261–270 of 320 posts
Twitter is the odd one out. While others built walled gardens, twitter kept the gate open. We now have a general catalog of human discourse for the last decade. Record of great tragedy, revolutions, elections past and future. It would be shame if this was bought and locked up by some gardeners.
>general catalog of human discourse I would contest this. Twitter represents a very narrow sector of society.
As does most written text.
This would be fantastic. Twitter's utility is in its open (inherently less profitable) nature. As a data source for academic study it's unparalleled.
>As a data source for academic study it's unparalleled. Does that actually mean it's valuable? Just because something's one of a kind doesn't mean it's worth that much.
It's worth mentioning that the more principled alternative is GNU Social: https://gnu.io/
I like the idea of GNU Social, but the Twitter-like frontend, Qvitter, is slow and feels clunky. And last time I checked, it still hadn't solved its "spooling problem": offline nodes won't receive updates and won't catch up when they're back online. A post you delete from your timeline might end up still visible on a node if it was offline when you deleted it. I'm sort of tempted to try writing a UUCP- or NNTP-based…
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A word of warning. You think you're curating it yourself, but the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased towards finding you an opinion you already agree with. This is why a) social media is often characterised as a narcissistic echo chamber, and b) why it becomes so rapidly toxic when two naturally opposed communities coincide on a topic. A wonderful petri dish for anthropologists, but not a medium we'll be…
> ...the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased... That depends entirely on how you use Twitter. Find people you know or have heard of other places and think are smart/interesting/important/etc. Follow people they retweet. Repeat. Meet Kevin Bacon.
Your friends and FOAFs are not likely to exercise the same level of control as you're expressing. I've consistently observed this even among a carefully curated set of sources on several SocMed sites.
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
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?
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If you have a demographic model of twitter users and appropriately re-weight, why is this a bad approach to take?
Because you don't (and probably can't) know that this model is accurate? Also, there are a lot of populations which are not present on Twitter at all, and more which are not present in meaningful numbers.
I'm not claiming that such a model is guaranteed to be perfect or even as good as a pollster, but it sounds in principle like a reasonable thing to do, if you take appropriate precautions to reduce bias.
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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…
You should stop by /r/austin sometime, and just lurk. The amount of local reporters looking for some kind of pulse to put their finger on and even those nu-'journalist' sites (Vice,Vox,insert here) obviously mining for quotebait is absurd, and the community has been calling it out.
Of course, /r/austin isn't a remarkably interesting place to be anyway for a lot of reasons...it's just interesting to watch the "Austin" phenomenon manifested there. Different story though.
This would be fantastic. Twitter's utility is in its open (inherently less profitable) nature. As a data source for academic study it's unparalleled.