The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.
I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.
As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
I don't have this problem, but the only people that follow me are typically my friends who may be interested in the things I have to say.
One interesting comment during the debate was that many (liberal) journalists use Twitter as a side platform on which they feel comfortable voicing more personal views. While it is an acceptable practice in their circles, conservative readers often point to those tweets as evidence of liberal bias in the industry. Regardless of the professional ethical consensus, it may be a cause of distrust, and suggests a general problem of liberal journalists preaching to the choir.
A final thought as well, I think, whatever your politics, that much of the liberal bias talk from the right, especially the now unmasked far right, was simply language policing. It was an attempt to set the terms of the debate and pull the frame as far right as possible, which seemed to have been largely successful in my opinion. Thanks for the link and the comment, I'll check it out!
I've found that twitter has gotten close to replacing email for sending a message to a "stranger" (software dev, journo).
I post stuff more for myself. I get sad when my clever tweets don't get looked at, but just writing is fun too.
Twitter could front run wall street on Donald Trump tweets.
I bet they could get a few tens of millions of revenue there. Probably HFT firms would at least experiment with it, right?
Might get them into some serious regulatory crosshairs.
http://www.sandstormgold.com/_resources/policies/SSL_Stock_T...
https://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Definition_of_...
The most direct version is here:
> In 1983, Switzer was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an alleged civil violation of the laws prohibiting "insider trading" of securities. He defended himself as having innocently overheard the information while lounging on the bleacher behind some corporate insiders—at a stadium where Switzer was watching his elder son compete in a track meet. The case was tried in Oklahoma City United States District Court (before a special U.S. District Judge appointed from Kansas). The case was dismissed at the conclusion of the Government's case for its failure to demonstrate that there had been any purposeful disclosure to Switzer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Switzer#After_coaching
https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/1986/062086grundfest.pdf#pag...
Do you have a source that says otherwise?
The situation is even more clear for Twitter. If I'm a marine biologist making the world's most detailed measurements of the ocean, I can clearly use this info to buy or sell stock in a fishing company, even if I don't release that info publicly. Likewise, I can sell that info to someone else who makes the trades.
News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network's identities (and had enormous reach).
Can you talk more about this? I was always under the impression that newspapers and newsrooms were always for-profit enterprises.
What newspapers had was a lock on the business now owned by Craigslist, with the transport and fulfillment network (newsagents and delivery vans!) being the key asset. Once that went away they were no longer businesses.
They didn't see it that way, but that's because their core business was so good they could afford to delude themselves - it didn't matter that they didn't know what they were really doing, the business model was that powerful. Google is remarkably similar in many ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrOqjS9ZyA
But trying to do a little research on it, the best I could come up with for proof is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Time_Access_Rule
Still a good show though.
By 1987, a number of factors - changes in ownership for the big 3 networks, upstart FOX network, the increasing importance of celebrity anchors on ratings, deregulation of media ownership laws and other factors - caused a mass shift towards looking at news as profit centers.
Ken Auletta's "Three Blind Mice" is excellent. (At least on recollection. It profoundly changed my understanding of the media when I read it 25 years ago.)
Newspapers have never had such constraints but there were laws limiting the concentration of ownership aimed at making sure people had diverse influences in any one market. For instance, TV channels could not be owned by the same company that owned a newspaper in the same market. I don't know enough off the top of my head to expand more usefully on that.
Twitter is a great platform to keep your name in the public consciousness. So... indispensable if you're a Kardashian. Other than that, though, it's not clear. A lot of people are wasting a lot of time building up a subscriber account that ends up being meaningless.
Facebook makes money because people give it a lot more information than they give twitter. Too much, IMO.
Look at all the articles written when Beyonce posts her pregnant body on Instagram as an example. we only think twitter has so much influence because thats where a lot of techies hang out.
I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.
Only people who know Paul Graham will know about his blog, but his tweets can be re-broadcast to a much wider audience through re-tweeting, who can be exposed to him without having sought him out or known about him in the first place.
I've discovered, and subsequently followed, probably half of my twitter feed through re-tweets from my existing feed.
I have to imagine that's the same for a lot of others.
I still email links, and receive links by email, all the time ..
Which means that different people in different communities choose different communication tools for reasons that are not obvious.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble Twitter: https://twitter.com/Scobleizer
Of note for Scoble is that there's much more room to talk on Facebook than twitter. I wonder if that's a similar reason that Torvalds uses G+
I think that may be my biggest issue with G+ (despite so few people using it)... they keep changing it. Facebook evolves much more slowly, so it's much more predictable and comfortable to the distracted and comfort-seeking social media user like myself. G+ is constantly experimenting and I can't easily pin down exactly what it is...
Plus garnered a bit of a "tech"/thinker corner. I don't know whether it has any remaining vibrancy/growth, at this point, or whether its mostly a matter of inertia combined with the crapitude of other platforms for the particular communicating they are doing.
Too bad Plus was so thoroughly hosed from the start by political agendas.
OT: At Christmas, I stopped accessing Facebook. I thought it would be for a few days or a week. Coming up on two months, soon, and I haven't been able to make myself go back. Even with a relatively small set of FB friends whom I actually, personally know, and who are nice and not rabid and actually respond meaningfully to some of my own contributions, there.
