I Hope Twitter Goes Away | Hacker News Reader

I Hope Twitter Goes Away

alexgaynor.net

395 pointsmwcampbell239 comments

Alright, so twitter is terrible because its 'broadcast' instead of 'communities', and you don't like 'broadcast' but you like 'communities', so twitter should go away.

   a) "I hope Twitter genuinely ceases to be."
   b) "I want a product that enables me to build and participate 
   in communities[...]."

Having a product that enables b) doesn't mean a) must happen. Why come to that conclusion. Because you don't like participating in it, it should cease to be?

I don't get how people come to conclusions like this. It feels very self absorbed to conclude a) from b). Maybe I'm just allergic to opinion pieces with hyperbolic titles.

I don't want to speak for the author, but an argument could be made that a product that:

1) Is massively popular; and

2) Has design flaws that actively sabotage conversation

... could lead to a situation where "B would be better if A went away," due to network effects. No matter how good an alternative B you build, people will keep on suffering with A despite its limitations, because that's where all the other people are. The existence of A sucks away oxygen that B needs to grow.

Twitter doesn't have a design flaw, it sets out to do what it wants and it does so spectacularly. Twitter is a platform for announcements not for conversations (although many try to use it for that very thing).

People who think twitter is a conversation platform are #doingitwrong. Period. People who try to use twitter for conversations and get angry when it doesn't work well or some random stranger barges in and starts hurting their feelings obviously need to realize that there are a ton of other platforms that solve their problem. Namely message boards, any form of chat (irc, IM, etc), blogs, etc.

> People who think twitter is a conversation platform are #doingitwrong. Period.

If millions of people insist on using your product as a conversation platform, it is a conversation platform, no matter what you intended it to be.

A thing is what it is.

Then why does it need to go away? It's obviously ok at conversations if millions of people use it that way.

No, it's not "obviously ok" for conversations if "millions of people use it that way". What kind of strange thought process leads to that conclusion?

It's only "obviously ok" if (a AND b), where:

(a) "millions of people use it that way"

(b) it's productive and beneficial when used that way.

The (a) is only enough to show that Twitter serves a need people have for certain coversational structure (short messages). Doesn't prove that it's the best tool imaginable tool for the purpose or thats it's the pinnacle where evolution in such networks stops.

Actually, this very thread started with a FA saying that it's not (b).

People don't generally voluntarily use a service unless it is beneficial to them in some way. It's not like millions of people are being forced to use Twitter for conversations.

Edit to add: also, I didn't try to "prove that it's the best tool imaginable tool for the purpose or thats it's the pinnacle where evolution in such networks stops." I just said it's ok.

>People don't generally voluntarily use a service unless it is beneficial to them in some way.

People are not always the best to judge what benefits them. Case in point: everything from Bush, to heroin addicts, to fast food, to Justin Bieber.

Back to Bush again. Thankfully we have Gauleiter coldtea to bark out orders...

Did I ever ordered you to do anything?

Agency effect. People would use something else if met their needs better and had as many users. (e.g. Facebook vs. Myspace)

That explains why a new user would choose Twitter today. It doesn't explain why people started using it for conversations in the first place, years ago when the network was new and small.

That's kind of non sequitur, isn't it? Thats like saying Myspace is doing a good job of giving users what they want now, because at some point in the past it did.

  A thing is what it is.

That depends on what the definition of “is” is.

Ah, but that depends on what the definition of ""is" is" is

The unescaped inner quotes made me cringe...

Ah, but that depends on what your definition of ““is” is” is.

Ah, but that depends on what your definition "\"is\" is" is.

I hope this makes you feel better!

And that depends on what your definition of "\"" is.

And that depends on what your definition of "\\" is.

People use twitter for announcements and then for comments on those announcements. Very few people have actual conversations. When a conversation does happen, it's usually the root poster agreeing (or disagreeing) with the person that tweeted at them. I don't see anyone going to twitter with the initial intent of conversing with someone. Nobody goes onto their computer and says "Hey I'm gonna go message this person on twitter so we can have a conversation"

Twitter isn't a conversation platform

Tell that to my mobile phone provider, who no longer accepts email as a viable support request path, but insists on me starting up a conversation with them on twitter or facebook (I don't have facebook, so that leaves twitter), requiring private information (so I have to 'follow' them first, and they have to 'follow' me in return), is one D away from exposing private info and in general totally unsuitable for the purpose.

So because your mobile phone provider is incompetent twitter is a bad platform?

Who is your provider btw? That sort of bad acting should be named and shamed (on a platform like twitter perhaps?)

It was merely meant as an illustration of why some people hold 'conversations' on twitter. The provider is Vodafone.

One simple solution: send them an old school registered letter. They'll have to read it, or at least sign for it. In that letter you can let them know how displeased you are, and announce that you will a) continue to send registered letters and b) will change telco as soon as you can.

Not so much a solution or even a workaround, more of a way to take a stand.

You're just flat out wrong. That's why there's a tab dedicated to replies. Twitter conversations can be incredibly interesting and benefit all participants by being public. Twitter's setup hugely encourages @ing people in your tweets.

Except conversations are badly broken. So many people don't hit the actual reply, so conversations get cut off, often restarted, and thus become fragmented, which makes them hard to follow and participate in. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn't. I think this is what the OP was talking about.

But this is not a problem of the platform, but of how users are using the platform. I rarely have conversations on twitter (i.e. most are just a couple of replies long at most) but I occasionally have a 20+ post. If you hit proper reply, it works. If you don't, it doesn't (or does really badly), but this is a user fault, not a platform fault.

If users have difficulty properly using the platform, the platform is at fault. An arbitrarily naive user should never have to fight the platform to do what he wants.

I don't think I agree. If we view twitter as a tool, an arbitrarily naive user can chop his hand with an axe.

Very accurate analogy.

Also consider when there's say four people tagged in a conversation, and then someone needs the extra characters to make their point and they remove one of the names, then that person loses the context too.

Also, conversations look different when you're looking at them from one of your lists, or if the people you are following are different than the people I follow.

So many clunky issues that you need to be on top of for it to make sense, and this is what's lost on the general person.

I guess it depends on which Twitter client one uses, I've never had a cut-off conversation with Echofon.

Vast, vast majority use twitter.com or the Twitter mobile apps.

This is one of the many examples of Twitter not knowing what Twitter is. Twitter is a product that was a success in spite of the efforts of its founders.

> I don't see anyone going to twitter with the initial intent of conversing with someone.

They're you're either blind or not looking very hard.

Twitter is a conversation platform. A shitty one perhaps, but one nontheless.

Conversation (yes, often about announcements) is the main thing I use twitter for. To me twitter, at its best, is basically a giant irc channel with some filtering features.

Now you've seen one. I think you're confusing emergent with wrong, tbh.

totally agree. at least you can have someone moderate channels on irc though.

>it sets out to do what it wants and it does so spectacularly.

That sounds post hoc. It, of course, is what it is and does what it does, but do you have any evidence that this result was well-calculated or planned?

Have you intentionally left out Facebook in your list of alternatives? Because I think that is where many discussions have moved to, and it's pretty good for that. Articles posted by news pages have kinda-threaded comments, and Facebook's trademark "Like" button fits in well, too. I think that's a good example of how sites can evolve (so Twitter could, too).

This. The way Alex uses Twitter now (tweeting links to his blog posts) is exactly how someone of his stature should use Twitter.

Twitter is something that missed its potential. They created something that is/was incredibly powerful, but actively undermined it in wacky ways.

IMO they could have been the killer app. That potential fell a little short and it's just another marketing funnel for TV people.

Sorry to be pedantic but perfectly executing a flawed design doesn't mean the design isn't flawed.

I agree twitter is not suitable for conversations, and also don't understand why it must go away. Like you said, it does one thing and it does it well.

