The Decay of Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#91

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

johnward wrote: post #27

benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

Twitter and facebook serve completely different purposes for me. Facebook is where I mostly interact with people I actually know in real life. I use twitter like you do, to follow interesting things. Then linkedin is people I have worked with. Each network serves a different purpose. I'd never pay for any of them though. I guess I should say I'd rather pay with my privacy.

[deleted]

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#92

Post by danielrakh » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 7:53 PM UTC

johnward wrote: post #27

benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

Twitter and facebook serve completely different purposes for me. Facebook is where I mostly interact with people I actually know in real life. I use twitter like you do, to follow interesting things. Then linkedin is people I have worked with. Each network serves a different purpose. I'd never pay for any of them though. I guess I should say I'd rather pay with my privacy.

I've actually recently designed a concept around the interest graph of Twitter that I think would be a step in the right direction.

Twitter Rooms: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#93

Post by pmontra » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 7:59 PM UTC

> At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.”

That's always been the point with Twitter for me. There are very few things that I want to discuss in front of potentially every person in the world. I wonder why it took so long for people to realize it.

Writing this here is not the same as writing on Twitter, different size.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#94

Post by warcher » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 7:59 PM UTC

I'm consistently disappointed at the (IMHO) mischaracterization of Twitter's woes by prominent writers. While I realize that they are experiencing some real stress, and yeah, it should get fixed, I think they're blind to Twitter's real problem.

Simply put: twitter is, for those without an audience, a strictly one-way medium. There is no social network or medium that is less interactive to the relatively anonymous, save perhaps a standalone blog. You're shouting into the vacuum, which is disheartening and eventually people just stop and eat their tweets.

The opposite of love is total indifference.

I would argue that twitter is actively encouraging this one-way-ness, which is going to be their downfall, because Twitter as a feed aggregator is high-noise and feature-poor. All of my "suggested friends" on Facebook (who got this right) are people who might reasonably care about anything I have to say. All of my suggested follows on Twitter are people who could not give one single fuck. (It's ok, I forgive you just this once Elon Musk. I'm not tearing your poster off my wall or anything. Although you're missing out on a goldmine here.)

It is a shame, because yet another news aggregator is highly unnecessary at this point in time, but number of two-sided social networks of Twitter's scope you could count on the fingers of one hand.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#95

Post by stesch » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #34

benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain If everyone would agree, we'd all be using https://app.net/ .

They didn't want my money and now I don't care anymore. Don't know about the current situation there but for a long time they only accepted credit cards. We in Germany don't use credit cards the same way US Americans do.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#96

Post by zem » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 8:02 PM UTC

benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

it's possibly unfair, but when twitter started exerting strong control over the platform and user experience i went from enthusiastic supporter to "enh, whatever". i will be happy for them if they succeed, and i am glad that they are supporting a lot of valuable use cases, but i no longer have any emotional investment in them as a "space". their ongoing failure to address harassment properly is just the final nail in the coffin; these days, i see it as exactly equivalent to facebook - i use it because that's where the people are, but if it goes the way of myspace i'll switch to whatever replaces it without a backward glance.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#97

Post by ogurechny » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 8:06 PM UTC

benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”?

Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yourself. If Twitter had some technology tuned to solve your specific task for a freshly registered user, it could take the credit, but it's neutral and indifferent.

Also, I can't see much difference between good ongoing conversation and a good conversation that happened thousand years ago. Part of the problem, as described in the article, is that Twitter “community” matured and generally switched from using it for transitory chirps to gathering and organizing knowledge for a long term somehow. And, as we all know, Twitter is horrible in that regard. Enormous planetary-scale log file without tools to parse it is a giant step backwards.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#98

Post by debacle » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 8:06 PM UTC

benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

A mediocre existence is no longer in Twitter's future. It's a massively overvalued public company now. There's no longer an opportunity for Twitter to take on Twilio's business model. Twitter can't pivot into a model that drops its market cap by an order of magnitude.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#99

Post by theseatoms » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC

ogurechny wrote: post #97

benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”? Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yourself. If Twitter had some technology tuned to solve your specific task for a freshly registered user, it could take the credit, but it's neutral and indifferent. Also, I can't see much difference between good ongoing conversation and a good conversation that happe…

> Enormous planetary-scale log file without tools to parse it is a giant step backwards.

Certainly an exaggeration. The recording of the log file is itself a massive step forward. The tools can come later.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#100

Post by benten10 » Fri, Nov 06, 2015, 8:20 PM UTC

ogurechny wrote: post #97

benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”? Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yourself. If Twitter had some technology tuned to solve your specific task for a freshly registered user, it could take the credit, but it's neutral and indifferent. Also, I can't see much difference between good ongoing conversation and a good conversation that happe…

That is a ridiculous hyperbole, haha. I'm rolling my eyes.

I can justify: I do not have to 'actively' go out to seek for information that I might be interesting/relevant to me: it comes to me. It's better than reddit because I see posts only by people vetted by me, so that's my 'filter'.It's better than email, because it's open conversation, and it's better than RSS because it's a 'social-network'. The network effect brings in the 'celebrities' (or, cool people, as I see it)

Yeah, twitter search sx ba*s. I'm hoping they make an agreement w google to figure out some sort of indexing. Regardless, it's pretty nifty. Highly recommend. Specially considering a lot of academic CS celebrities seem to be active there. (I do not come from SV eng background, so it might be a different community.)