Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#161

Post by jmfayard » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 9:40 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #141

jmfayard wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment was not about Twitter Reddit Facebook coexisting or not peacefully, but about the logic of all of them competing against our public health. IMHO we should regulate the hell out of them each time a significant harm on society can be proved, like we did for any other things that humans ever invented. But tech evangelists will say that time is different because 0 and 1 are being exchanged

Tech evangelists will say that not because "it's different" but because we never agreed with regulation so we've built tools and platforms that embrace free speech. That's the entire point of something like Twitter. Or at least it used to be until the politics of the employees shifted to be more mainstream. The end-goal for a lot of us is a fully decentralized internet that is technologically impossible to regulate.

Fully decentralized internet lol. The internet economy is much more centralized that the old world ever was There is no problem at all identifying the big players that have too much power

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#162

Post by malvosenior » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

jmfayard wrote: post #161

malvosenior wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech evangelists will say that not because "it's different" but because we never agreed with regulation so we've built tools and platforms that embrace free speech. That's the entire point of something like Twitter. Or at least it used to be until the politics of the employees shifted to be more mainstream. The end-goal for a lot of us is a fully decentralized internet that is technologically impossible to regulate.

Fully decentralized internet lol. The internet economy is much more centralized that the old world ever was There is no problem at all identifying the big players that have too much power

There's more to tech than companies, examples:

Linux: open, distributed development, massive success Bittorrent: p2p, massive success Bitcoin: fully distributed, massive success (pending)

There is nothing more centralized than the government. They have a monopoly on violence. I (and many others) want them as far away from our industry as possible. I'll take Google over government intervention any day.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#163

Post by rconti » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 9:45 PM UTC

jjrh wrote: post #87

I'm still amazed how bad the Twitter.com UI is. The fact stuff like Hootsuite,tweetdeck and a zillion similar tools exist to effectively make twitter usable if you follow more than a dozen people is crazy. There is a whole bunch of innovation waiting to happen: for instance Twitter could build a community around creating and sharing 'lists' for just about any topic. I wanted to make a 'list' for every Canadian MP but…

Agreed. How a 160 character text service manages to bloat and provide less utility than something that STARTED as richer content (Facebook) is beyond me. I've tried for perhaps 10 yeas now and have never been able to make Twitter work for me.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#164

Post by icedchai » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

aaron-lebo wrote: post #95

md224 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different perspective: Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. "Controversy" is just another name for clashes of opinions that have occurred since the beginning of humankind and will likely continue to occur until the extinction of our species. These clashes occur within discursive spaces, and Twitter is one such space. This is why I'm bullish on Twitter. It's a space for con…

Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. When in human history have public spheres like Twitter existed? The public sphere up until about 50 years ago for most people was strictly local. You could not broadcast dumb narcissistic ignorance for free to millions of people. It wasn't possible. Twitter is not good at what it does. It does not elevate public discourse. It's the equivalent of…

Usenet and similar distributed messaging systems (FidoNet) have been around since the 80's. Twitter made it accessible.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#165

Post by vram22 » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

jjrh wrote: post #87

I'm still amazed how bad the Twitter.com UI is. The fact stuff like Hootsuite,tweetdeck and a zillion similar tools exist to effectively make twitter usable if you follow more than a dozen people is crazy. There is a whole bunch of innovation waiting to happen: for instance Twitter could build a community around creating and sharing 'lists' for just about any topic. I wanted to make a 'list' for every Canadian MP but…

>I'm still amazed how bad the Twitter.com UI is.

Yes, I have been complaining about this sporadically for a while. I mean, I once tweeted that you have to do a headstand to read the tweets in chronological order [1], and even, the text will be upside down ... :) Some time later, I think they have made some changes to that, for certain cases at least, e.g. for a thread consisting of a tweet and replies to it. But in a sense that makes things even more confusing, because now you have to sometimes read things chronologically (a tweet and its replies), and sometimes in reverse (the rest)!

