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As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

washingtonpost.com

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Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#2
Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them.

More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#3

Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them. More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

> wonder why Twitter is so popular

Anecdotally, I've found several useful tidbits on twitter that are less than newsworthy (maybe because they are not interesting to a large subset of people) but that never popped up other places- I'm probably not using it correctly though.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#4

Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them. More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

From the article it sounds like a very large percent of their power users use tools like this. So if they banned it, many of their best users would quit.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#5

Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them. More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

Why should this be banned? It's not the same as spam, since you have to subscribe to someone to see their tweets.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#6

Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them. More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

I've found Twitter feeds more timely than status-light dashboards for various online services. Partly because the users start to scream before the SREs update their blinken lights.

I was vaguely interested in it (Twitter) when the Iranian purple revolution was going on, but that passed, and after that version of tweetdeck did as well, I've never been able to track topics well enough to make it more worth-while (to me) than a meme-tracker.

Other than that, I haven't found much use of it. I'm guessing that puts me in the dissenting position, but this isn't the first time that's happened.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#7
To each his own ! I brutally prune the list of people I follow ; if I feel someone is spamming or retweeting garbage, I get rid of them. However, some people may not be so unforgiving and that is ok : they are probably the ones clicking on links in sponsored tweets.

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#8
post #5

Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them. More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

Why should this be banned? It's not the same as spam, since you have to subscribe to someone to see their tweets.

Not a Twitter user but: if you wanted to disrupt or derail ongoing conversations, couldn't that be done programmatically too? Or harass people?

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#9

Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them. More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

> I wonder why Twitter is so popular.

I don't have an account but it is very useful if I want to see is a program updated to a new version, how a politician feels about a recent event (or wants us to think they feel), or live updates to current events. All that may be possible with Facebook, but since I don't want to always be logged on, I have a huge pop up and annoying captcha

Re: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

#10

Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them. More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

Everyone I know that enjoys twitter (I never got into it) uses it to interact with an extended group of people that they aren't friends with but have similar interests to -- including minor celebrities in their area.
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