
Twitter Has an Old Media Problem, Here’s a Solution - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/opinion/twitter-has-an-old-media-problem-heres-a-solution.html?ref=opinion
======
aaron-lebo
There's a bizarre focus on Larry Page buying it for whatever reason. Sounds
almost like a plea.

But hey, let's imagine that's possible - why do we want Google guy to run
Twitter, too. What does that solve? Google has already tried and "failed" in
the social area, Page buying it doesn't strike me as some kind of panacea.

What this election cycle has proven to me is that the old media and rapidly
more and more of the new media censors things they or various friends of
theirs don't agree with, and that doesn't sound like a path to a healthy
society to me. The media's problem isn't about being "Old", it's about trust,
and expecting people who have built the modern landscape to take a different
path seems naive.

There's no evidence that modern social or political discourse is made better
by Twitter. Some people seem convinced that Twitter shouldn't just die as is
natural. Why?

Twitter strikes me as a platform where the existing media and celebrities pat
themselves on the back. Of course media would think it such an important tool,
but the average person doesn't get value from it unless we really like to hear
Donald Trump's unfiltered thoughts at 3 AM. Personally, don't find that
especially compelling.

Edit:

 _The country’s pre-eminent newspapers, including this one, have long been
controlled by families who have understood that the press is not just an
ordinary industry, but a civic calling. Twitter is not yet treated as
hallowed, but it has the makings of an institution that could be._

I find this in particular hilariously out of touch. At least we're now
admitting that families control the country, but let's not act like what the
press has been doing for some time now is is anything like a civic calling.
This election wouldn't be a complete disaster if the media had been doing its
job instead of entertaining or pandering. If that's the standard that the
media is holding itself to, then Twitter doesn't have a high bar to clear.

~~~
kapitza
Here's a great picture of "families who have understood that the press is a
civic calling" (what is this supposed to be, the Venetian Republic?) in
action:

 _When bloomberg was having problems w the times he called Arthur [Sulzberger]
and asked for coffee. He made the case that they were treating him like a
billionaire dilettante instead of Third term mayor. It changed the coverage
moderately but also aired the issues in the newsroom so people were more
conscious of it. But Arthur is a pretty big wuss so he 's not going to do a
lot more than that._

 _Hillary would have to be the one to call._

 _He also thinks the brown and women pundits can shame the times and others on
social media. So cultivating Joan Walsh, Yglesias, Allen, perry bacon, Greg
Sargent, to defend her is helpful. They can be emboldened. Fwiw - I pushed
[Philippe Reines] to do this a yr ago._

[https://wikileaks.org/podesta-
emails/emailid/31954](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31954)

~~~
LordHumungous
Not sure what the big deal is here. Political operatives are angling for good
coverage? That kind of thing has always gone on. If you think this is bad, you
should read about what went on back in the old days.

~~~
talmand
The problem is whether the media responds to the angling and provides good
coverage while reducing negative coverage. The operatives doing this and the
news media responding positively has almost certainly been happening since the
beginning of news, but that doesn't excuse the behavior.

------
alva
Old Media has a Twitter problem. They don't have the solution.

NY Times is barely profitable. Some mainstream publications are in a similar
situation, most are hemorrhaging money all over the printing floor.

Money is one thing, but what the established media are really frightened by is
the loss of power they have been witnessing over the last few years.

They do not like it one bit.

"The country’s pre-eminent newspapers, including this one, have long been
controlled by families who have understood that the press is not just an
ordinary industry, but a civic calling."

~~~
eternalban
> "The country’s pre-eminent newspapers, including this one, have long been
> controlled by families who have understood that the press is not just an
> ordinary industry, but a civic calling."

