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I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool. It's valuable if/when there are useful things being communicated

I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool. It's valuable if/when there are useful things being communicated with it. To say that Twitter is a "land of marketers and bloggers and personalities pushing their own stuff" is like saying that telephones are only useful for telemarketers. To say that Twitter is too noisy is like saying that there's nothing good on TV. If you don't like what's on _your_ TV you're free to put on whatever you like.

axod 17y ago
The fact though is that twitter is mainly a tool to promote yourself. It's mainly a one way broadcast mechanism for one->many. That's why there's a fair number of bloggers, personalities, spammers, etc on there.
elblanco 17y ago
> I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool. This isn't the problem with Twitter. I think everybody gets that it's a communication tool. It's just that it's an awful tool for communication. It's designed with a number of ridiculous and artificial constraints to conform to an aging and rapidly dying technology (phone texting). Almost the entire ecosystem of communication you see on Twitter is designed to overcome the limitations of the medium, from Twitter specific acronyms (RT, OH, b/c, etc.) to url shorteners (http://bit.ly/ http://bit.ly/, http://tinyurl.com/ http://tinyurl.com/, etc.) to multiple tweets to cover a single topic, and on and on and on. Most of the time, things like urls are simply designed to be pointers to actual content anyways, because you can't fit the content into a Tweet. In effect Twitter becomes an RSS/link aggregator. Sure it's different than other communication mediums, but it's not really solving a problem that anybody in particular had, and ends up creating a whole new slew of problems because of the poor decision to tie the entire architecture essentially artificial limitations.
vaksel 17y ago
the difficult part is to filter out the noise to find the 2-3 gems. The home page twitter feed, is the equivalent of having your TV flipping through, 1 channel a second. Except, every few seconds it'll go back to that one spam channel. the homepage only has 20 positions, and it doesn't discriminate whether that spot goes to someone who puts out 1 tweet a second, or someone who puts out 1 tweet a year. I had to make a list for a single person, just because I kept missing his tweets in all the noise.

axod 17y ago

The fact though is that twitter is mainly a tool to promote yourself. It's mainly a one way broadcast mechanism for one->many. That's why there's a fair number of bloggers, personalities, spammers, etc on there.

elblanco 17y ago

> I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool. This isn't the problem with Twitter. I think everybody gets that it's a communication tool. It's just that it's an awful tool for communication. It's designed with a number of ridiculous and artificial constraints to conform to an aging and rapidly dying technology (phone texting). Almost the entire ecosystem of communication you see on Twitter is designed to overcome the limitations of the medium, from Twitter specific acronyms (RT, OH, b/c, etc.) to url shorteners (http://bit.ly/ http://bit.ly/, http://tinyurl.com/ http://tinyurl.com/, etc.) to multiple tweets to cover a single topic, and on and on and on. Most of the time, things like urls are simply designed to be pointers to actual content anyways, because you can't fit the content into a Tweet. In effect Twitter becomes an RSS/link aggregator. Sure it's different than other communication mediums, but it's not really solving a problem that anybody in particular had, and ends up creating a whole new slew of problems because of the poor decision to tie the entire architecture essentially artificial limitations.

vaksel 17y ago

the difficult part is to filter out the noise to find the 2-3 gems. The home page twitter feed, is the equivalent of having your TV flipping through, 1 channel a second. Except, every few seconds it'll go back to that one spam channel. the homepage only has 20 positions, and it doesn't discriminate whether that spot goes to someone who puts out 1 tweet a second, or someone who puts out 1 tweet a year. I had to make a list for a single person, just because I kept missing his tweets in all the noise.