X Kicked Off 2024 by Screwing Up During Japan's Earthquake Emergency | Hacker News Reader

X Kicked Off 2024 by Screwing Up During Japan's Earthquake Emergency

vice.com

20 pointscf100clunk17 comments

This is a total nothingburger. No reasonable person should expect timely or accurate information about a current event on any social media platform. It's weird for Vice to try to make this into a story.

For most of Twitter's existence, it was a fantastic source of real-time information about rapidly-changing events. Many organizations used it to distribute urgent information, and it was totally reasonable for users to rely on that.

I can't imagine the level of leadership incompetence in any organization that would rely on Twitter to distribute urgent information. Seriously wtf?

"Rely" implies they don't use multiple vectors. Regardless, Twitter was historically reliable for the purpose of being one vector - a particularly functional one, in fact. You're making exaggerated attacks.

In your eagerness to hate on everything Twitter ever was, and not just what it has become, you are ignoring that Twitter was a fantastic resource for that kind of thing for over a decade. It's not incompetence to use a free tool that is so well suited for the job.

And as the other reply mentioned, this wasn't the only way they were distributing information. In the tweet where the NERV announced they were being rate limited, they also linked to their dedicated app.

You misunderstand. I don't hate Twitter/X. I've used it since near the beginning and continue to use it today. It's a useful tool for some purposes. But it was never a reliable channel for distributing urgent information. It has always been highly unreliable for a wide range of reasons.

It was used as that though, I was in Paris during both Charlie Hebdo (close to one of a student i worked with lived) and during the Bataclan (family member was working at the football game where the secondary attack attempt took place). SMS and calls were overloaded, i didn't have any social media account, so Facebook was out for me, twitter was the only place i got news.

Now, i don't think i would even consider using it though. Mainly because you have to create an account, but also i think the quality degraded since Covid and i can't check if its becomming better (nitter tells me it isn't though).

Eh, back when Twitter actually worked properly (essentially from the end of the failwhale era to the ascension of Carface) it was… kind of fine for that purpose? Became particularly popular for it in Japan.

Having lots of garbage information is not the same thing as not having useful information.

Lots of reasonable people are used to being able to find timely and accurate information via Twitter (either from accounts belonging to first-hand sources, from accounts belonging to sources the user trusts, or via links to one of those). You may argue that they shouldn't, or no-true-Scotsman the definition of a "reasonable" person, but the simple reality is that Twitter historically earned that expectation from tons of people. It was the example of a platform, social media or otherwise, that, with a little curation, could produce "timely or accurate information about a current event".

It was an exact counter-example to your assertion. Whether it still is, I don't know.

that was a major feature of twitter and people got used to it over the past decade+

This is, like… one of the things that Twitter was historically quite good for.

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