
The Decay of Twitter - bceskavich
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/conversation-smoosh-twitter-decay/412867/?single_page=true
======
benten10
I _really_ hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a
subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the
hottest fires of all the hells.

I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm
interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on
twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an
insider, but make me explore the field in a much deeper level. Three of the
fields that I have gotten 'into' because of twitter are Urban 'renewal' sort
of projects (citylab, atlantic cities, etcetera), the book reviews circle, and
a certain subfield of computer science I won't mention, because I'd probably
be the only intersection of those fields. : P

Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply
mute them. Done. (This is however NOT a apology for all the awful harassment
that does happen)

I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months,
so it doesn't get out of hand, and it's worked perfectly for me. I can catch
up with pretty much everything that appears on my timeline. I Like twitter
because it doesn't 'curate' my content for me. The day it decides to get rid
of the 'everything' timeline will be the day the 'decay' begins.

Perhaps my viewpoint is tainted, but in the past six years (that's how long
I've been on it/using it), the number of twitter users has been growing (at
least in terms of people I know), and their quality increasing. I realize
harassment is still a huge issue, but despite that, Twitter is still a great
community : )

~~~
kafkaesque
Why can't you follow the experts in that field via their site or their online
communities? The depth of which they would go into their chosen subject would
be much more enlightening, surely. It sounds like you just use Twitter to
bookmark the links and "soundbites" experts say. How much depth can a
conversation that only allows 140 characters per response relay? They are
meant to be "soundbites", only telling part of a story.

You could have easily gotten into those other areas via Google or following
their conversations on their online communities, no?

And yes, your viewpoint is tainted, because, as the article says, it hasn't
added active US users in 2015.

~~~
benten10
Couple of responses:

0) Your arguments seem to be targeted at social media in general (eg. why I
can't follow them on their sites, etc). Don't want to get into a conversation
on benefits/disbenefits of social media

1) There was nothing in my comment to imply that my friends were from the U.S
(they are not), but as I said, the user growth could be just for me.

2) >Why can't you follow the experts... Twitter IS their online community. As
everyone has mentioned, it's like RSS, where everyone is, and they let me know
when their 'communities' are updated. Because I wouldn't want to check a
hundred sites every day.

3) A tweet is 140 characters. All large tweeters post texts as images to get
over the limit. People often engage in multi-tweet conversation. The 140 char
limit is useful there because twitter shows how many tweets the user has in
the conversation. If you're not interested, you don't encounter a wall of
text: you see a tweet, and then bail out. Subtlety is lost in 140 characters,
but if both parties are looking for a fair conversation, they usually engage
in multiple tweets.

4) I do indeed use twitter to bookmark. I also use twitter as RSS. And to get
to know people I don't know and follow them too. As a public social media. You
could also have Googled 'arguments for and against twitter' and be done with
this entire thing, but you chose not to. : ) Twitter is a community, and
that's what people are there for.

~~~
kafkaesque
With regard to point 2, isn't this what newsletters are for or email
notifications? I get notifications of sites I have subscribed to via email. I
find it is still a very reliable and good source because my email lists are
curated to suit my needs all in one place. I get payment notifications, site
update notifications, and correspondences to varying lengths with people. It's
pretty great, actually!

As for point 3, text images seem like a poor way to digitise text, because it
makes it very unsearchable and is prone to pixelation if you are writing a lot
of it. It seems like a silly solution to something that was never a problem.

Actually, I sense a hostility in your response that I sense in Twitter users
often when I bring up things I don't agree with. I am not at all attacking
you, but rather find the way users use Twitter interesting, because it is
something I no longer do. I know every single point you have made because I
was a Twitter user for about 4 years -- I deleted my account last year.

Why would I Google arguments for and against Twitter when what I am interested
is in your opinion? I would hate to put words in your mouth.

~~~
benten10
First para: I mention social network elsewhere. Give me group emails, with
everyone replying to everyone else, and give me the ability to see only those
emails that people I care about are sending, and give me a limit in the size
of an individual emails so they don't get unwieldy, and you will have given me
Twitter.

Yupp, text images are a poor way to digitize text. They're way backwards. And
twitter has awful, almost non-existent indexing/search. And the
bullying/harassment issue is out of hand. I still get utility from following
people I follow.

