
Why is Twitter Destroying Itself? - ytNumbers
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/twitter-is-the-webs-best-public-identity-service-151-so-why-is-it-destroying-itself/261497/
======
tptacek
This Atlantic blog piece engages so little with the question in its headline
(it really doesn't engage at all, except by means of a flimsy metaphor in the
last graf of the piece) that you have to assume someone else at the Atlantic
wrote this headline. That's often the case at big publications; authors write
reasonable pieces, and then editors slap crazy headlines on them to maximize
views.

An Atlantic blog post that merely pondered the question of "Why is Twitter
willing to alienate new Tumblr users" would obviously not drive as many views;
people (rightly) don't expect random bloggers at The Atlantic to have a lot of
insight into that question, and the only reason you'd want to read someone
grappling with that question is if there was some promise that they'd have an
answer.

The Atlantic's mostly poor coverage of technology issues is synecdochic of the
decline of the whole publication in the wake of its pivot towards online
journalism. They built a website with a pretty firm wall between The Atlantic
Monthly and The Atlantic (Website), recruited some blog writers, and got some
of their correspondants (Fallows, in particular) to write alongside them.
Gradually, the blog writers seem to have swallowed the whole place, driving it
towards Huffington-esque short-form provocations instead of essays and
journalism; this mentality has infected the Monthly as well.

The same fate, of becoming a second-rate version of Slate with a reputation
propped up by a second-rate version of The New Yorker, interestingly hasn't
seemed to have befallen The New Yorker itself.

~~~
klochner
Agreed on the link bait title, pretty sure you misused "synecdochic".
Synecdoche is like metaphor, but the former I've only seen used to explicitly
refer to figures of speech, like a simile, while the latter is used
interchangeably with "symbolic", so a thing could be metaphoric, but only
written or oral communications could be synecdochic.

~~~
tptacek
A small instance of a larger concept that does a good job of illustrating the
contours of that larger concept; a part for the whole.

(Who the hell would downvote your comment? Weird! I fixed that.)

~~~
klochner
Right, I'm with you there, but I would say that referring to "the crown" in
place of the King would be synecdochic (the expression is synecdochic), but
the crown, in itself, isn't synecdochic of the king.

~~~
tptacek
When people say "the crown" when referencing a monarch and their
administration, that's a textbook synecdoche. Similarly, when people refer to
the number of "seats" in an enterprise, as with a "10 seat license", that is
also a synecdoche; obviously, the licensor could care less about seats per se;
you pay even if you use a standing desk. :)

I am unapologetic about introducing this confusing word into the thread, as
this discussion is more interesting than the blog post we're commenting on.

~~~
klochner
Similarly to rhizome, I appreciate your use of a word I hadn't seen in a long
while (and that HN spellcheckers flag), and I agree this is much more
interesting than the article, but I would have gone with something in
{emblematic, symptomatic, representative}.

I'm holding firm in claiming that synecdoche should be reserved for
referencing oral or written expressions, viz., intentional usages of a part to
indicate the whole.

Thanks for a little diversion :)

~~~
tptacek
I think the poor quality of their tech coverage, which quality is indeed a
"symptom" of a problem, isn't the whole story. The total fact of their tech
coverage --- that they feel the need to do it at all at any level of quality
--- is more important to me, and so "symptomatic" didn't seem right. But I
wrote unclearly enough that "symptomatic" is a better word in the context of
my original comment.

I do own the fact that "synecdochic" is never a good word to use in clear
writing. :)

------
jerrya
It seems dumb in the same way that vertical integration is often seen to be
inferior to horizontal integration.

If for instance Twitter is doing this to support Posterous, a tumblr
competitor, this will probably harm Twitter more than it will support
Posterous.

When I heard they cut of Instagram, I figured it was to support TwitPic (or?)
which again seems to be a losing move for them.

------
dchuk
Because they haven't properly understood how to monetize since day 1

~~~
tptacek
They are by many accounts significantly (as in, not just pro-forma)
profitable.

------
coltr
This guy just joined Tumblr on Monday? Doesn't this kind of discredit his
opinion?

~~~
tptacek
The article doesn't work if he's a long-time Tumblr user, because find-friends
is something you typically do when you first join.

------
gavinlynch
It isn't.

