In this case, it's probably not twitter's fault that the conversation fails, but Jack's. I saw him on Joe Rogans Podcast, who tried to get some concrete answers out of him, and he was probably the most evasive guest I've ever seen there.
How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
161–170 of 246 posts
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#162Why would you try to have a conversation on Twitter? Twitter is about commenting on someone else's stream of consciousness. That's it.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#163Regardless of what Twitter is or isn't, how in the world is the CEO surprised by how his product works? And we're not talking some obscure corner case, but basic use case? Having a conversation was a learning experience for him and his team? Such a basic level of unfamiliarity with their own product gives me a lot of pause that he can do anything to guide the company on fixing rampant automated accounts or making it…
My impression after following him on there for a while: he still uses, and sees the platform as if it's the original version of Twitter from ~2006. Most of his tweets are written in a way that sound like a person writing in a public diary, not someone expecting to have a conversation.
He's using Twitter for what it's good at, desperately hoping people somehow stop ruining the experience while still maintaining popularity and ad views.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're downvoted, but I tend to agree. Regardless of the community, reddit's full-width, compact layout is the easiest way I've found to follow a tree-based conversation.
The one thing that reddit and Hacker News lack is the ability to easily see new posts on an existing thread (though you can get this with a reddit gold subscription or becoming a moderator). The other thing they lack is an index of comments (like you would see with a mail reader). Those two features made something like usenet with a good news reader easier to use compared to reddit or Hacker News.
Reddit does have that, although I'm not sure how an index of comments would be useful... What would they be indexed by?
I agree that Usenet is fantastic for discussion, too bad it fell out of popularity...
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#165A lot to unpack recently with Twitter and Jack. A few thoughts. 1. Jack doesn’t seem passionate about product, especially Twitter. 2. Kara seems to lack the vocabulary to talk about product which is both surprising and confusing, given her niche and time spent in it. She also doesn’t understand that Twitter has evolved way beyond Jack. “Why don’t you know, it’s your product!” she kept asking. The fact he doesn’t know…
Do you think the rate of improvements that have happened to the internet would be sustained if it were run by the government? I sure don't. Moving decision-making capabilities away from the public and into the hands of bureaucrats sounds like a good way to increase surveillance, decrease innovation, and lord knows what else. I really hope that idea does not take off.
Funnily enough the internet was run by governments from when it started in 1969 through 1992 or 1993.
Specifically, The US government paid for most of it with most of the rest being paid for Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries and maybe Finland. Unless they happened to be next door to an organization that already had a connection, US organizations had to lease a dedicated circuit from a phone company to connect to the internet, but generally did not have to compensate the US government or the organization owning the router they connected to.
The US government tried to transfer ownership of the internet to AT&T in 1977 and again in 1987, at a token price, but AT&T didn't want it because they couldn't see how to make money from it and worried about the potential for disruption of their existing businesses.
Those dedicated circuits I mentioned earlier were not a service that AT&T offered voluntarily: AT&T was required by the US Federal Court to sell one to anyone who wanted one as part of the outcome of an anti-trust case brought by the US government against AT&T. At the time that the requirement was first imposed, most wide-area computer networks in the US were "proprietary" rather than "public", meaning that the network was used to connect the offices of a single (large, wealthy) organization, mostly running protocols developed by IBM. Although the intent of the court ruling was to protect IBM's business in wide-area networks from AT&T's monopoly power, the young internet benefitted greatly from the ruling, too.
Starting in the late 1980s most large US tech companies were connected to the internet, but management's intent in paying whatever costs were involved in getting connected to the internet were to make it easier for the company's scientists and engineers to communicate with their counterparts in other large tech companies or in university science and engineering departments or various research labs. No large tech company at that time saw the internet as a way to generate revenue or sell products or services.
I do not advocate returning to a government-run public network, but I spent a lot of time on the internet in 1992 and I can tell you that there would be lots of intense conversation and lots of publishing on the internet even if we were to remove all the profit-motivated entities.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, this is a really atypical mode of using Twitter. Normally it's used for shouting at your audience/someone you disagree with. It's rarely used for true conversations, so I can somewhat see why the CEO is unfamiliar with its performance in that role.
> It's rarely used for true conversations Not a twitter user myself, but I've seen a lot of people use their twitter handles like they'd use an E-Mail address. They say "this is a twitter handle send me a DM if you want to talk with me" instead of "this is my E-Mail address please send me an E-Mail if you want to talk". So they do derive conversational value from twitter.
It’s worth noting that DMs have a much more generous length limit than tweets. You can actually type an entire paragraph into a single DM versus the formerly 140, now 280 characters a public tweet is limited to.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#167A lot to unpack recently with Twitter and Jack. A few thoughts. 1. Jack doesn’t seem passionate about product, especially Twitter. 2. Kara seems to lack the vocabulary to talk about product which is both surprising and confusing, given her niche and time spent in it. She also doesn’t understand that Twitter has evolved way beyond Jack. “Why don’t you know, it’s your product!” she kept asking. The fact he doesn’t know…
Do you think the rate of improvements that have happened to the internet would be sustained if it were run by the government? I sure don't. Moving decision-making capabilities away from the public and into the hands of bureaucrats sounds like a good way to increase surveillance, decrease innovation, and lord knows what else. I really hope that idea does not take off.
Do you think the rate of improvements in TV from 1930 to 2018 have been unacceptable? I'm not suggesting all of the social web become government controlled, I am saying there should be a national public social channel. The public web would still innovative, but sometimes you just want NPR.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#168Twitter sucks as a discussion platform but it excels as an insult delivery system.
It worked flawlessly for Kara Swisher to berate Jack.
And to insult and attack innocent high school kids.
https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1086735766997344261
To her credit, at least she apologized.
It's funny how the people who claim twitter, social media, etc are toxic are the ones creating the toxicity.
Twitter, like anything else, is a tool. If it is toxic for you, then it's mostly likely because you yourself is a toxic person.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here it goes, from a few days ago (I'm not the OP): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6687123/Mother-arre... Sorry for the Daily Mail link but it looks like the mainstream press hasn't catch up on the subject. Afaik transphobia is not on the same level with "bomb threats or holocaust denial" but apparently people get arrested for it.
Daily Mail reporting will be grossly inaccurate on this subject. I suspect this was not for a single incident but as part of a campaign of harrasment. There's a lot of that going on against trans people at the moment, often enabled by twitter and the gutter press.
Yes. The arrest was for harassment and doxxing, not for misgendering.
paganel, when you say "Sorry for the Daily Mail link" it sounds like you know you're citing a source that will be extremely untrustworthy on this topic, and then did it anyway.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#170A lot to unpack recently with Twitter and Jack. A few thoughts. 1. Jack doesn’t seem passionate about product, especially Twitter. 2. Kara seems to lack the vocabulary to talk about product which is both surprising and confusing, given her niche and time spent in it. She also doesn’t understand that Twitter has evolved way beyond Jack. “Why don’t you know, it’s your product!” she kept asking. The fact he doesn’t know…
I don't think Twitter is a conversational medium, essentially. It certainly isn't a good one, for complex conversations. It's hard to find the horse-and-boogie analogy for something that's essentially new, but bumper sticker, or billboard is more apt. On the public utility front... email exists, RSS exists, the www exists... all open platforms, public by some (the right) definitions. The problem is that an open field…
NPR and PBS didn't invent anything, they used an established technology to be a not-for-profit public good. The National Public Internet wouldn't be breaking ground, it would be using social media for the public good.