I'm still amazed how bad the Twitter.com UI is. The fact stuff like Hootsuite,tweetdeck and a zillion similar tools exist to effectively make twitter usable if you follow more than a dozen people is crazy.
There is a whole bunch of innovation waiting to happen: for instance Twitter could build a community around creating and sharing 'lists' for just about any topic. I wanted to make a 'list' for every Canadian MP but man that's a lot of work and surely someone has done it already but I have no clue how to find that 'list'.
Yes, I have been complaining about this sporadically for a while. I mean, I once tweeted that you have to do a headstand to read the tweets in chronological order [1], and even, the text will be upside down ... :) Some time later, I think they have made some changes to that, for certain cases at least, e.g. for a thread consisting of a tweet and replies to it. But in a sense that makes things even more confusing, because now you have to sometimes read things chronologically (a tweet and its replies), and sometimes in reverse (the rest)!
Jokes apart, there are multiple issues with the UI.
[1] Yes, I know there may be a technical reason for the problem, but has anyone at Twitter tried working on a solution?.
It would be interesting to play with a left-to-right timeline for any tweet replies or conversations. It would leave the standard timeline alone, but allow users to scroll right to deep dive into specific conversations.
Agreed. How a 160 character text service manages to bloat and provide less utility than something that STARTED as richer content (Facebook) is beyond me. I've tried for perhaps 10 yeas now and have never been able to make Twitter work for me.
I decided last year that after 10 years, I would figure out how to get something out of twitter, and what I've found is that it really became a useful tool for me by the time I was following around 300 people, and had curated joke and garbage accounts out.
What I have now is a bunch of people in my own industry (music twitter, tech twitter), a bunch of people in industries I'm tangentially related to (Game dev twitter, vis-art twitter), a bunch of individual journalists, but by and large not the accounts of the publications they belong to, as well as the senators and congresspersons from my state.
By keeping a realtime stream of the people I follow in my periphery, I know when something is interesting when the list moves faster than normal, and if I feel like paying attention to it, the list moves quickly enough normally that there's a steady stream of real-time thoughts from people that I care about, and it doesn't move too quickly to read them.
The biggest thing I had to get over early on was wanting to read everything. Twitter's timeline isn't particularly legible if you want to go through and read everything your friends have written, but that's not how most people are really using it in my experience. People are checking in, seeing what's buzzing, and participating in the conversation if they have something to say.
That was the next big hurdle that I'm trying to get over now: Twitter is a participatory thing. You get more out of it if you start engaging with people. Twitter is so obtuse though, that it took my getting in to Mastodon to realize this.
You can talk to the void all you want, but if you want people to find /you/, you have to start talking to people.
I use it in a similar way. I follow ~400 mostly in my fields and fields I am interested in, with a heavy emphasis on accounts who post mostly text (as well as a few exceptional photographers). I unfollow or mute accounts that start posting animated gifs, memes, or clickbait.
One difference, however: I hardly ever use the Twitter Web interface anymore because of its algorithm that seems to emphasize yesterday's news and bury the stuff from people that I want to see. Tweetdeck's home feed is a godsend - just reverse-chron and no ads (yet).
Tangential rant: LinkedIn's feed has become a cesspool of clickbait and low-value "news" articles, as the algorithm prioritizes those posts which link to articles with photos. There are sometimes good text discussions sparked by people like Jason Fried, but 90%+ of the posts in my feed feature stock photography, company logos, and headshots of the titans of industry.
Oh, yeah- I only ever use the Twitter website to manage my notifications. Tweetbot on OSX and Flamingo on Android are my gotos.
Also, LinkedIn is terrible, and has been for the entire duration of my experience with it. I recently discovered that someone had tried to contact me about something extremely important using the LinkedIn messaging service, so now I feel somewhat obligated to follow it, and trying to navigate it was physically painful for me. I'm deeply upset that it's been made a necessary part of my life.
It's the type of thing twitter could really facilitate too - oh I see you added snoopdog and drdre, you might be interested in the "West coast Rappers" list!
Publishing/maintaining lists is something a organisation could do - ie CNN might want to publish a list of all their political journalists.
The list thing is really just a example of a feature they could have experimented with and for whatever reason didn't.
I didn't join twitter due to Trump, but I kept going there to see if his ludicrous tweets were real, when one day I decided on a whim to create an account since I liked the design compared to Reddit and Facebook. I found a lot of good people and pages to follow, and now I login everyday, and it's probably a more useful use of time than my usage of Reddit/YouTube/Facebook.
I started using Twitter daily a year ago and now I follow about 600 deep learning researchers. It is more lively than /r/machinelearning. I quite enjoy occasionally being able to chat with top guys in the field, especially that they are so busy.
Pro tip: when a Trump article comes, select "I don't like this tweet" from the side menu, and after a few such actions applied here and there, your feed is going to feel clean.
Same, I follow other programmers and chess players/chess organisations and for that its very good, I carefully curate the people I do follow to maximise the signal/minimise the noise and for that I haven't found anything better.
