Twitter Has an Old Media Problem, Here’s a Solution | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Has an Old Media Problem, Here’s a Solution

nytimes.com

66 pointshvo62 comments

There's a bizarre focus on Larry Page buying it for whatever reason. Sounds almost like a plea.

But hey, let's imagine that's possible - why do we want Google guy to run Twitter, too. What does that solve? Google has already tried and "failed" in the social area, Page buying it doesn't strike me as some kind of panacea.

What this election cycle has proven to me is that the old media and rapidly more and more of the new media censors things they or various friends of theirs don't agree with, and that doesn't sound like a path to a healthy society to me. The media's problem isn't about being "Old", it's about trust, and expecting people who have built the modern landscape to take a different path seems naive.

There's no evidence that modern social or political discourse is made better by Twitter. Some people seem convinced that Twitter shouldn't just die as is natural. Why?

Twitter strikes me as a platform where the existing media and celebrities pat themselves on the back. Of course media would think it such an important tool, but the average person doesn't get value from it unless we really like to hear Donald Trump's unfiltered thoughts at 3 AM. Personally, don't find that especially compelling.

Edit:

The country’s pre-eminent newspapers, including this one, have long been controlled by families who have understood that the press is not just an ordinary industry, but a civic calling. Twitter is not yet treated as hallowed, but it has the makings of an institution that could be.

I find this in particular hilariously out of touch. At least we're now admitting that families control the country, but let's not act like what the press has been doing for some time now is is anything like a civic calling. This election wouldn't be a complete disaster if the media had been doing its job instead of entertaining or pandering. If that's the standard that the media is holding itself to, then Twitter doesn't have a high bar to clear.

I think when dealing with twitter it's a mistake to talk about the "average user". Just because there aren't clear boundaries between subcommunities doesn't mean they don't exist.

And there are a lot of communities which derive real value from Twitter. Few of them could be described as news, they're more like "fandoms". Fandoms of TV shows, sports, pop stars, books, comics, games. Also what now look like "political fandoms". And just like football there's a fan hooligan problem at the edges. The "ultras" need to be corralled away from everyone else they're throwing abuse at.

Various people have pointed out that, on Vine, it was young black kids who were doing especially well on the platform. There's a substantial "black twitter" as well, not just related to the specific issues of BLM but covering entire fields of entertainment and politics.

(A paper from the dawn of Twitter on communities and social nodes; the specifics will be out of date but I think the principles still hold http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf )

In a similar sense, it seems like there's an additional fixation (I see it in a lot of places) on thinking of Twitter as a news platform. It's true for obvious reasons that Twitter can "get you closer to the action" and you can "see things happening in real time" (I guess), but I'm still skeptical that we should think about it as a news platform for the exact reasons you outlined.

I've seen it pointed out here elsewhere that Twitter and sports can sort of go hand in hand. I do enjoy watching the World Series feed, or if there are solid NBA match-ups NBA Twitter can be pretty fun.

I'm not really sure what that means, other than (gulp) maybe Disney could actually find some use for it with ESPN content? Trying really hard, here.

The worst is when you read a news "story" that is basically fluff using 3 - 4 hand-picked tweets as citation to justify its thesis. As if snarky one-liner reactions to events on Twitter somehow constitute news.

Here's a great picture of "families who have understood that the press is a civic calling" (what is this supposed to be, the Venetian Republic?) in action:

When bloomberg was having problems w the times he called Arthur [Sulzberger] and asked for coffee. He made the case that they were treating him like a billionaire dilettante instead of Third term mayor. It changed the coverage moderately but also aired the issues in the newsroom so people were more conscious of it. But Arthur is a pretty big wuss so he's not going to do a lot more than that.

Hillary would have to be the one to call.

He also thinks the brown and women pundits can shame the times and others on social media. So cultivating Joan Walsh, Yglesias, Allen, perry bacon, Greg Sargent, to defend her is helpful. They can be emboldened. Fwiw - I pushed [Philippe Reines] to do this a yr ago.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31954

Not sure what the big deal is here. Political operatives are angling for good coverage? That kind of thing has always gone on. If you think this is bad, you should read about what went on back in the old days.

