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The End of Big Twitter

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Re: The End of Big Twitter

#51

Post by k__ »

A_COMPUTER wrote: post #39

Twitter is an optimal conduit for narcissism, trolling, harassment, mobbing, astroturfing, demagoguery, and manufacturing consent. The medium shapes the discourse, and Twitter encourages and amplifies bad behavior while inhibiting intelligent and thoughtful conversation. Even if it didn't architecturally push you toward this behavior the scale alone enables every bad behavior you would expect if you scaled a single I…

I had the same impression.

Many people tell me they don't use Facebook because it's just for show-offs who want to populate their opinions.

And then their Twitter account is all about this.

There seem to be very few people who just use it to broadcast some informations about their projects and ask simple questions.

Re: The End of Big Twitter

#52

Post by ducuboy »

This is exactly what I'm working on!

Twitter demands a lot of hard manual work in order to stay interesting. It doesn't have an efficient filtering mechanism. Follow/Unfollow button will not do.

I tried showing this problem from a different point of view - we get overloaded with popular stuff that we don't care about.

"How to Find Out Who‘s Popular on Twitter. And why there’s no point in doing it" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252252

Re: The End of Big Twitter

#53

Post by im_dario »

I left this comment in the blog:

I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense for me nowadays. I'm not a big account (close to 1.5k followers) and I suffered serious trolling, threatening and harassment due political ideology (striking harder on electoral campaign). My notifications were full of their tweets.

First, I blocked them and report them to Twitter. I got their accounts suspended but they came back within a few days. This lead me to a different strategy and mindset. I saw their tweets but I "felt" them as what they were: noise.

Do you know that pain-in-the-ass noise that you ignore after a while? Somebody drilling, i.e. That kind of noise.

When I realized this, I didn't care about them. I just passed through them, ignoring actively. They eventually stopped harassing. They became powerless.

With this experience I developed a fine sense to detect useless discussions, allowing me to even get in one on purpose if I'm bored enough. Even if I'm in the mood I can answer them but when I do it I use to be right on the spot. They tend to stop after two or three tweets.

I think everybody should develop this kind of mindset around Twitter. Obviously, this won't work in other types of harassments beyond "intellectual" one. They should be dealt in more severe ways.

Re: The End of Big Twitter

#54

Post by ducuboy »

grrowl wrote: post #44
nmjohn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter has, for me, become a news stream and very little more. It has for me as well. I just checked and I have tweeted exactly once in the last year, it was when I was on vacation in march. Before that, it was August 1, 2013. However I still frequently use twitter. I have a highly curated followers list which results in 70-80% of the tweets I see being relevant to me. When I am waiting in line, or waiting for my…

The greatest difficulty is that you may follow someone you like , but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll like their stream, and it can be difficult thing to ascertain based on a paltry handful of latest statuses. Honestly I'm surprised they haven't started influencing the order non-chronologically, I'd love to prioritise certain people I know IRL or bump certain hashtags.

Prioritizing has to be done automatically, there's no way you could do that manually. And yes indeed, this is what has to be done. A system that "hand picks" exactly the items (not the whole feed) you'd be interested in, automatically, from a cluster of like-minded users.

I am working on it.

Re: The End of Big Twitter

#55

Post by Litost »

camillomiller wrote: post #47
calinet6 wrote: post #24

This is great. It's just perfect. The service purposefully limited to naturally content-light context-light 180-character quips—whose intent is to broadcast and be broadcasted to unfiltered—achieves its destiny. The result is natural and unavoidable. I'm so happy we're beginning to realize it. Seriously though, this is one of those unmeasurables that's difficult to nail down. Sure you could blame it on changes to the…

It's 140' but yeah, you nailed it. Synthesis ability is a good thing. In longer constructs, that is. We don't base our lives on aphorisms alone. Sometimes we really need to be verbose. Sometimes we really need to read "à la recherche du temps perdu". Twitter is just heading to its natural destination, a place where people share links and headlines and quick comments of little to no value. All the "revolution instrume…

I watched a Noam Chomsky youtube video recently, where he said something similar about TV news. The amount of time you get is only about enough to throw out some half-baked soundbite i.e. "XXX are terrorists", "All benefit claimaints are scroungers" and if it doesn't reiterate whatever the perceived wisdom of the day is, there's no way you'll get enough time to make a point.

