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Comment by msvan | Hacker News Reader

> Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users.

One of the things I disliked about communities moving to Twitter away from bulletin boards/forums was that before, I could write something and people would read it. But when I made a Twitter account I would tweet something and nobody would read it. I was more or less forced to be a consumer of information because I had very few followers. I suppose that's why Twitter is popular among celebrities and busy people: it is largely a one-way communication channel.

If you stick with it I'm sure your follower count will grow ever so slowly, but I never got over that hump because it felt so dumb tweeting out into the void. When I used Twitter I mostly used it as a bulky RSS reader. These days, many of the interactions I would've wanted to have on Twitter are happening in chat apps. I'm quite happy with this.

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Twitter is the literal opposite of community-building, like usenet used to be.

Not that I'm nostalgic, usenet simply could not scale to the number of users we see online today.

I think Reddit is closer to usenet in its DNA, but usenet groups were TINY compared even the smallest popular subreddits. reddit isn't perfect by any means, no one has solved the scalability issue, but if it weren't for mods, reddit would be even worse than it is right now.

I would disagree. It is community building in a different construct. There is no /r/X or group structure built in. I am only Twitter because I design board games. I only interact with board game community accounts and posts. The community is diverse, varied and thriving. If I was trying to get 100K followers to argue about politics maybe I'd have a bad time. I'm just trying to say that there is a lot of community building but it is self-directed not controlled by the platform.

>> It is community building in a different construct

Yeah that's a good point, but it is more of a broadcast mechanism, isn't it? Like, I follow people I'm interested in on twitter like Adam Savage and Simone Giertz. But they would never reply to a post to them b/c they get flooded by their legions of followers.

Yes and no. There are several medium sized publishers that run their own accounts and are active participants in the conversations. It is a slightly different structure because you can meet and talk with them at conventions too but in the end it is a marketing tool to build their audience. Some of the most famous game designers in the world actively communicate with other members all the time. There are also sub-communities of just people who design games or people who follow popular game reviewers, etc. I was just trying to make the point that there are some communities on Twitter but they are self organizing. There are sites like boardgamegeek that are popular too but some of the reddit communities have weird rules like not being able to post that you have a new game coming out.

People will read it if you're outrageous, trite, and generally behave poorly....

It's not just dumb tweeting into the void, Twitter basically makes you dumb in order to avoid tweeting into the void.

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