
The End of Big Twitter - mjn
http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2014/08/the-end-of-big-twitter.html
======
A_COMPUTER
Twitter is an optimal conduit for narcissism, trolling, harassment, mobbing,
astroturfing, demagoguery, and manufacturing consent. The medium shapes the
discourse, and Twitter encourages and amplifies bad behavior while inhibiting
intelligent and thoughtful conversation. Even if it didn't architecturally
push you toward this behavior the scale alone enables every bad behavior you
would expect if you scaled a single IRC channel up to a billion people. There
is no way to "fix" this. It is its nature.

It is a technology that exists because it makes a few people a ton of money
and gives regular people a dopamine tweak along with heaps of suffering. It is
the online equivalent of a crackhouse.

~~~
ivraatiems
Based on my experiences with Twitter, this is totally correct, but you forgot
one key part: echo chamber.

In addition to doing all that you describe, Twitter also encourages you to
ignore anyone claiming otherwise - somebody has a difference of opinion? Block
and unfollow!

I'm pretty anti-social-media in general, but Twitter is definitely among the
worst.

~~~
chatmasta
Hacker News is as much, if not more, of an echo chamber as any Twitter
newsfeed is. At least on Twitter you can choose your echo chamber, and if you
desire, even fill it with opinions from diametrically opposite sides of an
issue. You can simultaneously follow @GoldmanSachs and #OccupyWallStreet, for
instance. You have no choice on Hacker News, except to subscribe to an echo
chamber generated by some nebulous algorithm subject to in determinant
cognitive trickery.

The reason Hacker News and Twitter enjoy such high engagement rates is
precisely _because_ they are echo chambers. Groups tend to share opinions and
tastes, so naturally enjoy the same clusters of reading material. I enjoy the
echo chamber at HN, because the opinions of the group that composes it are
important to me. I haven't been able to hook myself on Twitter, but I imagine
it's because I haven't found the right echo chamber yet.

------
bphogan
In a completely unrelated matter, I liked the Dave Matthews Band _before_ they
were cool.

Seriously though, the revelation that the "unwashed masses" now dominate a
platform is pretty much commonplace. Twitter has, for me, become a news stream
and very little more.

I did an experiment where I recorded and released a song a day, and nobody
really noticed; I promoted via social media and all that, but really, there's
so much noise, so much of a firehose, that unless you are watching the stream
when something posts, you're going to miss it.

It's neat in a way, but it's also, exactly as the author says, no longer the
intimate gather place.

Ah well, back to IRC then. :)

~~~
nmjohn
> Twitter has, for me, become a news stream and very little more.

It has for me as well.

I just checked and I have tweeted exactly once in the last year, it was when I
was on vacation in march. Before that, it was August 1, 2013.

However I still frequently use twitter. I have a highly curated followers list
which results in 70-80% of the tweets I see being relevant to me. When I am
waiting in line, or waiting for my food at a restaurant if I'm eating alone,
or am just bored, it is a great way to get highly curated content without
having to do really anything.

I don't know if I've ever said this before, but some of the comments on the
article itself are pretty spot on.

> I can´t see where is the problem with a platform in which you can choose who
> to follow and what tweets you ignore/pay attention to ??? works just fine
> for me. I devote some time to "edit" twitter, I mean MY twitter.

> The great thing about Twitter is that if your signal:noise ratio is wrong,
> you have no-one to blame but yourself: resolute use of the Unfollow button
> cures all ills!

It's kindof like reddit, if you unsubscribe all the defaults and follow topics
you are interested in (some of which get crazy specific niches and have
relatively active communities for how specific a niche may be) your experience
will increase ten-fold.

~~~
grrowl
The greatest difficulty is that you may follow someone you _like_ , but that
doesn't necessarily mean you'll like their stream, and it can be difficult
thing to ascertain based on a paltry handful of latest statuses.

