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Comment by proksoup | Hacker News Reader

They became the defacto place for public discussion instead.

The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe?

Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?

I am not sure I would call what happens on Twitter discussions. It's a great platform for posting things that are easily misunderstood or taken out of context due to their brevity. Then someone starts a witch-hunt, which in turn sparks a counter-witch-hunt. In the end no one is any wiser, but everyone is little more bitter.

I think the appeal of Twitter is feeling "in the loop" due to the real-time nature of the service. But in reality most of the content is just meaningless noise. It's hard to find any signal on that platform.

Plenty of what you mention is true and is a major problem with Twitter. That said, there remain some vibrant, niche Twitter communities where discussions do take place (the NBA comes to mind immediately)

Minor League Baseball as well. Speculation about scouting reports, and potential call-ups is really fun. I'm a huge baseball fan (as I imagine many here might be), and this kind of thing is just not talked about on SportsCenter and it adds a human element to The Game. Concur about the NBA. NBA-Twitter is awesome.

Twitter is a huge, huge place and your conclusions are massively over-generalized. There's lots and lots of good stuff: analysis of news stories, humor, statistics, low-level or amateur reporting. Covering tons of niches: sports, politics, music, "Black Twitter".

It's true that it's a poor platform for adversarial conversation or debate, but that's no reason to dismiss the whole thing.

I've been on Twitter for seven years and in that time I've curated a timeline which is, bar none, the most entertaining and informative web destination available to me, specifically tailored to my interests and disposition.

They could have kept the 140-char service as a free service, to raise the profile of their brand. And it probably would have been more successful without the increasingly desperate attempts to "monetise" it by stuffing your timeline with keyword-based advertising.

Meanwhile, every app or website with a messaging or notification function could have been using (and paying for) Twitter's API and infrastructure underneath. And all using a single Twitter account, so that every subscription to any of their customers' services would be a new account for them.

It could have been a great business model, but their leadership did have the imagination to try anything other than keyword advertising.

And they would have given up control of the experience, and the types of discussion and interaction would have been different, and the "X and Y fought on twitter last night" would have become "X and Y fought on Zthingthatintegrates with twitter" instead.

It's where famous and infamous people go to boast and to brownnose each other and score points. It's a forum to continue high school style social interaction (peer pressure and peer approvals) Or, as nirvana said, territorial pissings.

It's also good as a breaking news medium.

That social approval is what defines what's socially acceptable everywhere.

Twitter has expanded the boundaries of politically correct / acceptable speech, by enabling that brown nosing and echo chamber re-enforcement and not cracking down further on what's acceptable speech on their medium.

I agree with most of your assessment and would add that I find that so much "meaningful content" is now almost required to be packaged and "sold" as a Twitter bite. So much meaningful and necessary content is not reducible to 140 characters, but gets overlooked because it wont garner the social points that it needs to make the poster "popular" or the content recognized.

Even our political campaigns are now reduced to tweet wars, and platforms seem to need to be (lossy) compressed into 140 characters, or maybe 3 if it's very important. If you have a string of longer than 3 tweets, you lose a majority of your audience.

Twitter is a good tool, but simply should not be the de facto anything other than short messaging, in my opinion.

Yes. Journalism is about sensationalism created by out-of-context sound-bytes, which is exactly what Tweets provide due to their 140-character limit.

Twitter is probably the best thing that has happened to low-quality journalism over the past 15 years.

> They became the defacto place for public discussion instead.

I've always view Twitter as the commerical break and news teasers for the internet. I rarely see good thorough discussions on Twitter especially anything expected to last more than 30 hours of relevance.

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