Yep, this is how I use twitter and it does nicely. The trick is to aggressively unfollow anyone whose signal/noise ratio isn't great. That way almost everything in the feed is interesting.
I had a strict rule of following a max of 50 accounts, operating a 1 in 1 out, I've lifted that to 80 (for Chess stuff) but still 1 in 1 out, so I have to decide whether following this one is worth unfollowing something else.
Except for a programmer friend who died (I just can't bring myself to unfollow him) everyone is expendable.
Try an alternative client or maybe TweetDeck and make some lists and get into the habit of checking them more than the timeline and you'll be able to see much less of the ads/bloat/meaningless trends and more of actual posts from accounts you're interested in
In the last two years I've seen a large migration of digital artists off of traditional gallery sites (Deviantart, Artstation, etc) to Twitter as their "gallery". The same thing happened with Tumblr circa 2012-2014, but even those folks are moving to twitter instead of using a dedicated site designed for showcasing art.
I've never had a Twitter account because I'd much rather see ostatus and decentralized networks succeed, and Twitter has never offered anything meaningful in the past, but if this trend continues I'll be stuck signing up there just like I did with Tumblr not to use it as a social network but as a media consumption platform (as was mentioned in the article, video is also growing). Its also similar to how musicians were nigh forced to start using Youtube as their primary jumping off point over Bandcamp and Soundcloud because that was where the eyeballs were.
What kind of backwards world would it be if artists, musicians, animators, etc are all using Twitter as their primary distribution platform just because of the network effects. Same reason Tumblr took off in those circles. It doesn't matter if the UI is lacking even the barest support for effective navigation of media, its all about social bridging and getting into feeds. In my experience about 80% of artists and writers that use Tumblr have their creative works inaccessible because they are buried under a mountain of reblogs and non-content filler posts with limited to no means to filter or navigate them.
I'd hope this trend doesn't continue, but it almost certainly will. Those making a living for themselves through online media are doing so via network effects and memes. Get a breakout success, get into peoples "feeds", and spread through casual retweets and reblogs. Its never about discovery or wanting to find them, its them getting randomly referred to you through the hive mind, and that creates a handful of wildly successful winners and a sea of equally competent and capable creators that never gain any traction.
The trend certainly will continue, if only because that's how it's always worked - even before twitter, or even the internet. TV, radio, newspapers, publishers, etc. have always had this power - you had to market yourself to enough people for someone with influence in one of the aforementioned medias to consider you worthy and propel you to visibility and success.
One might even say that the current state of affairs, or trend, is preferable because it's not some small group of people acting as gatekeepers, but instead it's "the hivemind" as you've put it.
It's not just twitter... the whole profit center around online communities is based on active communities. Most topics are cyclical - once the Superbowl is over, it's hard to keep a football community active. Only so many people are interested in the draft, in coaching changes, etc.
But throw in some controversy and all of a sudden everything lights up again.
The problem, or _a_ problem, is that people can only handle so much controversy. They have lives to lead. They _need_ to be happy. But as more and more profit centers are tied to active online communities, and as people who run those communities strive to keep people active, and since controversy is as easy a tool to use as there is in the toolbox... Well the end result is that online interaction shifts from being something that brings people together into something unhealthy.
Don't get me wrong, Twitter is a great tool for getting up to the moment information out there and for consuming it. I just wonder what there bottom line would look like if Trumps Tweets weren't making headlines 3 times a week.
The social health issue is one for all companies that compete in the social media space to figure out.
> The problem, or _a_ problem, is that people can only handle so much controversy. They have lives to lead.
You're so spot on. You know how everyone says, "Seinfeld is a show about nothing!" It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched.
People say "it was about nothing!" in shock, as if its incredulous that a show without drama in the characters lives could be so popular.
But that was why it was popular -- because most people's lives, most of the times, are not filled with drama. They just go about their day.
> It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched.
> This is very common to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The '60s through The '90s in part because programming directors like to have the luxury of repeating episodes in any order, and in part because (prior to the advent of the internet) watching or catching up on a missed episode could be nearly impossible for viewers.
See anything from Gilligan always ruining the rescue attempt to JD always screwing things up with the current romantic interest on Scrubs. There's a long history of shows trying to make baby steps against this (resolving a 'will-they-won't-they' situation, for instance) and the show basically dying as a result. Exceptions like Babylon 5 where major things changed were rare.
Seinfeld was "about nothing" in that the things the reset button applied to were so minor that you basically didn't even notice the reset button most of the time - you wouldn't expect them to majorly change the characters. That, and that it wasn't super-location-centric in the way that Newsradio is "about a radio station" - I mean, it isn't, really, it's about the characters there too, but 99% of the action takes place in the radio station.
Escapism. We like vicariously experiencing drama that is more than we want to personally experience. We love watching violent movies but don't want to experience or commit violence. We love stories with convoluted romantic intrigue and yet most of us just want to settle down with our partner. We love a view into a life we're too scared to live.