The problem is whether the media responds to the angling and provides good coverage while reducing negative coverage. The operatives doing this and the news media responding positively has almost certainly been happening since the beginning of news, but that doesn't excuse the behavior.

Yglesias is brown?

I can only agree that newspapers believing themselves as impartial is hilarious, given the agenda many of them openly push, from industrialists, to liberalists, to patriots, etc. For much of their existence their purpose was to promulgate a PoV. Maybe the NYT does suffer from hubris thinking it's been immune from the same.

They very well may be better "now" but even then it's a stretch to believe they thought that it was the civic calling rather than believing it was _their kind_ of civic calling.

The idea is more an ideal than reality, sadly.

Well clearly one of the ideas they're very keen to push is that they're performing a civic duty not just acting as cheer leaders for their particular masters.

If this idea was not believed then they'd have a far harder job peddling their bias as interesting fact.

It also misses the actual reason why rich people buy newspapers, which is that they want their opinions to be the newspaper's opinion. They want to become the Voice of the Establishment, which a newspaper can let them be. In other words, they want the op-ed page, everything else is beside the point.

From that perspective Twitter would be spectacularly unattractive to this crowd, as it lacks any kind of institutional editorial viewpoint. It's a newspaper without an op-ed page, which for this kind of buyer is not much of a newspaper.

I share a similar opinion. Twitter is not special to me, nor do I believe it holds a special place for anyone outside of those select few who. The purpose of the media is to filter nonsense about politics (and celebrities if that's your cuppa). Twitter somehow seems to be seen as valuable by doing the opposite?

Apple is a better fit. Google already has Youtube and Youtube Comments. Apple has AppleTV but doesnt control the metaconversation around their content they host. If Apple wants to be a part of live-reality, Periscope+iPhone puts them in a good position against Facebook.

They also both have somewhat stagnant software innovation right now, so they could grow old slowly together. But more importantly, Apple could run Twitter at a loss as a data platform around their product.

> But more importantly, Apple could run Twitter at a loss as a data platform around their product.

This is something I don't understand. Pardon me if this sounds pie in the sky but how much does it cost to RUN Twitter without any expectations of profit? It seems like the people here in the conversation have knowledge that I lack about Twitter's expenses. It probably is public information but I can't find anything satisfying from a cursory Google search. Anyone want to help me out?

If Twitter were to tighten it's belt today, how would it's operating expenses look like?

I remember talking to Justin TV (precursors to twitch) folks and they said operating a live streaming site wasn't expensive and that one ad every couple of hours was enough to keep the lights on. I imagine running Twitter should be cheaper except for maybe dealing with SMS providers but Twitter is big enough that it could ask for special treatment from telecom providers to get a favorable rate if not to not have to pay anything entirely.

I understand that I'm asking two different questions here. One is how much it costs to operate Twitter at a profit versus what it costs to run Twitter at all (and I'm thinking like a highly upscaled https://mastodon.social than anything Twitter is today, none of this augmented reality play). I do understand that to make a profit, Twitter must be spending heavily to pour over analytics day and night to find s breakthrough but if you remove the need to make a profit, things should be less hectic, right?

exactly. twitter SHOULD be a fairly cheap company to run if it focused on its main platform and not its profit platform.

plus, if Apple bought twitter, twitter could go back to what it was, before it closed access to its apis/firehose. Twitter was the developers, developers, developers haven, that Apple/TheAppstore should LOVE to have. Everyone and their mom wanted to write an app ontop of the twitter datastream.

In my crazy delusional mind, Apple should buy Twitter, strip it of everything that is not communication (such as growth strategy, marketing, sales, ads) and merge it into the AppStore as a api/service provided by Apple. Similar to Microsoft's Azure/Cognitive AI type stuff. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...

Obviously they would need to keep the API open to Android apps as well, but I think it would be a good first shot at Google/Facebooks/Microsofts recognition that you have to cater to other platforms, and it would be a way to ensure iOS apps continue to be first class citizens compared to Android. Twitter would be available to Android devs, but it would always be more tightly integrated to iOS.

At some point, if Apple wants to continue to be a software player, they might need to buy a marketing company, like say Adobe Marketing Cloud. Owning twitter would make them lucratively competitive against Salesforce/Dynamics etc.

The reason I think Apple cant buy twitter is harassment. Twitters free speech values conflict with Apple's happy image.

