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

I Hope Twitter Goes Away

alexgaynor.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 251 posts

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#41

Post by kefka »

I'm another person who doesn't use Twitter, however I do have an account. And frankly, I fail to see many use cases. But I also acknowledge that the few use cases are powerful.

     1. On the ground reporting
     2. Messages to group of friends, like where to meet
     3. Coordinating group efforts outside friends list in X social media
     4. Warnings related to specific area/time
     5. Error logs related to web services
     6. Command/Control of hidden machines
     7. Complaints to companies with sensitive web presence

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#42

Post by [deleted] »

Eiriksmal wrote: post #29
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…

Exactly. Shotgun-blast your puerile thoughts to your dozens/hundreds/millions of followers. Don't bother reading any responses it might garner—they're going to be just as base. Now you're in the habit of just shotgunning statements into the crowd, so when you do the same thing on Facebook, you've forgotten how to engage in a more lengthy, rational discussion. Or, even worse, you've grown up with Twitter and don't und…

[deleted]

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#43

Post by Tombone5 »

negativeview wrote: post #6

Eh. I'm definitely a part of several communities on Twitter. It's just that they're micro-communities that are fluid in size and shape. If I'm talking business stuff I'll @shazow usually. If it's coding, usually @wolever, sometimes @shazow or @lnxprgr3, depending on the language/platform/etc. The whole hashtag thing is ... pretty hit or miss. I wouldn't mind a better solution to that. But as weak as it is, it's how I…

It's not at all exactly like twitter, for one a text that needs to stand on its own (a blog post) will require far more work to be of any sort of quality than a simple reply on twitter.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#44

Post by Justsignedup »

Eiriksmal wrote: post #29
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…

Exactly. Shotgun-blast your puerile thoughts to your dozens/hundreds/millions of followers. Don't bother reading any responses it might garner—they're going to be just as base. Now you're in the habit of just shotgunning statements into the crowd, so when you do the same thing on Facebook, you've forgotten how to engage in a more lengthy, rational discussion. Or, even worse, you've grown up with Twitter and don't und…

Basically because of this Twitter has been a place to share "interesting" links, pictures, jokes, and complaints. There's no discussion, no thought, no ability to back-n-forth. Worse is everything is very public so I have to be super duper careful that what I say doesn't get back to me professionally. There is no "private community" or anything. I find twitter useless except as a means to scream really loud not caring if anyone hears it.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#45

Post by schoen »

schoen wrote: post #26
GI_Josh wrote: post #11

I don't necessarily agree that Twitter users can't build communities. A friend of mine writes for a sports blog specific to an NFL team. His twitter account (and @replies) show that he is a part of a very strong community around the team. The tweets from these super-fans aren't just missives shouted into space, these people use Twitter almost solely as a response tool to each other. Their tweets look very much like s…

I guess another way of phrasing the original article's claim is that although communities do form, they have no straightforward way to exclude strangers, interlopers, and even griefers: and except for incessant use of hashtags (which could eat up valuable space), there's no simple way for a person who is part of multiple communities to direct comments to only one community. That's a recipe for both serendipity and un…

An example: I remember a blog written by an Orthodox Jew on theology and also cultural and political issues within the Orthodox community.

Periodically commenters would come by who would take exception to gender relations in the Orthodox world, or to the idea that there is a God who created the world and revealed his will to the Jewish people, who are uniquely continuing to follow it. The author would ban these commenters. His theory was that people are entitled to debate those topics somewhere, but that he wanted to have productive discussions on his blog with people who shared his basic premises.

It's easy for me see two different points of view about this: that it creates a "filter bubble" of the sort described by Eli Pariser, where the Orthodox (and people with other beliefs, for that matter, in their own blog communities) never see their faith questioned, and have a subjective experience that their beliefs are "normal" and don't hear about the substance of criticisms or objections to them. Or that it actually allows discussions about the topics that the audience of that blog mainly wants to discuss, without having every single thread turn into a debate about the existence of God, whether the Torah is divine, and whether Orthodoxy should adopt gender egalitarianism.

I think one idea here is that Twitter only makes one of these two options practical: the one where every thread can conceivably go off in the direction of a bunch of strangers saying that your basic beliefs are wrong (or even that you are a bad person).

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#46

Post by vhost- »

>About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter. Though I'd been thinking about it for a while, ultimately leaving was a snap decision for me. Lately I've been reflecting on why I hate Twitter so much.

It took me a minute to figure out he never worked for Twitter and that he just quit _using_ Twitter.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#47

Post by penprog »

smacktoward wrote: post #37
penprog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People use twitter for announcements and then for comments on those announcements. Very few people have actual conversations. When a conversation does happen, it's usually the root poster agreeing (or disagreeing) with the person that tweeted at them. I don't see anyone going to twitter with the initial intent of conversing with someone. Nobody goes onto their computer and says "Hey I'm gonna go message this person on twitter so we can have a conversation"

Twitter isn't a conversation platform

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#49

Post by mikeryan »

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…

Has design flaws that actively sabotage conversation

I've never thought of Twitter as a platform about having a conversation. Its a strange mix of a soapbox and some messaging but its inherently a public medium with the ability to have a public conversations but thats not its focus, its why brands love it, but its not Snapchat/Facebook or Google+.

Post reply on HN