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Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”? Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yoursel

Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”? Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yourself. If Twitter had some technology tuned to solve your specific task for a freshly registered user, it could take the credit, but it's neutral and indifferent. Also, I can't see much difference between good ongoing conversation and a good conversation that happened thousand years ago. Part of the problem, as described in the article, is that Twitter “community” matured and generally switched from using it for transitory chirps to gathering and organizing knowledge for a long term somehow. And, as we all know, Twitter is horrible in that regard. Enormous planetary-scale log file without tools to parse it is a giant step backwards.

theseatoms 11y ago
> Enormous planetary-scale log file without tools to parse it is a giant step backwards. Certainly an exaggeration. The recording of the log file is itself a massive step forward. The tools can come later.
- ogurechny 11y ago
  I doubt Twitter is going to share its database with anyone for free. Either way, it is still subject to the same rot everything else on the Net is (hardware failures, purged, deleted and reclaimed accounts, “private” data visibility, etc.) Archaeologists sure have tools and methods to reconstruct life in Pompeii, but it's still nothing like real-life observation (and it citizens would probably prefer real-time seismic data to becoming a part of history, too). No matter how “trending” some bustle is and how big the hubbub it generates (and how unbelievably important media want to present it), after a few weeks you can't practically “rewind” to it. Heck, you can't even find out what user wrote at some point in time! It's considered unimportant. Twitter may be praised for its countless virtues all the time, but, no matter what you do, single message's value rapidly declines to zero after a short period of time. You can organize them any way you want and post information as valuable as you can bring forth, it all returns to nothing. That's why I compared it to transport protocol: it knows nothing about the importance of of payload and doesn't interact with it, and delayed data is of little use. …Who said “screenshots”? Seriously, no one would believe all the tech support stories about silly people sharing desktop screenshots in Word files would result in it becoming the acceptable way of spreading information in 2015. A lot has already been written about global turn of the Web from more and more complex schemes of data organization to concept of mindless, useless infinite “stream” of half-finished minutiae (presented in pastel colors with rounded corners). P.S. Of course, NSA seems to have the solution for this problem. I wonder if its data will be available sooner than in, say, 50 years GULAG prisoners waited to see their own cases declassified.
benten10 11y ago
That is a ridiculous hyperbole, haha. I'm rolling my eyes. I can justify: I do not have to 'actively' go out to seek for information that I might be interesting/relevant to me: it comes to me. It's better than reddit because I see posts only by people vetted by me, so that's my 'filter'.It's better than email, because it's open conversation, and it's better than RSS because it's a 'social-network'. The network effect brings in the 'celebrities' (or, cool people, as I see it) Yeah, twitter search sx ba*s. I'm hoping they make an agreement w google to figure out some sort of indexing. Regardless, it's pretty nifty. Highly recommend. Specially considering a lot of academic CS celebrities seem to be active there. (I do not come from SV eng background, so it might be a different community.)
- rhaps0dy 11y ago
  > a lot of academic CS celebrities seem to be active there Would you mind sharing the list? I might start using Twitter to follow those people.
- simonswords82 11y ago
  Twitter does not do a good enough job of curating the huge amount of high-quality content it holds for new Twitter subscribers. You said it yourself: > If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. > Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply mute them. > I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months All of the above steps are time consuming, and a lot of people (including me) simply can’t be bothered or don't have the time, or both! Last time I created a new account I entered some basic details and in return a bunch of well-known Tweeters were offered up, none of whom I was actually wanted to follow. That was the sum-total of the on boarding experience and I was left with nothing useful. So what do I do? I start posting content and following people - adding more content almost randomly in a hope that something sticks. Twitter absolutely nailed the input side of their user experience. Adding content is almost too easy, hence the amount of bullshit “here’s what I ate this morning” tweets. Imo their next mission should now be to help new and existing users discover high-quality content. Reddit does a better job of this using their sub-reddit approach and it’s entirely because this curation is perfumed for me that I return there more regularly than Twitter.
Karunamon 11y ago
For the same reason we never see the phrase "TCP/IP made me a lot of money", true as it may be. Twitter provided the mechanism for the parent to access the information from those people. You might as well be saying the same useless thing about RSS or blogs.
- ogurechny 11y ago
  “X's twitter made me smarter”, “Y's blog made me smarter” and “Z's RSS made me smarter” are OK. It's hard to see how it's Twitter's, Wordpress', or ACME RSS reader's credit.

