291–300 of 444 posts
As a person who never understood why twitter existed, let alone what purpose it might serve this information validates my feelings.
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I recently wondered about this, from another angle. In a way it was "weird" that they had an API, given our times. I.e., it was different: imagine if FB/Instagram/WhatsApp had an API. (I think it would be awesome, but it puts into perspective that it was weird that they had one imo)
Facebook actually had APIs which got closed down after a couple of data-mining scandals (first these "quiz" apps and games, then Cambridge Analytica as the final nail in the coffin), and their messenger used to support federation via XMPP. IIRC that got shut down because of spam and scams.
The convoluted ways in which people are gathering info on individuals is rampant in many Facebutt groups... There is way too much unsolicited spam and it grows every time I use an app or social site.
Makes me not want to log in at all a lot.
After all of these decades ... After talk/ytalk, .plan files, sysop chat, fidonet, usenet, livejournal/myspace/facebook ... I can't believe that the mass-adoption of threaded, text discussions looks like this ! What must non-technical, end user, always-online-generation think of this ? It's confusing, barely-usable garbage.
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What they’ve been doing is tons and tons and incomprehensibly many tons of work on targeting and selling advertisements.
Based on the ads I see in my timeline, they didn't do a great job at that. I have used the service for many many years and I have literally never seen any ad that I wanted to click. Maybe they do better for the US, but they seem to have done far worse than their competitors in ad space.
In contrast, I joined Instagram just last year and use it very little, but its ads are much more (sometimes almost scarily) relevant to me. My wife is a big Instagram user, so perhaps Instagram has a shadow profile for our home IP address and I'm seeing ads personalized based on her activity (and thus peripherally relevant to me).
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One could argue they filled out their niche. Took the VC money, made the thing global, does what it says on the tin. The world now has a broadcast-short-messages service that can be used by people to reach their audience. Unfortunately that's not enough, since these tech firms tend to be priced to eat the whole planet, thus requiring a lot more than going global with a little thing that works.
They're not even remotely priced at the magnitude to eat the whole planet. And yet, their market IS eating the entire world (except China, due to insular political reasons). That points to me like they're significantly undervalued.
Sure they could start slapping ads on everything, even paywall the site but at the end of the day there'd be significant competition eroding profits.
Twitter almost makes more sense as an open protocol than a commercial service, which is basically what Mastodon is. It's even what Dorsey wanted to do at one point with Bluesky, not sure if that's still alive.
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Twitter like all mass social media is competing for quantity of user not quality of user. Because their product is the user: behavioral analytics & advertising. If you're gonna use Twitter anyways, Twitter has zero incentive to make it a more productive tool for you (in fact they want to be slightly less productive so you spend more time on it). Due to network effects, they are not worried about competitors shipping…
>Twitter like all mass social media is competing for quantity of user not quality of user. Then why do they ban low quality users such as bots or users who have broken their rules?
So I never created a Twitter account. Over the years, there are a few people that I liked to read their thoughts on Twitter, so I'd manually go to their wall and read occasionally. They're all verified. Over time, it became cumbersome to continue doing this and I thought I'd give in and create an account (on the website) so that these people were all easy to access from a single point. So I did, and went and immediat…
you can no longer dismiss the modal, or in any other way bypass this as of a few days ago. (at least on mobile)
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I would guess it started as a reaction to the many botnets used by companies and countries trying to maximize certain opinions On top of the phone number, they also go through purges seemingly once a year, getting rid of up to a million accounts a day. That also doesn't fair well with giving the stock market raw numbers
> reaction to the many botnets Makes no sense. If they wanted to require a phone number to keep out bots, they would simply ask for a phone number at registration. Delaying it like this, claiming “suspicious activity” is hard to see any other way than how I described it.
So much opposition with everything having to be bigger and bigger.