Honestly I'm surprised they haven't started influencing the order non-
chronologically, I'd love to prioritise certain people I know IRL or bump
certain hashtags.

~~~
nmjohn
I completely agree with you, I would love more control over tweet priority.

However, I think part of what makes twitter more unique is that you can't.
With reddit and HN, I _only_ see what enough other people have upvoted to a
point which intersects how many pages I'm willing to scroll through at a given
time.

With twitter though, I find just as much unique (at least to my eyes) content
as I do elsewhere. There are a lot of people creating a lot of great content
and there are not enough upvotes to bring a sizeable portion of it to the
masses. And in the end it primarily comes down to post time, title, and luck.
But then with twitter I at least see an article title for a sizeable portion
of it.

> but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll like their stream

There is a semi-popular programmer that I care a lot about the project he
works on and think he is a tremendous developer. However he sucks at twitter.
Consistently. And that's okay, I do too, which I why I so rarely actually
tweet myself. But after a few days of following him I had to unfollow him
because he tweeted a lot and they were driving me crazy.

------
calinet6
This is great. It's just perfect.

The service purposefully limited to naturally content-light context-light
180-character quips—whose intent is to broadcast and be broadcasted to
unfiltered—achieves its destiny.

The result is natural and unavoidable. I'm so happy we're beginning to realize
it.

Seriously though, this is one of those unmeasurables that's difficult to nail
down. Sure you could blame it on changes to the UX, or on the user-base
itself, or any number of other reasons. But in the end, you've gotta look at
the nature of the form of communication itself and its parameters and
assumptions, and make a conclusion at face value.

~~~
camillomiller
It's 140' but yeah, you nailed it. Synthesis ability is a good thing. In
longer constructs, that is. We don't base our lives on aphorisms alone.
Sometimes we really need to be verbose. Sometimes we really need to read "à la
recherche du temps perdu". Twitter is just heading to its natural destination,
a place where people share links and headlines and quick comments of little to
no value. All the "revolution instrument" narrative is plain bullshit, too. A
high percentage of what you'll have on your timeline is nonsense in no
particular order. Only thing I save: lists. Useful for news gathering, but not
much more.

~~~
Litost
I watched a Noam Chomsky youtube video recently, where he said something
similar about TV news. The amount of time you get is only about enough to
throw out some half-baked soundbite i.e. "XXX are terrorists", "All benefit
claimaints are scroungers" and if it doesn't reiterate whatever the perceived
wisdom of the day is, there's no way you'll get enough time to make a point.

I don't use twitter but i imagine the 140 character limit must be much worse.
Facebook might be generally vacuous but at least there's enough space and
persistance of thread that it's possible to have something of an intellectual
discussion.

~~~
tormeh
I think a character limit is a good idea, but it should be closer to 400 or
something. It should force people to be concise, but not force people to
divide their message in multiple posts. I don't really know where the sweet
spot is, but I don't think it's 140.

~~~
calinet6
I imagine you could design a UX which encouraged people to keep their messages
short, but enabled longer elaboration when necessary.

------
nsxwolf
One of the advantages of being a total nobody is that I don't have these sorts
of problems with Twitter.

~~~
welly
I use twitter for one thing and one thing only - moaning at companies, ie.
supermarkets, train companies, airlines etc. who have given me bad service.
They're surprisingly responsive.

Other than that, I find twitter little to no use at all. There are better
places to get my news from (RSS).

------
snowwrestler
It's probably better described as the end of "small Twitter"\--the time when
everyone on Twitter wanted to be there. Today many people on Twitter just
ended up there because that's where the celebrities are. They have no sense of
community or allegiance to a "culture" of the service.

Every single popular technology goes through this phase. For example, people
used to dress up to fly on airplanes. Look around the next airport you're in
and think of that.

On the Internet, Usenet's "September that never ended" was the most famous of
many such transitions.

