
Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/technology/twitter-to-save-itself-must-scale-back-world-swallowing-ambitions.html?ref=technology
======
roymurdock
_Mr. Jones used to be the chief executive of Myspace, the once-giant social
network, but he rejected any comparison between Twitter and that now vastly
diminished network.

“For me and for lots of people, Twitter has actual utility to it, and for
those people, that’s what will keep it around,” he said._

So instead of figuring an unorthodox way to take it private or set up a
donation scheme ala Wikipedia, why not just charge the superusers with tens of
thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really _do_ get some tangible
benefit from the service?

I also take issue with the author's opening assessment of Twitter:

 _Twitter is the world’s most important social network.

That might sound like the ravings of an addict, but look at the headlines in
every morning’s newspaper and the obsessions of every evening’s cable news
broadcast. Just about anything you encounter in the news media these days has
some foot in the controversies and conversations occurring on the
140-character network._

We live in a hyperconnected world where every tiny little twitter controversy
gets blown massively out of proportion, draining people's time and energy on
things that really don't matter in the face of much larger and more important
problems. At the end of the day, Twitter is used mainly for entertainment
purposes. The author can keep pointing to the Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter,
etc. but the fact remains that revolutions and social movements occurred long
before Twitter existed, long before cell phones and computers existed, and
that Twitter is not some be-all-end-all enabler that we need to rescue for the
betterment of humanity.

If it's really worth $5bn, someone will figure out how to get the service
there. If it's really worth $100bn, someone will get it there. Let the market
settle things with Twitter.

~~~
scott_s
"If it's really worth $5bn, someone will figure out how to get the service
there. If it's really worth $100bn, someone will get it there. Let the market
settle things with Twitter."

I don't agree with this kind of market-determinism. If a small-message
broadcast-based social media service is "really worth $5bn" or "really worth
$100bn" is a different question from if Twitter will be that service.
Sometimes in order to discover their true utility, services need to change in
fundamental ways. I think Facebook is a good example of that; Facebook in 2016
is a different beast than Facebook in 2006. That takes deliberate innovation.
But sometimes, when trying to do that, the transformed version has _less_
utility, and the service dies. That's the risk here.

Perhaps you're saying that Twitter should not change at all, and it should
continue on its current path?

~~~
oblio
> Facebook in 2016 is a different beast than Facebook in 2006

I'm not a big Facebook user. Is Facebook 2016 really that different to
Facebook 2006? To my untrained eyes it still looks like:

* blogging for normal people, restricted to friends and family

* free photo photo storage

~~~
meisterbrendan
You're mostly right. There is a lot more sophistication now, but most of the
advances facebook has made are in two areas:

-Mobile. Making messaging a central strength of the platform. Figuring this out is a big piece of why the stock is doing so well. -Conversations. Facebook has become the default place for people to discuss (or, more accurately, shout about) media/news. I mean both news from external sources and personal life events.

Everything else is reorganizations of existing features in new ways, like the
shift from the wall to the timeline. It was a new feature that better fit an
existing goal, not an expansion in the scope of the service.

~~~
rconti
They effectively destroyed Facebook when they got rid of all of the college
class info -- all of the curated content that had to be done on a school-by-
school basis. When they got rid of groups (before later re-adding them). The
newsfeed.

There was a time somewhere in 2006-2007 where Facebook was an utter shell of
its former self, looked weird, and wasn't particularly useful.

And the amazing thing was, they were right. They did what they needed to do to
pivot from what it was (a college information source) into a global social
network superpower. It sort of reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote where if you
don't cannibalize your own products, someone else will.

------
jpeg_hero
I'm no neckbeard (well, maybe I am, ha) but I've been wondering really if the
new "Safety Council" will be the beginning of the end.

There's already stresses on the system, baroque user name / user discovery,
you go to post and you can't condense your point into the space allowed even
though you tried a few times, you've been using twitter for a while so the
novelty is wearing off, you are in your own place in your own "timeline
curation journey" \-- maybe you have too few people and you don't get a lot of
value out of timeline checking, maybe you've got too many and the high volume
posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I
am at, and don't know how quite to fix it,,,), maybe your interests have
changed, so when you check your timeline its like listening to those old mp3's
from the 90's that you still keep around (not your current tastes, and
terrible encoding rates), so now you need to curate a new timeline, and that's
a lot of work, and where to start?!?