Surrogate drama. We like drama, but we don't like it in our own lives. It results in anxiety, uncertainty, and other negative feelings. But when we watch it on TV, we can interact with it like real drama, but it stays at a safe distance from our own lives. e.g. "OMG, did you see what Meredith did last night on Grey's? I can't believe she did that, what was she thinking?" We can partake in the drama, but no matter what she did, it doesn't really have any bearing on us.
> But that was why it was popular -- because most people's lives, most of the times, are not filled with drama.
A lot of the story arcs involved situations that people loved to gossip about. Like the woman who wouldn't wear a bra, or the whole "regifter" episode.
Put another way; Seinfield was about how people react to a breakdown in social conventions, and really small ones at that. The types of things that happen in Seinfield were the types of things you would go home and talk to your spouse about. "Someone at work today was standing really close to me!" "I was driving through an exit ramp and two cars tried to merge into the same space!" etc.
This is such a good way of putting it, and despite having watched every episode two or three times, I had never quite thought of it this way. I think this is best captured by the moment (which I think about all the time) is when George gets so mad at the person hogging the phone at a Chinese restaurant and yells, "you know we're living in a SOCIETY!". After reading your comment, I realize that complaint could be applied to most of the story lines in the show.
I have a different perspective: Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. "Controversy" is just another name for clashes of opinions that have occurred since the beginning of humankind and will likely continue to occur until the extinction of our species. These clashes occur within discursive spaces, and Twitter is one such space.
This is why I'm bullish on Twitter. It's a space for conversation, and people want to converse. (Also, it occupies a unique middle ground between message boards and real-time chat.) The other two spaces I can think of are Reddit and Facebook, and there's enough differentiation to allow all 3 platforms to peacefully co-exist.
The parent comment was not about Twitter Reddit Facebook coexisting or not peacefully, but about the logic of all of them competing against our public health.
IMHO we should regulate the hell out of them each time a significant harm on society can be proved, like we did for any other things that humans ever invented. But tech evangelists will say that time is different because 0 and 1 are being exchanged
Tech evangelists will say that not because "it's different" but because we never agreed with regulation so we've built tools and platforms that embrace free speech. That's the entire point of something like Twitter.
Or at least it used to be until the politics of the employees shifted to be more mainstream.
The end-goal for a lot of us is a fully decentralized internet that is technologically impossible to regulate.
Fully decentralized internet lol.
The internet economy is much more centralized that the old world ever was
There is no problem at all identifying the big players that have too much power
There is nothing more centralized than the government. They have a monopoly on violence. I (and many others) want them as far away from our industry as possible. I'll take Google over government intervention any day.
Centralization isn't bad; often, it's welcome, as by its nature it's more efficient. Bitcoin is a good example of how not to do tech.
Beyond that, you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized. The reality is, governments and markets are two sides of the same coin. They both strive centralize control.
> Bitcoin is a great example of exactly how to do tech. I'm pretty sure we probably fundamentally disagree on most things :)
I disagree about that, but I don't really think we have that many fundamental disagreement. For instance, I get why many honest people like the decentralization and censorship-free ideas in Bitcoin. I share some of those values, too, but I put a different priority for them; for me, in case of Bitcoin, all those benefits are heavily outweighed by the energy footprint.
> None of the technologies I listed are private enterprises.
No, but that part was referring to the second part of your comment, about "taking Google over government intervention any day". Maybe I worded it too strongly, though.
Look, everywhere there is power, there is abuse of power, it does not matter what source of power it comes from. The only thing that helps is having another power that checks it.
Yeah, controversies are natural, but they're not the only reason for discourse, and if controversies crowd out everything else because they're addictive or because they're encouraged to keep activity high, then that's a problem.
> clashes of opinions that have occurred since the beginning of humankind
> This is why I'm bullish on Twitter.
Fuck Twitter. Its roles and permissions structure is a disaster to effective and FAIR communications and there is little reason by Twitter to disallow the more viral concepts circulating within its web. Time to deploy active measures to give humanity some means by which education on these concepts can occur.
Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy.
When in human history have public spheres like Twitter existed? The public sphere up until about 50 years ago for most people was strictly local. You could not broadcast dumb narcissistic ignorance for free to millions of people. It wasn't possible.
Twitter is not good at what it does. It does not elevate public discourse. It's the equivalent of all the newsteams beating the hell out of each other at the end of Anchorman 2.
If you're bullish about Twitter, maybe we should be bearish about our chances as societies and as a species, because Twitter is full of examples of some or our worst behaviors. It's no surprise Trump loves it.
Just as an example, check out this tweet and its thread:
What if the size of the sphere is the determining characteristic about the level of discourse? I just read Geoffrey West's book, "Scale", and it is interesting to think of a sub-linear relationship, with "quality of discussion" on the y-axis and "number of people participating" on the X.
It's possible the current state of "bad" affairs is a natural consequence of the democratizing power of the internet itself. Reduced friction means anyone can participate; more participants means lower quality of discussion.
Just a theory as I try to synthesize West's ideas.
Yeah, I agree with you. It's very Eternal Septemberish. Many of the political discussions about the flaws of democracy are probably relevant here, too.
This is then applied to America to argue that the increased democratization of American society and culture is what has caused the perceived failures of the government and governing elites.
