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The Decay of Twitter

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Decay of Twitter

#111

Post by marssaxman »

[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]

I don't know that I'd say "I want to see the service you enjoy die", but it'd be really nice if I didn't have to hear about it anymore. Alas, many of the same people who are interested in things I actually care about also like to talk about Twitter, so I end up hearing about it all the time even though I find the whole thing inexplicable and vaguely irritating.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#112

Post by alanh »

forgetsusername wrote: post #54
dennisnedry wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem I have with many of these articles, the journalists try to make use of their philosophy degrees and make nothing into something.

> That's the problem I have with many of these articles Perhaps Buzzfeed type listicles are more your speed then? Every time there's an article like this posted on HN, there's inevitably someone who posts, "Fewer words! More facts!" (Bonus points for you for getting in a dig about them useless Humanities!) A thesis isn't right or wrong; it's presented and supported. It's an idea. This is literary journalism. Some peo…

I enjoy long-form articles, but I still prefer the concise over the verbose.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#113

Post by MichaelGG »

Nadya wrote: post #107
danielrakh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

IRC on Twitter would be popular if only because Twitter is about a frillion times more popular than IRC.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#115

Post by danielrakh »

MichaelGG wrote: post #113
Nadya wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

IRC on Twitter would be popular if only because Twitter is about a frillion times more popular than IRC.

Exactly.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#116

Post by danielrakh »

cpeterso wrote: post #104
danielrakh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's definitely something to figure out. I have a few thoughts about it, I just didn't wanted to keep the post short(er). But yeah that's a great point.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#117

Post by MichaelGG »

eloy wrote: post #81
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…

So much of this. Twitter has made me become interested in InfoSec, so I follow a lot of interesting people there. I discovered Hacker News thanks to Twitter. For example, @thegrugq and @tqbf tweet a lot of interesing things :)

Really? I recently tried Twitter and those 2 were the near the first ones I added along with Ken Popehat. There's so much RTing and noise I found it rather uninteresting. HN has a way, way, higher signal-to-noise ratio. Twitter feels like a constant competition to see who can write clever one liners.

Even with a few follows, it became entirely unmanageable. Plus the Twitter web UI sucks so much that trying to catch up is a nightmare. Clicking anything causes a saving throw vs bad engineering to determine if I'll be reset to the top of my stream. Plus it's slow (as in laggy UI).

Despite being super excited at first (hey, it's 2015 maybe I'll "get" Twitter this time around and find it as awesome as all these smart people do), I quickly ended up not using it at all.

Edit: I'll note that I think very highly of Thomas and Ken and other people I followed, and in other venues they seem to provide tons of reading value. Not that they should be obligated to do so on Twitter, of course! Just that if even high-quality folks don't make a compelling usecase for staying on Twitter, I'm not sure how I'd ever get value out of it.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#118

Post by Nadya »

JDiculous wrote: post #114

Twitter would be great without a 140 character limit. Impossible to put much substance in tweets.

"This is partially circumvented by 1/2"

"chaining together multiple messages. 2/2"

The best thing about having to keep things within 140 characters is that everyone else has to keep things within 140 characters. If I wanted to read their blog - I'd go read their blog. If I wanted Twitter to be like Tumblr, I'd have a Tumblr.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#119

Post by pmelendez »

felipeerias wrote: post #45
pmelendez wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There isn't a company that knows better what I am really interested in than Twitter, and yet they seem unable to recommend me anything even remotely interesting. It wouldn't even need to be particularly evil stuff: I'm convinced that my public profile would be enough to sell me e.g. half a dozen good books per year.

True... I believe this is not a targeting issue but more an inventory problem.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#120

Post by Karunamon »

ogurechny wrote: post #97
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…

Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”? Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yourself. If Twitter had some technology tuned to solve your specific task for a freshly registered user, it could take the credit, but it's neutral and indifferent. Also, I can't see much difference between good ongoing conversation and a good conversation that happe…

For the same reason we never see the phrase "TCP/IP made me a lot of money", true as it may be.

Twitter provided the mechanism for the parent to access the information from those people. You might as well be saying the same useless thing about RSS or blogs.

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