Teenagers don't use twitter | Hacker News Reader

Teenagers don't use twitter

brisbanetimes.com.au

8 pointsdiv8 comments

A few individual examples aside I can see why this would be accurate.

Twitter is a broadcast medium. Part of what's implied in a personal broadcase medium is the idea that the people using it don't have time to speak to each individual on their list. So as a compromise they broadcast their interests in a public way. That way they can still communicate with friends, relatives, et al.

Teenagers, despite what some of them believe, have tons of time on their hands. Accordingly studies have shown most teens use one-to-one mediums like the phone or texting. They have no need for the compromise of Twitter. Facebook appeals to them because that allows them to broadcast items they couldn't otherwise share one-to-one like photos, quizzes, etc...

for the last time, yes i do.

You are teenagers?

18 for one more month. :)

Yes, exactly, thank you. I am so sick of this story already. There's only one line you need to take away from the article: "Morgan Stanley makes no claims for the report's statistical vigour."

"Teenagers don't use twitter" is not even close to being true. It's more like, "One teenager and his friends don't use twitter", a classic case of biased sampling. To then jump to the conclusions - NO teenagers use twitter, ALL teenagers prefer text messaging - is not only idiotic, but demonstrably false.

Some data seems to back up the kid's claim (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nielsen_twitter_was_fas...), which is not to say he arrived at his conclusion in an scientific way.

You also use Hacker News.

Someone was talking about 'statistical vigor' and 'small sample sizes' and . . . well . . .

I'm just saying.

Me too.

I don't think issue is exclusive to teens. I think it's more an issue of previous Facebook or MySpace users switching to something as "basic" as Twitter (and many of those users just happen to be teens). Since there is a greater variety of things to do on Facebook, at least at first glance, I think many people feel Twitter is too simple, especially when most of their close friends aren't active on it.

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