------
blackaspen
"I have found that my greatest frustrations with Twitter come not from people
who are being nasty — though there are far too many of them — but from people
who just misunderstand."

This is not different from life outside of Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram
or The Internet for that matter). It's life. A fraction of people will always
'misunderstand'. The Internet has generally attracted open and eager people to
the platforms it builds, but as things go more mainstream, you're going to get
some 'normalcy'. The Internet population becomes the rest of the global
population.

------
jbogp
People are growing out of things, thinking platforms are getting old but
forgetting that sometimes it is simply them that are in fact struggling to
adapt to fast evolving ways to use a concept as generic as Twitter.

I'm not saying that he is necessarily wrong about the recent changes in the
timeline but it does sound a bit like "things were better when we were the
kings of the hill"... you don't hear the Bieber and Lady Gaga fans complaining
about Twitter...

~~~
coldtea
> _People are growing out of things, thinking platforms are getting old but
> forgetting that sometimes it is simply them that are in fact struggling to
> adapt to fast evolving ways to use a concept as generic as Twitter._

Yeah, but sometimes services, even as generic as Twitter, simply fade off too.

------
liface
Platform starts, intelligent, well-spoken early adopters sign on.

Fast forward 7-8 years. Platform is overrun by normal people.

Early adopters leave and move on to the next platform

The cycle continues.

~~~
kordless
Where are we going again?

~~~
egeozcan
We don't have to go anywhere. It's the joy of trying new ways to communicate
and having feedback.

So we're going nowhere. We're just running in circles. Social circles, I
guess.

------
fineline
I have never had a Twitter account, nor have I ever posted to Facebook
(although I do have a page, so the press have a nice picture of me in case I'm
kidnapped or something, as well as 50 or so "friends", although I have no idea
who many of them are or where they came from). So I don't quite get what this
guy is complaining about. How was posting to a privately owned (by someone
else) but publicly broadcasted platform, designed to attract freely
contributed content in order to build an advertising channel, ever supposed to
be "intimate"?

~~~
XorNot
You should have a Twitter account. I have a Twitter account under my real name
with a keyboard smash password, just to ensure no one else can take it. Same
with Facebook.

~~~
jarek
Then someone registers @XNot with name XorNot and you're no better off.

~~~
XorNot
Having name providence provides some amount of deniability though. If there's
multiple accounts with the same or similar then it takes deliberate effort to
create mistaken identity.

~~~
jarek
Not to mention a sufficiently motivated deliberate actor could get Twitter to
hand over your account - particularly easy if it's completely unused...

------
adventured
I'm not a heavy user of Twitter, although I've been a member since 2008.
Mostly I check in a couple times per week with a few people that matter to me.
The first time I noticed just how bad the 'people just misunderstand' effect
now is, I was observing Richard Dawkins argue on his Twitter about simple
logic concepts, and the people that were arguing against him could not grasp
even rudimentary concepts of logic. It was terrible to observe.

Or another example: I randomly ran across Dax Shepard making a point about
sugar consumption and the rise of diabetes (
[https://twitter.com/daxshepard1/status/498145203639685120](https://twitter.com/daxshepard1/status/498145203639685120)
). Many replies were pointing out that type 1 diabetes isn't acquired from a
sugar heavy diet (which was blatantly not his point). Type 2 diabetes is over
95% of diabetes cases in America, and that's obviously what he meant. Could
the audience be that stupid?

I suppose it's the MySpace'ification of Twitter; that point where mass-appeal
or distribution has been reached. I don't think I've seen any mega-sized,
public service that this hasn't happened to (it's a non-stop complaint on
Reddit for example).

------
ux-app
For me the benefit of Twitter is access to its social graph. I still don't
personally see the benefit of Twitter as a communication channel. It is
amazing for mining connections between people. In this respect I've found it
an invaluable resource.