Doublespeak at its finest. Love it.

~~~
talmand
Yes, especially since we don't get these families' definition of "civic
calling". It could be "help fellow humans be more informed" or "control
information to our liking for the betterment of the society we want". Both
could be seen as beneficial from certain points of view.

------
yabatopia
So the solution for Twitter's problem is to find an idiot willing to pay $12
billion for a medium that many people consider the digital equivalent of an
open sewer? An idiot who's willing to spend another few billion dollars to
turn that sewer in a hallowed spring for journalism? And Larry Page is
supposed to be that idiot? Good luck with that.

Twitter hasn't an old media problem, Twitter's problem is that it has a goal,
but no vision. That goal right now is profitability, no matter what. Twitter
started out as a micro-blogging platform, but the company seems to be at a
loss what it wants to be now or in the future. They have something, but they
they don't know what to do with it, causing them to keep treading on the spot.
And treading water, especially sewage water, is not a healthy long-term
strategy.

~~~
M_Grey
"Open sewer"... pretty much. Then again, at some point most people are going
to figure out that it's true of most big social media platforms. Anything
which connects to you to the teeming mass of humanity is thrilling, then
tiresome, then downright corrosive; there are just too many trolls, nuts, and
dim bulbs to be borne.

~~~
basch
that's just not true. slashdot taught us you can intake data, have humans tag
it with metadata, and then let the viewer sort the data based on their own
preferences and parameters. and that it works really really well.
reddit/hackernews are a simplification of that idea brewed down to just
upvote/downvote/flag.

twitter is unnavigatable by itself in any sort of abstract high level way.
that doesnt mean you cant use software to parse, sort, and display the content
in a more organized manner. the first step is to get people to tag and
describe the data that exists.

~~~
mschuster91
> reddit/hackernews are a simplification of that idea brewed down to just
> upvote/downvote/flag.

HN has the unique advantage that it's a niche board. This means that the
userbase is small, which makes moderation infinitely easier, because the pool
of potential trolls just is extremely small.

Reddit has solved this problem by shifting the moderation load to volunteers
for each subreddit. Of course, that can go south too (as witnessed with
/r/fatpeoplehate, /r/thefappening, ...) but most of the time Reddit seems to
be OK.

4chan just lets everything stay except childporn, because it doesn't have to
take care of a public image (everyone knows 4chan is the vilest place on the
net, except for the CP sites in the .onion tor net).

Twitter has probably more users than HN, Reddit and 4chan combined and has to
rely mostly on automation for anti-spam (which rarely works, because there's a
LOT of legit bots) and user reports, which, like FB, don't work at all or lead
to brigading, mass-reports etc.

~~~
basch
reddit and hackernews both use human moderation, as did slashdot, as and I
mentioned it in my comment. Human metadata generation (this comment is good,
funny, wrong, sad, incomplete etc) is a great first step in turning a sewer
into a watertower.

------
namaemuta
I can't believe how quickly you guys are jumping to the conclusion of letting
twitter die. It has a lot of value for common people to report problems and
make them being noticed. For example, I've lost the count of how many people
have gotten a better deal with companies that in the first place offered them
a bad service / product, just by publicly reporting them on twitter.

Also lot of people get a quick support response just by typing "@company
problem" no matter what company or the problem is. That's an incredibly easy
way for users to solve many of their problems.

The world will keep going on without twitter for sure, but the hole that it
will leave behind will be noticed.

~~~
happyslobro
I think that this real value will ensure that it never really dies. If
anything happened to twitter.com, then dozens of little MVP short message
boards would spring up. In fact, that might actually be an ideal outcome in
the long run, especially if it leads to the formation of a standardized tweet
data format and competing public APIs.

------
Grue3
>Log In Don't have an account? Sign up here »

New York Times has an old media problem...

------
warcher
Man, as I sit here at this news aggregator, which funded another pretty good
news aggregator, having come from yet a third news aggregator, none of which
are Twitter, it makes me think.... eh, maybe we just let this one die.

I have said before and I'll say again, journalists _love_ twitter because it's
a (free) portfolio site for them that hasn't (as yet) messed with their
ability to interface with their fans (although they're moving that way).