Exactly. Shotgun-blast your puerile thoughts to your dozens/hundreds/millions of followers. Don't bother reading any responses it might garner—they're going to be just as base.

Now you're in the habit of just shotgunning statements into the crowd, so when you do the same thing on Facebook, you've forgotten how to engage in a more lengthy, rational discussion.

Or, even worse, you've grown up with Twitter and don't understand that people can have lengthy, meaningful conversations via the internet.

Basically because of this Twitter has been a place to share "interesting" links, pictures, jokes, and complaints. There's no discussion, no thought, no ability to back-n-forth. Worse is everything is very public so I have to be super duper careful that what I say doesn't get back to me professionally. There is no "private community" or anything. I find twitter useless except as a means to scream really loud not caring if anyone hears it.

There is no shortage of intelligent, rational material on Twitter. It's all about who you follow. I choose to not follow anyone who posts junk. It is true that I can't do anything about foul responses except just ignore them.

I'm pretty sure you'd be hard pressed to find any actual effect on conversational skills from the existence of a fucking short messaging site!

YMMV, but I have fairly long and extended conversations on Twitter all the time.

They're almost invariably not with tech people, though.

That's a bit like saying "I wish cell phone B would go away, because I prefer cell phone A, and if cell phone A was the only one people could buy, it would be cheaper for me to buy because of economies of scale."

No, it's like "I wish cell phone B would go away" because I prefer cell phone A, and I think cell phone B is POISONOUS to community and discussion, and leads to a worse society.

The trouble is that "worse society" is defined by the preferences of the speaker, not the aggregate preferences of everyone in society including the thousands (millions?) of users contently using Twitter in ways the speaker dislikes.

>The trouble is that "worse society" is defined by the preferences of the speaker, not the aggregate preferences of everyone in society including the thousands (millions?) of users contently using Twitter in ways the speaker dislikes.

Yeah, and what's the issue with that?

The very idea behind a "society" is that its members take certain decisions about whats OK and what's not. Not everybody has to agree, but everybody can try to convince society for what he thinks it's best or what should be stopped.

That "millions are doing it" is also not an argument. 2/3 of Americans did smoke, and yet it's now banned in most public places and looked down upon. Thousands of businesses did "seggregation" too.

What Alex does is start a discussion and voice his dislike and wish for X to stop. He doesn't rule over anybody, and doesn't force people to stop X with violence.

So I see no problem there.

I don't see how that's problematic at all. If my ideal society is different from that of most other people, it still doesn't mean I'm not entitled to my own opinion.

I'm not suggesting that he's not entitled to his opinion and to voice it. I just think that it's a poor justification for action, and it's also slightly troubling for someone to earnestly desire a service with which millions of people are happy to disappear because it would make that one person happy.

For all we know these persons might be even more happy NOT using the service, or using something else or better in it's place.

That's, by the way, is his whole point.

Just people people are OK using X now, doesn't mean wanting to take X down is bad, or will necessarily hurt people.

I think it's more like cell phone A can't even be produced because of economies of scale.

Has design flaws that actively sabotage conversation

I've never thought of Twitter as a platform about having a conversation. Its a strange mix of a soapbox and some messaging but its inherently a public medium with the ability to have a public conversations but thats not its focus, its why brands love it, but its not Snapchat/Facebook or Google+.

>Having a product that enables b) doesn't mean a) must happen. Why come to that conclusion. Because you don't like participating in it, it should cease to be? I don't get how people come to conclusions like this. It feels very self absorbed to conclude a) from b). Maybe I'm just allergic to opinion pieces with hyperbolic titles.

No, it's simply that you ignore the fact that he didn't state his opinion as a conclusion in the form: (b) -> (a), nor he claimed (b)->(a) is some kind of deduction by itself.

He just stated (a) and (b), which are independent thoughts. The link, if any, is his belief that social networks who don't work with communities are inherently bad (thus (a)).

Why they are bad? That's what he provides his arguments about in the whole f... article.

I suspect a) is more a response to his perception that Twitter is unique in the large amount of harassment it hosts.

I like Twitter precisely because it's a broadcasting mechanism. I choose to follow people/organizations that are smarter or more in the know than me.

I never directly communicate with people on Twitter.

Twitter doesn't need to go away. I feel I'm not missing out on much by not using Twitter. Facebook is sort of forced upon me because I'd miss on a bunch of social activities if I didn't use it. With Twitter it exists and sometimes I use it. My life is not negatively impacted by avoiding it.

The article is shallow and points out the obvious characteristics of Twitter. It's a waste of time to read.

Deleted comment

Ok, i'll bite

Because twitter boosts "negative social behavior" (wtf? by whose definition?) you want a platform that allows people to report natural disasters, broadcast their products/movements, report corruption, communicate with their fan base, etc. to die?

Also, let's all ignore that fact that twitter is used by a ton of government dissidents living in totalitarian governments to broadcast the oppression that occurs there.

I'd like them to use a more open platform. I can get rss feeds of the tweets, but if Twitter drops the ball at any point all that communication infrastructure dies with it. Businesses aligning with your use case, especially a twitter user (who represents nil profit individually) is a fleeting thing.

Wait, is this satire? His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article. He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled. What is this?

>He claims to want to encourage conversations

He certainly does not want to encourage conversation.

>Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities;

It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. That's not a community, that's an echo chamber with no disagreeing, no joking, no comments.

It's okay if he doesn't like Twitter and doesn't want to use it, but wishing for it to go away makes me uncomfortable. Why should he care if others use Twitter ? I, for one, am happy with Twitter being alive even though I don't use it.

It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does.

You say "seems," but it doesn't just seem like that, it is exactly that. The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves of (minor point, but I'll clarify because I don't want conversation to degrade to pedantics).

Why should he care if others use Twitter ?

If I had to jump into speculation, I'd say he cares because he feels excluded from a tool many of the rest of us can choose to ignore or live with.

>> The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves

"Safe space" is a much abused phrase. The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn?

It seems that some people will not hesitate to demand the complete absence of anything they find the least bit objectionable, all in the name of 'safe spaces'.

> Where is the line drawn?

I think that's the point. With a more community oriented system the line could be drawn at the single user's discretion. Like on Facebook. I don't agree with the author of the article that twitter should die, though.

Oh, I understand that the ability to draw that line himself is part of what he is seeking. I meant to say that the idea of 'safe spaces' can be used to conflate 'preventing harm' with 'indulging arbitrary wants' and even 'pandering to narcissists'. Unlike with physical safety, I don't see a line we can use to semi-objectively declare that one has left one domain of 'emotionally safe' and entered another domain.

Notice that I'm not arguing against the establishment of circumstances in which a person can feel safe! Only that we should pay attention to the language and how it is used, lest we become manipulated into an unhealthy dynamic, all in the name of pursuing a healthy dynamic.

> Oh, I understand that the ability to draw that line himself is part of what he is seeking.

Why, then, do you keep insisting that we should somehow "semi-objectively" declare one? There isn't even a clear line as to what is physically harmful. Why do you think that something as inherently subjective as emotional harm would have to be objectively defined to be considered?

As for "indulging arbitrary wants"; I bid you welcome to the social network business and wish you will have a pleasant stay.

> Why, then, do you keep insisting that we should somehow "semi-objectively" declare one?

It's very strange that you say 'why, then' while coupling these sentences, as if the existence of the first makes the second less sensible. Its exactly because of the existence of the first that we should consider the 2nd.

> There isn't even a clear line as to what is physically harmful

Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone. Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.

> inherently subjective as emotional harm would have to be objectively defined to be considered?

Oh, did someone say that, somewhere? Did someone say that something must be objectively defined in order to be _considered_? I wonder what that person might be thinking. Maybe they are constructing false dilemmas and straw men.

> It's very strange that you say 'why, then' while coupling these sentences, as if the existence of the first makes the second less sensible.