>"What this election cycle has proven to me is that the old media and rapidly more and more of the new media censors things they or various friends of theirs don't agree with, and that doesn't sound like a path to a healthy society to me."

Can you mention some of the censorship incidents are you referring to here?

I think you made some interesting points. That NY Times quote is particularly condescending. I can't help but think theres a bit of schadenfreude from some of the old guard media regarding recent Twitter events.

Old Media has a Twitter problem. They don't have the solution.

NY Times is barely profitable. Some mainstream publications are in a similar situation, most are hemorrhaging money all over the printing floor.

Money is one thing, but what the established media are really frightened by is the loss of power they have been witnessing over the last few years.

They do not like it one bit.

"The country’s pre-eminent newspapers, including this one, have long been controlled by families who have understood that the press is not just an ordinary industry, but a civic calling."

> "The country’s pre-eminent newspapers, including this one, have long been controlled by families who have understood that the press is not just an ordinary industry, but a civic calling."

Doublespeak at its finest. Love it.

Yes, especially since we don't get these families' definition of "civic calling". It could be "help fellow humans be more informed" or "control information to our liking for the betterment of the society we want". Both could be seen as beneficial from certain points of view.

So the solution for Twitter's problem is to find an idiot willing to pay $12 billion for a medium that many people consider the digital equivalent of an open sewer? An idiot who's willing to spend another few billion dollars to turn that sewer in a hallowed spring for journalism? And Larry Page is supposed to be that idiot? Good luck with that.

Twitter hasn't an old media problem, Twitter's problem is that it has a goal, but no vision. That goal right now is profitability, no matter what. Twitter started out as a micro-blogging platform, but the company seems to be at a loss what it wants to be now or in the future. They have something, but they they don't know what to do with it, causing them to keep treading on the spot. And treading water, especially sewage water, is not a healthy long-term strategy.

"Open sewer"... pretty much. Then again, at some point most people are going to figure out that it's true of most big social media platforms. Anything which connects to you to the teeming mass of humanity is thrilling, then tiresome, then downright corrosive; there are just too many trolls, nuts, and dim bulbs to be borne.

that's just not true. slashdot taught us you can intake data, have humans tag it with metadata, and then let the viewer sort the data based on their own preferences and parameters. and that it works really really well. reddit/hackernews are a simplification of that idea brewed down to just upvote/downvote/flag.

twitter is unnavigatable by itself in any sort of abstract high level way. that doesnt mean you cant use software to parse, sort, and display the content in a more organized manner. the first step is to get people to tag and describe the data that exists.

> reddit/hackernews are a simplification of that idea brewed down to just upvote/downvote/flag.

HN has the unique advantage that it's a niche board. This means that the userbase is small, which makes moderation infinitely easier, because the pool of potential trolls just is extremely small.

Reddit has solved this problem by shifting the moderation load to volunteers for each subreddit. Of course, that can go south too (as witnessed with /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/thefappening, ...) but most of the time Reddit seems to be OK.

4chan just lets everything stay except childporn, because it doesn't have to take care of a public image (everyone knows 4chan is the vilest place on the net, except for the CP sites in the .onion tor net).

Twitter has probably more users than HN, Reddit and 4chan combined and has to rely mostly on automation for anti-spam (which rarely works, because there's a LOT of legit bots) and user reports, which, like FB, don't work at all or lead to brigading, mass-reports etc.

reddit and hackernews both use human moderation, as did slashdot, as and I mentioned it in my comment. Human metadata generation (this comment is good, funny, wrong, sad, incomplete etc) is a great first step in turning a sewer into a watertower.

I'm pretty sure reddit is operating at a loss, as is hackernews. You need better examples :)

so what? sometimes public services cost money. the comment i was replying to mentioned connecting humanity without creating a sewer, not profit.

These aren't public services, they're private endeavors.

arent sewers usually municipal? if twitter is a virtual telephony infrastructure, maybe we should treat its successor more like a municipal telecom. that said, it would also be federated systems compared to monolithic, so the analogy doesnt hold perfectly.