------
ThomPete
Twitters problem is simple, they are a router not a destination. The simple
fact that you are linking to an article but not debating it on twitter unless
you really hit some nerve is why they cant make money. 140 chars dictatorship
have hindered them doing any real innovation and the puritans unfortunately
have been able to slowly choke twitter.

~~~
bbctol
Is that really their target, though? I think of twitter as a place for
communities, where people react, tell jokes, and have conversations. It's not
a place for serious debate, but that might not be the problem.

~~~
ThomPete
That's exactly the problem. Twitter is a serious place in fact if it wasn't
for shared professional interests twitter would have died out earlier on. It
was once people realized they could connect with people they shared interest
with that it started to gain traction.

But the problem is that people don't spend time on twitter and twitter doesn't
encourage people to spend time there. Instead they push people off twitter to
somewhere else which means they spend less time on the platform and more time
on others platforms.

This is opposite of Facebook where you debate the articles on the actual
platform.

------
kordless
While I agree with the article's intent, we're missing the forest for the
trees. The reason a billionaire has to do this is because it can't be done
with traditional business models.

Twitter is infrastructure. Rapid bursts of semi-trustworthy data for us to
consume and consider, at our own peril. That Twitter has to change its core
behavior providing that service in order to make revenue is the problem. The
value it provides is _intangible_ in current financial models.

When I talk about this stuff, I think the value or commodity of a thing
Twitter is such that current financial models cannot describe it properly. It
feels as if we need a different type of business model to deal with keeping
the business side of these houses in business.

Call it a suffering coin, if you will.

~~~
dingo_bat
Twitter is not infrastructure. An LTE network is infrastructure. An optical
fiber cable is part of infrastructure. Amazon AWS is perhaps infrastructure.

I don't get these weird redefinitions of common words that don't convey the
original meaning at all.

~~~
kluck
Yep, same with the word "hacker": Some people like to call themselves a hacker
when they simply made a meal or put some clothes into a bag nicely ...

Then again, isn't language always changing and words are constantly redefined,
reused, ommitted and invented etc. Although we should strive for common
definitions of words, we should also allow for change.

Twitter is not infrastructure though.

~~~
talmand
>> Then again, isn't language always changing and words are constantly
redefined, reused, ommitted and invented etc.

There's a difference between a language evolving in a natural, organic way
versus someone using a word incorrectly while insisting it is correct and that
everyone must change to suit them.

------
vonklaus
The article makes virtually no logical case for its own claim. The example
that Larry Page should buy twitter because it is great, is immeadiately under
cut by the follow up reason. Larry Page is Jewish and Twitter is an extremely
vitriolic place, especially towards people of color or minority groups. The
"Old Media" problem is that no-one wants to pay for content. Twitter is less
of "content" and more real-time news pings-- closer to reuters than NYT. If
the author were to make the case they should go the way of Reuters, I would at
least entertain it, but Twitter as a b2c play seems like a stretch at this
point.

Twitter has an extremely viable business. They should try this innovative
model I was reading about called subscription billing. The hail mary play is
to ask users for $1 a month. Users would churn and they would have to limit
adverts so their current model would take a hit, but it makes sense.

I think users would pay $1 per month per 160 char addition to their monthly
limit. At minimum advertisers would. kill adds, sell tweet length. I get it
Jack, you want to preserve the arbitrary SMS thing, but it needs to go before
your company does.

------
mobiuscog
NYTimes has an Old Media Problem - they have to paywall off the content
because they don't have any other business model.

------
sfifs
While this is a valid solution, Twitter has to go into bankruptcy first for
this to happen. One of the challenges of being a publicly traded company is
that these types of creative financing through equity can't happen quickly.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Twitter has to go into bankruptcy first_

Not necessarily. It just needs to shave off about 90% of its market cap. That
means management gets fired and the Board replaced; they don't want that.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12710784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12710784)

------
LordHumungous
I think most journalists would not necessarily agree with the proposition that
Twitter has been good for journalism or the public discourse.

------
kluck
I like how the article transformed my view of Twitter. I never saw it as a
kind of newspaper without a filter and I think I like the analogy.

Twitter does give a voice to people and the magnitude of participation by
people on Twitter speaks for itself. Weither we (or anyone) _need_ to hear all
those voices is debatable though. Maybe some filter is not too bad after all.

------
saji13
So this article claims the problem with Twitter is that advertisers don't
bring in enough money because of hate speech in Twitter. This is just absurd,
any sources on that claim?

Why would advertisers care of the content? They are scared people would
associate the company to the hate tweets?