Jokes apart, there are multiple issues with the UI.

[1] Yes, I know there may be a technical reason for the problem, but has anyone at Twitter tried working on a solution?.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#166

Post by jmfayard » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #162

jmfayard wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully decentralized internet lol. The internet economy is much more centralized that the old world ever was There is no problem at all identifying the big players that have too much power

There's more to tech than companies, examples: Linux: open, distributed development, massive success Bittorrent: p2p, massive success Bitcoin: fully distributed, massive success (pending) There is nothing more centralized than the government. They have a monopoly on violence. I (and many others) want them as far away from our industry as possible. I'll take Google over government intervention any day.

Look, everywhere there is power, there is abuse of power, it does not matter what source of power it comes from. The only thing that helps is having another power that checks it.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#167

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #162

jmfayard wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully decentralized internet lol. The internet economy is much more centralized that the old world ever was There is no problem at all identifying the big players that have too much power

There's more to tech than companies, examples: Linux: open, distributed development, massive success Bittorrent: p2p, massive success Bitcoin: fully distributed, massive success (pending) There is nothing more centralized than the government. They have a monopoly on violence. I (and many others) want them as far away from our industry as possible. I'll take Google over government intervention any day.

Centralization isn't bad; often, it's welcome, as by its nature it's more efficient. Bitcoin is a good example of how not to do tech.

Beyond that, you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized. The reality is, governments and markets are two sides of the same coin. They both strive centralize control.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#168

Post by lopmotr » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

chisleu wrote: post #112

Steeeve wrote: post #18

Twitter loves Trump. It's not just twitter... the whole profit center around online communities is based on active communities. Most topics are cyclical - once the Superbowl is over, it's hard to keep a football community active. Only so many people are interested in the draft, in coaching changes, etc. But throw in some controversy and all of a sudden everything lights up again. The problem, or _a_ problem, is that…

Reddit has become very much the same as Tumbler and Twitter became. It's no longer a tool for expression and conversation. It's an echo chamber with separate factions occupying separate areas... downvoting and banning every opinion that goes against the "reddit circle jerk". Hacker News has become the only place I can have reasoned conversations about science, politics, etc without so much of an issue. The requiremen…

I found HN aggravatingly hostile to freedom of thinking and open discussion. There are several hypocrisies/arbitrary taboos about what ideas you're allowed to mention on here. Even some anti-science taboos. Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned. People are very afraid of specific political ideas so even getting accidentally misidentified as a member of some popular hateable group gets you penalised. People see hints of "bad-thought" hidden behind innocent or open-minded words.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#169

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 9:58 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #164

aaron-lebo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. When in human history have public spheres like Twitter existed? The public sphere up until about 50 years ago for most people was strictly local. You could not broadcast dumb narcissistic ignorance for free to millions of people. It wasn't possible. Twitter is not good at what it does. It does not elevate public discourse. It's the equivalent of…

Usenet and similar distributed messaging systems (FidoNet) have been around since the 80's. Twitter made it accessible.

> Twitter made it accessible.

Which is the real problem.

Usenet was better because it was before the Internet was interesting to the general population. Twitter sucks for the same reason YouTube comments and /r/all suck - regular people.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#170

Post by Agathos » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

sekou wrote: post #126

This excellently shows the problem with how value is currently assessed in the social media landscape. The "In case you missed it" algorithm-based organization of tweets and the focus on video to "increase engagement" at any cost are same reasons why there has been a widespread backlash against Facebook. On the other hand, building your feed from the ground up granularly is one of the larger differences between Twitt…

Whenever I see, "In case you missed it," I read it as, "Now you have to decide if checking for new tweets is worth re-reading a half dozen tweets you've already seen."

So far, the answer is usually yes. I follow a lot of good people and the fear of missing something is real. But it's not 100% yes and I don't think the trend line looks good for Twitter.