I Hope Twitter Goes Away • Hacker News Board

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#101

Post by gojomo » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:24 PM UTC

Conversations work on Twitter if the participants share enough context, such as similar vocabularies or compatible high-level goals.

Unfortunately the system and its harsh constraints is also really good at matching up people sure to misunderstand each other.

I suspect, though, that a lot of recent angst is transient, due to the inrush of users with wildly different rhetorical standards, and the exciting novelty, including the excitement of discord and performative moralizing.

But the novelty of nasty arguments with strangers will wear off – like how Farmville and similar games become less interesting when their basic mechanics and repetitive loops are understood. The true utility of Twitter will persist, leaving us with a better ratio of light-to-heat than some are experiencing at the moment.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#102

Post by eclipxe » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:24 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #93

cheshire137 wrote: post #22

Man, this dude's crotchety. "Stop liking things I don't like!"

I can't disagree with you, even if I really want to. I'm the same way, I want people to stop using Twitter, because I don't want to use it. I went to dotgo this month, much of the last minute communication was on Twitter, which is a really annoying platform to navigate when you don't have an account. I want to get other people of the platforms that I don't use, so I'm not forced to deal with them myself. Being push t…

>me being bitter about Twitter, JavaScript, smartphones, tablets and all the other stuff I really don't care about

Can you elaborate why you are bitter about the above?

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#103

Post by golemotron » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:24 PM UTC

> Twitter has no mechanisms for this. Every user floats by themselves, interacting with who they please. This denies us the ability to build communities, to set social norms, and to enforce them. Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities

I read this and said "oh, he wants to censor people." Then, I got to the bottom of the post and saw that he doesn't allow comments either. It was a one, two punch.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#104

Post by fuzzywalrus » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:27 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #32

If you want a more detailed critique of Twitter's design and the effect it has on conversations there, I wrote one last year: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/ /end self-promotion

I agree, this is more of an eloquent critique. Also this reads as "this is why I don't like twitter" instead of "stop liking things I don't".

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#105

Post by Kalium » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:28 PM UTC

morganvachon wrote: post #27

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, but comments are disabled. That bothered me as well, especially his flippant attitude about it ("Comments are never going to happen. Stop trying to make comments happen"). I get the joke, it's from that Lindsay Lohan movie. But the cognitive dissonance that it creates is annoying. He's basically saying "I want Twitter to die because they don't allow proper conversations…

Between the two, I can only conclude that he has something very, very specific in mind as the proper form a community should assume. I wonder what it is.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#106

Post by snowwrestler » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:28 PM UTC

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.

Then why does it need to go away? It's obviously ok at conversations if millions of people use it that way.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#107

Post by hippowithgas » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:29 PM UTC

I actually hope Twitter doesn't go away, it can serve as a fly-paper for the short-attention-span conversionist. The sort of people who talk at you, rather than with you. If they are all there, we can sneak off, to the other party, enjoy conversation, with give and take, learn, laugh, cry, take a real interest. It may even run to more than 140 chars. It will be great!

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#108

Post by namank » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:30 PM UTC

Broadcast has it's own use. I posit that broadcast leads to a more organic formation of a community since it ensures that communities are emergent rather than prescribed.

Thousands of communities come into being and dissolve on twitter every single day - what, really, is the hashtag?

People within an "idea proximity" (nearness of two ideas:)) commune about ideas with a gusto lost in other social sites. Twitter is one of the greatest communication gifts of this century.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#109

Post by Kalium » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:31 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #85

This line stood out for me, "Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities; unless they do something so bad as to actually get banned from Twitter" I've heard this several times from people with large followers, basically that they can't escape the bad actors without taking their account private. I don't think this is a Twitter issue so much as it is a…

The catch is that once you introduce marginalization mechanisms, abuse is inevitable. What people often want is some kind of abuse-proof marginalize-only-the-people-I-don't-like button.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#110

Post by snowwrestler » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 9:36 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #105

morganvachon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled. That bothered me as well, especially his flippant attitude about it ("Comments are never going to happen. Stop trying to make comments happen"). I get the joke, it's from that Lindsay Lohan movie. But the cognitive dissonance that it creates is annoying. He's basically saying "I want Twitter to die because they don't allow proper conversations…

Between the two, I can only conclude that he has something very, very specific in mind as the proper form a community should assume. I wonder what it is.

I think it's pretty clear what he wants. He wants the ability to selectively include some people, and exclude others. Like Facebook, where you can set your privacy policy to "friends only" and then you only get comments from people you've mutually agreed to converse with.

This is defining a community in terms of its edges. He seems to believe that if you can't exclude anyone, you can't define a community. It's just, I don't know, a crowd.

Twitter doesn't work this way, and neither do website comments. Both invite anyone at all to speak to you.