51–60 of 172 posts
long-form would be interesting if it were a pull-based model (N followers of some expert want their opinion on some piece of information)
public follower networks are also valuable -- the signal value of one expert following another is non-zero
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.
> I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that. You mean like running your own webserver? Why would I do that instead of just getting a web host that'll take care of all of the sysadmin for you? With a lot of web hosting platforms all you'll need is to just press a button on a web site, then all you'll have to deal with is the wordpress interface
And frickin RSS! That was the content collaborator before Twitter.
I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).
The obstacle is not the format but the ease of sharing. Yes, I've had a blog since ~2000, I know there are some ways to share others' content on your own blog, but it never became as easy or readily consumable as a retweet. Ironically, I think the reason is recognizable from epidemiology. The network of twitter followers is just denser than the network of bloggers ever was or likely ever will be. Even the very best b…
The network allows things to go viral, but I don't think a retweet or tweets are very consumable. Twitter has an atrocious UI. I think when people do these threads tweet storm things, it's way way less readable than essays people were writing a thousand of years ago. I close the page when I encounter those and shake my head at how redundant all the extra stuff is between each sentence. Who naturally writes like that? It's almost like we are going backwards.
The only reason Twitter is big and the network has the power it does it because by a chance of history it got celebs on it in the middle of the last decade. I think content creators, especially devs, should be aware that there are a lot of us (dozens of us!) that won't touch Twitter with a ten foot pole. I don't go out of my way to read Tweets and I never ever check out someone's Twitter feed because I can't stand the site and the narcissism it fuels.
It's like America Online keywords. Someday it will be a dead piece of history. Twitter, what's that, grandpa?
We're funneling our content through platforms that amplify those who talk the most and/or have the patience to comb through that. How many voices are excluded because people don't want that?
I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).
> If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Not entirely true. You can generate nicely formatted content using a centralized service, and then self-host the files it outputs. E.g. we support this with FWD:Everyone, folks are free to use our tool to format any email thread for publication on the web, and then self-host published threads elsewhere by just saving our API responses. IMHO this is a much…
The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all. The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.
You can produce outcomes through both processes. Depends fully on what problems you work on.
The article mentions the 15-20 tweet roll as being cumbersome, and it is. But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being pulled in two opposite directions. It's a platform in which authoritative content is hosted. For example, the president conducts foreign policy through Twitter. And Twitter is also a platform where bots try to influence elections, people post images of dubious taste, and plain ol…
> Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating authoritative content. To be fair, both political ends of the spectrum in the US have been leaning very hard on Twitter, Facebook & Youtube to increase the active moderation of their platforms, algorithms and advertising services (not that those three are exactly the same content problem). And those political ploys tend to scream "censorship" (or refere…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...
The hard part is who is deciding what is true and what is not. It’s important to verify authenticity of the message (who the message claims to come from is actually who it’s coming from), but deciding what to disallow based on truthiness is a lot more problematic.
There's just so little there of value amonst an absolutely swarm of careerists (see every journo) sociopaths (see anyone replying to a journo) and arseholes (see anyone replying to anyone they don't follow). This isn't a COVID-19 thing, this is essential to twitter as a platform. And the SV folks know it too- which is why their libertarian credentials went out the window the second it got serious.
There's absolutely a problem that there are experts on twitter, because it's preventing them from being somewhere they can be seen by anyone with an ounce of sense, but the replacement to twitter needs more connectivity than blogs (not as much as twitter) and the classical separation of author from consumer. That's the fundamental problem - you could be Fauci or Trump, you're still just a twit. Whereas in the past it would be Fauci writing an update on the HHS website, and Trump being ignored on Sean Hannity's comment section.