,,,anyways, this is your feeling about Twitter, and then, now there is this
new layer of the "Safety Council Directorate" and the wild west feel is gone
from some of the signal, and maybe it even makes you worried about your own
potential implosion from a social media misstep ("So You've Been Publicly
Shamed"),,, and then you say to yourself, to hell with it, this Twitter thing
is getting too ponderous.

\---

[http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/twitters-new-safety-
cou...](http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/twitters-new-safety-council-
makes-a-mockery-of-free-speech/)

~~~
elcapitan
OMG. I left twitter a while ago and now seeing that it turns into a digital
nanny state makes me even happier to be out.

~~~
coldpie
If you're the type of person to say something likely to be censored on
Twitter, we don't want you on there anyway.

~~~
elcapitan
"We"? Are you the queen?

~~~
coldpie
Which of Twitter's unacceptable content policies do you find objectionable? I
agree with all of them, and I think the vast majority of Twitter users do as
well.

[https://twitter.com/rules](https://twitter.com/rules)

~~~
dayon
Instead of rules, look at what's being censored and tell us if you agree.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter)

[http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-
comment/censoring-...](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-
comment/censoring-twitter)

And so on.

~~~
elcapitan
Exactly. Give them the tools and they'll censor whatever the fashion of the
day calls offensive.

~~~
coldpie
I know! It starts when you can't call a woman a slut, threaten her life, and
post her private details and nude pictures on Twitter, and then before you
know it you can't print out her picture, ejaculate onto it, and mail the
soiled photo to her family[1]. What a crazy world we're headed towards.

[1] Why yes, this does actually happen. Harassment on the Internet is no joke.
[http://blog.unburntwitch.com/post/139084743809/why-i-just-
dr...](http://blog.unburntwitch.com/post/139084743809/why-i-just-dropped-the-
harassment-charges-the-man)

~~~
elcapitan
Exactly! So let's just pick that one thing, and then invent some "guidelines"
that totally won't prevent anything like that ever, but allow you to
arbitrarily censor people with the wrong opinions. Awesome! War against
"harrassment", mission accomplished!

~~~
nommm-nommm
Entitlement generation.

I don't have a problem with Twitter "arbitrarily censor[ing] people with the
wrong opinions." Its their platform and they don't have to give a voice to
everyone who has one, they can do whatever they please and promote any agenda
they want. That is their choice. If you don't like Twitter's rules you're free
to start your own site, or write a book. Nobody is entitled to use someone
else's site any way they wish.

~~~
PKop
People are bringing this up to say that it could annoy many users and chase
them away, as well as limit their user growth, not that they don't have the
right to do it. Bad business decision, in other words.

------
jaydigital
Twitter is a niche site, it's not built on appealing to everyone. It's by far
my favourite social network, but Facebook provides a more populist service.

Analogy time: I feel like everyone thinks of Facebook and Twitter as Coke vs
Pepsi, including Twitter's head honchos. Facebook have this unique combination
that is massively successful, Twitter are desperately trying to imitate it.

They should look at it more like Coke and Sprite. Sprite offers a different
taste, it's for us guys that like lemonade. Why not crush the lemonade game,
rather than gun for Coke? (I know that Sprite is owned by Coca-Cola, the
analogy doesn't run forever)

~~~
Steuard
I like this analogy: Twitter intrinsically _isn 't_ Facebook, and it wouldn't
make sense for it to try to be. Having that diversity in the marketplace is a
good thing, and soft drinks demonstrate that such situations can absolutely be
sustainable.

(Aside: if you make it Coke vs. 7-Up, you'll dodge that last complaint.)

~~~
jackcosgrove
I always considered Twitter to be a subset of Facebook, namely the status
update.

------
fossuser
I think Twitter's issue is a vision problem, they don't have a good idea of
what they're trying to do.

Facebook's is trying to connect the world - this leads to FB messenger,
Oculus, Instagram, trying to buy Snapchat, internet.org - basically acquiring
or creating what they can to drive human interaction and communication online.