I don't use twitter but i imagine the 140 character limit must be much worse. Facebook might be generally vacuous but at least there's enough space and persistance of thread that it's possible to have something of an intellectual discussion.

Re: The End of Big Twitter

#56

Post by tormeh »

Litost wrote: post #55
camillomiller wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 140' but yeah, you nailed it. Synthesis ability is a good thing. In longer constructs, that is. We don't base our lives on aphorisms alone. Sometimes we really need to be verbose. Sometimes we really need to read "à la recherche du temps perdu". Twitter is just heading to its natural destination, a place where people share links and headlines and quick comments of little to no value. All the "revolution instrume…

I watched a Noam Chomsky youtube video recently, where he said something similar about TV news. The amount of time you get is only about enough to throw out some half-baked soundbite i.e. "XXX are terrorists", "All benefit claimaints are scroungers" and if it doesn't reiterate whatever the perceived wisdom of the day is, there's no way you'll get enough time to make a point. I don't use twitter but i imagine the 140…

I think a character limit is a good idea, but it should be closer to 400 or something. It should force people to be concise, but not force people to divide their message in multiple posts. I don't really know where the sweet spot is, but I don't think it's 140.

Re: The End of Big Twitter

#57

Post by kitd »

im_dario wrote: post #53

I left this comment in the blog: I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense for me nowadays. I'm not a big account (close to 1.5k followers) and I suffered serious trolling, threatening and harassment due political ideology (striking harder on electoral campaign). My notifications were full of their tweets. First, I blocked them and report them to Twitter. I got their accounts suspended but they came back within a few day…

I tend to do this on Reddit. I'll try to have a meaningful conversation with people who demonstrate they want one in return, but all those little glib snarks, gripes or quips that the lazy (ie me from time to time) post get ignored, even if they really do warrant a response.

Reddit has a mechanism where you can tag individuals so familiar trolls can show up in comments like a sore thumb. Twitter needs something similar. Not Block/Unblock, but some kind of user-controlled colour-coding so the eye knows easily what to skip.

Re: The End of Big Twitter

#58

Post by chippy »

kitd wrote: post #57
im_dario wrote: post #53

I left this comment in the blog: I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense for me nowadays. I'm not a big account (close to 1.5k followers) and I suffered serious trolling, threatening and harassment due political ideology (striking harder on electoral campaign). My notifications were full of their tweets. First, I blocked them and report them to Twitter. I got their accounts suspended but they came back within a few day…

I tend to do this on Reddit. I'll try to have a meaningful conversation with people who demonstrate they want one in return, but all those little glib snarks, gripes or quips that the lazy (ie me from time to time) post get ignored, even if they really do warrant a response. Reddit has a mechanism where you can tag individuals so familiar trolls can show up in comments like a sore thumb. Twitter needs something simil…

reddit's mechanism is a (third party?) browser extension (RES) - I'm sure that one already exists for Twitter... or could easily be built in a weekend/hackathon?

Re: The End of Big Twitter

#59

Post by chippy »

nsxwolf wrote: post #19

One of the advantages of being a total nobody is that I don't have these sorts of problems with Twitter.

Most people in the world are also like you. Looking forward, Twitter needs to get these people into their service, or at least using it more.

Re: The End of Big Twitter

#60

Post by chippy »

kordless wrote: post #37
liface wrote: post #21

Platform starts, intelligent, well-spoken early adopters sign on. Fast forward 7-8 years. Platform is overrun by normal people. Early adopters leave and move on to the next platform The cycle continues.

Where are we going again?

Back to the safety of IRC - #hackernews freenode
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