I'm not asking you why because I think that the two ideas are inherently tangled, but because I don't understand the relevance semi-objectively declaring a "line" has to the discussion.

> Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone.

Where is the line drawn when it comes to damaging one's body? Eating too much? Sleeping to little? Hitting someone in the face? Too little exercise? Bad ergonomics? Suicide? Watching TV? Smoking? When do you leave the domain of physically unsafe and enter the domain of physically safe?

> Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.

Surely you can see that this isn't an actual argument, and I won't respond to it as such. Explain how it is radically different and I will return to you.

> Oh, did someone say that, somewhere? Did someone say that something must be objectively defined in order to be _considered_?

No, you didn't outright say that, but it's the idea I got from your reasoning. Your argument seems to be that the phrase "safe spaces" is abused, and the only reasoning you support that conclusion with is based on the idea that emotional harm is hard to define. That seems like the opposite of the dictionary definition of considering something.

> Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone. Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.

The idea that emotional harm doesn't involve physical (even if not structural) damage to the body requires that emotions exist in a non-physical realm rather than being epiphenoma of physical states of the body.

The idea that so called emotional 'harm' cannot involve physical changes is not assumed in anything I've said.

The important thing here is that it is easy for reasonable, practical people to agree on what constitutes the act of physically harming another. Your own statement demonstrates that it is not so easy to draw a line on what constitutes 'emotional harm'. Which structural changes deserve the label "results of harm" ? The innate slipperiness of the concept is exploited by those who wish not only to 'protect' themselves from hearing unpleasant opinions, but also to elevate the act of silencing others to a righteous form of 'protection from harm'.

And if you consider being offended to qualify as "unsafe" or "emotional and psychological harm," then anything you find offensive violates your "safe space" criteria.

> The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn?

Offer a meaning of safe as it applies to physical harm. Let's see if we actually agree to that as easily as you presume we would first.

A space where you have no reasonable expectation of any form of personal injury, perhaps excluding self-inflicted harm caused by negligence (e.g. cutting off your own hand in the kitchen, but not somebody else cutting off your hand in the kitchen).

Great! In only 41 words, and seemingly off-the-cuff, you've crafted a perfectly reasonable definition of an 'acceptably physically safe space'.

The term 'safe' should never have been brought over like this to apply to psychological comfort. With physical safety, there is a clear and obvious event around which related concepts can be built: the event of physical damage to the body. We can point to those events, and it is easier to trace back a chain of cause-and-effect and discuss reasonable domains of responsibility.

With 'emotionally safe' spaces, there is no line that prevents the notion from being abused, and substituted for "the absence of anything I don't like".

> It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does.

It's interesting that you say that, given that this is the same person who started a firestorm of drama by pull requesting gendered documentation in Node.js.

Oh my god, everything about the discussion of this article is nuts. What are you talking about?!

I did some quick research and found this [0]. It seems he rewrote some documentation changing "he/she/etc" to "they/them/etc". Doesn't seem like a terrible thing to do really. I had never particularly thought about the issue. The pull request was denied by another guy for some reason. I can't imagine caring if the "he"s get changed to "they"s.

Then everyone came out and started criticizing the other guy and it all blew up. I can see not necessarily spending time changing the documentation (it's certainly an easy task to set aside for later or not even think about in the first place) but to deny the pull request seems to be in bad taste in my opinion. It's not as if people who might normally use "he"s would see the the "they"s and have some sort of problem with it so if people want "they"s give the people "they"s if someone does it for you.

[0] - http://www.dailydot.com/news/github-gendered-pronoun-debate/

If anything was in bad taste, it was the pull request itself. You don't just go to a project you have never contributed to and tell them they're using pronouns wrong. And who talks like this to people:

> I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really see why you wouldn't merge it if it's so trivial though. Surely making the library less hostile is worth a few seconds of our time to press the "merge" button?

Do you see what's going on there? It assumes as a premise that his pull request makes the library "less hostile" when everybody knows that's not a universally agreed upon premise. Now if you want to argue with that comment, you have to unwind it to argue with the premise, which is going to lead to an exhausting conversation. So instead, people don't usually do that. This behavior serves to exclude and alienate people that don't agree with his premises.

Alex Gaynor does this all the time and has been doing so at least since back when he posted on the Something Awful forums. Maybe he just wants everybody with views different than the ones he's adopted as part of his identity to just go away. In online communities where this sort of conversational tactic can't achieve that (Twitter, Hacker News), he leaves and publicly announces that those communities are beneath him.

(This opinion is not borne of confirmation bias: Thanks to him using different usernames in different contexts, I've managed to independently come to hate him for this sort of thing three different times before realizing it was the same person all along.)

sounds very much like a person on /r/stredditsays

The pull request was rejected as part of nodejs's standard policy of rejecting small changes to the documentation or code comments. When isaacs merged it in manually, bnoordhuis reverted the commit because it broke the rules: all changes landing in master had to be signed-off by one of the head maintainers, and his wasn't.

What are you talking about?!

News: https://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/slap-fight-in-node-js-land/

The drama pull request in question: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

Alex authored the commit that 804d40e reverted, and when the drama was going down Alex rallied the troops on Twitter.

Good to know, thanks.

Perhaps the fact that he wants such a thing is a joke? Or a comment on the person himself?

The irony.

> He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled.

That bothered me as well, especially his flippant attitude about it ("Comments are never going to happen. Stop trying to make comments happen"). I get the joke, it's from that Lindsay Lohan movie. But the cognitive dissonance that it creates is annoying.

He's basically saying "I want Twitter to die because they don't allow proper conversations to take place. Oh and by the way, don't bother commenting on my post because I don't believe in blog post conversations."

More likely, Alex does not want to spend the time to provide moderation for a comments section. His stance is that Twitter is bad because the kind of community it creates—it would be silly for him to create a comment section that similarly failed to meet his expectations.

It is perfectly fine for Alex to criticize Twitter without providing his own alternative (though he does tacitly recommend using IRC and Facebook instead). Alex is a Rackspace employee who also is heavily involved in the Python community. The expectations on him for providing a space to talk are completely different than a company who's business is providing a communications platform.

He says though, you can email him, write your own email blog, except that you don't comment on his blog.

Does that mean he doesn't want communication to happen?

I emailed him once. At the time, I was a big python fanatic, and had a few questions about pypy. He never replied. So I asked someone else, and wrote a blogpost on pypy.

Between the two, I can only conclude that he has something very, very specific in mind as the proper form a community should assume. I wonder what it is.

I think it's pretty clear what he wants. He wants the ability to selectively include some people, and exclude others. Like Facebook, where you can set your privacy policy to "friends only" and then you only get comments from people you've mutually agreed to converse with.

This is defining a community in terms of its edges. He seems to believe that if you can't exclude anyone, you can't define a community. It's just, I don't know, a crowd.

Twitter doesn't work this way, and neither do website comments. Both invite anyone at all to speak to you.

I think you've nailed it. He isn't happy that Twitter has no boundaries or walls for him to build and maintain. It appears that in his mind, Twitter should go away since it doesn't serve his specific needs, never mind the 200 million+ other users who are happy with how it works.

I don't care for Twitter myself, but I'm not going to call for its demise just because I don't get much out of it. Obviously it has a prominent place as a major social media engine, and that's just fine. But then, it's not all about me.

There's something very sad about defining a community by who is excluded.

The article is all about how he doesn't want to communicate with people unless they are in his specifically selected group of people he thinks is OK. So allowing blog comments would probably let anyone communicate, which is what he dislikes about Twitter. So I see the blog comments being disabled as more in line with his philosophy, at least.

So Facebook groups/google+ communities?

His blog comments were probably just like Twitter conversations: impossible to follow and appearing in an inconsistent order. Thus they had to go away. Also the jokes. Stop broadcasting jokes!