In some ways, the impersonal, more technical content on Plus (and here, and etc.) is easier. There is no "missing aspect" as there is with FB engagement with friends.
Twitter? Gave up on that years ago. Tim O'Reilly had an interesting post or two about some of its positive, community aspects, in its early days. But now, it just mostly seems a megaphone for the loud and discontent.
And then, too, anywhere Trump et al. are and that seems to aid his lying megalomania. I'm not inclined to lend it the (incremental) support of my participation.
If he's a particular indication of their future, well, then, welcome to the gutter, Twitter.
I didn't know Tim O'Reilly was on G+ but ALL these recent posts are pop-politics and ugly at that! I thought you were referring to all Google services being tied in.
I don't spend too much time in Plus. Brin has had a lot of political stuff, recently, although he's a bit mixed and individual in his opinions and they do tend to tie back to points modeled in his sci-fi writing.
O'Reilly I see less frequently. I suppose he's getting more "elder statesman", too.
Torvalds actually addresses some tech stuff. Though he has personal stuff, too -- he does not use it as a "tech blog".
Reminds me some of Tim Bray's "Ongoing" blog -- self-hosted -- that I haven't been to in a while. A personal take, on both tech and other stuff in his life. Whatever the topic, informed, intelligent, and thoughtful. Creative, too.
I don't think Plus is in any kind of a steady state. Even what I wrote about, may well be in decline. Maybe it was better a few years ago.
Regardless, this year's politics have really shocked a lot of people, and this is spilling over into erstwhile non-political venues.
Twitter might have value, but no route to profitability.
Edit: Y'all are super salty about Twitter falling apart. Sad!
You can be the best platform in the world, and if you don't make money, you're going under.
Massive mailing list. Web enabled. Trivial cost. Deep links possible to share. EDIT: And more than 160 characters! Hallelujah! A format an actual discussion can take place in.
I compare the two because I'm old, tech is cyclic, and everyone reinvents the wheel. Twitter is, clearly, not special, and can't justify its valuation.
Just joking around. But, not completely. The value you speak of is really the ability to spend your time on something potentially more worthwhile. People forget social media has an opportunity cost.
You just aren't going to ever have that with a mailing list. If you could we would be doing it.
Because "current news" are so interesting/relevant/important to one's everyday life and/or politics?
It's mostly a bunch of noise -- with plenty of BS and lies on top.
If you want to know what's happening, better read a "not instant", more analysis/depth outlet.
I read WaPo and the NYT for that, Twitter is for breaking news and info from reporters real-time when they are questioning folks.
That said, is this page representative of what you're talking about or am I missing a better UI? http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2017-February/threa...
Obviously it could be styled differently/"better" for mass consumption, but that aside, it still exposes private emails and full names of the participants.
And I think the character limit is part of what makes it valuable...I don't really want to read an essay, the forced concision is great for a lot of the use cases. And getting back to Elon, he probably doesn't want to engage in deep discussion with all those randoms, he wants to drop a juicy tidbit, build excitement and let the discussion happen elsewhere. When he has something more to say, he writes a blog post and tweets a link.
I'm actually not defending Twitter's valuation or business prospects, just the value or uniqueness of the service relative to something like a mailing list. I'm still not convinced they're so similar.
People have to sign up for a mailing list; and people who aren't signed up generally don't get your content. This is a stark contrast with Twitter, where content is shared at a significantly higher rate. I don't necessarily have to subscribe to a certain source to get content from them, if someone in my network decides to share that content. When was the last time you received a message that was sent over a mailing list that someone forwarded to your inbox?
I don't follow Elon Musk, but if he puts out an important tweet someone I follow will retweet him putting his content in my feed. An Elon tweet with some big announcement easily reaches an audience of millions. No mailing list has that kind of reach.
I don't have the time or energy to consume the firehose that my Twitter feed has become - so I just don't use it anymore.
More like broadcast to their fans.
Which is something of a strength and weakness of Twitter. It can be used for conversations but the 140 character limit makes it tough. As a result, Twitter is generally best used for people who are broadcasting things to a group of interested followers. If that doesn't describe you (either as a follower or a followee) then you're probably not going to find Twitter very useful.
> I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them.
> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
> So we filter our inputs.
> ...
> Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear.
> ...
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-haras...
Trump doesn't do Snapchat videos. He does 3AM tweets.
It's always been the fluff which drew the ads; the lifestyle and sports content.
My sentiment as well, why I never got into Twitter at all.
There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.
Wow. I didn't even know he tweeted.
There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter.
It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.
There is no discussion possible on Twitter, as the "threads" quickly devolve into an unintelligible mess.
You say something to the public, then you're done. It's purely a channel for viral marketing (also called "push", that word says it all).
Last I heard numbers, it was something like 80% of the population checked Facebook at least once a week.
Here most politicians and other "influential people" will take to Facebook when they want to be heard.
The President of the United States, for instance.
I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
It's an amazing way to connect, but ultimately it's a loudspeaker for loudmouths. It needs to die.
It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.
No. I was proposing a thought experiment. Chill out, dude.