We have a tendency to see size and democracy as obvious goods, but there are certainly some limits there. It's funny how around the time Digg got going, all the talk was about the "wisdom of the crowds". Not sure anyone wants to make that argument today after 15 years of social media.
Eh, I think it may come down to Dunbarr's Number more than anything else. People can only have a certain number of truly close friends/connections at any one time, and when you get beyond that, you see clashes and the social structure breaks down. Maybe Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc are simply too big, so people break into separate tribes rather than get along with each other.
Usenet was better because it was before the Internet was interesting to the general population. Twitter sucks for the same reason YouTube comments and /r/all suck - regular people.
There clearly are some problems with the Internet, but nobody is forcing me to use Facebook or Twitter.
But there are some things I emphatically do not miss about the late '90s: Slow modems; even with ISDN, the Internet was painfully slow. Also, no flat rates - in Germany, the phone companies charged for dial-up connections by the minute. No mobile Internet. No Wikipedia. No YouTube. 10 MiB-sized mailboxes. TFT displays cost more than the entire PC I was using at the time (with a crappy CRT display). PCs with less RAM than todays HDDs have in cache. Windows 95 and 98. I could go on and on.
About the only thing I miss more and more often is that I was twenty years younger.
The tweet is in fact excellent, and the phenomenon predates Trump : stock markets will go down on good macro news in fear of interest rate hikes. This has been going on for at least 5 yrs, if not 10.
I'm not sure that's relevant to the OP's point - it's the arguing beneath the tweet they were referring to, nothing to do with the content of the tweet itself.
I find the concept of "elevated" public discourse to be very questionable. Elevated to what? Your standards? Your opinions?
That tweet gave 32k people a chance to voice their opinion on the topic. You may not want to hear it but I bet they appreciated the platform that gave them a voice.
I'm really glad we live in a society that gives people more tools than a voting booth to express themselves.
Reddit has become very much the same as Tumbler and Twitter became. It's no longer a tool for expression and conversation. It's an echo chamber with separate factions occupying separate areas... downvoting and banning every opinion that goes against the "reddit circle jerk".
Hacker News has become the only place I can have reasoned conversations about science, politics, etc without so much of an issue. The requirement of quality comments eliminates the karma farming from memes and nonsense and the inability to downvote until you are somewhat established prevents mass downvoting of opinions. It's a quality model IMHO.
I found HN aggravatingly hostile to freedom of thinking and open discussion. There are several hypocrisies/arbitrary taboos about what ideas you're allowed to mention on here. Even some anti-science taboos. Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned. People are very afraid of specific political ideas so even getting accidentally misidentified as a member of some popular hateable group gets you penalised. People see hints of "bad-thought" hidden behind innocent or open-minded words.
> Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned.
Isn't this the inherent nature of a fact-based platform? And most HN posters are probably quite rational and fact-based?
I wouldn't come to HN if it was a place where people could air stupid, non-fact based opinions and have them treated without criticism or derision. people can hang out in their Facebook group if they want to assert the world is flat.
The thing is people can be very rational and fact based and still be out of their league in various topics or have strong biases that they do or don't realize.
Here's a thread where someone is getting downvoted for asking a question because people don't like the implication of that question, it doesn't fit the biases of the audience. That's not rational and fact based, its suppressing views we don't like.
There are many examples like that, and one of the dangers of "rational" communities is we assume we're rational and can't mess it up, when really we aren't any different.
Surely fact-based and conforming to group belief are pretty opposite concepts aren't they? I'm not talking about false facts, but ideas that are outside the fairly clearly delineated (as I found by testing various boundaries and seeing others do so), but arbitrary scope of what's acceptable on HN.
No community is perfect. HN has some groupthink too, but honestly, it's an order of magnitude better place than anything else I've seen on the entire Web[0], so myself, I'm sticking to it.
--
[0] - except maybe LessWrong of old, but I was (and still am) too dumb to be able to contribute anything of value on that site.
Reddit is insta-community. Here's how I use Reddit: I pick up a new hobby, say knitting. I go to reddit.com/r/knitting and suddenly I have a bunch of experts there who I can ask questions, exchange ideas with, or brag to about my accomplishments. There is an instant community already existing on Reddit for pretty much every activity I can think of.
Where this gets dicey is politics. If you are suddenly a black libretarian baptist who believes in evolution, but not gravity, there's probably a /r/blbwbiebng already waiting for you. And if any of those gravity believing scum show up, the mods will ban them.
My ex used to study these little fish from Alaska who evolved in basically tiny separated ponds as the water level dropped and they all got separated. This is what's happening with Reddit. Silos where evolution happens completely independently of anything in the outside world.
I don't think reddit does a good job of dealing with academic subjects or discussions either. Any /r/{academic_topic} is usually filled with undergraduate-level discussion. I think that is a direct consequence of reddit being an insta-community though - it prevents the development of actual-expert communities.
There are some good expert communities like /r/askhistorians, and their model certainly works for something like history, but I don't think the same format would really work for something like machine learning or mathematics.
