The Decay of Twitter
theatlantic.com
The Decay of Twitter
1–10 of 139 posts
Re: The Decay of Twitter
#2Meh, clickbait.
Re: The Decay of Twitter
#3> In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation.
This seems to point to the main problem of Twitter: it's not clear who your audience is. Are you talking to your friends? To your family? To people with similar interests? To people you're trying to convince to agree with you on some position? Who? It's too... vague a medium to be useful for most kinds of communication.
Re: The Decay of Twitter
#4Here's the author's thesis, buried in the last paragraph with "little data to support" it:
In the final paragraphs of this article, let me assert something I have very little data to support: At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.” The public knows about conversation smoosh, and that constitutes, I think, a major problem for Twitter the Company.
I don't think I agree with the author's conclusions about "conversation smoosh" causing the decay of Twitter. Would love to hear any rethinkings/clarifications of the author's points, as I found them near inscrutable due to the convoluted structure and logic of the article.
Re: The Decay of Twitter
#5Recently, within the past month, someone I follow either posted or retweeted a link to a survey about paracetamol use in accident and emergency departments in the Uk, and how it was about as effective as opiate meds for most people.
Today there are stories on HN where that link would be relevant. I would have posted a link to the tweet, and a link to the study mentioned in the tweet. But Twitter's search is not good enough for this kind of thing. I have no way of finding this tweet apart from just ploughing through the twitter streams of the four or five people who might have posted / retweeted this link.
Filtering trolls and harassers is still too hard.
Controlling what's on my feed is a bit tricky. Some people post nonsense but retweet useful to me info. Others do the opposite - the stuff they tweet is useful but the stuff they retweet is nonsense. I have limited options, and I usually just unfollow.
I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me, my profile, my twitter stream, the people I follow, etc etc. I have no idea where Twitter gets information about me, but it doesn't seem to come from Twitter.
Re: The Decay of Twitter
#6Maybe it will seem as a dumb question, but how Twitter can be in the loss (in order of millions of US dollars) since day one, without (IMHO) clear path to profitability and not be bankrupt?
It is growing, but it still has huge losses. Do investors believe it will be hugely profitable 5-10 years from now?
Is this new normal in business?
Re: The Decay of Twitter
#7> In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. This seems to point to the main problem of Twitter: it's not clear who your audience is. Are you talking to your friends? To your family? To people with similar interests? To people you're trying to convince to agree with…
You are completely right. In a sense, it is also what draws people to Twitter. There is a low barrier to entry if you want to make an account to just broadcast to your family, fans (if you are celebrity), advertise for companies, collect people for activism (whether political, economic, or social media activism), etc.
Then again, there are probably better mediums for this. If you want to talk to your friends, why not use Facebook? If you want to advertise your art, why not go on tumblr or Soundcloud? Nowadays, the only Twitter accounts that seem to get much traffic are celebrities and companies (I am thinking particularly Twitch as I don't go on twitter much) advertising.
Re: The Decay of Twitter
#8Twitter is somewhat of a quantum state for me. It's a complete cesspool on the whole, but the academic community is absolutely outstanding.
I follow @Neuro_Skeptic, @StanDehaene, @practiCalfMRI, @sensorimotorlab, @davidpoeppel, among many others, and they certainly seem to squeeze a lot of insight into 160 characters.
In any case, everything I've been hearing relates to twitter not growing. I understand the pressure on investors, but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't need to grow. The niche is saturated, and there's no problem, per se.
Re: The Decay of Twitter
#9Recently, within the past month, someone I follow either posted or retweeted a link to a survey about paracetamol use in accident and emergency departments in the Uk, and how it was about as effective as opiate meds for most people. Today there are stories on HN where that link would be relevant. I would have posted a link to the tweet, and a link to the study mentioned in the tweet. But Twitter's search is not good…
> I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me
I have actually thinking about this and some ideas come up. If you don't mind me asking... What would be your ideal non-introsive ads mechanism? Maybe a relevant mention to you on a recommended tweet?
Re: The Decay of Twitter
#10Twitter is somewhat of a quantum state for me. It's a complete cesspool on the whole, but the academic community is absolutely outstanding. I follow @Neuro_Skeptic, @StanDehaene, @practiCalfMRI, @sensorimotorlab, @davidpoeppel, among many others, and they certainly seem to squeeze a lot of insight into 160 characters. In any case, everything I've been hearing relates to twitter not growing. I understand the pressure…
I love Twitter, but the burden is on the user to make the experience—it's entirely dictated by who you follow.