You may or may not be right, but certainly at this point they are not public services. The tragedy is that people treat them like they are, hence cries of "censorship".

the other tragedy being them run by shareholders that dont care about the platform health over short term profit

That's bad news for sure, but then, it's a self-correcting issue; the platform fails, another takes it place and tries again. It's not as though Twitter does something that anyone else couldn't do just as well, or better.

I can't believe how quickly you guys are jumping to the conclusion of letting twitter die. It has a lot of value for common people to report problems and make them being noticed. For example, I've lost the count of how many people have gotten a better deal with companies that in the first place offered them a bad service / product, just by publicly reporting them on twitter.

Also lot of people get a quick support response just by typing "@company problem" no matter what company or the problem is. That's an incredibly easy way for users to solve many of their problems.

The world will keep going on without twitter for sure, but the hole that it will leave behind will be noticed.

I think that this real value will ensure that it never really dies. If anything happened to twitter.com, then dozens of little MVP short message boards would spring up. In fact, that might actually be an ideal outcome in the long run, especially if it leads to the formation of a standardized tweet data format and competing public APIs.

If the concept is valuable, something will spring up to replace it.

>Log In Don't have an account? Sign up here »

New York Times has an old media problem...

Man, as I sit here at this news aggregator, which funded another pretty good news aggregator, having come from yet a third news aggregator, none of which are Twitter, it makes me think.... eh, maybe we just let this one die.

I have said before and I'll say again, journalists love twitter because it's a (free) portfolio site for them that hasn't (as yet) messed with their ability to interface with their fans (although they're moving that way).

Twitters problem is simple, they are a router not a destination. The simple fact that you are linking to an article but not debating it on twitter unless you really hit some nerve is why they cant make money. 140 chars dictatorship have hindered them doing any real innovation and the puritans unfortunately have been able to slowly choke twitter.

Is that really their target, though? I think of twitter as a place for communities, where people react, tell jokes, and have conversations. It's not a place for serious debate, but that might not be the problem.

That's exactly the problem. Twitter is a serious place in fact if it wasn't for shared professional interests twitter would have died out earlier on. It was once people realized they could connect with people they shared interest with that it started to gain traction.

But the problem is that people don't spend time on twitter and twitter doesn't encourage people to spend time there. Instead they push people off twitter to somewhere else which means they spend less time on the platform and more time on others platforms.

This is opposite of Facebook where you debate the articles on the actual platform.

+1; totally on point!

While I agree with the article's intent, we're missing the forest for the trees. The reason a billionaire has to do this is because it can't be done with traditional business models.

Twitter is infrastructure. Rapid bursts of semi-trustworthy data for us to consume and consider, at our own peril. That Twitter has to change its core behavior providing that service in order to make revenue is the problem. The value it provides is intangible in current financial models.

When I talk about this stuff, I think the value or commodity of a thing Twitter is such that current financial models cannot describe it properly. It feels as if we need a different type of business model to deal with keeping the business side of these houses in business.

Call it a suffering coin, if you will.

Twitter is not infrastructure. An LTE network is infrastructure. An optical fiber cable is part of infrastructure. Amazon AWS is perhaps infrastructure.

I don't get these weird redefinitions of common words that don't convey the original meaning at all.

Yep, same with the word "hacker": Some people like to call themselves a hacker when they simply made a meal or put some clothes into a bag nicely ...

Then again, isn't language always changing and words are constantly redefined, reused, ommitted and invented etc. Although we should strive for common definitions of words, we should also allow for change.

Twitter is not infrastructure though.

>> Then again, isn't language always changing and words are constantly redefined, reused, ommitted and invented etc.

There's a difference between a language evolving in a natural, organic way versus someone using a word incorrectly while insisting it is correct and that everyone must change to suit them.

The article makes virtually no logical case for its own claim. The example that Larry Page should buy twitter because it is great, is immeadiately under cut by the follow up reason. Larry Page is Jewish and Twitter is an extremely vitriolic place, especially towards people of color or minority groups. The "Old Media" problem is that no-one wants to pay for content. Twitter is less of "content" and more real-time news pings-- closer to reuters than NYT. If the author were to make the case they should go the way of Reuters, I would at least entertain it, but Twitter as a b2c play seems like a stretch at this point.

Twitter has an extremely viable business. They should try this innovative model I was reading about called subscription billing. The hail mary play is to ask users for $1 a month. Users would churn and they would have to limit adverts so their current model would take a hit, but it makes sense.