Twitter has one thing they built that they've made awkward changes to which
most people seem not to care about. Closing their open APIs which built on
Twitters core value was a mistake and their attempts to monetize in weird ways
at the cost of their own usefulness has also not worked out.

~~~
tdeck
I would say the mission of Twitter seems to be "help people promote their
personal brand". Unfortunately for them, not everyone is interested in either
doing that or reading about other people doing it.

------
Touche
Who was the early employee that argued that Twitter should federate? When they
ignored that they went down this inevitable road of world domination or bust.
There's no turning back now.

(side note: the fact that I couldn't find the name of the person who argued
for this just shows how broken web search is today. When people argue that
DuckDuckGo has poor search results I always scratch my head because unless
your query is a one syllable common query you will not be able to find it on
Google either.)

~~~
spatulon
Alex Payne: [https://al3x.net/2010/09/15/last-thing-about-
twitter.html](https://al3x.net/2010/09/15/last-thing-about-twitter.html)

"Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward
thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. "

~~~
Touche
Yes! Thank you! Was starting to think I was crazy.

------
headgasket
I am a very light twitter user. I've been on for ages; but I really dont post
or read tweets; I however have a use for twitter.

Find smart people, and hear what they think. Smart people follow smart or
smarter people. Or reply to smart people. The actual intellectual goods is
usually not on twitter, but in a forum or a blog post. I usually dont event
follow these though leaders on twitter, because I dont want to spend time in
this constant partial attention state, I want to be here and now at 100%, in
this piece of code, project or post/book. You see noise is my enemy. The size
of a community is ironically then a curse. That's why I loved HN so much in
the beginning. Smart guys like PG. The thing is, the smarts are distributed as
a bell curve...

------
owenwil
This is definitely right. _Creation_ on Twitter isn't for everyone. It's
confusing, convoluted and hard to use. _Consuming_ Twitter is something almost
everyone does unwittingly. New stories are generated there, celebrities post
directly. It tears down walls between PR and the masses. It's a great service,
but truly Twitter must give up on the idea that it's going to be able to get
_everyone_ or even a larger chunk of the population to actively send messages
there -- it can't and won't.

~~~
galfarragem
Not sure if this formula allows twitter to be highly profitable but allows it
to be a great tool:

\- Don't tweet (I never did it): Twitter is for _broadcasting_ and most people
have nothing important to broadcast.

\- Follow a maximum of 20 accounts. Be very picky and choose wisely. I don't
follow friends (this is not FB). Spam and noise will almost disappear.

------
lukasm
"Twitter is the world’s most important social network."

Not it's not. It's a great tool for news journalists and announcements
(Tesla). I don't like Twitter, I don't know how to use it and it doesn't
provide enough value for me to care to learn. I like some funny stuff like
Borat Dev Ops or WeWantPlates. But short of that I don't need extra cognitive
overhead. Newspapers, HN etc. are my frontends for Twitter.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "Twitter is the world’s most important social network."

> "Not it's not." ... "I don't like Twitter"

What does you liking it or disliking it have anything to do with Twitter being
the 'world's most important social network'? You only have to look at it's
traffic and influence to know its position on the web. Whilst Facebook and
Instagram are larger than Twitter terms of users, it could be argued that
Twitter fills a more important niche in terms of the diversity of its content
and its role as a fast moving news source.

~~~
mafribe

       fast moving news source.
    

There is a hard trade-off in news between speed and accuracy.

Twitter helped moved news away from accuracy. This is a negative development
as truth is more important than speed in most cases for most people most of
the time. For all its flaws, the old media had professional journalist that at
least occasionally engaged in fact-checking, however perfunctory. This has
completely gone out of the window, for many reasons, the most important of
which is probably the collapse of ad-revenue and print sales, which isn't
Twitter's fault. But Twitter has made things worse.

Twitter is a peer-to-peer tabloid.

~~~
Karunamon
Rant mode on:

If the last few years of really paying attention has taught me one thing, it's
that honest-to-god journalism, as in checking facts, vetting sources, and
reporting stories as objectively as possible is dead. _Completely and totally
dead_. Most people taking up that title flatly do not deserve it.

Finding out what actual people are doing and what's happening in situations
like Ferguson and the Arab Spring is a lot more important than some self-
important agenda pusher's view on it. Journalism has failed the people it's
supposed to serve, so now it's on the people to sort the information and come
to their own conclusions.

It's not like the vox populi could do much worse than the mainstream media...

