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Buzz Kill

leoville.com

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Re: Buzz Kill

#31

Post by Hagelin »

m0nty wrote: post #17

I've never understood the appeal of Twitter and I think it would help if more "social media people" (and web app developers) could try to understand why. They are obscure little techie tools that a huge percentage of the population will never use. When Leo says "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber" what he really should say is "I was shouting into a miniscule echo chamber". And nobody was really listening because…

Isn’t Facebook pretty much the same thing, though? I’d say it’s taken off with quite a few people?

Re: Buzz Kill

#32

Post by muhfuhkuh »

m0nty wrote: post #17

I've never understood the appeal of Twitter and I think it would help if more "social media people" (and web app developers) could try to understand why. They are obscure little techie tools that a huge percentage of the population will never use. When Leo says "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber" what he really should say is "I was shouting into a miniscule echo chamber". And nobody was really listening because…

"what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?"

It's an ego-driven medium. All of it: YouTube (when actually done for its intended purpose and not flagrant copyright flouting); facebook/myspace, foursquare, getglue. It's all about what you're doing and more recently _where_ you are when you're doing it. It's about the inherent need for self-fulfillment.

Let's say you have great taste in music. Just by someone noticing your daily playlist, you have an admirer. That admirer might want to know more about you based on that superficial quality, and follow you on your social update tool of choice. It's a tool of communication, much like a phone (actually more like a partyline, but I digress).

When it boils down to it, people need people, and as social creatures, we find every convenient avenue of acquiring and managing our social sphere as we can without expending too much energy. If we didn't care about any of that, hell, we wouldn't ever even comment in HN, right m0nty?

Re: Buzz Kill

#33

Post by skybrian »

Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News? Does that mean Hacker News isn't valuable? What if someone decided to stop editing Wikipedia? When you read the news, do you remember the byline of every story you read?

For large public conversations, most of what you read is contributed by people you don't know. Your friends' contributions are only a small part of what makes the place what it is. And yet the overall effect is valuable.

So post or don't post, as you please. There are only a few people whose posting schedules I keep track of, but I still value the overall effort.

Re: Buzz Kill

#34

Post by rimantas »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #16
telemachos wrote: post #12

I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. This reminded me of something from one of Joel Spolsky's last regular blog posts ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/14.html ): Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in…

Two words: Learning curve . It takes time to understand what new media are for. Real , human-scale time, measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph, amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording memos and stuff.…

Twitter is not a technology. Unless you want to call phone calls shorter than 14 seconds a new technology too.

  Twitter is RSS for humans.
Uhm, what? Maybe for some weird breed of humans who cannot digest more than 140 chars and hate context.

Re: Buzz Kill

#35

Post by hiraki9 »

telemachos wrote: post #12

I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. This reminded me of something from one of Joel Spolsky's last regular blog posts ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/14.html ): Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in…

If you try to use social media as a traditional advertising platform, of course nobody's going to notice.

Leo used Google Buzz, Twitter, etc. to broadcast content instead of cultivating conversation & community. If he was using these tools for two-way interaction instead of one-way communication, he would've gotten a lot more complaints when he went offline.

Re: Buzz Kill

#36

Post by ugh »

duskwuff wrote: post #27
jacquesm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is closely related to some people that are 'dead' on HN and don't notice. They're still shouting to themselves though, some of those have been doing it for so long that it's scary.

Case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos

That's just sad and immoral. Can somebody please tell that guy?

Re: Buzz Kill

#37

Post by pacemkr »

Twitter invented a problem and then solved. They just solved it in a way that made people feel self-important, hence the growth.

I don't yet know what social media is. I just know that we're doing it all wrong.

Re: Buzz Kill

#38

Post by zacharyz »

olalonde wrote: post #30

In the comments: Why traditional blogging is a better medium than micro-blogging or social media - via Twitter Quite ironic.

This is the gist of the article for me, in particular because his tweet is the way I found the post.

I think if anything it just goes to show that buzz is way more personal than twitter and most people unfollowed him on it because he was too spammy. My small circle of friends still routinely use it to share stuff that we find amusing/interesting.

Re: Buzz Kill

#39

Post by pyre »

rimantas wrote: post #34
mechanical_fish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two words: Learning curve . It takes time to understand what new media are for. Real , human-scale time, measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph, amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording memos and stuff.…

Twitter is not a technology. Unless you want to call phone calls shorter than 14 seconds a new technology too. Twitter is RSS for humans. Uhm, what? Maybe for some weird breed of humans who cannot digest more than 140 chars and hate context.

For a lot of sites, the RSS feed is basically a headline and a link to the actual article. 140 characters can be sufficient for those purposes... Not that that's necessarily taxing the limits of RSS or anything though.

Re: Buzz Kill

#40

Post by jacquesm »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #16
telemachos wrote: post #12

I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. This reminded me of something from one of Joel Spolsky's last regular blog posts ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/14.html ): Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in…

Two words: Learning curve . It takes time to understand what new media are for. Real , human-scale time, measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph, amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording memos and stuff.…

> The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives

Much less in their pockets.

> Ebert gets X tweets per hour on average into my aggregated stream;

And those should be the ones re-tweeted most often.

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