theseatoms 11y ago

> Enormous planetary-scale log file without tools to parse it is a giant step backwards. Certainly an exaggeration. The recording of the log file is itself a massive step forward. The tools can come later.

ogurechny 11y ago
I doubt Twitter is going to share its database with anyone for free. Either way, it is still subject to the same rot everything else on the Net is (hardware failures, purged, deleted and reclaimed accounts, “private” data visibility, etc.) Archaeologists sure have tools and methods to reconstruct life in Pompeii, but it's still nothing like real-life observation (and it citizens would probably prefer real-time seismic data to becoming a part of history, too). No matter how “trending” some bustle is and how big the hubbub it generates (and how unbelievably important media want to present it), after a few weeks you can't practically “rewind” to it. Heck, you can't even find out what user wrote at some point in time! It's considered unimportant. Twitter may be praised for its countless virtues all the time, but, no matter what you do, single message's value rapidly declines to zero after a short period of time. You can organize them any way you want and post information as valuable as you can bring forth, it all returns to nothing. That's why I compared it to transport protocol: it knows nothing about the importance of of payload and doesn't interact with it, and delayed data is of little use. …Who said “screenshots”? Seriously, no one would believe all the tech support stories about silly people sharing desktop screenshots in Word files would result in it becoming the acceptable way of spreading information in 2015. A lot has already been written about global turn of the Web from more and more complex schemes of data organization to concept of mindless, useless infinite “stream” of half-finished minutiae (presented in pastel colors with rounded corners). P.S. Of course, NSA seems to have the solution for this problem. I wonder if its data will be available sooner than in, say, 50 years GULAG prisoners waited to see their own cases declassified.

benten10 11y ago

That is a ridiculous hyperbole, haha. I'm rolling my eyes. I can justify: I do not have to 'actively' go out to seek for information that I might be interesting/relevant to me: it comes to me. It's better than reddit because I see posts only by people vetted by me, so that's my 'filter'.It's better than email, because it's open conversation, and it's better than RSS because it's a 'social-network'. The network effect brings in the 'celebrities' (or, cool people, as I see it) Yeah, twitter search sx ba*s. I'm hoping they make an agreement w google to figure out some sort of indexing. Regardless, it's pretty nifty. Highly recommend. Specially considering a lot of academic CS celebrities seem to be active there. (I do not come from SV eng background, so it might be a different community.)

rhaps0dy 11y ago
> a lot of academic CS celebrities seem to be active there Would you mind sharing the list? I might start using Twitter to follow those people.
simonswords82 11y ago
Twitter does not do a good enough job of curating the huge amount of high-quality content it holds for new Twitter subscribers. You said it yourself: > If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. > Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply mute them. > I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months All of the above steps are time consuming, and a lot of people (including me) simply can’t be bothered or don't have the time, or both! Last time I created a new account I entered some basic details and in return a bunch of well-known Tweeters were offered up, none of whom I was actually wanted to follow. That was the sum-total of the on boarding experience and I was left with nothing useful. So what do I do? I start posting content and following people - adding more content almost randomly in a hope that something sticks. Twitter absolutely nailed the input side of their user experience. Adding content is almost too easy, hence the amount of bullshit “here’s what I ate this morning” tweets. Imo their next mission should now be to help new and existing users discover high-quality content. Reddit does a better job of this using their sub-reddit approach and it’s entirely because this curation is perfumed for me that I return there more regularly than Twitter.

Karunamon 11y ago

For the same reason we never see the phrase "TCP/IP made me a lot of money", true as it may be. Twitter provided the mechanism for the parent to access the information from those people. You might as well be saying the same useless thing about RSS or blogs.

ogurechny 11y ago
“X's twitter made me smarter”, “Y's blog made me smarter” and “Z's RSS made me smarter” are OK. It's hard to see how it's Twitter's, Wordpress', or ACME RSS reader's credit.