61–70 of 94 posts
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.
If the platform is designed to cluster the users based on their interests automatically, you'd have early adopters and normal people co-existing without bothering each other.
That's what I'm working on now.
For me the benefit of Twitter is access to its social graph. I still don't personally see the benefit of Twitter as a communication channel. It is amazing for mining connections between people. In this respect I've found it an invaluable resource.
> It is amazing for mining connections between people What do you use for mining Twitter's interest/social graph?
Here I'm just showing the problem of Twitter getting mainstream and pushing what's popular on us: https://github.com/ducu/twitter-most-followed
We need an automatic tool that filters out the noise by figuring out the interest graph for each user individually. I plan to use Twitter for that.
Legere, et non intelligere, neglegere est means "As good not [to] read, as not to understand."
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…
In addition to doing all that you describe, Twitter also encourages you to ignore anyone claiming otherwise - somebody has a difference of opinion? Block and unfollow!
I'm pretty anti-social-media in general, but Twitter is definitely among the worst.
One of the advantages of being a total nobody is that I don't have these sorts of problems with Twitter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, HN used to be much more technical early on, so I'm sure some would argue it's already happened. Long gone are the days of waking up to a front page full of Erlang posts in an attempt to scare off the general public whenever there was press about HN. I think it's been accepted that HN is more just general interest about startups these days.
I don't think that HN is less technical than it used to be. It has always had mixed content. Perceptions of it are perennially mixed as well—someone was just asking me why there hasn't been much startup news on HN lately.
I follow a small number of people. The people I follow are followed by a small number of people. This creates more of a small room atmosphere. If you piss all over the place, you're going to be back online tomorrow with the same folks. Over and over again I learn the lesson that Twitter as a broadcasting medium sucks. Twitter as an open chat room is tolerable. More accessible than IRC. I suspect others are coming to…
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.
However, I think part of what makes twitter more unique is that you can't. With reddit and HN, I _only_ see what enough other people have upvoted to a point which intersects how many pages I'm willing to scroll through at a given time.
With twitter though, I find just as much unique (at least to my eyes) content as I do elsewhere. There are a lot of people creating a lot of great content and there are not enough upvotes to bring a sizeable portion of it to the masses. And in the end it primarily comes down to post time, title, and luck. But then with twitter I at least see an article title for a sizeable portion of it.
> but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll like their stream
There is a semi-popular programmer that I care a lot about the project he works on and think he is a tremendous developer. However he sucks at twitter. Consistently. And that's okay, I do too, which I why I so rarely actually tweet myself. But after a few days of following him I had to unfollow him because he tweeted a lot and they were driving me crazy.
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 was just starting to really like Twitter. Is it really the end? I have my doubts. Something is going to have replace it first, and it wont be Facebook since Facebook has conflicts family and private groups with public sharing.