Only communities with expert-level moderators, who are capable of recognising layman speculation, can become expert communities. Unfortunately, unless you're a historian, most experts have better things to do than moderate online communities for free.
I use Reddit the same way. Whenever I want to explore a new interest, I start with /r/[that interest] - almost always there's a high-quality community there, full of domain experts and often lots of useful resources collected in the sidebar. I stay away from general and political subreddits.
HN tends to avoid hot button political issues issues. I guarantee that if it started posting climate change/evolution/abortion/political articles on a regular basis the troll brigade would show up.
Arstechnica is another tech oriented news aggregator/comment section and the ideological trolls on that board are a well oiled machine. They're on top of any relevant article before the bits are dry; pushing their agenda and gaming voting system until it finally falls off of the front page.
i do notice that a lot of demographics in twitter is changing. its starting to become a place you can network yourself for careers and such. I'm not saying thats its primary purpose, but now its being used for that more oten
While I expect a lot of people to not agree with what I am going to say, I believe this is much more linked to the political moment than to Twitter having a problem with "handling controversy". This just feels like an excuse to find a way to filter human communication, at this point.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Brazilian and the latest years' politics headlines have been flooding Twitter around here too, but spurious political tweets tend to be much more boosted by people who don't agree with them -- they just feel that urge to answer it or create a hashtag against it -- than by people actually supporting said tweets.
> This just feels like an excuse to find a way to filter human communication
Interesting. I've modded a fair amount of communities and the censorship argument to moderated discussion comes up frequently as new rules are implemented.
From an online discussion point of view I don't think it holds merit at all. If I run a football board and have a rule that says "no basketball talk" that's my prerogative.
As long as it's not government driven, censorship is perfectly fine (if you don't like the rules of my service, you are free to use someone else's). When it is government driven, censorship is murky territory at best, but not immediately bad and illegal/unconstitutional. The FCC in some form or another has rules against broadcasting certain types of content. You can't swear, you can't show nudity (or certain types of nudity anyways). That's government driven censorship, and its largely accepted.
Slashdot had a hands off approach for a long time. I couldn't go to their site without seeing a n-word reference in the comments because their approach was abused. If you go to reddit, facebook, twitter, snapchat, instagram, or any other major site you run into astroturfing campaigns. We've grown to accept that Microsoft is good at it and Sony is bad at it. But somehow when AT&T does it, it's evil.
I don't know what the solution looks like. I just know that we need to evolve. Filtering communication is part of it. A bigger part of it would be finding ways to drive healthier habits.
"As long as it's not government driven, censorship is perfectly fine"
This is sort of begging the question though, since the question at hand in a way is precisely whether that is still a good manifestation of the free speech ideal. A good case could be made that scale critically matters; your tiny football forum of like a couple hundred people can make whatever rules it wants, and anyone who doesn't like it can easily just go somewhere else.
On the other hand, if Level 3, the internet backbone provider, hypothetically started censoring based on the content of what was going through their network, we'd have a free speech problem.
I don't think it's that shocking an idea that Facebook and Twitter are now large enough that they should be obligated to take a very light hand, basically the minimum the government permits, on the grounds that free speech is not something that should be killable by the simple expedient of making as much communication as possible flow through commercial entities, then freely applying arbitrary censorship to the communication because it's a private entity. It isn't even that far of a trip before the government "requires" things of the companies that produce this result with some clever plausibly-deniable requirements, and thus free speech is just mysteriously suppressed even though it's nobody's "fault". If free speech is that fragile, it's materially ceased to be free speech.
I'm pragmatic about free speech, not legally deterministic. I want the effect of free speech, not a legal form of free speech that yet somehow lacks the effects.
The "evil" associated with censorship scales with the social importance of the medium. Xbox and PlayStation? Those communities could turn in to or do essentially anything and nobody would really be that worried. The entire internet? Now, that would be terrifying.
So, people don't depend on the Xbox network to regulate the social position of Microsoft. We have those discussions on other forums. But, if AT&T started censoring, what would stop them from working with other telecoms to standardise on a CoC where you couldn't criticise them? If you say, "because that would be wrong and people would stop them," then you're back to believing in limits on what it's right for a private corporation to censor.
So, the question is, where should we draw the line? Well, I'd propose that it should be deeply frowned upon to limit any discussions that server any social purpose; pressure release, activism, anything that connects society together and keeps it in sync. Unfortunately, those discussions sometimes use bad words.
By the way, there actually is an important (progressive even) social purpose served by individuals being crude. The bystanders watch, and depending on how the crowd responds to the bad behavior, they adjust their idea of how wrong it is to engage in the behavior. If you were to take bad words and hate entirely out of the information diet of everyone, we would all loose our socal resistance to seeing them. (Note: this is a great argument against filter bubbles as well.)
> From an online discussion point of view I don't think it holds merit at all. If I run a football board and have a rule that says "no basketball talk" that's my prerogative.
I think this is absolutely true. But things get murky when you're talking about sites like Facebook that are a primary means of communication for a significant part of the world's population. Because there's no "public space" online, large social networks become the de facto public space. But because they're not truly public they can do things like censor speech that would normally be allowed in the town square.
