Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite | Hacker News Reader

Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

23 pointsiProject20 comments

Ugh. I don't know about the rest of you - that post felt patronizing. This stuff is complicated enough without layering on massive metaphors that shudder under the weight of the context they are trying to convey. It would be awesome if someone took a crack at a similar explanation without all the pandering.

It almost felt like a meta-analogy about the inherent limitations of analogy.

I would guess that a lot of the readers of the Times this is really helpful. I don't think most people understand this stuff at all, and the analogy is better than nothing.

Agreed.

"Metaphors and similes do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology" -- Charles Petzold, "CODE"

And more bluntly:

"I dislike allegory wherever I smell it." -- J.R.R. Tolkien

"The people who had come to Twitter in the early days also felt duped, as if they had been told their bite-size snacks were being used to feed everyone on the planet, not to make money...The early Twitter customers and chefs should have realized that eventually Twitter would have to make money. That possibility included advertising."

That's not true. Early adopters (us) knew they needed to make money, but we hoped it wouldn't be at the expense of the people who invested in their success (us).

"The food trucks that had set up shop on the corner, were in some sense, too idealistic, believing they could always get the food coming out of Twitter free."

Not true. It's still free, but no one else can access it. The problem isn't with the cost, but the availability.

"But most of all Twitter, which changed its decisions and strategy midstream, confused almost everyone, often hurting those who helped make Twitter successful and popular."

The only true statement in the entire article.

I don't get why developers are so mad at Twitter. Why is making a Twitter client the only project you can do? If you really can make a piece of software that provides a better experience for Twitter, certainly you have the ability to make something else. And if you're anything like me and every dev I know, you have half a dozen or more project ideas rattling around in your head. Make one of those and let Twitter go.

I'm guessing it's also an emotional issue: someone loves Twitter, they use it to communicate in ways they couldn't before. But they are frustrated by Twitter's own apps, and wanted to find a better way to use this service they love.

And so much of twitter's functionality was "contributed" by those same passionate early users - hashtags, @replies etc.

And don't forget if it wasn't for third party developers building their own clients, we wouldn't have the official Twitter clients on iOS or Mac.

Everyone keeps quoting this acting like it validates the sense of entitlement everyone feels they have to all of Twitter's data.

Ask Tapbots what makes them more money: The four projects they launched before TweetBot, the aforementioned "project ideas rattling around in your head" or TweetBot. I have little doubt as to the answer you'll get.

Developers are mad at Twitter because Twitter gave them a platform to develop on, one that their users enjoyed and made them lots of money, and then yanked it away. Simply telling people to "let twitter go" is ridiculous. Just because you have another idea doesn't mean it will be anywhere close to as lucrative and sustainable as a Twitter client.

Just like the article says, nobody owes anyone in this situation. Everyone was basically in the wrong. However, devs are still going to be mad at twitter. You don't have to feel entitled to something to be annoyed when it's taken away.

Fine so Tapbots made a bunch of money on a Twitter client. So people get mad because they can't "me too"? Make something else. Maybe it'll tank. Maybe it'll go nuts and make you a millionaire. Probably it'll be somewhere in between. But at least you're being creative and trying to move forward instead of lamenting change

"The new boss, Dick Costolo, realized that if the company wanted to make money, it would need to stop allowing all the food trucks and delivery services from taking everything made at Twitter."

This was not the only option.

Yeah, the whole restaurant metaphor was distracting. Twitter has always seemed to me more like an infrastructure project: we build the highways, you supply the vehicles and the destinations. The thing I've never understood is how that model is supposed to be sustainable -- in a real infrastructure project, everyone chips in, through taxes. With Twitter, no one chips in and everyone complains about the ads. How is that supposed to work?

Is it me, or does this ridiculous metaphor just make it much, much harder to understand? I'm pretty aware of what's going on with the whole Twitter thing at the moment, and I found this really impenetrable.

I'm with you. I've been annoyed with reasoning by analogy and metaphor for a while now, because it's so often bogus.

Good tech writing is about being able to explain complex technology issues clearly to a broad audience without reverting to cheap, simple and inaccurate metaphors.

To somebody who isn't familiar with the recent issues concerning Twitter this post doesn't teach you anything.

I'm somewhat glad to see a mainstream news piece covering HN material like this getting slammed by the community - I know people who still subscribe to real newspapers (of the local variety) and am amazed at how terrible and slow their coverage of most things is. This is especially apparent in instances like this one, where we've been having a much more coherent discussion about this for days now.

edit: Just to add another anecdote about the failings of mainstream news, last July there was an article in the business section of the paper about that blog post about the fake Apple stores in China, which appeared at least a week after the link appeared on HN and with unintelligent, spun commentary attached.

Where this analogy goes totally off the rails (no pun intended) is the suggestion the developer community was called in to help Twitter scale.

> So Twitter came up with a plan: it told people that they could take the food being made in Twitter’s kitchen and give it away by creating new places for people to eat.

Strained analogies aside, that is just completely and utterly backwards. The API was a critical part of Twitter early from day one, and the 3rd-party client ecosystem and extremely high utility of Twitter as microblogging plumbing was arguably what gave Twitter the momentum to cross the chasm.

"The new boss, Dick Costolo, realized that if the company wanted to make money, it would need to stop allowing all the food trucks and delivery services from taking everything made at Twitter."

That's a false dichotomy if there ever was one.

"So who was at fault in this tale? Really, everyone."

The best.

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