And his Twitter feed is nothing but promotional one-way blasts (not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts).

> not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts

A ratio of 20:1 is consistent with sole individuals having some contextual visiblity within an ecosystem/community, e.g. being a lead developer on a language's primary alternative implementation, which he is (pypy). It's similar to David Nolen (Om, 20:1) or Armin Ronacher (Flask, 40:1).

It says send him an email. Maybe you think he's imposing undue restrictions on the conversation, but I don't think it's fair to say someone doesn't want a conversation because they would prefer to have it in one medium over the other. Plus comments need to be moderated, etc.

Are you actually engaging with his comments regarding Twitter or just whipping out a lame tu quoque?

> His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article.

Some people link their social media presences together so that posts made in one place get replicated on various socia media things, for the benefit of people who follow them on those social media things. That doesn't mean they have to enjoy that particular social media whatsit's experience, or can't criticize it.

The only thing that you can tell from comments being disabled is that he doesn't want to have this specific conversation on the specific venue that is comments to his blog post. Trying to extrapolate that into some stance of I HATE HAVING CONVERSATIONS is stupid.

He isn't just criticizing it. He is saying it shouldn't exist.

It is hypocritical to use it and exclaim that it shouldn't be used.

How so? He wants it to stop existing so he stops being compelled to use it. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

The author probably created the header when he was a twitter user, and hasn't gotten around to reformatting it yet. No great conspiracy.

I had similar thoughts. Thank you for transforming my confusion and annoyance to laughter.

Looks like classic trolling clickbait to me.

I value communities too, but the open broadcast nature of Twitter is what I like about it: I can put a message out into the either ("sector-level FDE encryption is bad!" or "ChiSec is next Wednesday") and it quickly percolates to people who (a) I'm glad saw it and (b) I would not have known to send it to. Lots of good things have come from that dynamic.

Twitter is full of abuse and harassment. Other communities are, too. One solution to that problem is policing, which is what HN does. Another is (for lack of a better term) cliquishness, which is what closed communities do. I see a lot of value in both of those approaches too, but every community management strategy has tradeoffs, and serendipity is an awfully powerful force to trade for orderliness.

OT, I didn't know about ChiSec, so thanks for that. I'm going to try and come to the next meetup.

Neato. It's 2 weeks from now. http://sockpuppet.org/chisec.

We're going to put together something similar for HN-types.

It's kind of ridiculous and solipsistic to declare that something that exists for a purpose you don't care about shouldn't exist at all. I prefer Twitter to other social networks and haven't had any problems with it. (Though Twitter should improve the situation for people who do get harassed. You can't eliminate all anonymity on the internet.)

I'm also not interested in the shallow/faux "communities" that are more easily facilitated by Facebook but I have no problem with allowing it to exist and I can't imagine censoring it as a whole due to the parts I don't like. Or even writing up a blog post about doing so.

For someone that supposedly quit Twitter months ago, there are a surprising number of recent tweets:

https://twitter.com/Alex_Gaynor

Not to mention the big Twitter logo linking to his profile at the top of his blog.

Maybe he just wants to engage with #Brands.

Well, all his Twitter account is doing is tweeting out links to his blog posts. It's a glorified RSS feed, not what he's talking about the post.

But still, yeah.

Not all his posts are links to his blog:

https://twitter.com/alex_gaynor/status/524683684180271106

But even if they were, there's a certain irony to decrying Twitter while syndicating yourself on it.

If you criticize the effects of cars on society, are you a hypocrite for driving? How about riding? If you critique capitalism and wish it would end, are you a hypocrite for buying?

That's always a low accusation to make primarily because it's ad hominem and completely irrelevant, but secondarily because it's an easy attack that requires a detailed defense.

If a person making billions from running tobacco companies doesn't smoke, prefers people he's around don't smoke, and thinks that it's a nasty habit, is he a hypocrite? What about if he makes money from a rise in sales of sugary candy but thinks people eat too much sugary candy? What if he makes money from selling housing but rents?

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8535040

Hypocrite:

1.) a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion

2.) a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings

Maybe, there's also something to be said for being pragmatic. You may not like the way the world is right now, but you still have to live in it, you know?

Except that his first words in the post are "About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter.", so that's just utter BS.

I may be biased because Alex Gaynor is a prominent member of the Django community and one of the pillars of what made it so elitist and hostile to contributions. But then again, I hate twitter too.

I can see why he would want to do that; I hate Facebook and only hold onto it for a few long distance family members, but realistically I could drop it and communicate with them via my wife's account. However, if I drop Facebook then I also drop the FB Pages associated with the websites I manage. While it's not a huge audience by any stretch, it's still important to me.

In another example, recently I stopped commenting on OS News threads altogether due to the recent political shenanigans (in short, the managing editor stopped posting operating system/tech news and focused solely on the gamergate saga). However, I do still check out the site from time to time, and ironically both the stories and the subsequent discussions have improved in the past week or so while he's been on vacation. Still, I'm soured from engaging with that community for a while yet, even though I have friends there.

So I can see him keeping his Twitter account and only using it to promote his blog, declining to engage in regular conversation. On the one hand, maybe it is a bit hypocritical, but on the other, he's using Twitter for exactly what he said it should be used for.

Disagree. Twitter is immensely valuable for me to quickly communicate with people in my "community" (the Javascript tech world), as well as keep up on news in areas I'm interested in: the Javascript tech world & a few others.

He also clearly doesn't understand how to use lists to create his own communities. I have lists for devs, friends, funnies, etc. With a little effort you can have these communities on tap in columns. Hey, if you're lazy, you can even subscribe to other's lists and put them in a column too.

Twitter is not hard for conversation, so long as you can put together concise thoughts. I'll agree it does become a pain when you need to explain a lot, but that's why we have links and a multitude of platforms to record our thoughts.

This line stood out for me, "Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities; unless they do something so bad as to actually get banned from Twitter"

I've heard this several times from people with large followers, basically that they can't escape the bad actors without taking their account private. I don't think this is a Twitter issue so much as it is a everyone-on-the-network-has-the-same-volume issue. In the 'real' world, the relative population sizes of trolls vs non-trolls means that trolls get drowned out by the noise. But on the Internet everyone gets the same level of 'voice' and a minority can drown out the majority, especially if they are willing to be antisocial about it.

It is a hard problem. A naturally troll resistant but otherwise frictionless sharing platform. Maybe a voting button on every tweet, that is 'troll factor' (so +1 if they are a troll, -1 if they aren't) then use some data analytics to marginalize trolls. Seems like fertile ground for some fresh thinking.

The catch is that once you introduce marginalization mechanisms, abuse is inevitable. What people often want is some kind of abuse-proof marginalize-only-the-people-I-don't-like button.

Slightly side topic - does anyone else feel like they "need" to use Twitter because it's a good distribution platform (the "human RSS"), but generally don't particularly enjoy it?

I personally find myself thinking "oh maybe I should post that stupid comment that's in my head on Twitter...last time I did it I got X followers, so I should probably continue to do it"

yup. I'm worse than the author here, I've never understood twitter. It's bad for writing because of the limitation, it's bad to keep track of something because of all the noise, it's bad for discussions, it's bad for communities, etc...

The only good things that I can come up with are: broadcasting, stalking someone, press 2.0.

And yes I do use it, I have a twitter account with 600+ followers (I don't even know if they're called followers) and I just use it to promote and promote, and I dislike it so much that I miss on a lot of promotion by ignoring it most of the time.

>it's bad for communities

I'd say it's good for sharing intel within communities, just not for in-depth discussion (other sites are good for that).

I don't necessarily agree that Twitter users can't build communities. A friend of mine writes for a sports blog specific to an NFL team. His twitter account (and @replies) show that he is a part of a very strong community around the team. The tweets from these super-fans aren't just missives shouted into space, these people use Twitter almost solely as a response tool to each other. Their tweets look very much like something you'd see on IRC or a message board.

