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The Decay of Twitter

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Decay of Twitter

#121

Post by Karunamon »

kafkaesque wrote: post #68
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 can't you follow the experts in that field via their site or their online communities? The depth of which they would go into their chosen subject would be much more enlightening, surely. It sounds like you just use Twitter to bookmark the links and "soundbites" experts say. How much depth can a conversation that only allows 140 characters per response relay? They are meant to be "soundbites", only telling part of…

I'm getting really tired of this argument because it's both wrongheaded, ignorant, and will not die.

Why can't you follow the experts in that field via their site or their online communities?

What's easier, entering your email address into every random person's website, or just clicking "follow" on their name on one website so you get notified when they post?

This sounds like the web service version of the "less space than a nomad" comment. Other people have different use cases, you know?

The depth of which they would go into their chosen subject would be much more enlightening, surely.

We've got this thing called hyperlinks - A headline and a URL easily fits in 140 characters. Of course nobody's reading academic papers on http://twitter.com, nor does anyone expect them to.

How much depth can a conversation that only allows 140 characters per response relay?

How much needs to be?

Twitter is not a primary communications medium - we have email for that. It's not meant to be a primary news medium, we have blogs for that. However, it serves very well as a pointer to those things. It's a centralized pub/sub notification system.

And if you want to have a "conversation" with someone on Twitter, you've got direct messages, which are not subject to the character limit.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#122

Post by mschuster91 »

sirkneeland wrote: post #61
dspillett wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh there will be some way of identifying them, surely? If they are from people you have actively chosen to follow then the source isn't twitter anyway and you can just unfollow those users if you don't like what they post. If they are extra items in your display then there will likely be some marker to pick up on. Even if not then someone somewhere will start a service where people can report advertising tweets so su…

They are identifiable, I believe they say "promoted tweet" in close proximity to said promoted tweet

Not inside apps though. Mobile adblockers can at least ban iframe'd content, but not promoted tweets.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#123

Post by decisiveness »

> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.

Unfamiliar with Damocles [1], I had to look it up. It seems to be quite a vividly pertinent metaphor. The brevity with which statements are made on Twitter delivers shortcuts for others to react, acting as the single thread of the horses tail that holds the sword.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#124

Post by ogurechny »

theseatoms wrote: post #99
ogurechny wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Enormous planetary-scale log file without tools to parse it is a giant step backwards. Certainly an exaggeration. The recording of the log file is itself a massive step forward. The tools can come later.

I doubt Twitter is going to share its database with anyone for free. Either way, it is still subject to the same rot everything else on the Net is (hardware failures, purged, deleted and reclaimed accounts, “private” data visibility, etc.)

Archaeologists sure have tools and methods to reconstruct life in Pompeii, but it's still nothing like real-life observation (and it citizens would probably prefer real-time seismic data to becoming a part of history, too).

No matter how “trending” some bustle is and how big the hubbub it generates (and how unbelievably important media want to present it), after a few weeks you can't practically “rewind” to it. Heck, you can't even find out what user wrote at some point in time! It's considered unimportant. Twitter may be praised for its countless virtues all the time, but, no matter what you do, single message's value rapidly declines to zero after a short period of time. You can organize them any way you want and post information as valuable as you can bring forth, it all returns to nothing. That's why I compared it to transport protocol: it knows nothing about the importance of of payload and doesn't interact with it, and delayed data is of little use.

…Who said “screenshots”? Seriously, no one would believe all the tech support stories about silly people sharing desktop screenshots in Word files would result in it becoming the acceptable way of spreading information in 2015.

A lot has already been written about global turn of the Web from more and more complex schemes of data organization to concept of mindless, useless infinite “stream” of half-finished minutiae (presented in pastel colors with rounded corners).

P.S. Of course, NSA seems to have the solution for this problem. I wonder if its data will be available sooner than in, say, 50 years GULAG prisoners waited to see their own cases declassified.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#125

Post by ogurechny »

Karunamon wrote: post #120
ogurechny wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“X's twitter made me smarter”, “Y's blog made me smarter” and “Z's RSS made me smarter” are OK.

It's hard to see how it's Twitter's, Wordpress', or ACME RSS reader's credit.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#126

Post by rhaps0dy »

benten10 wrote: post #100
ogurechny wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is a ridiculous hyperbole, haha. I'm rolling my eyes. I can justify: I do not have to 'actively' go out to seek for information that I might be interesting/relevant to me: it comes to me. It's better than reddit because I see posts only by people vetted by me, so that's my 'filter'.It's better than email, because it's open conversation, and it's better than RSS because it's a 'social-network'. The network effect…

> a lot of academic CS celebrities seem to be active there Would you mind sharing the list? I might start using Twitter to follow those people.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#127

Post by hugh4 »

The only people who seem to be making money off twitter are journalists, who can now dash off a 1000-word "Thing trends on twitter" article in seven minutes without having to leave the office.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#128

Post by danielrakh »

danielrakh wrote: post #116
cpeterso wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just wanted to keep the post short(er)

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#129

Post by cperciva »

rsync wrote: post #60
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, 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." I am very interested in this ... We did a (roughly) 6 month long experiment here (rsync.net) in advertising on twitter - on paper it seemed like a very good id…

That's because all of your ad impressions were being shown to Tarsnap users!

In all seriousness, I've had a lot of people say they keep seeing rsync ads on twitter and ask me if you're trying to poach my customers. I always tell them that you're a good guy and I'm sure you wouldn't do that.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#130

Post by 13thLetter »

> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.

This is the key.

Twitter has a serious problem with abuse, and it's not the abuse that's usually talked about. At any point, anything you say -- no matter how anodyne -- can be ripped out of context by someone with malevolent goals and then used to trigger a global outrage storm. This has resulted in death threats or people even losing their jobs. I wouldn't post on Twitter any more than I'd take a shortcut through a dark alley in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. Why take the risk?

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