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Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

thetwitcleaner.com

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Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#81

Post by mkr-hn »

rschmitty wrote: post #80

TFA is about the API, but when I read the title prior to clicking my immediate reaction was "it was never fun" I'm in my 30s so I don't feel that "get off my lawn" old, but I just never "got it" I guess. Any tech person I want to follow normally has a blog because you are limited to the character limit. I wish twitter had built in filters, what drove me away was all the pictures, the "lolz", and food/drink shots in e…

> TFA is about the API, but when I read the title prior to clicking my immediate reaction was "it was never fun"

Whoever reverts all titles changed this one from the useful and descriptive title I submitted it with.

This was the original:

> TwitCleaner shutting down due to API changes

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#82

Post by dasil003 »

rschmitty wrote: post #80

TFA is about the API, but when I read the title prior to clicking my immediate reaction was "it was never fun" I'm in my 30s so I don't feel that "get off my lawn" old, but I just never "got it" I guess. Any tech person I want to follow normally has a blog because you are limited to the character limit. I wish twitter had built in filters, what drove me away was all the pictures, the "lolz", and food/drink shots in e…

I'm the same demographic and also never really got into Twitter, but I definitely see the appeal.

Comparing Twitter to RSS is definitely way off as RSS has really nothing to do with social, and Twitter has everything to do with social. HN/Reddit, by comparison, are almost exactly the same thing with just different community standards.

Twitter is really about a streamlined and open conversation. It's a more stripped-down social experience compared to Facebook or Tumblr or whatever other social networks came before, but yet it captures the essence of online interaction in an elegantly minimalist fashion. I think this leads some people to find it utterly vapid because online interaction is simply not the same as in-person, and Twitter exacerbates these characteristics by lowering the time and location requirements down to near zero, so you can participate anywhere, anytime, on any device without ever having to take more than a minute because you're limited to 140 characters anyway. There is definitely a purity and beauty to it, but it always gives me the sense that I'm wasting my time.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#84

Post by jt2190 »

rschmitty wrote: post #80

TFA is about the API, but when I read the title prior to clicking my immediate reaction was "it was never fun" I'm in my 30s so I don't feel that "get off my lawn" old, but I just never "got it" I guess. Any tech person I want to follow normally has a blog because you are limited to the character limit. I wish twitter had built in filters, what drove me away was all the pictures, the "lolz", and food/drink shots in e…

  > HN is super focused, and while some funny OT stories 
  > make it to the front page, for the most part it is solid 
  > tech news.
Interesting: My perception is the complete opposite, and I've actually found myself using Twitter (with Tweetbot) for tech news much more than HN lately. I think this is because Twitter uses the people I choose to follow to decide what to show me, whereas HN uses everybody, and to make a story popular with everybody it generally has to make people angry/mad/happy. That means that HN seems to have more and more polarizing stories reaching the front page, whereas Twitter seems more focused.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#85

Post by chippy »

shocks wrote: post #11

I dislike this new trend of linking to 'meme' like images within a blog post. It really detracts from the post and gives it a childish feel. I clicked those links expecting hard evidence about Twitter's bad API, instead I get irritating comics and stop signs. No thanks.

There are no such images in the article now.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#86

Post by theorique »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #76
phillmv wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It takes about 30 seconds to install an ad-blocking extension. I'd be willing wager that those 30 seconds of barrier would deter like 70-80% of the computer using population. Very few people as a whole know or are comfortable with browser extensions.

Is it wrong that I blame IE for a lot of this? I feel like IE was a major factor in ramming the "DON'T INSTALL TOOLBARS / ACTIVEX ADD-ONS NOT NO WAY NOT NO HOW" knowledge down consumers' throats (and that still remains good advice).

A lot of the early, nasty spyware / adware / crapware toolbars are to blame also.

I recall Bonzi Buddy by name, but I know there were lots of others ... redirects for ecommerce affiliate fees and other obnoxious rent seeking.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#87

Post by jdminhbg »

nashadelic wrote: post #57
TheZenPsycho wrote: post #46

What I find frustrating is that twitter has ignored /really obvious/ opportunities to monetize in a natural way, in favour of this strategy that involves backtracking on the things that makes twitter /twitter/. Opportunities that I see: -- Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers. Remember Ashton Kutcher's race to be the first twitter user with 1 million followers? Yeah.…

> Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers. You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans. Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the word out there. > Charge third party developers for increased API capacity. For the same reason as…

>> Charge third party developers for increased API capacity.

> For the same reason as above, you can't.

Twitter is already charging developers $infinity for > 100k API tokens; lowering that to $1/per token or something isn't going to harm the app ecosystem.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#88

Post by znowi »

lancewiggs wrote: post #7

Once again I'm just sad to see the continued erosion from the awesomeness that was Twitter. Twitter are killing off the good and magnifying the bad, all in the pursuit of goals that seem to be forcing a continuous decrease in the quality of end user experiences. The dumbest thing about this is that monetizing Twitter is trivial, without changing anything else. Just put occassional and obvious ads in our streams, and…

I have a hypothesis that any company reaching a certain growth threshold becomes evil :) If there's already a fancy named law on this matter, let me know. Oh, btw, the very top level is reserved for companies that are too big to fail :)

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#89

Post by glesica »

hboon wrote: post #72
glesica wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to me to be the problem. They took too much money to monetize in this way. A few bucks a month from a few million users, plus whatever they can make by occasionally inserting ads into the stream (which can't be that much considering how many people would never even see an ad because their streams are too noisy) just doesn't seem like enough to justify all the VC money...

It's improbable they would have the amount of users they have now if users had to pay a subscription. Do you think Facebook would?

Agreed, that's why I said "a few bucks a month from a few million users". I can't imagine that more than a couple million of their hundreds of millions of users would pay to remove the ads from their feeds.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#90

Post by sidawson »

GhotiFish wrote: post #29
sidawson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[author here] The post was intended to be stand alone commentary Not a bulletproof thesis. All I'm saying is my opinions etc after a long stressful week. Ignore the links, they're just there to lighten the story.

Ok, that's fine. You want to lighten the mood. but personally, I recommend against fart jokes during a eulogy.

And while this doesn't dispute your opinion as a general rule, there is always an amusing exception: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBCouCYjYUA

(death doesn't have to be a morbid depressing thing, despite the tendency in the west to view it as such)

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