I guess another way of phrasing the original article's claim is that although communities do form, they have no straightforward way to exclude strangers, interlopers, and even griefers: and except for incessant use of hashtags (which could eat up valuable space), there's no simple way for a person who is part of multiple communities to direct comments to only one community.

That's a recipe for both serendipity and uncomfortable moments (or worse) if someone has strong opinions on, say, computer science, religion, and animal rights. People who chose to follow them over one thing will constantly see their opinions on other things. That might be great under some circumstances because it will promote more interesting and broader discussions or lead people to learn about ideas that they wouldn't have naturally come across in their own filter bubble. But it might produce some serious disruption in the conversation too, especially if that person's views are offensive or upsetting to some readers.

I know a Twitter user writes a lot about computer science and a lot about sex and sexuality. I find both sets of posts frequently insightful, but the latter would be off-topic in a forum devoted only to computer science, and they do sometimes produce offense.

It seems like the best case for avoiding really bad forms of conflict is when a group of people tweet almost exclusively on a single topic that outsiders don't find upsetting or offensive (or simply don't know about). But a lot of people do want to have at least some discussions that others will inevitably be offended by, and the broadcast medium can be a challenge for that if you didn't want to get into it with the strangers (or for that matter have some of them insult you, threaten you, or even dox you).

An example: I remember a blog written by an Orthodox Jew on theology and also cultural and political issues within the Orthodox community.

Periodically commenters would come by who would take exception to gender relations in the Orthodox world, or to the idea that there is a God who created the world and revealed his will to the Jewish people, who are uniquely continuing to follow it. The author would ban these commenters. His theory was that people are entitled to debate those topics somewhere, but that he wanted to have productive discussions on his blog with people who shared his basic premises.

It's easy for me see two different points of view about this: that it creates a "filter bubble" of the sort described by Eli Pariser, where the Orthodox (and people with other beliefs, for that matter, in their own blog communities) never see their faith questioned, and have a subjective experience that their beliefs are "normal" and don't hear about the substance of criticisms or objections to them. Or that it actually allows discussions about the topics that the audience of that blog mainly wants to discuss, without having every single thread turn into a debate about the existence of God, whether the Torah is divine, and whether Orthodoxy should adopt gender egalitarianism.

I think one idea here is that Twitter only makes one of these two options practical: the one where every thread can conceivably go off in the direction of a bunch of strangers saying that your basic beliefs are wrong (or even that you are a bad person).

Twitter has a great feature of showing you the @reply messages by the people you follow, only if you follow that same person as well.

For example, if you sent me an @reply message to me ( @djloche ) that message would only show up in the feeds of your followers IF they followed me as well. This means you can have a conversation about the latest film with me, the party last night with your co-workers, and a pancake recipe with a friend that really loves pancakes - and there won't be any cross conversation unless there is a natural crossover in the social groups.

I guess that helps quite a lot in preventing group conflicts from getting out of hand accidentally. It seems like a weaker control if someone is deliberately trying to get involved in a conversation where other people would see them as unwelcome.

They can all choose to block him, though. And they don't need to include him in their replies.

That's a good point, that is clearer to what the article is trying to say.

Defining a community by its ability to exclude is interesting. Twitter just puts the impetus to exclude on a personal level (person A blocks person B) rather than on a community level (person B is banned from this IRC channel)

Yes, I think that's right. And some unmoderated mailing lists and newsgroups have also favored that approach (with killfiles), but even there there is potentially a stronger threshold for joining (you have to deliberately subscribe to the list or group) and stronger recourse for extreme misbehavior (at least on mailing lists, where someone can be banned from the list).

I agree. The hockey and baseball Twittersphere is awash in conversations. I've made a number of real-life friends through Twitter in these communities.

Sports is perhaps a special case in that people routinely disagree with each other without one being right and one being wrong. Trash talking is expected and is easily ignored (or it can be part of the fun).

Alex Gaynor can be a bit of a troll. This time he wrote a blog post about things he (allegedly) doesn't like about Twitter, added a couple of "flammable" statements here and there to clickbait, and meanwhile he still has a Twitter account.

It's not the first time he acts like this, regardless of his technical contributions. This is why I don't follow him and will keep discounting everything he says, sorry; he goes in the same bucket as Dave Winer and Eric Raymond, people who can code but whose overall opinions I really don't care for.

Ok this may seem crazy, but check out Google+ again. It is a really nice mix of broadcast and communities (when you can find a good community). It won't replace your FB or your Twitter, but it seems to have a solution to this one niche.

It has the directed-edge-graph of Twitter and also really strong support for communities and pages. I know a lot of the developer communities on there are really strong (I work on Developer Relations at Google so I see it all the time).

Twitter is the best real time news source I've ever seen. Any discussion of it's utility that ignores that is missing how a huge percentage of its users actually interact with it.

Yes its bad for conversations. Yes it is poor at building communities. But if you want to know whats happening in <insert area of interest here> Twitter can be a fantastic resource. Especially (but not exclusively) if your area of interest involves sports, tech, or politics.

Ahh, real time news! Yes I think that is the one biggest positive feature of twitter. When I was trying to remember some positive things about Twitter to respond to this with, I failed to remember this one due to all the other not-as-positive things Twitter is used for.

And that things are?

Oh the irony!

I stopped using twitter mainly because of Alex and other similar figures in the python community.

I quickly found out that twitter(or maybe the social media in general) brings the worst in people. I was following people because of their status in the software community and I hoped that I might get informed about tech stuff directly "from the source".

Instead, what I got were stupid jokes, rallies against "hostile" people that used "he" instead of "she" (oh the horror!) and other political nonsense.

I put up with the brain farts of people I used to admire only for a few months. I then decided that twitter probably isn't for me.

Man, this dude's crotchety. "Stop liking things I don't like!"

I can't disagree with you, even if I really want to. I'm the same way, I want people to stop using Twitter, because I don't want to use it. I went to dotgo this month, much of the last minute communication was on Twitter, which is a really annoying platform to navigate when you don't have an account. I want to get other people of the platforms that I don't use, so I'm not forced to deal with them myself.

Being push towards technologies, behaviors and trends you don't like can be extremely frustrating. In the end me being bitter about Twitter, JavaScript, smartphones, tablets and all the other stuff I really don't care about isn't going to change public opinion. I comfort myself in the fact that Twitter will be dead soon if they continue to lose money.

>me being bitter about Twitter, JavaScript, smartphones, tablets and all the other stuff I really don't care about

Can you elaborate why you are bitter about the above?

Well, for Javascript it's obvious. Not sure about the rest.

Well played :-)

And twitter users doing their part in turn by getting upset someone doesn't like what they like ;)

>It's fundamentally impossible to create a safe space with a public account

Right, so use something else for that.

Twitter grew because it's open. I interpret posts like this as an attempt to lobby for the creation of a caste within Twitter with the ability to censor. I've abandoned other large sites because of unreasonable censorship.

EDIT: Gaynor thinks people shouldn't use HN too. Quel surprise. https://twitter.com/alex_gaynor/status/259803468838080512

If you want a more detailed critique of Twitter's design and the effect it has on conversations there, I wrote one last year: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/

/end self-promotion

I agree, this is more of an eloquent critique. Also this reads as "this is why I don't like twitter" instead of "stop liking things I don't".

I suspect Mr Gaynor is tapping into a simmering feeling that many have that Twitter is inadequate for most communication needs (at least among technical crowds), and that there are now many, many more interesting alternatives now. He clearly cares a lot about his #Brand and being the among first person to say how uncool Twitter or FB or MySpace is becoming might very well boost his Klout score.