I think that's what the top comment was trying to say. High profile controversy like that prompts many people to react (either to disagree or to agree), which generates traffic and therefore helps the platform.
In addition, just the huge media coverage of Twitter (in the slipstream of Trump) is like a massive free ad campaign.
I've been on Mastodon for a week now and loving it.
But it's a different beast from Twitter. I find it much more socially engaging and interactive. On Twitter, I mostly just followed people and consumed their posts the way I consume an RSS feed. I re-tweeted, but never really posted much on my own or engaged in any kind of dialogue with anyone else.
On Mastodon, I don't really follow anyone. I post a lot of random thoughts on my mind, watch the local timeline and jump into impromptu conversations with people about whatever is striking our fancy at the time. I use it more like an threaded IRC channel or a very ephemeral/rapid-fire bulletin board.
I've been really engaging with Mastodon lately and having a similar experience. I find it's also changing the way I behave on sites like Twitter and HN as well.
I don't really get this point about Twitter, as often as it's said. On my account I don't follow anyone I personally know. I only follow some infosec/tech people who consistently have stuff to say about infosec/tech that I find at least a little interesting. Maybe occasionally they'll make a slight political tangent, but a great majority of what I see is on topic because I only follow people who stay on topic (John Carmack for instance usually geeks out on there about stuff related in some way to VR).
How has it ever been a problem? Create a new account on a new server, post a message on your old account "hey I'm moving to <url of new account>".
Conversations are usually only a day or two old before going stale, who cares whether or not toots from a year ago are linked to your account.
What I gain over facebook: no ads, not being tracked across the internet via 'like' buttons, not contributing to a massive dataset exclusively available to potentially evil corporation, and interacting with interesting strangers.
As a counter point, I think maximizing controversy is a short term optimization that reduces the number of users over time. Most people drop things at one point or another, and people are more reluctant to go back if their memories are stressful instead of fun.
It's definitely a short term thing with unfortunate long term consequences. Indeed, I've seen tons of communities founded on drama and hate for something else, and the vast majority will die in a matter of weeks or months. That's because people get bored with bashing the same things all the time or trying to kill each in other in an online flamewar, and the community will need to either build a real focus or accept its defeat.
Also, the more drama a site or service attracts, the more good members it'll inevitably lose. People with the kind of personality you want in a community aren't the kind to get into cat fights or attack people for months on end, and those you do attract with such 'content' tend to be the worst kinds of people.
So yeah, it's definitely a short term optimisation which can blow up in their face further down the line.
I don't think this is an explanation for the current status and gains of Twitter. Trump has been president for over a year, and has been a prolific tweeter for far longer. If anything, Trump tweets are less novel and more common place then they've been to date.
I think the activity on twitter being referred to is about Trump's presidency, not (mainly) about Trump's tweets. Same reason why cable news is raking it in.
> The social health issue is one for all companies that compete in the social media space to figure out.
Our traditional media organizations haven't figured this out in millennia. I'm not that hopeful. It's a fundamental conflict of interest between selling ads and creating informed citizens.
Some will tell you that's why they have the "church and state". I don't know. I'm not sure it's an effective policy and with native advertising the point is moot because they've given up on even the pretense.
A number of Twitter holdouts that I know finally created accounts this year. While they don't explicitly credit Trump for it, I think the constant barrage in the news made them feel like they were missing out.
Seems like a lot of out of context clips to push a narrative, standard project veritas stuff.
Like the clip about banning certain groups of people: the engineer says "it's going to ban a certain way of talking". You might take from this based on the video that he's talking about inadvertently banning right-leaning users. Well, what if he's talking about banning racism or messages that use ((subtle dog-whistles)) instead of overt racism?
Also, not many people like Trump, especially not in left-leaning areas (like where Twitter is based). Are employees not allowed to voice their dislike of a very dislikable man, while drinking at a social event?
I did, and it's just longer out of context videos that cut off at convenient points:
> Journalist: "Would you say the algorithms block liberal or conservative users?"
> Engineer: "I would say the majority of it are for Republicans, because they are all from Russia and wanted Trump to win"
> Journalist: "So you would mostly just get rid of Conservatives?"
> Engineer: "Yes"
> Immediate cut.
Woah, what a compelling argument. The guy is saying they are using machine learning to block Russian bots masquerading as American conservatives that are influencing the narrative in favor of Trump (that totally don't exist btw because we love Russia now and they would never attempt to meddle in any other countries elections). The video attempts to twist that into him saying they block conservatives.
Being hated on the basis of something one says is a good heuristic for me, as a free speech advocate, to decide whether or not I respect someone for their courage. So long as someone says something they think is important. Perhaps you do not agree with their journalistic methods but you're attacking the messenger and not the idea presented.
Their "journalistic methods" are fraud, full stop. It's fabrication. Nothing they've ever released has been true, it's all either lies or heavily edited footage that draws a conclusion that is the exact opposite of the truth.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter is not a single person with a single opinion that can be reduced to a few words.