~~~
talmand
It happens all the time right now. How many times have we've seen press
releases that explain the company's position of distancing itself from some
stupid thing on the Internet that stupid people wrongfully attribute to the
company in some stupid way?

The recent bowl of Skittles analogy is a prime example. Everyone knows it had
nothing to do with Skittles the company, yet they still felt the need to
release a statement because people are stupid. Because if they didn't release
a statement then some idiot would come along and claim the company supported
the analogy.

------
mxuribe
Hmmm...many comments stated in the article sound like someone clinging to old
legacy not for utility but for mere nostalgia... "Twitter is a communications
marvel..." << No, I feel the _internet_ and the _web_ running over it are
communications marvels with applications like twitter simply being an (as in,
one of many) application that was somewhat useful back in the day.

"Twitter is not yet treated as hallowed, but it has the makings of an
institution that could be." << I struggle to classify any application that
artificially constraints its messaging to 140 characters, as anything that
could be considered "an institution". There's something good to be said for
being succinct but 140 characters - nowadays - is just silly, i think. Mind
you, not just because it limits the initial message, but I believe it
drastically limits the possibility for further discourse and discussion.

"Twitter is the first draft of journalism." << I disagree. I would argue that
systems like BBS or even early blogs represent truer electronic
representations of "the first draft of journalism". I fail to see why
journalism needs to feel beholden to a single, monolithic company. What about
the Internat Archive and its wayback machine? I actually feel that might be a
good (though not the only) representation of journalism - albeit inclusive of
"civilian journalism".

"This computer-science problem — filtering out trolls — remains as
difficult...technology would not only win back the advertisers who are fleeing
because of trolls, but also, if shared, enable newspapers to reopen their
comments’ sections at their own websites, promoting the airing of differing
views in public space." << While I can't speak to the advertising aspect,
here's one method to provide for airing of different views _while_ helping to
de-anonymize trolls (at least a little, which might lessen their flames):
don't have everyone jump into yet another walled garden; instead have everyone
build up their own decentralized social network presence. So everyone has a
presence online - either managed through their own website which runs a
decentralized social network application/software, or maybe they pay a small
fee to group onto a small community...this would help mitigate from a single
platform failing and bringing down the whole "first draft journalism". This
would also give each user the freedom to express themselves - without any
constraints from twitter, etc. Its not perfect, and i'm sure there would be
problems, but i feel this is the better direction forward.

------
emptybits
> Twitter puts no intermediary between speaker and listener.

Actually, Twitter puts ads, filters, and clever curation algorithms between
the speaker and listener.

Now an IRC channel ... _that_ puts no intermediary between speaker and
listener.

------
tomcam
> Twitter puts no intermediary between speaker and listener.

Uh, @Nero

------
soyiuz
How about Twitter buys the NYT or the other way around? I know it is not
feasible, but a nice thought.

------
riffic
Old media should consider running their own social infrastructure, Gnu Social
for example.

------
ivanstame
I dont't wont to log in to read the article...

~~~
talmand
I keep seeing people say that, yet I didn't have to log in to read the
article?

------
bres
I can't access the article, it asks me to log in.

~~~
ungzd
You need to buy subscription on every US news site otherwise journalism will
die.