I've been put in this position to defend twitter, and really man, I am not a
particularly big twitter fanboy. It's a product that I enjoy using. I don't
see a point in converting anyone ( I would, if it were MS vs Gmail argument).
If you want to understand, just join in and follow people you aspire to be in
conversations with. I follow popular professors, researchers, publications,
celebs, etc, and I like it. You might too. That's all I can say.

------
DanBC
Recently, within the past month, someone I follow either posted or retweeted a
link to a survey about paracetamol use in accident and emergency departments
in the Uk, and how it was about as effective as opiate meds for most people.

Today there are stories on HN where that link would be relevant. I would have
posted a link to the tweet, and a link to the study mentioned in the tweet.
But Twitter's search is not good enough for this kind of thing. I have no way
of finding this tweet apart from just ploughing through the twitter streams of
the four or five people who might have posted / retweeted this link.

Filtering trolls and harassers is still too hard.

Controlling what's on my feed is a bit tricky. Some people post nonsense but
retweet useful to me info. Others do the opposite - the stuff they tweet is
useful but the stuff they retweet is nonsense. I have limited options, and I
usually just unfollow.

I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have
zero relevance to me, my profile, my twitter stream, the people I follow, etc
etc. I have no idea where Twitter gets information about me, but it doesn't
seem to come from Twitter.

~~~
pmelendez
> I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads
> have zero relevance to me

I have actually thinking about this and some ideas come up. If you don't mind
me asking... What would be your ideal non-introsive ads mechanism? Maybe a
relevant mention to you on a recommended tweet?

~~~
DanBC
Ads should allow me to opt out of any alcohol or gambling company's campaign.

If the ad network is slurping all my data they should use that info to serve
ads that have some relevance to me.

I'm happy for stuff to end up in my twitter stream. I'm not happy for anything
to sound like it's come from me, or has my endorsement or recommendation.

~~~
duggan
I'd actually be ok with explicitly endorsing something if it's something I
really like (and not get a revenue cut). The sort of product/services where
I'm a "Net Promoter" 9-10.

Could have a sort of "tinder for endorsements" built into the platform,
refreshed once every week maybe, that lets companies request your endorsement
for a particular ad/message.

You flip through with an endorse/don't endorse (and some granularity around
"I'll never endorse" this) and have that tied to a custom decay function where
your endorsement expires and needs to be requested again.

Maybe you have a paid sub to opt out of this system entirely. And for those
who don't want to pay or endorse, ok, let's see if the other mechanisms are
enough to support them too.

------
roymurdock
Here's the author's thesis, buried in the last paragraph with "little data to
support" it:

 _In the final paragraphs of this article, let me assert something I have very
little data to support: At some point early last year, the standard knock
against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what
someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have
to say.” The public knows about conversation smoosh, and that constitutes, I
think, a major problem for Twitter the Company._

I don't think I agree with the author's conclusions about "conversation
smoosh" causing the decay of Twitter. Would love to hear any
rethinkings/clarifications of the author's points, as I found them near
inscrutable due to the convoluted structure and logic of the article.

~~~
hissworks
Yeah, this was a poorly constructed article. Lost me at:

"To talk about Stewart’s theory, you have to first tackle the ideas of the
20th-century philosopher of media, Walter J. Ong."

No, you really don't.

That said, Twitter's never made it easy to digest its content. Sure there are
lists, and now moments, but it's not always easy to find what you're looking
for, and if you're not really careful about curating your own feed and follows
reading twitter is like some sadist's idea of an exquisite corpse.

It could be that people don't feel comfortable with everyone having access to
what they have to say. It could also still be as simple as not really caring
what other people have to say.

~~~
mikeg8
That was the same spot I lost interest as well. Way too verbose.

~~~
dennisnedry
That's the problem I have with many of these articles, the journalists try to
make use of their philosophy degrees and make nothing into something.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _That 's the problem I have with many of these articles_

Perhaps Buzzfeed type listicles are more your speed then? Every time there's
an article like this posted on HN, there's inevitably someone who posts,
"Fewer words! More facts!" (Bonus points for you for getting in a dig about
them useless Humanities!)

A thesis isn't right or wrong; it's presented and supported. It's an idea.
This is literary journalism. Some people, myself included, enjoy it.

~~~
alanh
I enjoy long-form articles, but I still prefer the concise over the verbose.

------
omginternets
Twitter is somewhat of a quantum state for me. It's a complete cesspool on the
whole, but the academic community is absolutely outstanding.

I follow @Neuro_Skeptic, @StanDehaene, @practiCalfMRI, @sensorimotorlab,
@davidpoeppel, among many others, and they certainly seem to squeeze a lot of
insight into 160 characters.

In any case, everything I've been hearing relates to twitter not growing. I
understand the pressure on investors, but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't
need to grow. The niche is saturated, and there's no problem, _per se_.