------
kennydude
> It could become a venture like Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit that depends on
> donations

That would be a very good decision. Could also help persuade them for having
everything behind a public API again.

~~~
swombat
This is less unrealistic than it might seem at first. Twitter is no longer
mostly owned by VCs looking for their 10x return - it's exited already. So
it's now owned by the public, just by a slice of the public who wants to
increase profits to increase the valuation. This is still not exactly
straightforward to turn into a charity, but it's more realistic than if it was
at the point where it was sitting on $700m of VC investments...

~~~
Riod
Even assuming everyone bought in at today's low cost base; who would agree to
this? Would you voluntarily lose $15+/share for...for what exactly? Greater
good?

~~~
swombat
As it happens, that's precisely the reason why public corporations exist: the
greater good.

That this has been forgotten and replaced with unilateral and antisocial
concerns like "increase shareholder value at all costs" is an accident along
the way. There is no reason why that can't be corrected.

Public corporations exist for the good of the public and are basically funded
by the public - even more so if they are largely owned by pension funds.

My point, that being said, was not that this is straightforward. It is clearly
not an easy step from public corporation to charity. However, that is a
slightly easier step than from VC owned private company to charity, because
VCs are very clear about wanting one thing only: capital gains, and they are
not equivalent to "the public".

~~~
Riod
What? You can't be serious..

------
belltyler
Twitter's been around for 10 years—and maybe it's just my perception—but I
feel like the tech. media has never done anything but hate on them. It's well-
founded criticism at times, sure, but at what point does it become a loop of
negative attitudes simply based on pre-existing negative attitudes? That's
just my take on the whole thing. I personally have some confidence in Twitter
and have nothing poor to say about their product / direction.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
And after 10 years they can't add a damn edit feature? Little stuff like that
that makes it less than desirable to use really upsets me, because they
clearly pay top dollar for talent and they have tons of engineers working
there (don't even get me started on their shitty mobile web pages).

~~~
belltyler
Obviously they _could_ add it - it wouldn't be hard. Just because it doesn't
have feature X doesn't mean it's bad. At that point it's a conscious decision
to exclude that feature. Poor performing mobile sites? That is something they
could for sure address, especially with the engineering power they have, I
agree.

------
spo81rty
This all sounds like the downfall of taking massive investments and going
public.

They are under pressure to keep growing at a high pace. In reality maybe they
have grown about as far as they can go. They have substantial revenues and
what should be a very profitable business as is.

But will the pressure to grow due to maintaining a high stock price kill them?

~~~
rubidium
They and Pandora. You could probably make quite list of "companies that could
be great and nicely profitable except that investors want it to try and be
mega-huge".

~~~
spo81rty
Twitter has almost $2 billion a year in revenues and 60%+ gross margins. They
should be or could be very profitable.

------
cel1ne
I argue that Twitter, like many other services, has become public
infrastructure. Public infrastructure costs money, needs maintenance and is
depended upon by many.

As far as I know capitalism hasn't yet come up with an answer to the question
about how to privately finance infrastructure without making it so expensive
that a large portion of their users have to be excluded. (See public baths,
railroads, sewage-systems etc.)

Maybe not everything that is useful can be turned into money.

~~~
malsun
My main issue with Twitter is it grew out of the weird environment that is San
Francisco and has all the baggage of people who live within that. That
wouldn't be a problem if the service was a normal startup, but it's a platform
for influencing public opinion that delves into journalism and politics. For
that reason, I wouldn't want it to be considered a public service, never mind
one that serves the world.

~~~
cel1ne
I agree wholeheartedly, but I don't think it'll disappear. It's considered too
important, even if it really isn't.

------
FussyZeus
Wall Street is where tech companies go to die. They make something good, go
public, investors demand to make ALL the money on Earth instead of a modest
profit for providing a good service, then the service goes to shit because
developers have to sacrifice what makes it good to make it more profitable,
users leave, service dies.

I'm perfectly happy to make my living in a small company that does good work.
I'll never be a billionaire and that's fine with me.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
This is the problem with every company that goes to Wall Street. The QER
killed any hopes of companies being able to just try things. Instead, the only
thing they can do is look to beat this quarter in the next. That is it.

------
cft
The problem with this thinking is that Twitter is not a software tool that
needs to be improved. It's a TV show that has ran its course and is declining.
Hollywood knows how to deal with these problems: they end the show, and
replace it with a new one. The problem here is that Twitter is an infotainment
studio with one single show. And Wall St will not let it run as a startup
anymore, incubating early stage new shows like Periscope.

