I dislike Twitter but this article is pretty sensationalist. Too much emphasis on the petty complaints. The actual "conversation" was fine.
How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
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Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? You'd think that after a decade he would have some idea of what Twitter is good and bad at. I can imagine having this kind of failed interview when the company was 3 years old, but after more than a decade, it's a bit bizarre. Unless this was explicitly meant as a test, and not simply an online interview.
> But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? Many people are knowingly doing a kabuki theatre version of a conversation where they are specifically trying to get attention and grab more followers and retweets. You can see it in how responses are framed. There's a lot of attempted "mic drop" moments. Real people don't have conversations like that, because they're not playing to an audience. In real co…
I think the MySpace narrative has always been a bit off- sure, most user pages were very much in the vein of Geocities, but that was only one problem. Very few of my friends were on MySpace, and the main reason they cited was it was too complicated. Even copy-pasting a pre-made layout was too much bother. I clearly remember multiple friends pushing me to get a FB account very hard, and often the main selling point was "easy".
Although for Twitter, I think they absolutely know the site has a problem with toxicity, but they 100% do not care. Angry people will spend longer on the site arguing, post more, and see more ads. They may say they care, but their actual business incentives push them towards maintaining the current state of discourse.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
That wouldn't have made the news the way this did, now would it?
Sure, but now non-Twitter users will just think of Twitter as being bad for 2 way conversation due to this event/stunt. But I guess all publicity is good publicity.
I assure you Kara Swisher cares not. Turning this into a shitfest is a big win for her.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter was billed as a microblogging platform. Blog posts are 1-way communication. Want a discussion? Allow comments and make them visually separate and less prominent just like blogs do.
Twitter is a million soap boxes in the town square. Perhaps what we really need is a million meeting rooms that people can enter or leave as they desire. I don't use Twitter, but I do use Facebook to keep up with family and friends, but the primary value I get out of it is from the groups I belong to, often private, where people can have (moderated, if needed) discussions about topics of common interest.
Or reddit. The experience of participating in small subreddits is vastly different from frontpage lurking.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
> I'm not sure how an index of comments would be useful... What would they be indexed by? By index, I mean a threaded list of messages that one can scroll through without having the message body present. In an email/news client, you would typically see something like: Subject Some Author Date Re: Subject Another Author Date Re: Subject A third Author Date Re: Subject A fourth Author Date Re: Subject A fifth Author Da…
Ah I see, you mean a newsgroup-style tree. With comment collapsing, I never missed that, but to each their own.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#226In 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.
The way he evasively responds to these important questions (not just with Rogan, but Sam Harris too) makes a lot more sense paired with the supposition that Twitter is not "failing" as Jack says here, but executing according to plan . Look at recent bans, across the technology sphere (and more recently the financial sphere with Chase), and a clear pattern emerges. Nobody denies what the pattern is. The only argument…
>We are inching closer to a world where, if someone engages in public wrongthink, they can immediately be shamed into poverty and banned from the public square.
And this is so different from the entirety of human history how...?
Tribalism and social ostracization of "deviants" is nothing new.
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#227This is like acting surprised that a skateboard is not a suitable vehicle for going on a long vacation with.
Still my favourite summary of Twitter:
> The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.
> What are you doing?
-- Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#attr-input...
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#228Twitter is like a town hall where everyone can heckle. Here’s a tree visualization I made of a portion of the #KaraJack thread, which demonstrates the problem (and only includes a fraction of the non-Jack/Kara tweets): https://treeverse.app/view/pX89745H
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Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#229It's hard to watch videos over email, too...
Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory is that Jack is trying to expose the flaws of twitter to the rest of the company. A way of bludgeoning the stubborn in the company by a blitz of bad press
You seem to be giving him too much credit. His recent interviews and (lack of) leadership have shown that he bludgeons no one, and the stubborn person is him. He's just an unusual kind of stubborn: unwilling to make any decision at all.
That, too, is a form of visionary leadership. He is protecting a bubble of chaos in which creative ferment can occur, by refusing to let outside forces impose too much order on it. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on whether the bubble of chaos in question is working for you or not.