~~~
samsolomon
I love Twitter, but the burden is on the user to make the experience—it's
entirely dictated by who you follow.

~~~
drumdance
That's a really good point.

A friend of mine who wants to be a forensic pathologist follows a coroner who
posts autopsy photos and asks people to guess the cause of death. She has
something like 500k followers. It's amazing all the micro-celebrity that's
possible, but as a user you have to know where to find it.

~~~
draugadrotten
> a coroner who posts autopsy photos

How is that even legal?

 __shudder __

~~~
pjc50
Some jurisdictions may consider them to be "public records".

------
trymas
Maybe it will seem as a dumb question, but how Twitter can be in the loss (in
order of millions of US dollars) since day one, without (IMHO) clear path to
profitability and not be bankrupt?

It is growing, but it still has huge losses. Do investors believe it will be
hugely profitable 5-10 years from now?

Is this new normal in business?

~~~
johnward
On top of that, what kind of revenue do the ads bring in?

~~~
simplicio
They've done a good job upping revenue over the last few years (somewhere
north of a billion dollars/yr in 2014). And, IMHO, done so without the
resulting ads being too obtrusive.

Their problem isn't that they can't make money. It's that their valuation
means investors expect them to make a ridiculous amount of money. So all
revenues are plowed back into R&D.

~~~
jessaustin
That's a bit of an accounting smell, isn't it? Obviously Twitter should have
_some_ costs other than R&D, like labor and servers. Even if we say the _rest_
is going to R&D, that's kind of a black box. It doesn't prove that they aren't
simply recording reasonable recurring costs correctly while hiding bizarre
business-killing recurring costs in R&D.

~~~
mikeyouse
They're a publicly traded company with a "big-4" auditing firm to make sure
that doesn't happen. The law is very clear on what counts as CapEx and OpEx.
Obviously, companies occasionally outsmart (or team up with) their auditors to
defraud the public, but the vast majority follow GAAP and succeed or fail on
the merit of their business.

~~~
jessaustin
It's OpEx either way, right? Ideally the firm would be able to point at x, y,
and z innovative and profitable new services, and say _that 's_ why we spend
so much on R&D. It's not clear to me that Twitter can do that. So, an investor
would be justified in suspecting that not all R&D expenditures are valid.

------
6stringmerc
Well, I think the recent 'Favorites' to 'Like' change is a bad omen with
structural and community reverberations that will be felt over time. It's a
gut instinct, but when 'established' brands and formats like Twitter or Reddit
jiggle with the cords, there's backlash - deserved or not. It's the danger of
making a tool for 'mobs of people' if you're okay with calling a user base
that.

The "between a rock & hard place" I see happening is that the need to add new
people tends to, well, bring out some bitterness from previous devotees. I saw
it happen first-hand with Half-Life Deathmatch. Every patch that made
significant changes (ex: tweaked splash damage, amount tau cannon could pierce
walls, etc) seemed to favor getting more users to play the game, which did
kind of breed a hostility from the 'old guard' to pillage, plunder, and
destroy all the newcomers with abandon. After all, the changes were to make it
easier, the learning curve smaller, and those who had made it to the next
level(s) felt sold-out. It was a microcosm, and probably isn't too relevant,
but it's about the best example I can think of that I witnessed first-hand.

I'm sure a lot of people had the thought or joke in mind, but changing the
'Star' to a 'Heart' might be pretty awkward if the company ever has to tweet
out an announcement of a round of layoffs. These are minor edits, sure...but
remember when Coca-Cola changed the recipe? That didn't go over so well.

~~~
richard_mcp
I disagree with the change being a bad thing. It makes more sense to like a
tweet than favorite it. Both imply some sort of agreement with the tweet, but
favoriting always seemed to imply something more to me. If your goal is to get
more user interaction, "like" seems like the better option.

As to user backlash, this happens with every change to a social media site and
it almost always blows over. There's nothing out there to threaten Twitter's
place and I doubt this has or is causing people to leave the platform. No
one's going to drop it because there are now hearts instead of stars.

------
mschuster91
Twitter has fallen victim to the advertising plague hitting a boatload of
other websites.

Offer your users a cheap way to opt out of ads (1$ a month) and you'll make
far more money than you could ever do with ads.

