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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

#231

Post by Faark »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #208
Mirioron wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't quite Twitter, but I think Instagram is close enough: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 Teenager was found guilty of "sending a grossly offensive message" because she cited lyrics of a song in memory of a dead friend.

And yet, Jay-Z, or whoever made the song quoted, was able to release this lyric in the public without causing a problem. (I'm not saying this is right or wrong, because I don't know what the lyric is, but the double standard should trouble everyone.) Implicit in all this nonsense is a "right not to be offended" which is absolutely impossible to enforce and protect without Orwellian levels of tyranny, which a lot of p…

> And yet, Jay-Z, or whoever made the song quoted, was able to release this lyric in the public without causing a problem.

Context matters. Saying otherwise is either uninformed or dishonest. Performing a song containing "the roof is on fire" is different than just yelling the phrase. And yes, how others perceive your behavior is partially your responsibility. Just like people might kill you in self-defense if they perceive you as threat, even in case your gun was just a theater prop.

Regarding your "where is the line"... communication always requires interpretation and there will never be an "objective and consistent" line. I'm sure i could easily rewrite your example to fit a law of every country in existence. As for the US, I could go for "Defamation Per Se", in other words were implicit in all this nonsense is a "right not to be talked bad about" which is absolutely impossible to enforce and protect without Orwellian levels of blah blah blah

So yes, we will always argue about were line are drawn, just like others will try to overstep them without consequences. That's part of life.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#232

Post by lokedhs »

gotocake wrote: post #145
zanny wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have Twitter as a utility, its called ActivityPub and dozens of products and thousands of independent instances are now using it. If Twitters higher ups were serious about "being a utility' they would federate on what is on track to become the browser social protocol from the W3C.

A public utility that very few people have even heard of outside of tech circles. I feel that more or less takes the “public” out of the “utility” and doesn’t give Twitter a pass.

Few people compared to Twitter, sure, but not as much as you muggy think. When I ask around in my circles, which is a typical mic of tech and non-tech people, very few have ever used Twitter. The ones who did are all tech people.

Sure, a lot of people have heard of it, but that seems to be mainly through reporting on other media.

I believe that Twitter is mostly a way for media people to get word out.

As for Mastodon, there is definitely a lot of tech people there, but there is a very large group of users who are not. A lot of them comes from other social media platforms to get away from the negative climate there.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#233

Post by smt88 »

marssaxman wrote: post #230
smt88 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> by refusing to let outside forces impose too much order on it

He also refuses to let inside forces impose order on it. He doesn't do anything at all. I would call Twitter a camel -- a horse designed by committee -- but it seems it's not even that. He apparently just consults committees ad infinitum and then does nothing.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#234

Post by 5trokerac3 »

crazypyro wrote: post #226
5trokerac3 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference being that the Overton window of “acceptable” opinion is rapidly shrinking.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#235

Post by zanny »

skybrian wrote: post #150
zanny wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have Twitter as a utility, its called ActivityPub and dozens of products and thousands of independent instances are now using it. If Twitters higher ups were serious about "being a utility' they would federate on what is on track to become the browser social protocol from the W3C.

ActivityPub seems like an interesting protocol waiting for a killer app. Mastodon is a reasonable start, but too much like Twitter.

The ultimate secret sauce of ActivityPub is that its killer app is every app that uses it. Its about having the same fundamental building blocks - because really, youtube, instagram, snap, tiktok, facebook, twitter, etc are all doing the same thing, you post content, aggregate it, share it, and comment on it - and having those portable across all the implementers so you can subscribe to someone whos on peertube via Mastodon and get their uploaded videos there, in the UI you like the most.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#236

Post by theNJR »

darkpuma wrote: post #191
theNJR wrote: post #132

A 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…

> It’s about human connection and conversation in the medium of real time public text. It doesn’t work. Your conclusion is too broad. It doesn't work on twitter, but I've seen it work just fine on other mediums. In fact I've seen people reconcile and resolve their differences on IRC when they couldn't/wouldn't do it face to face.

Can you expand on that? I have a weird case of internet nostalgia where IRC, niche forums and a little Usenet were perfect. But I think they were perfect because they were small and most people had a common ground based in tech. Lots of diverse people together in the same space, I don’t think, has ever worked in the history of man.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#237

Post by chillacy »

cvwright wrote: post #188
theNJR wrote: post #132

A 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…

> National Public Internet You want to put Ajit Pai (or someone like him) in charge of Twitter, Facebook, etc?

Being a utility hasn't stopped Comcast from being terrible either. In fact being considered a natural monopoly means I _have_ to use Comcast because they've entered a deal with the city to be the sole provider. I would hate to _have_ to use Twitter, Facebook, etc because the government only licenses them as social networks.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#238

Post by cabalamat »

dalbasal wrote: post #154
theNJR wrote: post #132

A 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…

> RSS exists

Which Twitter dropped support for in 2012.

> How are you going to stop the next twitter from winning the get users game, ban texting apps?

Hopefully the next Twitter will be the ActivityPub-powered Fediverse.

But say something wins big on the Fediverse, becoming bigger than everything else, and pivots to make itself a walled garden, with all the drawbacks of Facebook/Twitter? How could we stop that? Maybe one possibility would to put all content on the Fediverse under a copyright license similar in principle to the GPL, where any website that copies its content has to allow its own user-generated content to be accessed under the same terms.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#239

Post by aethertron »

no_gravity wrote: post #64

The main problem I have with Twitter is that when you reply to your own tweets, the reply will appear as a new tweet on your timeline. This way your timeline becomes total chaos. Unless you only tweet a single 280 chars text and never add anything to it. Otherwise, I would use it to post topics I am interested in. Reply to those topics to add more text or when new information becomes available. And have a discussion…

How about Wordpress? What you're describing sounds to me like the standard structure of a blog with comments.

Twitter is a weird sort of blog platform.

It is chaotic by design: the chaos is consequence of its distinguishing features. Everyone does get their own 'mini HN', i.e. a forum. But they lack the tools to rule over that forum. It's idealistically anarchic. Everyone's expected to get along peacefully, totally in public. There's no ownership over threads.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#240

Post by 7Z7 »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #202
7Z7 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Daily Mail is in the top three newspapers, by circulation, in the UK. And far far more read than the broadsheets. How is it not considered the "mainstream"?

"Mainstream" does not mean "reliable". After all, we have CNN in the States.

I didn't suggest reliable
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