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I Hope Twitter Goes Away

alexgaynor.net

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Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#161

Post by gurkendoktor »

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…

Have you intentionally left out Facebook in your list of alternatives? Because I think that is where many discussions have moved to, and it's pretty good for that. Articles posted by news pages have kinda-threaded comments, and Facebook's trademark "Like" button fits in well, too. I think that's a good example of how sites can evolve (so Twitter could, too).

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#163

Post by gurkendoktor »

enkitosh wrote: post #148
enkitosh wrote: post #143

I don't understand. You can build lists, I do and they are followed by other people. I have one list of Icelanders and I totally look at that list as a community of people. Just take Snoop dogg's account for example, he has a massive amount of followers. Is this not the community of Snoop dogg fans? You can find other Snoop dogg fans and follow them and interact with them if they are doing something that you like. I…

Wait. He has a link to his twitter account in the header of the blog. What is the last tweet? 9 hours ago, a link to this article. He hopes that twitter will go away yet he uses it constantly? I'm confused to say the least. I don't know what this man wants!

Of course you can use a service because it's too mainstream to avoid, and at the same time wish that it didn't exist. I've also signed up for Twitter because they stopped providing RSS feeds. That doesn't mean I wish them best.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#164

Post by gamesbrainiac »

abhididdigi wrote: post #112
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…

He says though, you can email him, write your own email blog, except that you don't comment on his blog. Does that mean he doesn't want communication to happen?

I emailed him once. At the time, I was a big python fanatic, and had a few questions about pypy. He never replied. So I asked someone else, and wrote a blogpost on pypy.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#165

Post by philwelch »

Honestly, @RealTimeWWII and its companion and imitator accounts (like @GuadaBattle) are, to me, the main justification of Twitter as a platform. If I didn't follow those accounts (and I will probably stop in three years once they finish) I wouldn't have hardly any use for Twitter.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#166

Post by mkr-hn »

The author has obviously never seen furry Twitter. One of my favorite communities. Maybe it helps that most people make a fresh account for it. It's diverse, safe, full of conversation, and seems to make a lot of people happy.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#167

Post by SamReidHughes »

codyb wrote: post #111
serve_yay wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my god, everything about the discussion of this article is nuts. What are you talking about?!

I did some quick research and found this [0]. It seems he rewrote some documentation changing "he/she/etc" to "they/them/etc". Doesn't seem like a terrible thing to do really. I had never particularly thought about the issue. The pull request was denied by another guy for some reason. I can't imagine caring if the "he"s get changed to "they"s. Then everyone came out and started criticizing the other guy and it all bl…

If anything was in bad taste, it was the pull request itself. You don't just go to a project you have never contributed to and tell them they're using pronouns wrong. And who talks like this to people:

> I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really see why you wouldn't merge it if it's so trivial though. Surely making the library less hostile is worth a few seconds of our time to press the "merge" button?

Do you see what's going on there? It assumes as a premise that his pull request makes the library "less hostile" when everybody knows that's not a universally agreed upon premise. Now if you want to argue with that comment, you have to unwind it to argue with the premise, which is going to lead to an exhausting conversation. So instead, people don't usually do that. This behavior serves to exclude and alienate people that don't agree with his premises.

Alex Gaynor does this all the time and has been doing so at least since back when he posted on the Something Awful forums. Maybe he just wants everybody with views different than the ones he's adopted as part of his identity to just go away. In online communities where this sort of conversational tactic can't achieve that (Twitter, Hacker News), he leaves and publicly announces that those communities are beneath him.

(This opinion is not borne of confirmation bias: Thanks to him using different usernames in different contexts, I've managed to independently come to hate him for this sort of thing three different times before realizing it was the same person all along.)

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#168

Post by [deleted] »

snowwrestler wrote: post #106
smacktoward wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#169

Post by saraid216 »

jshevek wrote: post #144
forgottenpass wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. You say "seems," but it doesn't just seem like that, it is exactly that. The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves of (minor point, but I'll clarify because I don't want conversation to degrade to pedantics). Why should he care if others use Twitter…

>> The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves "Safe space" is a much abused phrase. The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn? It seems that some people will not hesitate to demand the comp…

> The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn?

Offer a meaning of safe as it applies to physical harm. Let's see if we actually agree to that as easily as you presume we would first.

Re: I Hope Twitter Goes Away

#170

Post by eclipxe »

BuckRogers wrote: post #152
eclipxe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Well, for Javascript it's obvious. Not sure about the rest.

Well played :-)
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