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I Hope Twitter Goes Away

alexgaynor.net

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Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#31

Post by jsmthrowaway »

tux3 wrote: post #21
cr3ative wrote: post #3

Wait, is this satire? His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article. He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled. What is this?

>He claims to want to encourage conversations He certainly does not want to encourage conversation. >Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities; It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. That's not a community, that's an echo chamber with no disagreeing, no joking, no comments. It's okay if he doesn't like…

> It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does.

It's interesting that you say that, given that this is the same person who started a firestorm of drama by pull requesting gendered documentation in Node.js.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#33

Post by penprog »

smacktoward wrote: post #20
AYBABTME wrote: post #14

Alright, so twitter is terrible because its 'broadcast' instead of 'communities', and you don't like 'broadcast' but you like 'communities', so twitter should go away. a) "I hope Twitter genuinely ceases to be." b) "I want a product that enables me to build and participate in communities[...]." Having a product that enables b) doesn't mean a) must happen. Why come to that conclusion. Because you don't like participat…

I don't want to speak for the author, but an argument could be made that a product that: 1) Is massively popular; and 2) Has design flaws that actively sabotage conversation ... could lead to a situation where "B would be better if A went away," due to network effects. No matter how good an alternative B you build, people will keep on suffering with A despite its limitations , because that's where all the other peopl…

Twitter doesn't have a design flaw, it sets out to do what it wants and it does so spectacularly. Twitter is a platform for announcements not for conversations (although many try to use it for that very thing).

People who think twitter is a conversation platform are #doingitwrong. Period. People who try to use twitter for conversations and get angry when it doesn't work well or some random stranger barges in and starts hurting their feelings obviously need to realize that there are a ton of other platforms that solve their problem. Namely message boards, any form of chat (irc, IM, etc), blogs, etc.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#34

Post by api »

That's what I like about Twitter-- it's a global cocktail party. People tweet to one another about anything regardless of whether they know each other or what their relative socioeconomic background is.

It is what it is. It's not for everyone. But the net is more interesting with it than without it.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#35

Post by morganvachon »

kylec wrote: post #7
untog wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, all his Twitter account is doing is tweeting out links to his blog posts. It's a glorified RSS feed, not what he's talking about the post. But still, yeah.

Not all his posts are links to his blog: https://twitter.com/alex_gaynor/status/524683684180271106 But even if they were, there's a certain irony to decrying Twitter while syndicating yourself on it.

I can see why he would want to do that; I hate Facebook and only hold onto it for a few long distance family members, but realistically I could drop it and communicate with them via my wife's account. However, if I drop Facebook then I also drop the FB Pages associated with the websites I manage. While it's not a huge audience by any stretch, it's still important to me.

In another example, recently I stopped commenting on OS News threads altogether due to the recent political shenanigans (in short, the managing editor stopped posting operating system/tech news and focused solely on the gamergate saga). However, I do still check out the site from time to time, and ironically both the stories and the subsequent discussions have improved in the past week or so while he's been on vacation. Still, I'm soured from engaging with that community for a while yet, even though I have friends there.

So I can see him keeping his Twitter account and only using it to promote his blog, declining to engage in regular conversation. On the one hand, maybe it is a bit hypocritical, but on the other, he's using Twitter for exactly what he said it should be used for.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#36

Post by [deleted] »

AYBABTME wrote: post #14

Alright, so twitter is terrible because its 'broadcast' instead of 'communities', and you don't like 'broadcast' but you like 'communities', so twitter should go away. a) "I hope Twitter genuinely ceases to be." b) "I want a product that enables me to build and participate in communities[...]." Having a product that enables b) doesn't mean a) must happen. Why come to that conclusion. Because you don't like participat…

[deleted]

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#37

Post by smacktoward »

penprog wrote: post #33
smacktoward wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to speak for the author, but an argument could be made that a product that: 1) Is massively popular; and 2) Has design flaws that actively sabotage conversation ... could lead to a situation where "B would be better if A went away," due to network effects. No matter how good an alternative B you build, people will keep on suffering with A despite its limitations , because that's where all the other peopl…

Twitter doesn't have a design flaw, it sets out to do what it wants and it does so spectacularly. Twitter is a platform for announcements not for conversations (although many try to use it for that very thing). People who think twitter is a conversation platform are #doingitwrong. Period. People who try to use twitter for conversations and get angry when it doesn't work well or some random stranger barges in and star…

> People who think twitter is a conversation platform are #doingitwrong. Period.

If millions of people insist on using your product as a conversation platform, it is a conversation platform, no matter what you intended it to be.

A thing is what it is.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#38

Post by baby »

mbesto wrote: post #28

Slightly side topic - does anyone else feel like they "need" to use Twitter because it's a good distribution platform (the "human RSS"), but generally don't particularly enjoy it? I personally find myself thinking "oh maybe I should post that stupid comment that's in my head on Twitter...last time I did it I got X followers, so I should probably continue to do it"

yup. I'm worse than the author here, I've never understood twitter. It's bad for writing because of the limitation, it's bad to keep track of something because of all the noise, it's bad for discussions, it's bad for communities, etc...

The only good things that I can come up with are: broadcasting, stalking someone, press 2.0.

And yes I do use it, I have a twitter account with 600+ followers (I don't even know if they're called followers) and I just use it to promote and promote, and I dislike it so much that I miss on a lot of promotion by ignoring it most of the time.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#40

Post by gdulli »

It's kind of ridiculous and solipsistic to declare that something that exists for a purpose you don't care about shouldn't exist at all. I prefer Twitter to other social networks and haven't had any problems with it. (Though Twitter should improve the situation for people who do get harassed. You can't eliminate all anonymity on the internet.)

I'm also not interested in the shallow/faux "communities" that are more easily facilitated by Facebook but I have no problem with allowing it to exist and I can't imagine censoring it as a whole due to the parts I don't like. Or even writing up a blog post about doing so.

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