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Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

No community is perfect. HN has some groupthink too, but honestly, it's an order of magnitude better place than anything else I've seen on the entire Web[0], so myself, I'm sticking to it.

--

[0] - except maybe LessWrong of old, but I was (and still am) too dumb to be able to contribute anything of value on that site.

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned.

Isn't this the inherent nature of a fact-based platform? And most HN posters are probably quite rational and fact-based?

I wouldn't come to HN if it was a place where people could air stupid, non-fact based opinions and have them treated without criticism or derision. people can hang out in their Facebook group if they want to assert the world is flat.

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

#173
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is fine if you subscribe to small [0] or heavily moderated [1]. Default and large subreddits have practically always been as you describe. >requirement of quality comments Ha. You won't have shitposts or rehashed jokes, but you also won't always have quality. I'll refer to a past comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16154688 [0] - Usually niche interest or specific geographic [1] - e.g. /r/ask…

Reddit is insta-community. Here's how I use Reddit: I pick up a new hobby, say knitting. I go to reddit.com/r/knitting and suddenly I have a bunch of experts there who I can ask questions, exchange ideas with, or brag to about my accomplishments. There is an instant community already existing on Reddit for pretty much every activity I can think of. Where this gets dicey is politics. If you are suddenly a black libret…

I use Reddit the same way. Whenever I want to explore a new interest, I start with /r/[that interest] - almost always there's a high-quality community there, full of domain experts and often lots of useful resources collected in the sidebar. I stay away from general and political subreddits.

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

#174
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…

Twitter lists are most useful when connected to Flipboard, which can create a nicely formatted "magazine" for each Twitter list.

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

#175

Confession: when I open up twitter, the thing that excites me most is when I see that patio11 has tweeted. His stuff is just an absolute must-read for me. He uses twitter almost like a blog, which is different than most other people I follow. Some people use twitter like it's facebook, some people use it merely as a pointer to other content, some people use it to argue, some people use it to interact with major brand…

He uses twitter almost like a blog Yep, and I'm more than a little disappointed in myself about that. Something about the form factor of writing there and the perceived "well it doesn't have to be shippable, it's just twitter" quality bar lets me keep up a habit of writing there almost daily while I struggle "sitting down to write essays" even on a monthly basis.

Also, discoverability. Blogs have UI with mostly O(1) access to any article. Twitter and Facebook are O(n) - the older a post, the more difficult is to find it.

I like your tweets too, btw.

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

#176
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…

You can make lists on Twitter and see other people's lists.

The problem was searching for lists other people have made, not having a list feature at all.

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

#177
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not hand out RSUs instead?

I think Twitter was actually already giving out RSUs, not options. But either one dilutes the investor share of the company, which will push stock price down.

I think the problem is that appears on the accounts

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

#178

Confession: when I open up twitter, the thing that excites me most is when I see that patio11 has tweeted. His stuff is just an absolute must-read for me. He uses twitter almost like a blog, which is different than most other people I follow. Some people use twitter like it's facebook, some people use it merely as a pointer to other content, some people use it to argue, some people use it to interact with major brand…

He uses twitter almost like a blog Yep, and I'm more than a little disappointed in myself about that. Something about the form factor of writing there and the perceived "well it doesn't have to be shippable, it's just twitter" quality bar lets me keep up a habit of writing there almost daily while I struggle "sitting down to write essays" even on a monthly basis.

I don't think this is a bad thing.

In fact there probably is room in normal websites and blogs to allow you to write shorter "less quality" material along with the higher quality stuff.

I'm kind of convinced it's something like Medium + Twitter: A timeline of "tweets" on the home page where you can do everything you could on twitter but on the website (possibly syndicated) where you could also announce/promote articles written. One cool thing I realized is you can repromote old articles on your website when they become relevant again with a small blub just like most people end up doing all the time on Twitter.

But on your website, owned by you, etc. etc.

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

#179
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem, or _a_ problem, is that people can only handle so much controversy. They have lives to lead. You're so spot on. You know how everyone says, "Seinfeld is a show about nothing!" It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched. People say "it was about n…

> It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched. Sorry, this sounds backwards. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ResetButton > This is very common to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The '60s through The '90s in part beca…

> JD always screwing things up with the current romantic interest

Ah but see, JD had different romanic interests throughout the show.

And Gilligan was trying to get off the island.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter has become so bloated with advertisements and "artificial" trending topics that its nearly useless.

Corollary: Twitter is so useful that it seems to be thriving despite being bloated with advertisements and "artificial" trending topics

Things can thrive without being very useful.
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