~~~
walterbell
> It is amazing for mining connections between people

What do you use for mining Twitter's interest/social graph?

~~~
ducuboy
I'm working on a platform that leverages exactly that.

Here I'm just showing the problem of Twitter getting mainstream and pushing
what's popular on us: [https://github.com/ducu/twitter-most-
followed](https://github.com/ducu/twitter-most-followed)

We need an automatic tool that filters out the noise by figuring out the
interest graph for each user individually. I plan to use Twitter for that.

------
im_dario
I left this comment in the blog:

I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense for me nowadays. I'm not a big account
(close to 1.5k followers) and I suffered serious trolling, threatening and
harassment due political ideology (striking harder on electoral campaign). My
notifications were full of their tweets.

First, I blocked them and report them to Twitter. I got their accounts
suspended but they came back within a few days. This lead me to a different
strategy and mindset. I saw their tweets but I "felt" them as what they were:
noise.

Do you know that pain-in-the-ass noise that you ignore after a while? Somebody
drilling, i.e. That kind of noise.

When I realized this, I didn't care about them. I just passed through them,
ignoring actively. They eventually stopped harassing. They became powerless.

With this experience I developed a fine sense to detect useless discussions,
allowing me to even get in one on purpose if I'm bored enough. Even if I'm in
the mood I can answer them but when I do it I use to be right on the spot.
They tend to stop after two or three tweets.

I think everybody should develop this kind of mindset around Twitter.
Obviously, this won't work in other types of harassments beyond "intellectual"
one. They should be dealt in more severe ways.

~~~
kitd
I tend to do this on Reddit. I'll try to have a meaningful conversation with
people who demonstrate they want one in return, but all those little glib
snarks, gripes or quips that the lazy (ie me from time to time) post get
ignored, even if they really do warrant a response.

Reddit has a mechanism where you can tag individuals so familiar trolls can
show up in comments like a sore thumb. Twitter needs something similar. Not
Block/Unblock, but some kind of user-controlled colour-coding so the eye knows
easily what to skip.

~~~
chippy
reddit's mechanism is a (third party?) browser extension (RES) - I'm sure that
one already exists for Twitter... or could easily be built in a
weekend/hackathon?

------
DanielBMarkham
I follow a small number of people. The people I follow are followed by a small
number of people.

This creates more of a small room atmosphere. If you piss all over the place,
you're going to be back online tomorrow with the same folks.

Over and over again I learn the lesson that Twitter as a broadcasting medium
sucks. Twitter as an open chat room is tolerable. More accessible than IRC.

I suspect others are coming to similar conclusions.

~~~
jraedisch
My conclusions are similar. My follower/following ratio has been stable at
about 90/100 for a while now. Those that lose quality in my eyes or are no
longer relevant to me (because I do not use their product anymore, etc.) I
unfollow rigorously. Signal to noise ratio is one of the best out there IMHO,
even with annoying promotions. I would really welcome any suggestions for
something better. Only small thing I would improve is enabling people to
answer on pms, even if they are not followed by the account that pmed them.

------
walterbell
More UX change is on the way,
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-28/daniel-
grafs...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-28/daniel-grafs-
twitter-task-user-interface-changes)

------
peterkelly
People are always going to be nasty to each other online - as they have been
offline, for thousands of years.

I don't think the introduction or abandoning of any particular technology is
going to change that.

------
ducuboy
This is exactly what I'm working on!

Twitter demands a lot of hard manual work in order to stay interesting. It
doesn't have an efficient filtering mechanism. Follow/Unfollow button will not
do.

I tried showing this problem from a different point of view - we get
overloaded with popular stuff that we don't care about.

"How to Find Out Who‘s Popular on Twitter. And why there’s no point in doing
it" \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252252)

------
snoman
Twitter is useful and interesting, but your idea of rich conversation is
shallow or weak if it was ever satisfied by conversations that were had 140
characters at a time.

~~~
josu
Don't undersimate the power of 140 characters. It helps you convey your
thoughts. Take Plato's Republic as an example, most of the conversations could
have happened in twitter-form, and not much would have been lost (assuming
that some replies would be two or three tweets long).

