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

How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

recode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 246 posts

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#171

Post by burger_moon »

b1llyhoyle wrote: post #53

Getting lost in all this noise is Jack's willingness to have a conversation and also admit his product's shortcomings. How many other CEOs subject themselves to a similar, unscripted experiment? Kudos to Jack for being transparent and accessible.

Interesting that he also just did a podcast with Joe Rogan where he had to field questions but this time by someone who isn't in tech or a journalist. Elon Musk also did the same. It provides far more value and something to take away than an awkward rapid fire back and forth on twitter

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#172

Post by rdtsc »

> I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a “chaotic hellpit”)

It is interesting that this discussion on Twitter about discussions on Twitter ended up being a disorganized mess. It illustrates the problem with Twitter so well.

I consider Twitter a major step back in online discussion and sharing of ideas. It not just made that worse but it changed it in a qualitative way and it infected how people interact in other online communities and maybe in real life as well.

I call this process "twitterification of discourse". Short phrases, sarcastic quips, thrown back and forth are terrible way to build consensus, digest information and participate in meaningful discussions. It can be entertaining and give the poster a false sense of "victory" in "beating" an opponent but mostly just leads to sowing resentment and dividing people rather than bringing them together. "Oh I am a stupid idiot, for thinking this way. Well thank you, I appreciate your thoughtful comment and I'll reconsider my position" said nobody ever. Heck people might be well meaning in posting their short retort but the medium itself brings a coldness and negativity to it by its very nature.

Before this process was mostly happening in the media with talking heads spewing their positions quickly between commercial breaks. But now that has spread and everyone can talk and interact that way. Isn't it great!

Another insidious aspect of "twitterification of discourse" is that it cements people's positions. Once they promote some cause or state some opinions for everyone to see, but then later find out they have been wrong or misled, it becomes much harder to change their position because well their posts were there for everyone to see and now they are judged as hypocrites for example.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#174

Post by Kye »

gotocake wrote: post #145
zanny wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have Twitter as a utility, its called ActivityPub and dozens of products and thousands of independent instances are now using it. If Twitters higher ups were serious about "being a utility' they would federate on what is on track to become the browser social protocol from the W3C.

A public utility that very few people have even heard of outside of tech circles. I feel that more or less takes the “public” out of the “utility” and doesn’t give Twitter a pass.

This was true of every protocol. It's still true of every protocol. How many people use HTTP every day without ever hearing about it? Most people couldn't even tell you what a web browser is. They use it all the same. The ActivityPub standard is barely a year old.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#175

Post by ksec »

I assume people finally realise Jack isn't the next Steve Jobs as the media and supporters ( I now assume they are fake supporters?) likes to paint it.

And Travis Kalanick isn't either, I assume most have figure out by now.

And Evan Spiegel.

If you are a Product CEO, or Founder, which tends to be even more Product focus than any succession CEO, and you don't know the basics of your product, then the company has a problem. Even more so when these "products" are gazillion times simpler than everything Apple were doing.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#176

Post by porpoisely »

aikah wrote: post #142
endlessvoid94 wrote: post #131

Journalism is broken.

Only because it largely sourced its news based on Tweets and Twitter trends. They went for cheap then they are surprised people don't want to pay for glorified tabloids?

Journalism is broken because journalism is overrun by highly biased and agenda driven ideologues like kara swisher.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1086735766997344261

She epitomizes everything wrong with journalism today. It's not about truth, facts or news. It's about ideology.

Hopefully it's a temporary phase and things will get better.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#177

Post by lostconfused »

rdtsc wrote: post #172

> I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a “chaotic hellpit”) It is interesting that this discussion on Twitter about discussions on Twitter ended up being a disorganized mess. It illustrates the problem with Twitter so well. I consider Twitter a major step back in online discussion and sharing of ideas. It not just made that worse but it changed…

Just look at bash.org

Short, terse comments are not new. The systemic factors that cause it are somewhat different for twitter. But it's not a new occurrence.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#178

Post by paganel »

pjc50 wrote: post #143
paganel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boris Johnson has practically said the same thing in his latest editorial in The Telegraph [1], i.e. that that woman was transphobic and that the U.K. police should focus on other more stringent tasks (like knife crime). Transphobia is ugly but it’s not on the same level as Holocaust denial and people shouldn’t get arrested for it. [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/10/police-wasting-t...

Boris Johnson is one of the men who lied about Europe so often the EU made the Euromyths page in an attempt to stem the tide. He's not a reliable source (in any case that's an opinion piece), and nor is the Telegraph. There's a culture war going on, trans people are the current wedge issue, and people like Boris are absolutely part of it. Again, we need the underlying facts, which I suspect include a longer history o…

Johnson himself said the woman was a transphobic, him lying should mean that the woman was in the right and not a transphobic at all. I know about his past records, I only mentioned him to show that the story was real and mainstream, not some journalistic hack (like some of the stuff published in the Daily Mail).

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#179

Post by gotocake »

Kye wrote: post #174
gotocake wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A public utility that very few people have even heard of outside of tech circles. I feel that more or less takes the “public” out of the “utility” and doesn’t give Twitter a pass.

This was true of every protocol. It's still true of every protocol. How many people use HTTP every day without ever hearing about it? Most people couldn't even tell you what a web browser is. They use it all the same. The ActivityPub standard is barely a year old.

I didn’t say it’s doomed, or dead, I said that the reality of it being a little known and used protocol is at odds with the claim that it represents a public utility. I think that’s especially true when comparing it to a claim that Twitter, with many hundreds of millions active users, should be a public utility.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#180

Post by dalbasal »

theNJR wrote: post #170
dalbasal wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Twitter is a conversational medium, essentially. It certainly isn't a good one, for complex conversations. It's hard to find the horse-and-boogie analogy for something that's essentially new, but bumper sticker, or billboard is more apt. On the public utility front... email exists, RSS exists, the www exists... all open platforms, public by some (the right) definitions. The problem is that an open field…

NPR and PBS didn't invent anything, they used an established technology to be a not-for-profit public good. The National Public Internet wouldn't be breaking ground, it would be using social media for the public good.

That is all fine. You could have public (state owned) websites, apps, social networks and such.

I'd argue that wikipedia, lichess and such are public services already. I personally have more confidence in that sort of a model (os, community run, etc) than a traditional public service model, but there's room in the bed for three.

The problem is the same though. These services need to do more than just exist. They need popularity.

It's very well to say "twitter should be a public service." I have no doubt that it could be. But, it'd still need to outcompete commercial competition.

Post reply on HN