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The Decay of Twitter

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Decay of Twitter

#101

Post by jerrickhoang »

danielrakh wrote: post #92
johnward wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter and facebook serve completely different purposes for me. Facebook is where I mostly interact with people I actually know in real life. I use twitter like you do, to follow interesting things. Then linkedin is people I have worked with. Each network serves a different purpose. I'd never pay for any of them though. I guess I should say I'd rather pay with my privacy.

I've actually recently designed a concept around the interest graph of Twitter that I think would be a step in the right direction. Twitter Rooms: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a

amazing

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#102

Post by benten10 »

kafkaesque wrote: post #84
benten10 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple of responses: 0) Your arguments seem to be targeted at social media in general (eg. why I can't follow them on their sites, etc). Don't want to get into a conversation on benefits/disbenefits of social media 1) There was nothing in my comment to imply that my friends were from the U.S (they are not), but as I said, the user growth could be just for me. 2) >Why can't you follow the experts... Twitter IS their o…

With regard to point 2, isn't this what newsletters are for or email notifications? I get notifications of sites I have subscribed to via email. I find it is still a very reliable and good source because my email lists are curated to suit my needs all in one place. I get payment notifications, site update notifications, and correspondences to varying lengths with people. It's pretty great, actually! As for point 3, t…

First para: I mention social network elsewhere. Give me group emails, with everyone replying to everyone else, and give me the ability to see only those emails that people I care about are sending, and give me a limit in the size of an individual emails so they don't get unwieldy, and you will have given me Twitter.

Yupp, text images are a poor way to digitize text. They're way backwards. And twitter has awful, almost non-existent indexing/search. And the bullying/harassment issue is out of hand. I still get utility from following people I follow.

I've been put in this position to defend twitter, and really man, I am not a particularly big twitter fanboy. It's a product that I enjoy using. I don't see a point in converting anyone ( I would, if it were MS vs Gmail argument). If you want to understand, just join in and follow people you aspire to be in conversations with. I follow popular professors, researchers, publications, celebs, etc, and I like it. You might too. That's all I can say.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#104

Post by cpeterso »

danielrakh wrote: post #92
johnward wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter and facebook serve completely different purposes for me. Facebook is where I mostly interact with people I actually know in real life. I use twitter like you do, to follow interesting things. Then linkedin is people I have worked with. Each network serves a different purpose. I'd never pay for any of them though. I guess I should say I'd rather pay with my privacy.

I've actually recently designed a concept around the interest graph of Twitter that I think would be a step in the right direction. Twitter Rooms: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a

Rooms is an interesting direction. Twitter is part RSS reader, part chat room. It would be nice to follow hashtags on a topic, but then spammers would flood the hashtags with ads.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#105

Post by benten10 »

dragontamer wrote: post #88
[deleted] wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

But its not the service of Twitter that makes people smarter or better. Its the people there. There is always another social network: Reddit, Usenet, Forums, IRC. Twitter is a place where we have conversations for now, but the "innovation" of fast-paced conversations can exist anywhere... and already exists anywhere.

Oh absolutely!

But that's not really constructive because you could say the same about 99% of social-network businesses, no?

You could also say: "It's not always the physical structure of a country that makes it great but its people (culture, history, how it started, so on) " and that would be true too. The fact that different websites have different 'cultures' make all the difference, right?

I like the artificial 140-char limitation though, but it would be comically easy to enforce it anywhere else.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#106

Post by bostik »

pmelendez wrote: post #9
DanBC wrote: post #5

Recently, 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?

> What would be your ideal non-introsive ads mechanism?

I am not the OP but the answer to question is very close to my heart.

The pinnacle of non-intrusive online ads have been the original Google search ads. They were out of the way, clearly marked as ads - and hence could be visually filtered out. They were pure text, so could be neatly included as elements on the rendered page. And they were always targeting an INTEREST. Not an individual.

So I would take that as the minimum acceptable advertising behaviour. Not implying that it's perfect, but it's a clear set of ground rules. With that in mind, _my_ ideal, non-intrusive ads mechanism builds on the following rules:

* Ads must never be inline to page content

* Even when clearly out of the way, ads must not be allowed to mimic page content; they must be clearly marked as ads

* Text only.

* I might accept an image within the ad, provided it was always served from the content provider's system.

* As an extension to previous point: if the served image size would exceed a notable fraction of the page size, it must not be included in the output.

* No user tracking of any kind.

* No third-party javascript. Ever.

* At most 15% of display real estate allowed to be used by ads. Including the padding in the UI. (Counts as space denied from content.)