~~~
coldtea
> _most of the conversations could have happened in twitter-form, and not much
> would have been lost_

Actually all the nuance would have been lost out of the Republic in that way.

Philosophy (and literature for that matter) is never just about the concepts
or "plot", it's always about the way in which they are conveyed.

------
malloreon
This is fantastic news. Openness isn't inherently good; sharing everything and
allowing others into our lives isn't automatically better.

Not only because of the attacks and general constant stream of stupid
"content" that comes from even the most interesting of people, but since
social networks make us unhappy.

Hopefully people will stop using broadcast based social networking. You heard
it here first, one to one communication is the next big thing (tm)

------
void-star
So... FWIW, I totally don't have these problems with twitter. It's probably
because I only check my twitter feed and spout out a few tweets at a time once
every two weeks or so and pretty much ignore it the rest of the time.

Full disclosure: I don't use any other social network besides twitter, either.
It's because it's so non-committal that I can deal with twitter...

------
austenallred
The same frustrations (and more) are constantly levied against Facebook (as
well as nearly every other platform). The reality is, however, that people are
joining much, much faster than they're leaving. So even if 1 in 10 hates a
platform and refuses to use it, that is negated by the 5 that are joining.

~~~
mjn
In my own limited experience, Facebook has changed less than Twitter from the
perspective of conversation dynamics, to the extent that I now prefer FB,
while I used to prefer Twitter.

For one thing, FB is less "flat". On FB, my updates only go to my FB friends,
or optionally to "friends of friends". They are the only people who can either
see or comment on them. So the size of my friend list has a large effect on
discussion dynamics. That grows pretty slowly, so my FB experience hasn't
changed too much. On Twitter, I could have a "locked" profile, but the norm is
to post publicly, and certain things that are iconic of the platform (like
retweeting) don't work if you're locked. There is also no "friends of friends"
option, so you're either locked or public.

That wasn't a problem until recently, but in the past year or so, there seem
to be a lot of people (sometimes called "randos") using the search
functionality, and sending weird, often abusive, replies to people they don't
even know, because of a tweet that came up in a search. The "virality" of
retweets also accentuates that. Sometimes an offhand comment ends up read by
1000+ people because a chain of people retweeted it, and then there are all
these really out of context replies by people who aren't even within three
degrees of relationship to me. That can be welcome sometimes, and not welcome
other times. Once in a while, if you're unlucky, something you say will get
retweeted in a negative context by someone quasi-famous, which results in this
weird swarm of mindless acolytes. And some of those acolytes feel the need to
dig up your contact information and harass you outside of Twitter as well,
even though 30 seconds ago they had no idea who you were, and still really
have no idea who you are. These kinds of dynamics just aren't that enjoyable
imo, and not worth the effort it takes to deal with them, so I've been using
Twitter less.

~~~
Istof
Do you use email when you want to be even more private? Sure if you don't want
a stranger to reply to your message, don't send it to everybody.

------
hnriot
I only use twitter for its nlp signal, I have zero interest in actually
posting or worst still, actually reading any of it. twitter is like youtube
comments, without the video. But it's great for what the aggregate signal it
contains.

------
bellerocky
I was just starting to really like Twitter. Is it really the end? I have my
doubts. Something is going to have replace it first, and it wont be Facebook
since Facebook has conflicts family and private groups with public sharing.

~~~
ducuboy
Don't worry, they actually mean "The _Beginning_ of Big Twitter" , the title
is misleading ;)

------
ducuboy
My take on this problem.

"The Beginning of Big Twitter" \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8262519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8262519)

------
taylorbuley
This reminds me of a favorite latin phrase of mine.

 _Legere, et non intelligere, neglegere est_ means "As good not [to] read, as
not to understand."

