Twits on Twitter are no help in a crisis... | Hacker News Reader

Twits on Twitter are no help in a crisis...

nationaltimes.com.au

5 pointsmichaelpinto6 comments

How not to change mass behaviour: insult your audience in the headline, try to influence the lowest common denominator and ignore trend-setters, tell people to stop doing something they want to do without providing an alternative.

People who want to talk vacantly about an unfolding event will do so, and will not read articles like this. If social media adepts see a signal:noise problem, they know how to create new channels. That's the whole point of the internet.

The article did give some very clear suggestions: - Give directly to the Red Cross instead of lady gaga - Don't abuse hashtags in an emergency

Even back in the days of the CB Radio craze there were very specific rules for emergencies — if Twitter is going to evolve into something like that it will need a similar set of rules

Donations are not an alternative to chatter though and charity hijacking is nothing new. 'Don't' is not an alternative to anything and 'abuse' is subjective, as is 'emergency' incidentally. #jan25 was many things to many people.

CB is bandwidth-limited and provides few options for resource discovery in comparison to the internet.

In case it's not clear, what I'm saying is that it's the responsibility of broadcasters, guerrilla or otherwise, to find effective uses for the communication tools at hand.

People use twitter (and other SM sites) mostly as emotional toilets, throwing out there whatever gets to their mind. This wil not change likely, it's sickness of the masses who are mostly not taking things responsible, some do but they get buried by this random nonsense.

Thats why I follow on Twitter maximum 50 people and only those who are focused on providing useful information and not whether they got drunk yesterday and today they woke up with huge headache.

Saying that you are sending prayers and light on twitter to people in need is just one big excuse for doing nothing and continuing with your breakfast while you feel good about yourself.

Thats like saying going to church is no help in a crisis. It helps people deal with the emotional toll of loss and a removal of a large part of meaning in their life. The exchange of thoughts and hopes for another are one of the most powerful ties that bind humanity.

Wouldn't the japanese largely be using kanji hashtags? This seems like faux outrage. I have a feeling given the vapidity of Lady Gaga's fan base that it would lead to more money going to the charity to sell bracelets than would be donated.

I see a lot of ads on that page isn't the author using a crisis to sell ads on his paper?

My read from the article is that it's more akin to calling 911 during an emergency to tell the operators what a great job they're doing and that your thoughts are with them. Obviously a tweet has a much smaller impact, but multiply that behavior by tens of thousands of people it's not hard to imagine legitimate crisis messages scrolling out of view when someone finally gets signal and catches up on the last four hours of tweets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com