I agree that Twitter is inadequate for serious communications and is the last place I go to read deeply on anything, but that doesn't mean it's not immensely useful and fun to many others outside my communities. I don't usually find myself hoping that things I don't use "cease to be". I think Gaynor must just be addressing his own social circles here and speaking hyperbolically.

That's what I like about Twitter-- it's a global cocktail party. People tweet to one another about anything regardless of whether they know each other or what their relative socioeconomic background is.

It is what it is. It's not for everyone. But the net is more interesting with it than without it.

Twitter is awesome! It's so easy to use Twitter to connect with people you usually can't connect with because you have no way of reaching them.

I use twitter a lot to find clients, support (e.g. I need someone from Google or Microsoft to help me with an issue), and much more. It's also a great way for me to gather news and updates. I follow the account of most of the tech I work with so I'm always up-to-date with their latest updates.

I agree that this is Twitter's best feature. It's very easy to find and reach out to almost any person or organization.

It's easier than looking up a phone number, because you don't need to search through piles of "contact us" pages. It's also lighter and less cumbersome than email.

I just wish it was easier to send private messages. Often I don't want my customer support communications to be massively public.

I completely disagree.

> Twitter is good for two things: engaging with #Brands, and broadcasting messages to whoever wants to read them.

I almost never engage with brands on Twitter.

I do broadcast messages — to anybody who has chosen to follow me and hasn't chosen to unfollow me, both of which are freely done without any social consequences.

On the flip side, I read that which others have broadcast, provided I follow them. And I'm free to shape exactly who's in that set of people, without worrying about circles or unfriending or which IRC channels to sit in.

The author writes about communities, and about moderating IRC channels and making decisions about who can stay and who is banned. Perhaps he prefers to shape and steer communities in a way that Twitter doesn't facilitate.

Personally, the ephemeral and asymmetric nature of the Twitter social graph is the defining feature. The 140 character limit is perhaps just a constraint which helped that feature survive.

The author also mentioned harassment on Twitter. I've never been on the receiving end of it, and I hope I've never been on the other end either. But I believe it's a real problem. I hope there's a solution, but “Twitter going away” isn't that solution.

I hope twitter doesn't go away.

I was a very late adopter of Twitter because I always thought that Twitter and Facebook were the same. They are not. Twitter is slowly replacing my RSS and news reader. Twitter is not a community thing, it's about broadcasting (in real-time, if you need it, most people don't, they are just addicted). I don't tweet and I'm just following 11 people. I don't follow friends, I just follow who has something to broadcast. Twitter is great for that.

Facebook is more noisy by concept. Their focus in communities and friends makes broadcasting side noisy. I had to turn off almost all my friends wall notifications, I don't have the time or will to read that one friend that I meet once a year went to the restaurant or played a game. It's just too much noise. That's why FB for me is nowadays mostly a chat/email friends app. FB is great for that once most people are there. (Not to be confused with: FB is great doing that..)

How about if you want a safe place you don't go to unsafe places? It's that simple. You can choose what you read.

But then you might accidentally find yourself in an unsafe space one day. Its better to convert enough people to your opinions about safe spaces, and eventually force the world to conform to your vision.

>About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter. Though I'd been thinking about it for a while, ultimately leaving was a snap decision for me. Lately I've been reflecting on why I hate Twitter so much.

It took me a minute to figure out he never worked for Twitter and that he just quit _using_ Twitter.

Twitter still rules the real-time news/information area. Communities like facebook/irc/forums are too closed for broadcasts like that. It has its purpose and it does it well. But you can also not use products you don't like.

I suspect some Twitter hate as he spent time very close to it in working there. This is expected, you work on a product you might see more of the bad than the good. Game developers don't always enjoy the game because they see what they had to cut, directors can't watch a movie without pointing out flaws, security forces can't walk into a building without checking for safety, or you worked at Olive Garden and might never want that ever, ever again.

When you work in it, you really get to know something, for better or worse.

Twitter is an incredible medium for citizen journalism and news broadcasting in general. There is no doubt about that. It does have issues with tackling bots and fake profiles - something that it finds harder than other social networks like Facebook which have a better system in place for authenticating accounts. By subscribing to the right people on Twitter, my feed is highly curated to suit my interests. Their machine learning would only get better and I only wish they use the AI it to classify bots and other fake accounts to enhance user experience.

I dislike Twitter because so many people try to be clever, or think everything roaming through their mind is of interest to the world, and sadly because of retweets you can't 100% avoid them.

But what I hate the most is useless articles filled with random twitter posts. It's the new and lazier street interview and it's as stupid as those "X number of people started a petition / created a facebook group about [random outrage of the day]".

Twitter is OK to know when something is down, or when your favorite artist has a new album but it has weakened journalism.

haven't we always known that twitter is just an anechoic chamber to stick narcissists in?

i guess its alright for comedians/intellectuals to post amusing stuff (even then I find the tweet value to be inconsistent enough that its not worth scrolling through their history). outside that isnt it mainly a platform for egotists & social climbers to add to their self-importance?

i like it cuz it kinda tires them out, maybe stops them from taking to the streets to act like hot shit -- and i never have to look at it :)

> haven't we always known that twitter is just an anechoic chamber to stick narcissists in?

That's an incredibly broad generalization of ~300 million users.

> Twitter has no mechanisms for this. Every user floats by themselves, interacting with who they please. This denies us the ability to build communities, to set social norms, and to enforce them. Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities

I read this and said "oh, he wants to censor people." Then, I got to the bottom of the post and saw that he doesn't allow comments either. It was a one, two punch.

You make excellent points. Twitter IS for broadcasting. It is the counterpart to community interaction. Say, you want to reach those who aren't in your community. That would be difficult on Facebook. In fact, it's a "uniquely defining feature" of Facebook not to facilitate that sort of usage. They both have a purpose. Say, a startup needs to communicate app status to its users so people aren't left hanging in mystery during a downtime. Twitter would help with that well.

Maybe Twitter IS inherently less warm and more chaotic. I get that feeling too. (I don't even log-in often.) But I sort of use it to create a pseudo-community.

Here me out.

140 characters are limiting, right? That means that the author of a post has two options: risk losing followers by posting chatter, OR make sure each word matters so that it's a saturated snap-shot of their current thought.

Now, imagine that you follow a curated list of influencers (i.e., people that are involved-in and doing things you also are passionate about). THEY may not all know about each other, but YOU know about all them. (Think: one-to-many instead of many-to-many.) As a consequence of this, you're continually getting an influx of musings by people you respect and value the opinions of.

Hear

Broadcast has it's own use. I posit that broadcast leads to a more organic formation of a community since it ensures that communities are emergent rather than prescribed.
Thousands of communities come into being and dissolve on twitter every single day - what, really, is the hashtag?
People within an "idea proximity" (nearness of two ideas:)) commune about ideas with a gusto lost in other social sites. Twitter is one of the greatest communication gifts of this century.

There's a Dutch saying that roughly translates to: "Life is a party but you've got to hang your own balloons." Twitter can be a fantastic place for community if you know where to look or are willing to organize it yourself. Tweetchats are a great example of this [1], the phenomenon known as "Black Twitter" [2] is another. (Although many ostensible members of "Black Twitter" have legitimate issues with how "it" is being studied and reported.)[3]
Not to mention the ad hoc communities that spring up around events and pop culture happenings. As with many other things, it might just be a matter of what one makes it.
[1]http://janetfouts.com/how-to-participate-in-a-tweet-chat/ [2] http://www.annenberglab.com/projects/dsail-black-twitter-pro... [3]http://io9.com/what-happens-when-scientists-study-black-twit...

Is this some kind of joke?
It has a Twitter icon on his website that links to his active Twitter account. On that account, 4 hours ago, he tweeted about this blog post (https://twitter.com/Alex_Gaynor, https://twitter.com/alex_gaynor/status/527851651097309184)

"This hammer isn't a very good screwdriver."

