Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 369 posts

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#211

Post by aaron695 »

whatever_dude wrote: post #79

> I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place. _You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes". Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that they keep making the platform _worse_, not better. Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double d…

> Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong.

Sorry? Twitter is worth $25 billion.

How did it go wrong?

Even if you want to talk about morals on a philosophical level, that's not what A/B testing is.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#212

Post by stevehawk »

wesammikhail wrote: post #57
michaelhoffman wrote: post #5

Translation: he doesn't think allowing you to decide who you follow will make Twitter as much money as he wants.

A common theme really. Just look at youtube´s "notification bell" and forced un-subbing. These social networks are going out of their way to be classified as publishers rather than platform providers. It´s going to bite them and us all in the ass so freaking hard and Jack, Mark and Susan will deserve everything that is to come their way both from regulators as well as users that will _eventually_ be fed up with these…

It's really weird to me how I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast interview of Ben Shapiro and he made that same comment and I found myself agreeing with.. Ben Shapiro. But if the social media magnates are going to try and become publishers and not platforms, which they are by curating what is printed on their sites as much as any editor of any newspaper, then I don't think they realize what they have coming.

Or possibly worse, we don't realize that it's exactly what the government wants.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#214

Post by rorykoehler »

darawk wrote: post #210
code_duck wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a great example of fairly talentless people with large egos somehow finding success, and mistakenly thinking it is due to their merits. If Dorsey was going to make a good social network, it would have happened 5-8 years ago. It’s a lot like Etsy - someone had drive, funding and concepts to make a project at the right time. However, they were not actually good at running a business and had no idea what the…

You know that Jack Dorsey also founded another successful company in Square, right? Pretty hard to argue that he lucked into both of those things.

Not really. Once he had VCs attention he could do what he wanted as he wasn't exactly starting from zero.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#215

Post by zem »

crummy wrote: post #202
zem wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i can see no way to opt out of it either

You can click the "I don't like this tweet" button in the dropdown.

that's not opting out of the feature, that's trying to train the feature to be better.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#217

Post by sytelus »

Abuse and misinformation are certainly the big issues but even more bigger and rather meta-issue is the strong hub-and-spoke model that Twitter promotes. Here's an example: You could tweet some of the most informative and useful tweets relevant to, say, robotics enthusiasts for day after day and years after year, and you might still end up with absymal engagement in terms of likes, retweets and followers. Meanwhile, folks who happened to become celebrity by pure random exposure can tweet how they sneezed that morning and they might end up with dozens of likes on their sneeze tweet. The bottom line is that Twitter's ranking algorithms are strongly dependent on existing social engagement creating virtuous cycle of virality of irrelevant content as well as chicken-and-egg problem for not popular people. The end result is that Twitter is mostly a medium for information broadcast, as opposed to information exchange. This has fundamentally limited the participation as well as usefulness of Twitter and is the one thing they should strive to change.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#218

Post by chipotle_coyote »

grey-area wrote: post #169
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am. It's called Micro.blog. Micro.blog has been discussed on HN before and people were, well, skeptical, in part because we've seen App.Net fail at this before -- but also because I think a lot of folks don't quite understand what Micro.blog is doing. (To be fair, I don't think they're particularly good at explaining what they're doing.) In short form: Micro.blog is built on IndieWeb principles. You can pay to have…

That looks really nice - thanks for trying to fix this. I really like your straightforward home page. In case this is useful my concerns would be on seeing your home page - Is this going to go out of business in 2 years and lose my stuff? Do I want to pay to post drivel about my life, and retweet the odd thing? I don't really use twitter for personal blogging, and don't think I'd pay for it, but it's really interesti…

To clarify, this isn't my service. I'm an early adopter, but it's created by Manton Reece. (Long ago he created a web service called "Tweet Marker" that a lot of third-party Twitter clients used to sync reading positions.)

So I have no idea if it's going to go out of business in two years, although I guess I wouldn't really know that even if it was mine. :) Those are always the big questions -- is the service viable, and are you going to use it enough to make it worth it? (And those two questions are connected, since enough people have to say "yes" to the second question to make a "yes" to the first question possible.)

I still use Twitter, and I use Mastodon, too, although I'm less sanguine about Mastodon than most of its proponents seem to be.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#219

Post by udwum »

markdog12 wrote: post #162
jsnell wrote: post #2

> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your…

I recently created a Twitter account, mostly as an experiment. I just followed some programmers, stuck to programming content. Immediately and every day after, I was constantly being displayed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, etc. Not a single politician or voice not on the left. Considering how powerful Twitter has become, this is troubling. I know this is just one…

Programmers are usually very vocal leftists. I've always assumed that those who don't speak openly about politics don't care or are right wingers, but who knows.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#220

Post by sverige »

TomMckenny wrote: post #78
luckylion wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be happy that today it's not life on this planet or the universe itself that is at stake. ;) In my experience, there are primarily three kinds of people that regularly claim there's a lot on the line, and it doesn't matter what their political views are. 1) young people that are inexperienced, 2) people that need to feel good about fighting for something important, and 3) people that exploit the other two by appealin…

Perhaps there are better examples of that claim. More than a dozen democracies have fallen in the last twenty years. Many times that over the last century, making predictions of that correct. Obviously neither life nor the universe have ended as many times in that period. Furthermore, I know of no well informed people that have ever predicted the later but many who have successfully predicted the former.

I'd be mildly interested to see a list of these failed democracies. My other question is, did they fail because Twitter allowed unfettered tweeting of all kinds of unsavory thoughts and ideas? Or are they places where most people don't know what Twitter is?

Edit: It also begs the question of whether democracy is the best form of government for every country, but I leave that aside, since I'm not sure we've reached agreement on whether Twitter is really that important or influential in the lives of governments and societies.

Post reply on HN