* Not allowed to affect page content load times. Ad material must be included at the end of the page code. If your service pushes ads from internal and separate system, hard timeouts must be imposed: if the internal system cannot serve an ad within an allotted time, the frontend must never be forced to wait. You just missed an ad impression. Tough.

* If clicking an ad takes a user through a bounce page, all identifiable information from the user must be stripped. Bounce page or redirect must not impose any further page loading delay.

* No beacons

Breaking even one of the rules automatically disqualifies you.

If you, as an advertiser, find these rules unacceptable - well, then we are in mutual disagreement. I find your ads equally unacceptable and treat them as a form of cancer.

However, as a genuine service to the user... please allow the user to search for ads that have been displayed to them. Preferably by display context. I would be glad to return to a subject at a later date and search for something I remember seeing earlier.

The above is still not ideal, but everything that behaved according to it would at least be palatable.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#107

Post by Nadya »

danielrakh wrote: post #92
johnward wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter and facebook serve completely different purposes for me. Facebook is where I mostly interact with people I actually know in real life. I use twitter like you do, to follow interesting things. Then linkedin is people I have worked with. Each network serves a different purpose. I'd never pay for any of them though. I guess I should say I'd rather pay with my privacy.

I've actually recently designed a concept around the interest graph of Twitter that I think would be a step in the right direction. Twitter Rooms: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a

So... an IRC channel? Feels like joining a Star Wars room wouldn't differ from `irc.Twitter #StarWars` other than platform. The creator of an IRC channel is the Op and can promote others to be Hops (moderators). IRC channels are generally based on what can be seen as the equivalent of a hashtag...

You'd have to find a way to sell this as something different than IRC, because I doubt the idea of "IRC on Twitter" has never crossed Twitter's mind. What differentiates it other than being hosted on Twitter?

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#108

Post by volaski »

hissworks wrote: post #30
roymurdock wrote: post #4

Here'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 abou…

Yeah, this was a poorly constructed article. Lost me at: "To talk about Stewart’s theory, you have to first tackle the ideas of the 20th-century philosopher of media, Walter J. Ong." No, you really don't. That said, Twitter's never made it easy to digest its content. Sure there are lists, and now moments, but it's not always easy to find what you're looking for, and if you're not really careful about curating your ow…

As someone who enjoyed the article and got some good insights, I think it's your loss that you "lost" yourself at that point. Maybe you don't like the writing style, but there were some fresh ideas in there that people don't normally talk about when they talk about Twitter.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#109

Post by rdtsc »

[deleted] wrote: post #87
rdtsc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really hope twitter somehow makes money. Never really saw the benefit or value in Twitter. People I care about are not on Twitter most of the time, or if they post, they don't post stuff I care about. In general I found 140 character sentences are not just good enough to have a discussion (it ends up sounding curt and snippy). For links and all I just follow communities on forums (reddit, hn, github, their own si…

[deleted]

Sorry, you are right, it was too harsh. I am sorry.

I thought I was sharing my perspective on it, I didn't think enough that it would hurt OP's feelings. I made the comment lightheartedly even added an ;-) but it didn't work obviously. Let me explain better then:

What I was trying to say is that I in large agree with how the market reacted to it. It is hard for Twitter to make money. There is a lot of HN armchair analyst advice around (which I engage in as well) such as "why doesn't Twitter just ... to make money". But presumably there are smart people working there and they probably thought of all those things. It has been compared to Google or compared or Facebook. But those offer a richer more comprehensive experience. I give Google access to my life and it helps me drive places, keeps my email, and calender and other things. I don't use Facebook but my relatives do and they like. Twitter is too narrow in that respect. So objectively looking at it, I think it is struggling and it makes sense to me why.

And I pointed out that Twitter for me in the past has been associated more with negativity -- spats, mis-understandings stemming from reading short 140 character replies as being curt and rude, which then snowball and turn into fights.

Now what sounded most mean was saying some services would die. Sometimes, it is better to just have a service / product that is going down to just go down faster, to maybe something better take its place. There were languages, products, platforms, I enjoyed and liked but they just didn't become popular. Hoping they would have an upswing sometimes is unrealistic. I wished and hope Thinkpads wouldn't suck and IBM would come back and start making them and install Ubuntu on them, but it just won't happen. It is better to just find something else. Anyway that is the sentiment where that comment came from.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#110

Post by scholia »

anunderachiever wrote: post #44
benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

> I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. Both are useful, but Twitter is sticking to its domain, while Facebook tries to lure the user into dependency on as many levels as possible.

Maybe, but practically every change Twitter makes is to make it look and work more like a Facebook timeline.

Given that Twitter is overrun with trolls, especially women-hating gamergate-style trolls, it's rapidly losing its value. See, for example http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/132152537305/talking-publicly...

You don't get that on Facebook.

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