I don't think that was Gaynor's point. I think he was saying something more like "this hammer is so popular nobody is using screwdrivers anymore, but we still need screwdrivers."

How is this not a false dichotomy? The author presents it as "We can either have IRC communities and Facebook groups where everyone agrees with each other all the time or gets banned or we can have an uncontrolled twitter where people might disagree with me in ways I can't control" Both have existed very comfortably for a significant amount of time.
I think (along with hundreds of millions of other users) that there's a lot of value behind a broadcast platform like twitter, and I've made some really important connections on it. It seems arrogant to dismiss that because it doesn't enable the exact types of communication the author wants to have (that are addressed by the other platforms he explicitly mentions).
This is a clickbait article headline for the author's blog to get more attention, if he felt this strongly about communities, conversations, and against twitter he wouldn't disable comments, and tweet about the article.
"This screwdriver is so bad at putting nails in the wall!! We should get rid of screwdrivers!"

Isn't blogging a form of "broadcast"? Twitter was a originally a "micro-blogging" service after all.
I don't necessarily disagree with his point about the levels of abuse on Twitter, but the medium with which he is expressing his message (his blog) seems to disprove his point.
Why do blog posts seem to be (mostly) free of these levels of abuse, while they're so rampant on Twitter?

Eh. I'm definitely a part of several communities on Twitter. It's just that they're micro-communities that are fluid in size and shape. If I'm talking business stuff I'll @shazow usually. If it's coding, usually @wolever, sometimes @shazow or @lnxprgr3, depending on the language/platform/etc.
The whole hashtag thing is ... pretty hit or miss. I wouldn't mind a better solution to that. But as weak as it is, it's how I found some of my closest twitter-friends, so it can definitely work.
Thankfully I haven't had to deal with any harassment issues (not famous, nor a noticeable minority), though sadly I don't doubt that they exist to some degree.
And just to be snippy, I find it amusing that he's so against comments on blogs, preferring that you write your own blog post. Isn't that exactly like Twitter? Everyone has their own medium, none of which are explicitly connected...

It's not at all exactly like twitter, for one a text that needs to stand on its own (a blog post) will require far more work to be of any sort of quality than a simple reply on twitter.

Okay, I'll get more explicit.
> I think Twitter is defined by the fact that it's about broadcast.
Writing on a blog with comments off is 100% broadcast with no built-in solution for conversations to form. Twitter has a (flawed) way, so twitter is actually LESS about broadcast than this blog.
> Communities are, above all else, defined by membership, the ability for people to identify as a part of one, and to participate in activities, and share things and experiences with the group.
How does a reader proclaim membership in this blog. Sign up for comments? Post comments? Nope. How does a reader participate? How does a reader share their experiences with the group? Far easier on Twitter than here.
> Every user floats by themselves, interacting with who they please.
Every reader of the blog floats by themselves, interacting with nobody.
> Try following a multi-party conversation using any of the official clients;
How is THIS possible on the blog? You can email the author, sure, but you aren't going to see or be able to reply to anyone else that emailed him.
There's also the widely-repeated quote of "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Length is not necessarily indicative of amount of thought.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

Thanks for posting this, I have had the same unpopular opinion since Twitter first appeared. While I don't necessarily think that Twitter should go away, I do think it should get out of the way of other methods for communication. There are much better forms of communication for many circumstances where communication is needed. Which is damn near everything aside from communicating with marketers and expressing witty one-liners to the world.
EDIT: I forgot about one great thing about twitter that I normally don't think about (since all the other uses cloud this function for me): real-time news. There's not many tools out there that can handle this type of functionality better. Reddit serves the same purpose for many people and does so in an even better way in my opinion (no character limit, communities focused on a topic, etc.).

I don't understand. You can build lists, I do and they are followed by other people. I have one list of Icelanders and I totally look at that list as a community of people.
Just take Snoop dogg's account for example, he has a massive amount of followers. Is this not the community of Snoop dogg fans? You can find other Snoop dogg fans and follow them and interact with them if they are doing something that you like.
I love how I can just go on twitter and there is @BettyFckinWhite going "You know who doesn't care that it's #NationalCatDay? Every cat."
and I go "hah, that's hilarious" and then I go do something else. I think social media that aims at being everything you need on one site is robbing to much of our time. Twitter keeps it snappy, yet I can interact as much as I want.

Wait. He has a link to his twitter account in the header of the blog. What is the last tweet? 9 hours ago, a link to this article. He hopes that twitter will go away yet he uses it constantly? I'm confused to say the least. I don't know what this man wants!

Of course you can use a service because it's too mainstream to avoid, and at the same time wish that it didn't exist. I've also signed up for Twitter because they stopped providing RSS feeds. That doesn't mean I wish them best.

I am not a huge twitter fan. I watched the http://foundation.bz/ interview with Biz Stone, and he seems like he has integrity. I think some of the management of twitter is a bit dubious, but the core function of the application is rather valuable. It is a good way to keep track of people & events. It makes it easy to broadcast things like occupy, arabspring, ebola, charities, entrepreneurs, etc. It is a good way for people to collectively contribute ideas such as news. It isn't really meant to be a social network. What the author purports to be a bug, is actually like the key usecase/feature of twitter. I don't regularly use it, and am pretty ambivalent, but I understand the value.

Conversations work on Twitter if the participants share enough context, such as similar vocabularies or compatible high-level goals.
Unfortunately the system and its harsh constraints is also really good at matching up people sure to misunderstand each other.
I suspect, though, that a lot of recent angst is transient, due to the inrush of users with wildly different rhetorical standards, and the exciting novelty, including the excitement of discord and performative moralizing.
But the novelty of nasty arguments with strangers will wear off – like how Farmville and similar games become less interesting when their basic mechanics and repetitive loops are understood. The true utility of Twitter will persist, leaving us with a better ratio of light-to-heat than some are experiencing at the moment.

I always thought of twitter as a news filtering service. At least, that's how I use it. I follow people who tweet about things that I'm interested in. Journalism is about 'broadcast', not 'communities'. Should it go away, too?

I acknowledge the irony of 'no comments' on this blog post but beneath that there is a point.
All communication is broadcast. What differs is how those broadcasts are released and revisited through time. Twitter emphasizes the recent, most piecemeal events. Not building upon previous works, just consuming content FIFO and shouting back into the ether. Noise.
An old blog post has more potential, more signal-to-noise, than an old tweet.
Wikipedia is an interesting result of [anonymous] editors broadcasting content towards each other in a very constructive manner. Some termites might just stack dirt, but others can use simple methods to construct complex creations.

The author has obviously never seen furry Twitter. One of my favorite communities. Maybe it helps that most people make a fresh account for it. It's diverse, safe, full of conversation, and seems to make a lot of people happy.

I totally agree with this guy. At least, I mostly do. I'm not sure if I care if it goes away, but I've drastically cut back on my use of it mainly for the reasons he outlines. I think he's onto something.

I'm another person who doesn't use Twitter, however I do have an account. And frankly, I fail to see many use cases. But I also acknowledge that the few use cases are powerful.
1. On the ground reporting 2. Messages to group of friends, like where to meet 3. Coordinating group efforts outside friends list in X social media 4. Warnings related to specific area/time 5. Error logs related to web services 6. Command/Control of hidden machines 7. Complaints to companies with sensitive web presence

Twitter is an example of product design by technical limitations, not what people need.
Nevertheless, they hit very well, b/c the two were somewhat closely aligned for a decade or so. Now that it's being strained, some of its limitations are showing...
...But no matter what, I do not predict its imminent demise... Especially since they are mainly a technical layer, there is still a world of protocols they can implement on top of it to make it more like e.g. IRC, or whatever other comm. network people desire.
Then again CB radio rose and fell quite hard without ever completely going away.