~~~
majewsky
I reject the metaphor. Just because a tool does not gain new followers (heh)
anymore, doesn't mean it should be killed. It would be interesting to know if
Twitter would be profitable if it is just put into maintenance mode.

My point is, Twitter has value for me the way it is. I don't personally see
any reason for changing it. Of course, that's not a reasoning that Wall Street
would agree with.

------
benten10
Are there any more popular twitter-like alternatives? I'm aware of Ello, but
from what I'm told, too much of the uhh 'artistic community' for me to truly
enjoy (my artist friends have unsuccessfully tried persuading me to join).

~~~
coldpie
There's a thing called GNUSocial, which I think is open source and federated.
No idea if it's popular, I've never heard of it before someone mentioned it on
HN a few days ago. [https://gnu.io/](https://gnu.io/)

~~~
riffic
Great thing about software like GNUSocial is that organizations can run their
own social infrastructure, a bit like how organizations could previously run
their own email or any other service infrastructure, rather than rely on a
third-party company to dispatch it on your behalf.

By organizations, I'm talking about business, government agencies, educational
institutions, et cetera.

~~~
majewsky
> a bit like how organizations could previously run their own email [...]
> infrastructure

"Previously"?

~~~
riffic
Don't read too much into that, it was a poor choice of wording.

------
treenyc
Why does it have to make money? If service such as twitter that can benefit
the world in some way without making any money, why force it into a 'business
model'?

~~~
dchuk
...because it costs money to run it? And it costs money to hire good talent to
maintain it?

~~~
treenyc
Yes, but I would imagine that cost is not too much. Why not make it into
something like a public resource. Often that approach will generate more
wealth for the greater community.

Often the for-profit model and fiduciary responsibility can be constraining in
wealth creation in general.

------
morgante
> Twitter is the world’s most important social network.

I see sentiment like this and it just reminds me of how insular journalism is.
Twitter is incredibly popular amongst journalists and a certain kind of
person, but does that really make it "the most important" social network?

Facebook has an order of magnitude more daily active users. It might not have
the appeal to news and political junkies of Twitter, but it's intimately
involved in the lives of a billion people.

Calling Twitter the world's most important social network is like calling The
New Yorker the world's most important media outlet. It's a niche product for a
certain group of journalistically-influential people.

~~~
YngwieMalware
I definitely agree with you re: insular journalism, though I think Twitter has
been more present during world events than FB ever has. For instance, allowing
people to mass communicate during crisis. It's much better at breaking news
than FB ever has been, which I would say is more important, and IMO the
Twitter team needs to recognize that and quit trying to become FB.

~~~
morgante
> allowing people to mass communicate during crisis.

I'm not so sure about this. I think Safety Check has vastly more usage than
Twitter during crises.

Twitter historically dominated the real-time game, but I'm increasingly seeing
Facebook do a good job of it as well.

------
dcgoss
What if you could curate different timelines for yourself? You could have a
news timeline, with the NYT and CNN accounts added for example. Then you could
have a tech timeline, or a music timeline, etc. This would make consuming the
content a lot easier and less jumbled together, I feel.

~~~
mjquinn
This sounds like a good fit for Twitter's lists feature[0], if only the
standard clients supported it better.

[0]
[https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460](https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460)

------
whatever_dude
Twitter is another instance where a company destroys the one thing (service,
product) they do well by attempting to do all other things at the same time.
They end up creating a diluted, mediocre thing that everyone just dislikes
equally. Horizontal expansion at the cost of vertical depth.

> They see their favorite band straining to become U2. And they hate U2.

This is a perfect analogy.

I used to really like Twitter. But every change they do to the mobile app (or
to the service in general) is just polluting the experience of what was once a
pretty well controlled stream.

I can't find the group of people I like to follow (developers) anywhere else,
so I haven't given up on the service yet. The content is mostly still there.
But the friction, and the amount of noise, is increasing drastically.