Twitter’s shareholders love the fact that Trump uses Twitter in the way that he does. Many users love reading and discussing Trump’s tweets, precisely because they despise him.
Why: Subreddits for different tokens/currencies end up being echochambers (but still good resources as long you follow multiple subs). HN rarely shows blockchain stuff and the upvoted ones are often just anti crypto.
Following 30-50 crypto influencers on Twitter provides a good mix.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. I stopped using Reddit and started using Twitter. Perhaps this is a trend.
Reddit in general has become too draconian and filtered by secretive dictatorial mods. And I've used Reddit for nearly a decade, so my disappointment with its decline is palpable. I'd prefer to get info directly from the horse's mouth.
A good while controversial start is Ian Balina @diaryofamademan (ICO heavy content) and then just follow founders from various cryptos (Vitalik from Ethereum, Jed from Stellar). Then just add all the people mentioned people retweet.
Confession: when I open up twitter, the thing that excites me most is when I see that patio11 has tweeted. His stuff is just an absolute must-read for me. He uses twitter almost like a blog, which is different than most other people I follow.
Some people use twitter like it's facebook, some people use it merely as a pointer to other content, some people use it to argue, some people use it to interact with major brands / corporations. I'm not sure if this is a strength or a weakness of the platform.
I guess the important thing is that it's getting used.
Yep, and I'm more than a little disappointed in myself about that. Something about the form factor of writing there and the perceived "well it doesn't have to be shippable, it's just twitter" quality bar lets me keep up a habit of writing there almost daily while I struggle "sitting down to write essays" even on a monthly basis.
Also, discoverability. Blogs have UI with mostly O(1) access to any article. Twitter and Facebook are O(n) - the older a post, the more difficult is to find it.
In fact there probably is room in normal websites and blogs to allow you to write shorter "less quality" material along with the higher quality stuff.
I'm kind of convinced it's something like Medium + Twitter: A timeline of "tweets" on the home page where you can do everything you could on twitter but on the website (possibly syndicated) where you could also announce/promote articles written. One cool thing I realized is you can repromote old articles on your website when they become relevant again with a small blub just like most people end up doing all the time on Twitter.
That probably explains why patio11 is the only thing I ever read on Twitter.
I have no idea whether I follow anybody. My only interaction with the site is to go to https://twitter.com/patio11 from time to time, scroll way down to the last thing I remember having read, then read up.
I can't understand why they don't have a simple way to sort things in the order they were written. But then it's possible that I'm the only person who reads it this way, so perhaps it's unreasonable to expect them to build a feature for me.
I try from time to time to read other people's twitters. Even tech people who are interesting here and on their blogs. It's unbearable.
I said a while back they were optimising their algorithm for rage and that The Donald would be good for business. I think they are probably still buy because I suspect they will be bought - such a feature of the Internet it is hard to imagine a conversation, TV show or live event without it.
Are you active on Twitter? I'm not saying you're not, I'm just genuinely curious on what other's filter bubble experience looks like. For me most of what I see is related to state and local politics, and policy wonk issues. But I've also managed to curate my feed. Except for when something really big happens, my feed honestly does not feel to be full of rage. I wonder if your interactions send some kind of signal to Twitter that rage Tweets are what keep you most engaged?
Twitter can be a very valuable resource if you follow the right people.
No matter what industry you are interested in, there are leaders worth following on Twitter.
One example for finance, Cliff Asness. He's a billionaire quant hedge fund guy, but he tweets every day.
There's a ton of investors, businesspeople, reporters, programmers, researchers, etc. that are very active on Twitter, not to mention the plethora of comedy accounts that I find hilarious.
That's not entirely true. Twitter doesn't show you all tweets in chronological order, it has some kind of sorting algorithm like Facebook. If you follow enough people popular tweets and tweeters definitely drown out less popular ones
It's amazing how tech companies and unicorns are valued. If they are losing, the public market or VC's cover their aes and their value stays neutral, and first signs of profit send the stocks to the moon.
That is also the behaviour of crypto, but in this case the stocks aren't overvalued to start with, as decades of inflation have done to stocks.
Looking from another side, in crypto we haven't developed a sound investing framework yet, other than the usual github/reddit/social/TA checks, possibly because we are dealing with a protocol, not a product.
The interesting thing here, and maybe a somewhat contrarian position to take in the Twitter case, is that they're not a tech company, but a protocol company. And their value can't be measured with a number, they're essentially playing the same field as TCP or IRC, which value we haven't measured.
I would be buying $TWTR stock, if it weren't for cryptos like VEN, GVT or REQ which may be equivalent to investing in Twitter in the seed phase. Actually, this line of thought is really interesting, I may write something longer and more coherent about this stuff.
Agreed. Social companies like Facebook and Twitter started out with open APIs, but closed them as they grew more successful precisely because they don't want to be protocols.
I don't like that, but I get it. The money is in owning the user experience. And it's hard enough to continuously improve your user experience when all the people making that software work for one company. I think one of the reasons email and IRC are losing out to things like Facebook and Slack is that it's nearly impossible to make those things broadly better.