~~~
dspillett
I very much doubt that will work. People will just install ad blockers
instead. You'd be surprised what lengths many people will go to in order to
avoid spending even $1. It isn't poor people either: in my experience the
well-off who have time on their hands because they aren't busy living hand-to-
mouth are more likely to spend a pile of their time instead of giving you that
$.

~~~
pmlnr
Adblockers don't work on paid articles or on tweets looking exactly like other
tweets.

~~~
dspillett
Oh there will be some way of identifying them, surely?

If they are from people you have actively chosen to follow then the source
isn't twitter anyway and you can just unfollow those users if you don't like
what they post.

If they are extra items in your display then there will likely be some marker
to pick up on. Even if not then someone somewhere will start a service where
people can report advertising tweets so subsequent the plugin can remove those
from the feeds of subsequent users who use the service... Or perhaps Bayesian
filtering as used for email? Not perfect in either case but someone _will_ try
and have at least some success.

Of course if the paid posts are truly unidentifiable then presumably that look
like they were posted/shared by someone they were not posted/shared by, in
which case the service is completely untrustworthy and you should just stop
using it because nothing it tells you na be relied upon.

Caveat: I don't use twitter and aren't particularly likely to in future, so I
have no particular axe to grind here but might misunderstand how things work.

~~~
sirkneeland
They are identifiable, I believe they say "promoted tweet" in close proximity
to said promoted tweet

~~~
mschuster91
Not inside apps though. Mobile adblockers can at least ban iframe'd content,
but not promoted tweets.

------
olivermarks
I wrote this about Twitter way back in 2010 on ZDNet
[http://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-tragedy-of-the-
commons/](http://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-tragedy-of-the-commons/)

"As an information propagation device Twitter is peerless, but the Tragedy of
the Commons - and in this case the commons is your time - is happening all
over again.

When multiple individuals acting independently behave only in their own self-
interest they will ultimately deplete a shared but limited resource even when
it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen,
as happened in the original Tragedy of the Commons over land usage".

Twitter never solved this problem and if you want to use it I'd suggest you
have to spend a lot of time pruning who you follow and searching for people
who are adding value to your life. Very time consuming....

------
warcher
I'm consistently disappointed at the (IMHO) mischaracterization of Twitter's
woes by prominent writers. While I realize that they are experiencing some
real stress, and yeah, it should get fixed, I think they're blind to Twitter's
real problem.

Simply put: twitter is, for those without an audience, a strictly one-way
medium. There is no social network or medium that is less interactive to the
relatively anonymous, save perhaps a standalone blog. You're shouting into the
vacuum, which is disheartening and eventually people just stop and eat their
tweets.

The opposite of love is total indifference.

I would argue that twitter is actively encouraging this one-way-ness, which is
going to be their downfall, because Twitter as a feed aggregator is high-noise
and feature-poor. All of my "suggested friends" on Facebook (who got this
right) are people who might reasonably care about anything I have to say. All
of my suggested follows on Twitter are people who could not give one single
fuck. (It's ok, I forgive you just this once Elon Musk. I'm not tearing your
poster off my wall or anything. Although you're missing out on a goldmine
here.)

It is a shame, because yet another news aggregator is _highly_ unnecessary at
this point in time, but number of two-sided social networks of Twitter's scope
you could count on the fingers of one hand.

------
luisjgomez
Twitter might be having troubles as a public company, but this article has
very little to say about it that's insightful.

~~~
avens19
This article was trash. If the author thinks that Twitter's main function is
finding out what your friends ate for dinner then he's an idiot and doesn't
use Twitter. Twitter's problem is exactly this. The general Internet
population thinks it's like Facebook but less useful and with a character
limit. They have a branding problem

~~~
themoonbus
"If the author thinks that Twitter's main function is finding out what your
friends ate for dinner..."

...except for the fact that he says the opposite in the article.

