Why Twitter catches on: No guilt | Hacker News Reader

Why Twitter catches on: No guilt

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34 pointspeter12313 comments

Its one of its big downsides as well IMHO. There's no real incentive to reply to tweets. It's not about discussion, it's about "Here I am! Here's what I think is important! Listen to me."

I don't think that model is sustainable for most people. Which may go some of the way to explaining the high churn rate.

Right. For newfound Twitterers, if they have no vested interest in those already publishing, there's no reason to stay. Twitter serves two purposes: Follow others, and broadcast yourself to others. New twitter users must construct both of those social graphs by hand, and for most people who just heard about twitter on TV, it isn't worth the effort.

"It's not about discussion" is accurate, but not because Twitter is a narcissist platform. I think it's more akin to sending UDP packets (with no guarantee of delivery to the recipients) than email (with its excessive guarantees). It's even less like mass emails when it's being used like a low-priority broadcast (like when I use Twitter to say I'm headed to a particular bar, my friends are implicitly invited, but with the need to arrange times or RSVP, etc.).

In another sense, Twitter is about delayed discussion. It can set up future conversations that bypass some of the introduction. A friend tweets that he bought a house, he closes on this date, and moves in on that date; the next time I see him we have the chance to jump into an interesting conversation about the house and the process instead of him having to repeat that information for the millionth time.

And there's something else Twitter's done that I'm not sure could have happened before. I wrote a tweet about being in the Salt Lake City airport, and a friend of mine calls me to say "Hey, me too. Let's grab a drink." We hadn't seen each other in a while and neither of us knew the other was traveling or where. That wouldn't have happened a year ago. We would have missed that chance.

(I went a little further than I expected here. But Twitter has some real use cases people are still figuring out, and they're different than email or text or IM or phone calls. People using Twitter for "Here I am! Here's what I think is important! Listen to me." are doing it wrong.)

Good points.

For me though, the chance meetup at an airport is much more likely to happen on facebook, where I think more 'real life' friends live. Since facebook changed to put the emphasis on the 'steam', I think that use case is pretty much taken care of there.

I definitely see a range of usecases for twitter, but I don't think it works well for 2 way communication.

Which may go some of the way to explaining the high churn rate.

I think you're making an interesting point there. According to Nielson the churn-rate at twitter is 60-70%. People hear about it in the media, sign up, try it out... and move on.

A large part of the media hype is based on the high registration rate and on anecdotical evidence like "Ashton Kutcher has 1 million followers".

I have yet to see someone make a headline about the fact that circa 700.000 of these followers are dead accounts and that the registration-rate is a meaningless metric for a free service.

[1] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitter-qu...

Twitter can be seen as a slot machine.

"It was one of B.F Skinner's most important discoveries that behavior reinforced intermittently (as opposed to consistently) is the most difficult to extinguish. In other words, intermittent rewards beat predictable rewards. It's the basis of most animal training, but applies to humans as well... which is why slot machines are so appealing, and one needn't be addicted to feel it."

Read more in Kathy Sierra's post: Is Twitter TOO Good: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/0...

I've sorta wanted an "enterprise twitter" for a while now. A way to broadcast quick, intra-company messages that don't rise to the level of e-mail on channels that can be subscribed/unsubscribed to. Sorta like private IRC channels, I suppose.

This might do what you want: https://www.yammer.com/

Previous discussion worth checking out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515925

Many argued that mailing lists have provided the same features. However, I agree that twittering wouldn't have the same importance as email messages, and that's a concrete benefit for using a new medium.

I think a more accurate analysis is as follows:

The reason more people update statuses (Facebook, Twitter, etc) than maintain blogs is because there is little guilt in slacking on the former.

If you fail to blog for a week you typically hate yourself. If you fail to tweet for a week you think nothing of it. People prefer things that don't make them hate themselves.

I don't see how updating your status on Facebook presents any more obligation than putting out a tweet on Twitter. There's certainly not so much of a difference that it would make me use one over the other.

Funny Story, every follower I have on Twitter is someone I know from the net. I tried getting some folks from my actual life on but they thought it was "a poor man's facebook"

(in fairness, I'm a lousy salesman in general so it might be my fault)

I think in general facebook_friends > twitter_friends in terms of more likely to be close real life friends etc. Which means there's more of an incentive to reply, comment, etc (Also obviously the fact facebook has comments inline, no char limit etc helps)

I think it's popular because people love to promote themselves. Low level of required engagement feels secondary to me.

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