~~~
jerrickhoang
can you elaborate? what were the things that you really like that they took
out? What have they added that you dislike?

~~~
whatever_dude
The problem is not really with what they've taken out (although pretty much
killing TweetDeck still stings), but instead added to the overall experience.

* I'll click a tweet and immediately below it there will be an unrelated "Promoted Tweet". In the same place replies would normally be, so I always need to do a double take to see whether it's a reply or an ad.

* I'll look at my list and it'll always show a list of tweets out of order, the "While you were away" feature. The weird thing is that you can dismiss it, and then it asks you if you liked it; I always say no, but it keeps reappearing.

* They were recently inserting tweets from people I don't follow in my timeline because they were "popular". I think they changed that feature now, but it was very confusing at first.

* Promoted Tweets show way too often and are too similar to real Tweets.

* "Moments" is a joke. I used to like Twitter for live events (normally with just a search) and was excited to have a feature dedicated to that need, but they completely missed the point by making something that is hard to follow and not even close to real time. It's barely usable. That's what made me realize they have no idea what they're doing.

I like to follow a small group of people. My experience is a bit curated. But
nowadays, almost everything I do on the mobile or web app will show me content
I don't care about. The fact that none of it is controllable by the user (like
the "While you were away" feature) is infuriating. This is not even related to
ad revenue, it's just a point of user experience they decided to break
completely.

I have moved away from the official clients and the experience is a little bit
better. Doesn't change the fact that the platform is clearly moving away from
the use case that made it popular in the first place, at least for me.

------
perseusprime11
Ever heard of micro-management of a CEO? All these opinions, op-eds, VC advice
won't help Jack to focus on the company.

Their fundamental problem is that a tweet is not a great native ad unit.
That's where the story ends and a reason why Twitter cannot meet Wall Street
expectations.

------
jgalt212
I like twitter because I can follow people smarter or more informed than me.

My facebook feed, on the other hand, is utterly inane. My thoughtful/smart
friends almost never post, and if I unfollow the idiots, I'm left with only
ads.

------
transpy
My experience: Twitter has been very useful to get to know influencial people
in my line of work. Also, to practice concise expression of ideas. The problem
is, Twitter is not very actionable. Yeah, the CEO of X company now follows
you. What now? I found following people and writing posts in LinkedIn is more
actionable. I connect with leaders in my industry to whom I can send a CV
quickly.

------
Riod
Honestly even the changes twitter has made have been poor. Moments should ask
you, like Google Now, what you're interested in. What use is a random burst of
stuff if you're interested only in big basketball stories? It should blend
what you want with what's going on around you in an artful manner. Google even
showed the way with this.

------
bitmapbrother
Twitter needs to be Twitter. It's not for everyone and that's perfectly OK.
The people criticizing it seem to care more about market cap.

------
spot
maybe they should do like kickstarter did and convert to a public benefit
corp.

~~~
notahacker
I can't see the holders of $10bn in equity in Twitter agreeing to that.

------
vonnik
New York Times, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back Pulitzer Ambitions

I find it incredible how well newspapers solve other businesses problems, and
how poor they are at diagnosing their own.

------
pete_mg
How is this possible???

------
ha8o8le
whats twitter?

------
omonra
I might be wrong but it appears that Twitter is mostly useful for reporters
who want to write a story on something and find it easy to get quotes.

Whereas before this required traveling to the random place where the story
takes place (with potential danger and hassle of travel), now they merely have
to open twitter and find some random twat with an opinion on the subject. And
presto - a quote is ready.

The problem, of course, is that the importance of the quote is greatly
diminished and just 'someone with a twitter account thinks X'. If before the
reporter actually had to go out and ask people for their opinions which
presented an accurate view 'on the ground', now he's getting a view of the
'twitter-sphere' \- which might have little bearing on views of affected
population at large.

~~~
malsun
Before Twitter there was a phase where journalists would monitor discussion
forums (think vBulletin). I know this because I would take part in speculative
discussions and the next day it turned into front page news stories. No
sources but obviously came from the discussion. It spooked me and made me
realise that modern journalism was already becoming lazy.

~~~
jackcosgrove
So it turns out the "zeitgeist" is just reporters cribbing from gossip.

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majewsky
I don't think it's zeitgeist only. Or at least, not on such a short scale. The
pre-internet equivalent of that is interviewing random people on the street
about current events, to fill the 2:30 of your news report with something
vaguely related to the subject.

Like in Charlie Brooker's "How to report the news":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI)

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bobby_9x
I hope twitter collapses. Why? they gave api access to developers and business
owners to use their site, used this data as free R&D, and yanked access.

It put many companies out of business over night.

They deserve everything they get.

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draw_down
"Nope, it all went downhill when they made the fonts too small!" \- HN

