twitter's time and place has passed. Was clever and even a bit useful for a while, and like facebook, has been taken over by fake accounts, bots, scammer, shameless self-promoters and partisan hate on both sides yelling at each other
Tweeting these days is like screaming into a hurricane and hoping someone will hear it.
I've blocked twitter (and other social media) in my hosts file on my mac - can't get to it, can't follow links to it and haven't missed it a bit. May have even dropped my BP a couple of points.
The problem is that ultimately the business' incentives aren't aligned with their users' and this will be true for any subsequent platform as long as it's advertising-supported.
Advertising-supported platforms make money off "engagement" aka getting people to spend as much time on the platform as possible so they can see ads. It doesn't matter if the content people are being shown is deceptive (clickbait, fake news, etc) or outright malicious (spam, scams, etc). In fact, clickbait, deceptive or intentionally antagonistic typically generates more engagement (as people argue endlessly) than pleasant & useful content.
Solving this problem requires a different business model where the users pay the platform for access just like you pay for your phone or internet service. The problem is that it won't sustain a bloated company with lots of engineers making 6 figures endlessly building an engineering playground.
>>The problem is that ultimately the business' incentives aren't aligned with their users'
Twitter and facebook's business model is to amplify hate between groups of people with varying viewpoints and they got rich by encouraging people to get in other peoples faces and giving them a place to fight it out; might not have started out that way, but that IS the business model now.
It's really no difference than a boxing match promoter selling tickets to a fight, with fans on both sides cheering on their favorite boxer.
most people - if meeting in real life - could have put aside slight differences in viewpoints and converse on the things they do share common-ground, like actual adults.
> Twitter and facebook's business model is to amplify hate between groups of people with varying viewpoints and they got rich by encouraging people to get in other peoples faces and giving them a place to fight it out; might not have started out that way, but that IS the business model now.
The comment you replied to makes sense to me as a money maker but I don't see where the money is made with yours, care to explain?
If people hate each other enough, they feel a need to prove the other one wrong - so they do that on twitter and facebook, i.e. some 'red' person posts something, 20 blue people attach them back, a 'blue' person posts something, 20 'red' people attach them back.
When people are attacking each other online, they are engaged online - and the longer the stay online, the more ads they see, the more money facebook and twitter etc make.
The two most significant issues I've dealt with in the last year have been Microsoft's PrintNightmare and the two rounds of 10/10 Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities. In both cases, news regarding mitigations, scanning, live exploits and efficacy of patches all came from a few people's Twitter feed.
We have several vendors selling us "threat intelligence" and nothing I received provided all the detail, and "official" information was often literally a screenshot of people's Tweets, a week after I saw them. Customers were asking us for help and were I not looking a Twitter I would have had nothing.
I'd like to block Twitter. I never actually made an account there. But I can't manage what I need to without it.
That would sort of imply that there is an alternative. Where else do you get near-real-time commentary from ongoing popular events, as well as bite-sized (potentially insightful) ramblings on assorted topics of your interest that are not curated by corporate news sources and that you previously might never have known existed?
There's a difference between "doing it all the time" and "using it when I want to have it". We could be reading press newspapers once a day, and yet we check online webpages and forums. Do we really need it? Or we do it because it is an improvement as long as we use it wisely?
Not that many people use Twitter. It has 400 million monthly active users, about the same amount as MSN had in 2004. It's just not that indispensable for most people.
exactly - somehow we managed to survive a long time without needing to know 'instantly' that 'something' is happening 'someplace'.
Most of the instant reports are just plain lies anyway - watch any of big news channels when there is some breaking news - they literally just sit in front of the camera and make things up to fill the airtime with useless speculation, devoid of any real facts or news - I can tune in 6-12-24-48 hours later and read what really happened if I want to.
Same thing happens on twitter - some big event happens and ten's of thousands of people start commenting on their version of 'the facts'.
Take a 2-3 month break from twitter - see if your life is any worse of for not constantly being 'in the loop'.
> exactly - somehow we managed to survive a long time without needing to know 'instantly' that 'something' is happening 'someplace'.
We survived millions of years without having agriculture or human-made shelter, and yet at some point we built a civilization. That's not an argument for not doing things.
> Take a 2-3 month break from twitter - see if your life is any worse of for not constantly being 'in the loop'.
Who says I am constantly 'in the loop'? I do check Twitter when I want to, because there are subjects where I want to get the influx of raw ideas before they are processed and packaged by the powers that be. (It's also useful to track how those ideas are later processed and packaged in real time, something that you could never get by consuming mass media alone).
If you are addicted to it and can't spend one weekend without it that's your problem, don't project it on others.
It's just like representing debt with marks scribbled on a totem instead of a generic vague feeling of owing you something, or like movable types on the printing press. We could do without those, they were novelties at their time, but they happened to change society at a fundamental level when their substained use changed relationships built around the new tech.
I have a careful selection of people I follow, and I use the "block" feature a lot. Other than that, I look at what Twitter shows me and I see a relevant set of posts in the fields I'm interested in (tech, Classical Music, math). I scrupulously avoid people who talk "politics" -- maybe this is what helps my feed stay nice.
Tweeting these days is like screaming into a hurricane and hoping someone will hear it.
I've blocked twitter (and other social media) in my hosts file on my mac - can't get to it, can't follow links to it and haven't missed it a bit. May have even dropped my BP a couple of points.