Weibo (the Chinese "clone" of Twitter) actually does a lot better job with conversations. It has its own built-in instant messenger, as well as a comment dialogue interface similar to what you see on Facebook. Also, you can add your own text to the top when you retweet.
Nevertheless, though, I don't agree with the author's stance of "I hope Twitter goes away". If you don't like something, don't use it. Let the market decide what should exist, let hackers keep building better products, and let the market decide again.

By this authors definition, a community's primary function is to exclude others. While you are free to exclude whoever you want in your own life, it says something about you when you have a problem with others wanting to include the rest of the world.
Whether you or anyone else likes it or not, we are in a time where we need to learn to adapt and include, not hide and exclude.

I don't want to talk to everyone, or listen to everyone. That's a simple fact of life, almost everyone can agree to that. I don't want to make an inside joke to the world, I only want my social group to hear it. The world might be confused or not find the joke funny, but my group would. Likewise, I don't want to see someone else's life displayed in front of me, because frankly I don't care about that other person.
Life is too short to try to pretend to be interested in uninteresting people.

Twitter was never meant to be a social network. The author himself writes: "Twitter is good for two things: engaging with #Brands, and broadcasting messages", which is what Twitter is good at - a broadcast and a news consumption service. I don't see any other service that tracks realtime events as good as Twitter.

I hate Twitter as well. It is occupying a place that could very easily be occupied by much better products. It's primary purpose is to hold back innovation.
I'm sure some people prefer Twitter as it is and it is valid for them to do so. However, the existence of Twitter is still massively harmful in terms of opportunity cost.

I am not sure on your conclusions. I do not use Twitter (I have an account, only scammers and spammers follow me, I say nothing interesting on it) but if there could be much better products, they'd take the position of Twitter, wouldn't they?
Twitter's primary purpose is to allow shouting in the street, not to hold back innovation. How is Twitter's existence stopping you from innovating?

Completely disagree... what a selfish post.

Twitter won't go away for say 50-100 years. Why? There is value in the name/idea in the public consciousness.
Let's not forget that myspace, friendster, and livejournal still exist. There are a lot of pre 2000 sites and brands that are still sort of a live in some kind of zombie state or another.
It's weird.

Myspace has no impact on my life... Thats "close enough" to gone for my purposes, and I assume the author's as well.
I don't mine if there are people going around using tools that I don't care for, it's only when they're insanely popular beyond all cause do they exert social pressure on people who would prefer to not use them.

Honestly, @RealTimeWWII and its companion and imitator accounts (like @GuadaBattle) are, to me, the main justification of Twitter as a platform. If I didn't follow those accounts (and I will probably stop in three years once they finish) I wouldn't have hardly any use for Twitter.

ironically one of the reasons i've entertained the idea of quitting twitter is b/c of annoying things that showed up in my feed from the author(and others). But I just un-followed him instead. the technical things I'm interested in, but I dont care for the politics so much.

Yeah it's weird he still has a twitter account but I completely agree with him. Especially when I try to engage in a meaningful conversation. It's like excusing yourself from a loud party to talk to someone about something deep or complicated. Twitter is a party.

I'm surprised at seeing no reference to reddit which does allow for participation and discussion.

Reddit makes it much harder for you to completely shelter yourself from people who disagree with you (compared to, say, facebook). Some of the content of his post strongly suggests that he defines 'community' by his ability to block people he doesn't like or agree with.

I'm confused. His opening says >>> About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter. And this is his twitter >>> http://imgur.com/xAyW4h1
Last I checked oct 21st's not "seven months ago"
What gives?

Could just be automatic posting from his blogging clients.

https://quitter.se/ https://alpha.app.net/ http://sublevel.net/ https://cupcake.io/ https://ello.co/
..the internet is made of choice

Which sort of fails if 99% pick something different from you, or you don't want to pick.

I see what you're saying - but for the 1% that are influencers (who share and curate web content) - there is a strategy called POSSE http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)
Basically a lot of people have their own independent rig, and then spam out the link to the silos, while at the same time, operating 5-7 social media accounts where they engage with the feedback on those silos (app.net/ello, etc)
We all know these 'web personalities' - the Grubers, Anil Dashes, Marcos, and even the Gaynors

How to make Twitter go away: Stop talking about it, writing about it, using it, thinking about it.
How not to make Twitter go away: Write blog articles about how you want Twitter to go away, which are then shared and posted across the Internet.

* then shared and posted across the Internet. *
On Twitter, specifically. He tweeted his article about not using Twitter.
Maybe he just wants people to engage with the @alex_gaynor #Brand.

Twitters open API is very useful. Even if it doesn't allow you to get more than 1% of the tweets (without subscribing to firehouse and paying lots of $$$) it is very useful for many different projects of mine.

Twitter is definitely not for everyone. It is definitely not for me. I don't want it to go away. I see people, communities achieving a lot with it - it is a medium to get heard.

I am annoyed when people ask me for a twitter id to register. My twitter accounts are just for testing. I think there is a use for twitter as a generator for random number seeds

I cannot understand why this thread seems to be so popular. I'm not sure if I ever heard of this Alex Gaynor before (although he seems to have some recognition, but not really much), this article explains to some degree why he hates twitter, not why twitter is harmful for the universe and as stated in the comments many times already there isn't much constructive critique in his reasoning. So, essentially it is simply "somebody wrote he doesn't like something" post and would be of interest only if this "somebody" is some really special person.
Can somebody explain?

If discussions > broadcast then why disable comments?

He doesn't want discussions with people he doesn't agree with.

Why I agree with article
Emailed link to me from twitter redirected to http://imgur.com/uazq6A9 http://i.imgur.com/uazq6A9.jpg
Summary a big slot is dedicated to Westboro Baptists hate tweet.
This was labelled news. In what universe is it ok to have direct tweets from WBC promoted as news content. Free speech is one thing promoting hate speech is another - big fail twitter.

I think some people will quit fb/twitter the same way they quit smoking or drinking. Hi there, I am recovering twiterian

Twitter like Apple define themselves more by saying "No" then anything else and I love them for it.

Lots of Negativity here again. Most of the commenter here are saying it is wrong when he says Twitter should die because it doesn't encourage good communication, and then blocks his own comments section. It just means he wants to have a meaningful communication.
He says, you can email him, or write your own blog post to refute or add on to what he says. That way you will be facilitating a great communication.

>It just means he wants to have a meaningful communication.
If you want to communicate you don't create barriers for it to happen. There's nothing inherent to comment systems that prevents people from writing meaningful comments.

Yes, there is a lot of negativity here. Do you really think that its based on a misunderstanding of his post? Maybe the negativity is a result of people understanding his post, and having different - arguably better - values than he does.

Plus all good names are taken and there is no strategy for recycling unused ones - simply embarrassing.

I actually hope Twitter doesn't go away, it can serve as a fly-paper for the short-attention-span conversionist. The sort of people who talk at you, rather than with you. If they are all there, we can sneak off, to the other party, enjoy conversation, with give and take, learn, laugh, cry, take a real interest. It may even run to more than 140 chars. It will be great!

I quit it about a month ago. But I seriously, seriously doubt it is going anywhere.

Why is everyone so into Twitter? I've never actually met someone who tweeted.

Drinks from firehose. Complains about getting wet.

Well, they don't make any money, so...

Step 1: disable your own Twitter account.

The communities of twitter are #hashtags.

Says the guy with nearly 38k tweets.

Just make your account protected.

This too will pass.

sanctimonious bloviating
He is criticizing Twitter for being something it isn't.
It's a shame this made it to the front page of ycombinator news.

His wish might just come true. Investors are also wary of twitter and it's ability to monetize. The huge userbase alone won't work forever.
The end game for twitter will look in the shape and form of a buyout at a huge discount by an already hugely profitable company.

weirdo

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