I think users would pay $1 per month per 160 char addition to their monthly limit. At minimum advertisers would. kill adds, sell tweet length. I get it Jack, you want to preserve the arbitrary SMS thing, but it needs to go before your company does.

NYTimes has an Old Media Problem - they have to paywall off the content because they don't have any other business model.

While this is a valid solution, Twitter has to go into bankruptcy first for this to happen. One of the challenges of being a publicly traded company is that these types of creative financing through equity can't happen quickly.

> Twitter has to go into bankruptcy first

Not necessarily. It just needs to shave off about 90% of its market cap. That means management gets fired and the Board replaced; they don't want that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12710784

I think most journalists would not necessarily agree with the proposition that Twitter has been good for journalism or the public discourse.

I like how the article transformed my view of Twitter. I never saw it as a kind of newspaper without a filter and I think I like the analogy.

Twitter does give a voice to people and the magnitude of participation by people on Twitter speaks for itself. Weither we (or anyone) _need_ to hear all those voices is debatable though. Maybe some filter is not too bad after all.

So this article claims the problem with Twitter is that advertisers don't bring in enough money because of hate speech in Twitter. This is just absurd, any sources on that claim?

Why would advertisers care of the content? They are scared people would associate the company to the hate tweets?

It happens all the time right now. How many times have we've seen press releases that explain the company's position of distancing itself from some stupid thing on the Internet that stupid people wrongfully attribute to the company in some stupid way?

The recent bowl of Skittles analogy is a prime example. Everyone knows it had nothing to do with Skittles the company, yet they still felt the need to release a statement because people are stupid. Because if they didn't release a statement then some idiot would come along and claim the company supported the analogy.

Hmmm...many comments stated in the article sound like someone clinging to old legacy not for utility but for mere nostalgia... "Twitter is a communications marvel..." << No, I feel the internet and the web running over it are communications marvels with applications like twitter simply being an (as in, one of many) application that was somewhat useful back in the day.

"Twitter is not yet treated as hallowed, but it has the makings of an institution that could be." << I struggle to classify any application that artificially constraints its messaging to 140 characters, as anything that could be considered "an institution". There's something good to be said for being succinct but 140 characters - nowadays - is just silly, i think. Mind you, not just because it limits the initial message, but I believe it drastically limits the possibility for further discourse and discussion.

"Twitter is the first draft of journalism." << I disagree. I would argue that systems like BBS or even early blogs represent truer electronic representations of "the first draft of journalism". I fail to see why journalism needs to feel beholden to a single, monolithic company. What about the Internat Archive and its wayback machine? I actually feel that might be a good (though not the only) representation of journalism - albeit inclusive of "civilian journalism".

"This computer-science problem — filtering out trolls — remains as difficult...technology would not only win back the advertisers who are fleeing because of trolls, but also, if shared, enable newspapers to reopen their comments’ sections at their own websites, promoting the airing of differing views in public space." << While I can't speak to the advertising aspect, here's one method to provide for airing of different views while helping to de-anonymize trolls (at least a little, which might lessen their flames): don't have everyone jump into yet another walled garden; instead have everyone build up their own decentralized social network presence. So everyone has a presence online - either managed through their own website which runs a decentralized social network application/software, or maybe they pay a small fee to group onto a small community...this would help mitigate from a single platform failing and bringing down the whole "first draft journalism". This would also give each user the freedom to express themselves - without any constraints from twitter, etc. Its not perfect, and i'm sure there would be problems, but i feel this is the better direction forward.

> Twitter puts no intermediary between speaker and listener.

Actually, Twitter puts ads, filters, and clever curation algorithms between the speaker and listener.

Now an IRC channel ... that puts no intermediary between speaker and listener.

> Twitter puts no intermediary between speaker and listener.

Uh, @Nero

How about Twitter buys the NYT or the other way around? I know it is not feasible, but a nice thought.

Old media should consider running their own social infrastructure, Gnu Social for example.

I dont't wont to log in to read the article...

I keep seeing people say that, yet I didn't have to log in to read the article?

I can't access the article, it asks me to log in.

You need to buy subscription on every US news site otherwise journalism will die.

Clear cookies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com