a different purpose. I'd never pay for any of them though. I guess I should say I'd rather pay with my privacy.

Nothing wrong with using Twitter to meet people IRL. It seems weird to force those artificial boundaries on your social networks.

Perhaps I've just missed it, but my problem with twitter is this: Is there a way to send messages to just these 10 people, and not all 100 followers? That's what I need from a social network. I need a public (everyone can see) channel, and I need channels (that I control) that are visible to specific individuals and groups.

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.

I've never used it, but in interviews, Mark Cuban describes Cyberdust as a social network that allows that, claiming it's a reason he invested in it.

Google+ does all this and more. How I wish Google hadn't tied the name to the youtube cleanup / real name policy.

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.

There are group DMs now.

Facebook messenger has group messaging. Just use that. You can message people who you aren't "friends" with.

That seem like natural boundaries to me. That's what the platforms target. I wouldn't want the random people that follow me on twitter knowing the kind of things I post on Facebook.

It doesn't seem weird to me in the least, it's the nature of those two products that points in those directions. Sure Facebook wants you to make everything public, and sure Twitter offers private profiles and some private features like DMs, but in general they naturally gravitate towards the type of usage the GP describes.

I've used Twitter to meet like minded people, however, I think the main distinction is that I don't use Twitter (in general) for interactions with people I met outside of the Twitterverse

I've actually recently designed a concept around the interest graph of Twitter that I think would be a step in the right direction.

Twitter Rooms: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a

amazing

Rooms is an interesting direction. Twitter is part RSS reader, part chat room. It would be nice to follow hashtags on a topic, but then spammers would flood the hashtags with ads.

That's definitely something to figure out. I have a few thoughts about it, I just didn't wanted to keep the post short(er). But yeah that's a great point.

I just wanted to keep the post short(er)

So... an IRC channel? Feels like joining a Star Wars room wouldn't differ from `irc.Twitter #StarWars` other than platform. The creator of an IRC channel is the Op and can promote others to be Hops (moderators). IRC channels are generally based on what can be seen as the equivalent of a hashtag...
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?

IRC on Twitter would be popular if only because Twitter is about a frillion times more popular than IRC.

Exactly.

Isn't this what lists are, albeit perhaps more prominent?

-->>I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells.
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...

This just sounds like a religious argument more than anything. I would have taken it more seriously if you said "I do not find Facebook to be useful for my needs".
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.

Same here. I started using Twitter about a year ago. Before that I thought it was just silly status updates about what someone had for breakfast. I couldn't have been more wrong. It is the counterpoint to the decay of mainstream media, always my first stop when I want to know whats happening in the world.
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.

>I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain.
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.

The only reasonable way to monetize twitter is to find someone who is already making money out of it. Then get a slice of that pie. They still make a profit, so you aren't wiping out 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.

> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain
If everyone would agree, we'd all be using https://app.net/.

They didn't want my money and now I don't care anymore. Don't know about the current situation there but for a long time they only accepted credit cards. We in Germany don't use credit cards the same way US Americans do.

Why can't you follow the experts in that field via their site or their online communities? The depth of which they would go into their chosen subject would be much more enlightening, surely. It sounds like you just use Twitter to bookmark the links and "soundbites" experts say. How much depth can a conversation that only allows 140 characters per response relay? They are meant to be "soundbites", only telling part of a story.
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 don't use Twitter for having in depth conversations in those fields I'm interested in. I use it for finding and sharing the sites and articles where you do go into depth. With the amount of people invested in Twitter, it's easy to find good posts on a regular basis.

It's the commentary that has the value. Reading a paper is a large mental investment. Reading a conversation is a conduit into 'maker' time. It gets the juices flowing.
I get lost on twitter just to see what the world has to offer, and sometimes I find something amazing.

Couple of responses:
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.

With regard to point 2, isn't this what newsletters are for or email notifications? I get notifications of sites I have subscribed to via email. I find it is still a very reliable and good source because my email lists are curated to suit my needs all in one place. I get payment notifications, site update notifications, and correspondences to varying lengths with people. It's pretty great, actually!
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.

First para: I mention social network elsewhere. Give me group emails, with everyone replying to everyone else, and give me the ability to see only those emails that people I care about are sending, and give me a limit in the size of an individual emails so they don't get unwieldy, and you will have given me Twitter.
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.

I'm getting really tired of this argument because it's both wrongheaded, ignorant, and will not die.
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.

A mediocre existence is no longer in Twitter's future. It's a massively overvalued public company now. There's no longer an opportunity for Twitter to take on Twilio's business model. Twitter can't pivot into a model that drops its market cap by an order of magnitude.

> I really hope twitter somehow makes money.
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 ;-)

> I really hope twitter somehow makes money.
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.

I'd really love to see Twitter implement something approximating the reverse of Google+ style circles. Sometimes people follow me because I'm a developer, but I feel guilty when I post stream-of-consciousness nonsense into their feed. It would be great if I could separate that out - subscribe to @me/dev and/or @me/nonsense.
Of course, such complexity might put off new users, which is the problem they already have.

That's a fair point. Facebook is very very related to the emotional/interpersonal side of things. There were groups devoted to more intellectual subjects but somehow I never felt it was a place for thoughts. Twitter can be 'topics' oriented. G+ has that too. I'm starting to think that it even appeared as a defect when compared to Facebook even though it's a bit 'apple to oranges'.

> I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells.
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.

Maybe, but practically every change Twitter makes is to make it look and work more like a Facebook timeline.
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.

it's possibly unfair, but when twitter started exerting strong control over the platform and user experience i went from enthusiastic supporter to "enh, whatever". i will be happy for them if they succeed, and i am glad that they are supporting a lot of valuable use cases, but i no longer have any emotional investment in them as a "space". their ongoing failure to address harassment properly is just the final nail in the coffin; these days, i see it as exactly equivalent to facebook - i use it because that's where the people are, but if it goes the way of myspace i'll switch to whatever replaces it without a backward glance.

So much of this. Twitter has made me become interested in InfoSec, so I follow a lot of interesting people there. I discovered Hacker News thanks to Twitter.
For example, @thegrugq and @tqbf tweet a lot of interesing things :)

Make sure you follow @SwiftOnSecurity

Really? I recently tried Twitter and those 2 were the near the first ones I added along with Ken Popehat. There's so much RTing and noise I found it rather uninteresting. HN has a way, way, higher signal-to-noise ratio. Twitter feels like a constant competition to see who can write clever one liners.
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.