------
korisnik
All the Twitter accounts I'd ever want to follow have fairly infrequent status
updates so I just add them to my RSS reader and follow them that way instead
of having to interact with Twitter's website or application in any way.

~~~
benten10
that's what I used to do, when google reader was still around.

Twitter also removed direct RSS support for tweet feeds, and I did't like the
hassle of having a third party in between.

It'd be _really_ awesome if there was a tweet-ish open standard that anyone
could implement, ala email or RSS (but supporting encrypted/password protected
feeds). I feel like Google would be the perfect company to do it, but they
decided they don't want to pander the nerds, and instead force G+ down our
throats. (G+ I like. I just don't like how no one else is there)

~~~
johnward
I love RSS but does the average person even know what it is? Sites don't even
advertise RSS any more. I usually search the source for the link to it.

------
13thLetter
> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed
> swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.

This is the key.

Twitter has a serious problem with abuse, and it's not the abuse that's
usually talked about. At any point, anything you say -- no matter how anodyne
-- can be ripped out of context by someone with malevolent goals and then used
to trigger a global outrage storm. This has resulted in death threats or
people even losing their jobs. I wouldn't post on Twitter any more than I'd
take a shortcut through a dark alley in a bad neighborhood in the middle of
the night. Why take the risk?

------
hugh4
The only people who seem to be making money off twitter are journalists, who
can now dash off a 1000-word "Thing trends on twitter" article in seven
minutes without having to leave the office.

------
sdegutis
> In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as
> ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal
> political statements by people outside the conversation.

This seems to point to the main problem of Twitter: it's not clear who your
audience is. Are you talking to your friends? To your family? To people with
similar interests? To people you're trying to convince to agree with you on
some position? Who? It's too... _vague_ a medium to be useful for most kinds
of communication.

~~~
SpaceManNabs
You are completely right. In a sense, it is also what draws people to Twitter.
There is a low barrier to entry if you want to make an account to just
broadcast to your family, fans (if you are celebrity), advertise for
companies, collect people for activism (whether political, economic, or social
media activism), etc.

Then again, there are probably better mediums for this. If you want to talk to
your friends, why not use Facebook? If you want to advertise your art, why not
go on tumblr or Soundcloud? Nowadays, the only Twitter accounts that seem to
get much traffic are celebrities and companies (I am thinking particularly
Twitch as I don't go on twitter much) advertising.

------
decisiveness
> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed
> swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.

Unfamiliar with Damocles [1], I had to look it up. It seems to be quite a
vividly pertinent metaphor. The brevity with which statements are made on
Twitter delivers shortcuts for others to react, acting as the single thread of
the horses tail that holds the sword.

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

------
jmadsen
Seriously, a tech company that can't even shut off the stupid "While you were
away..." feature when I tell them repeatedly I don't want to see it?

That only lets you hide images, mute hashtags, etc on _mobile_ , not from a
regular browser?

Where every answer to "why doesn't this work normally?" is suggestions to go
buy a third-party tool?

Twitter is unfortunately "annoyingly useful" but I would love to see a
different, open source solution gain decent traction

------
pmontra
> At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had
> long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for
> lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.”

That's always been the point with Twitter for me. There are very few things
that I want to discuss in front of potentially every person in the world. I
wonder why it took so long for people to realize it.

Writing this here is not the same as writing on Twitter, different size.

------
edandersen
Why don't they add a "no ads, no 'curation', no 'suggestions'" just "pure"
timeline subscription model?

------
patsplat
The original use of my twitter account was to serve as an SMS distribution
link for online-gaming invites between a small group of friends.

Presently it provides a less spammy equivalent to linked-in groups. Sort of
like delicious in it's hey day.

Discussing media theory is challenging. Something of the OP's point is
demonstrated by personal example. But it's never a simple conversation.

------
JDiculous
Twitter would be great without a 140 character limit. Impossible to put much
substance in tweets.

~~~
Nadya
"This is partially circumvented by 1/2"

"chaining together multiple messages. 2/2"

The best thing about having to keep things within 140 characters is that
_everyone else_ has to keep things within 140 characters. If I wanted to read
their blog - I'd go read their blog. If I wanted Twitter to be like Tumblr,
I'd have a Tumblr.

------
wehadfun
tldr?

~~~
cpeterso
Looking for the 140 character summary of the article?

------
timrpeterson
Meh, clickbait.

------
J_Darnley
Burn baby burn.

~~~
sbierwagen
Hey James.

You post your PGP key ID and fingerprint in your profile, but a key ID is just
the last eight digits of the fingerprint.

~~~
J_Darnley
Thanks. I know that but it might help someone who hasn't realised it yet. I'm
sure I've also read that some servers require the 0x prefix when searching by
ID.

