141–150 of 320 posts
There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch. The open Facebook alternatives never took off though - very hard to get traction against deep pocketed and connected rivals. Doesn't look as though anyone is going to buy Twitter which is embarrassing for them
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It's unparalleled in that there is very little that's even similar out there. I'm less convinced of its actual value. The Twitter-based papers I've read seem to all have two things in common: First, they all use Twitter data. Second, they all seem to desperately want to present observations about how people interact on Twitter as being universal, even though nobody seems to be able to come up with a theoretical or em…
Yes. It also bothers me that quality news sources, like NPR, have fallen into the trap of presenting Twitter as representative of the general population. They often report about how some group of people on Twitter are angry about something -- as if that matters. Reddit has almost as many monthly active users lately, yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the la…
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As a point of reference, even the Wikimedia Foundation had almost 300 staff and contractors as of 2015. This is admittedly a lot fewer than Twitter employs today. However, I suspect that even a minimalist Twitter without sales, etc. needs more employees and would have more of other types of costs than Wikimedia.
And frankly, much of the same criticism applies to them. A tiny tiny sliver of their constantly multiplying budget is spent on actually hosting the Wikipedia.
I'd point out though that, according to Wikipedia :-), the Internet Archive has a staff of about 200 so a few hundred employees/contractors doesn't seem out out of line as the baseline for a non-profit information infrastructure project.
I've never been able to understand Twitter's popularity. To me, it's like a website's comment section without the attached content. And most of the stuff I've seen on Twitter is only slightly better than YouTube comments, and often worse. I know there are lots of Twitter users here -- seriously, I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic, I just don't get the appeal. What am I missing?
It's also interesting to follow some people you strongly disagree with just to see their day to day thinking, what they're reading and how they may've come to their conclusions.
You can also share a request/call into action/product you just launched etc. with your network and they'll spread it for you if you provide them with an interesting feed and generally quality stuff - must be a quality list of people you follow/they follow etc.
It's like your own personal humint if you know how to take advantage of it.
If you just engage with a bunch of random people, it's not that useful indeed.
I've never been able to understand Twitter's popularity. To me, it's like a website's comment section without the attached content. And most of the stuff I've seen on Twitter is only slightly better than YouTube comments, and often worse. I know there are lots of Twitter users here -- seriously, I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic, I just don't get the appeal. What am I missing?
I suppose I can try to make a more general case for it. Twitter is the global community of people who have some specific thing in their brain that is also in your brain. It's not the place to share life updates with your college buddies and cousins. It's a place to find people who have a specific niche interest you share, and to share in the thoughts that you all don't necessarily want to express to the people you interact with day-to-day. Unlike Facebook, you can actually meet people there. And it doesn't require the sustained attention (I won't dare call it obsession) of places like forums and LiveJournal so a wider crowd is willing to use it. I still don't know if it's an eleven-figure business, but I'm glad it exists. It makes me feel more connected to the world.
How about charging users?. Like monthly plans etc.
Wasn't there some "Twitter alternative" launched by someone who used HN? Its entire business model was to bill users. I can't remember the name of it, or the founder, but I think the service failed to gain traction. edit: The service was/is App.net, and it was founded by Dalton Caldwell. It used to make the rounds on HN all the time.
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Yes. It also bothers me that quality news sources, like NPR, have fallen into the trap of presenting Twitter as representative of the general population. They often report about how some group of people on Twitter are angry about something -- as if that matters. Reddit has almost as many monthly active users lately, yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the la…
Twitter is a cheap way to get response quotes for an article without asking anyone any questions. It's gotten so ridiculous that some news "content" is just a series of embedded Tweets. Serious news organizations should band together and restrain themselves from this silly practice. It violates one of the most important rules of interviewing, which is to know who the source is and what her biases might be so that the…
This isn't new. When I was an analyst, some reporters would call me for a quote about something. There were times when I didn't have anything to say because I didn't know anything about said thing. But some would pester me for a quote anyway so they didn't have to give someone else a call.
Twitter does seem to have become a particular crutch though.
I think we are seeing a (vastly accelerated) version of turn of the century industrial politics. The ultimate (good) destiny if Google, Facebook and Twitter is as public utilities. This valuable data open to all and their connective abilities as useful and common to all as the road network. Should it be a non-profit. No it should be a utility
I'm confused, do you mean the Dot-com bubble turn of the century or something that happened around the turn of the 19th/20th century?
Basically oil barons went bat shit crazy and owned everything and everyone, railways, oil etc. Whilst less pronounced in the US, most "modern" nations brought energy supply into strongly regulated industries, often price controlled
I hope / assume / fear that the (personally identifying) data industry will go the same way
I've never been able to understand Twitter's popularity. To me, it's like a website's comment section without the attached content. And most of the stuff I've seen on Twitter is only slightly better than YouTube comments, and often worse. I know there are lots of Twitter users here -- seriously, I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic, I just don't get the appeal. What am I missing?
Twitter gives you the ability to curate yourself a feed from comments of people you deem interesting enough to follow and keep up-to-date with, as far as I know. I mostly use it for my literary pursuits, and being able to follow editors, agents, and authors at the same time with minimal hassle has made twitter very useful to the fiction scene. Alternatively, in the tech world, it gives you live updates on various dev…
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Yes. It also bothers me that quality news sources, like NPR, have fallen into the trap of presenting Twitter as representative of the general population. They often report about how some group of people on Twitter are angry about something -- as if that matters. Reddit has almost as many monthly active users lately, yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the la…
Most of the news reporting I've seen cast on individual Reddit communities. I don't think such a thing can be done as easily as twitter except through hashtags, thus the coverage on twitter being more twitter-wide hashtagging rather than sub-tweet communities.
Twitter currently has lists, but the problem is that these lists aren't crowdsourced (to my knowledge). They're maintained by individuals, which is unsustainable, because one person can only do so much work keeping a list accurate and up-to-date.