I've seen the same thing; it also seems like it's not so much an issue of the platform as celebrities understandably don't have the time or inclination to interact with strangers on a regular basis.
The smarter play may be genuine Kanye doing 100 tweets at a time to 85 people who are identified as Kanye's Most Lucrative Fans In The Town He Is Currently In and 15 folks randomly selected (whose inclusion is for social purposes).
I'm peripherally aware of someone who is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Kayne presently doing this. I believe the vernacular is "killing it."
(Think of the economics for a touring band which can sell out a 100 seat theatre. The approximate lifestyle is "They plow 80% of their meagre revenues into the costs of producing music, make McDonalds wages, and live in a van." Now, give that band the ability to tweet for two hours, glad hand some fans, and make $10k with no venue cut and no label cut. The specific example I heard was "DM fan123: Hey Dave. Enjoyed seeing you at the last 5 concerts. Got a VIP event coming up Thursday: 12 people, live in studio with us, light drinks to follow. Thought you'd want to know. Tix & details: linkylink. Hope to see you there.")
P.S. Before anyone on says "Wait, Patrick, the economics do not make 2 hours of Kayne's time affordable on the budget of upper middle class Americans unless he is sharded between so many people to not even have the pretense of interacting with all of them" think less "movie tickets" as a comparable and more "season tickets to an NFL team" or "a set of golf clubs" or "a cruise around Europe" or any of the host of big-ticket items which upper middle class Americans actually do purchase frequently when given the chance.
Yes, I'm sure twitter could highlight the followers with the most followed and then Kanye could reply to them. He could also get a highlight of those most engaged in twitter (though they might not have a lot of followers) and tweet to them as well.
And, while it's at it, twitter could provide some kind of AI analysis of his followers to find the ones who are the most positive and have said the most positive things about Kanye.
Hell, they could even advertise they're doing that. Imagine being a rabid fan and learning that if you say lots of nice things about Kanye all over twitter that it'll bring you to his attention and he'll start personally replying to your tweets! Oh the algorithmic cult of personality...
We were verified on Twitter last week, and one of the useful additions is a verified notifications tab, which similarly, allows us to quickly see 'important' accounts interacting with us amongst all the 'noise'.
I think your suggestions are great, but I don't see why Twitter should do it -- what they should do is open up the game for developers, so Kanyer's software development/PR team can work a specific system to do that. Or a company do a generic platform and sell the service to celebrities.
I don't know, as much as the growing money from events being made by musicians is great for music as a whole, I wish we could put money's incentivizing focus back on album production, like the recording companies' golden days. What if, taking this supporter/fan model (which is also more generally available in something like Patreon), we sell tiers for fans to peek into the production of the album at different stages. Like you subscribe with X, you follow all our updates Y, with 2X, all our updates Y and Z, so on and so forth. Using a social network frontend (not unlike twitter or soundcloud) and backend software connecting to something like Ableton Live, musicians could literally share/stream their workflow and assets for people to toy around at home (only for upper echelons of patrons, of course). Those kind of insider views/treats could also inspire and even serve as learning tools for fans to learn into how their idols work. Maybe more niche, then maybe again with all the people getting into computer musicianship and electronic music being as big as ever, not so niche.
That's what I want to see, and I'm willing to code it, just not now.
P.S. I like how my grand parent comment had -1 score before you replied but is now recovering well.
P.S. I like how my grand parent comment had -1 score before you replied but is now recovering well.
FWIW, it's easy to read that as a reddit-esque throwaway oneliner, which HN doesn't really encourage, rather than serious commentary about social media optimization for a musician. When I have a comment like that, and I do occasionally, I generally thicken it out a bit to signal "No, wait, actual thought happened." (An example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177005 was originally just the first two sentences, which taken alone read like middlebrow dismissal, so I added a bit of supporting detail.)