Sorry, I might be too used to the swings in crypto. Last year has been bad for twitter indeed looking from traditional-Buffetian investing point of view.
Being a protocol company is risky for adoption, but helps develop a huge moat over the competition, which doesn't remove the possibility of becoming an E-Corp-like company and/or dying from inefficiency. No idea about these two in particular sorry.
No; but twitter will likely get a better conversion rate if they tell people what it is they are buying and the cost, prior to handing over their payment details
> Revenue in the recent period rose 2 percent from a year earlier to $731.6 million, buoyed by data-licensing sales and video advertising.
I understand video advertising and if Twitter turns their attention to this area (after dipping their toes on Vine and Periscope) Youtube and Twitch may get a competitor. Now what does "data-licensing sales" means in this context? User data?
Twitter acquired a company called Gnip back in 2014[1]. This company built a SaaS business off licensing Twitter's firehose of tweets, in various forms, to various industries. For example, my company, which provides real-time web/content analytics to high-traffic websites, licenses Gnip's real-time API of tweets so that we can do analytics on those tweets and embed them inside our customer-facing products. That revenue ends up counted in Twitter's data licensing sales. Other popular use cases include PR media monitoring systems (e.g. Brandwatch), news alerting (e.g. Dataminr), and even finance (e.g. Bloomberg licenses Twitter data for its terminal[2]).
Even though Twitter isn't growing DAUs quickly (and possibly will never do so), it is actually a pretty diversified business. It has a multi-hundred-million ARR SaaS business embedded inside a multi-hundred-million user consumer destination site, which primarily monetizes through a billion-dollar self-service advertising business.
I highly doubt they will ban cryptocurrencies from their ad-platform when they can barely stay afloat. I speculate Facebook did so only because they're under pressure plus Zuckerberg said he's looking into the blockchain. I wouldn't be surprised if they'll monetize Messenger or WhatsApp with (the speculation it self of) a token in 2019/2020, akin to Telegram. Messaging-based apps are notoriously hard to monetize and Zuckerberg has said on earning's calls that he's unsatisfied with Messenger's progress in terms of monetization.
This seems fair, as a consumer. I follow a few very good computer scientists and entrepreneurs on Twitter and the things they post are of high value to me. I don’t mind the ads or the web app.
I favor reading books and academic papers over random web browsing, but some time spent on Twitter, HN, and a few Reddit subs-Reddit’s keeps me up to date, tech-news wise.
A further quarter of a billion dollars in stock options per quarter is insane when stacked against a $15-$20b market cap. Practically no sustaining public companies operate like that, with that scale of constant dilution.
It'll be interesting to see what that does to their hiring and retention, though. They are competing for people with Facebook, Google, etc. They weren't previously giving out those options to be nice.
And instead of paper options they will have to increase real $ - part of the problem for them is the way options are treated from an accounting perspective when in fact not all options get exercised.
I think Twitter was actually already giving out RSUs, not options. But either one dilutes the investor share of the company, which will push stock price down.
So Twitter has finally given up on building for the avg person and begun creating more tools to make life easier for advertisers (ie big money) and they're suddenly more profitable. Shocker!!
This excellently shows the problem with how value is currently assessed in the social media landscape. The "In case you missed it" algorithm-based organization of tweets and the focus on video to "increase engagement" at any cost are same reasons why there has been a widespread backlash against Facebook. On the other hand, building your feed from the ground up granularly is one of the larger differences between Twitter and Facebook.
Whenever I see, "In case you missed it," I read it as, "Now you have to decide if checking for new tweets is worth re-reading a half dozen tweets you've already seen."
So far, the answer is usually yes. I follow a lot of good people and the fear of missing something is real. But it's not 100% yes and I don't think the trend line looks good for Twitter.
I first wondered why were you downvoted for such a comment when I saw it, since it seemed on topic.
Then I realized that I am unable to read the next three pages of the analysis without creating an account on a website that I hear about for the very first time and that I am probably never going to open again.
Also, there are no links to terms of services and the privacy policy in the pop up (just two text boxes and a button), which on its own probably breaks some law.
They don't have any new revenue. Sales were only up 2%.
What changed is their expenses.
Negative $167m to positive $91m in net income, year over year for the quarter. That's nearly entirely from adjusting their expenses down. Dorsey is turning Twitter into the profit machine it should have always been by properly adjusting its expenses to the size of the business (rather than the size they hoped it would become years ago).
They are generating about 600 mil in free cash flow. Their revenues aren't growing. Other than acquisition there is no way to justify a 24 billion dollar valuation.
note that they slashed spending as well. Given all of the talk of regulation I don't think they are out of the woods yet. If increased regulation does happen it will have an enormous effect on the business.
It's always supply and demand, maybe demand rose as a result, or supply decreased as a result, but to claim that an earnings report directly correlates to valuation is like claiming that measuring the temperature of the sea affects the water level.
There is a whole bunch of innovation waiting to happen: for instance Twitter could build a community around creating and sharing 'lists' for just about any topic. I wanted to make a 'list' for every Canadian MP but man that's a lot of work and surely someone has done it already but I have no clue how to find that 'list'.