19 ms·

Twitter is so powerful. When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Not Facebook. Not Hacker News. Not reddit. The same goes for man

Twitter is so powerful. When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Not Facebook. Not Hacker News. Not reddit. The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world. Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.

wslh 10y ago
Linus Torvalds uses Google+. Compare https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds to https://twitter.com/Linus__Torvalds/with_replies?lang=en https://twitter.com/Linus__Torvalds/with_replies?lang=en Which means that different people in different communities choose different communication tools for reasons that are not obvious.
- Navarr 10y ago
  Robert Scoble uses Facebook. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble Twitter: https://twitter.com/Scobleizer https://twitter.com/Scobleizer Of note for Scoble is that there's much more room to talk on Facebook than twitter. I wonder if that's a similar reason that Torvalds uses G+
  - problems 10y ago
    Quite probably, G+ also doesn't beg for login like Facebook does sometimes so it's easier to use without an account.
    - oxryly1 10y ago
      Oddly, when I clicked on Linus's G+ link it redirected me to a G+ advertising sequence, complete with web popups. I had to click a second time to actually get there. I think that may be my biggest issue with G+ (despite so few people using it)... they keep changing it. Facebook evolves much more slowly, so it's much more predictable and comfortable to the distracted and comfort-seeking social media user like myself. G+ is constantly experimenting and I can't easily pin down exactly what it is...
- bluedino 10y ago
  Carmack used to, didn't he? Until Facebook hired him?
  - whatever_dude 10y ago
    Carmack uses Twitter a lot. But he uses Facebook for longer posts.
- pasbesoin 10y ago
  Torvalds. David Brin. Tim O'Reilly (although Tim uses or used to use multiple platforms in an ongoing fashion). Randall Schwartz. A few others I'm not thinking of right now. Plus garnered a bit of a "tech"/thinker corner. I don't know whether it has any remaining vibrancy/growth, at this point, or whether its mostly a matter of inertia combined with the crapitude of other platforms for the particular communicating they are doing. Too bad Plus was so thoroughly hosed from the start by political agendas. OT: At Christmas, I stopped accessing Facebook. I thought it would be for a few days or a week. Coming up on two months, soon, and I haven't been able to make myself go back. Even with a relatively small set of FB friends whom I actually, personally know, and who are nice and not rabid and actually respond meaningfully to some of my own contributions, there. In some ways, the impersonal, more technical content on Plus (and here, and etc.) is easier. There is no "missing aspect" as there is with FB engagement with friends. Twitter? Gave up on that years ago. Tim O'Reilly had an interesting post or two about some of its positive, community aspects, in its early days. But now, it just mostly seems a megaphone for the loud and discontent. And then, too, anywhere Trump et al. are and that seems to aid his lying megalomania. I'm not inclined to lend it the (incremental) support of my participation. If he's a particular indication of their future, well, then, welcome to the gutter, Twitter.
  - waynecolvin 10y ago
    Are you sure there weren't some sort of recruitment effort with at least some of those guys... Though you do see some tech pages out there, maybe because of Hangouts? shrug I didn't know Tim O'Reilly was on G+ but ALL these recent posts are pop-politics and ugly at that! I thought you were referring to all Google services being tied in.
    - pasbesoin 10y ago
      I don't know. Good point. I expect some, e.g. O'Reilly, were actively solicited. I don't spend too much time in Plus. Brin has had a lot of political stuff, recently, although he's a bit mixed and individual in his opinions and they do tend to tie back to points modeled in his sci-fi writing. O'Reilly I see less frequently. I suppose he's getting more "elder statesman", too. Torvalds actually addresses some tech stuff. Though he has personal stuff, too -- he does not use it as a "tech blog". Reminds me some of Tim Bray's "Ongoing" blog -- self-hosted -- that I haven't been to in a while. A personal take, on both tech and other stuff in his life. Whatever the topic, informed, intelligent, and thoughtful. Creative, too. I don't think Plus is in any kind of a steady state. Even what I wrote about, may well be in decline. Maybe it was better a few years ago. Regardless, this year's politics have really shocked a lot of people, and this is spilling over into erstwhile non-political venues.
- supergreg 10y ago
  Is there a service that can aggregate posts from people in Google+, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, patreon, etc?
  - chei0iaV 10y ago
    There was, it was called RSS, which all these services had.
  - bjelkeman-again 10y ago
    The closest I get is the Flipboard app.
jeron 10y ago
I agree with this, Twitter is still the best place for celebrities to interact with their fans. Elon Musk for example has unveiled more than a few of his ideas and dropped details of his products on Twitter instead of anywhere else.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  There's no reason he couldn't do the same with a mailing list. Twitter might have value, but no route to profitability. Edit: Y'all are super salty about Twitter falling apart. Sad!
  - detaro 10y ago
    Twitter is way better for directly hype-building around those tweets. Although maybe a mailing list could be marketed in a similar way, of done cleverly.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Twitter might be better, but it appears it can't make money from "being better" than a mailing list. You can be the best platform in the world, and if you don't make money, you're going under.
  - jkaunisv1 10y ago
    The interaction is completely different. I can check on Elon's twitter whenever I want without having to subscribe. People can have conversations around his tweets without spamming strangers' inboxen. I can send you a link to one of his tweets and you can pass it on to whoever you want without exposing my address to your friends. I have no idea why you would compare the two.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      You just described a mailing list with a web frontend. Perfect example: NANOG (North American network ops group) Massive mailing list. Web enabled. Trivial cost. Deep links possible to share. EDIT: And more than 160 characters! Hallelujah! A format an actual discussion can take place in. I compare the two because I'm old, tech is cyclic, and everyone reinvents the wheel. Twitter is, clearly, not special, and can't justify its valuation.
mtw 10y ago
It's interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.
- schnevets 10y ago
  And a Snap is volatile and even more frivolous! Maybe they're even MORE valuable!
  - sjg007 10y ago
    Snapchat has a novel engagement mechanism. Short multimedia interactive ads in a captured setting. The format has potential. The Snapstream keeps people hooked. It's basically a next gen Facebook but more private.
- danjoc 10y ago
  >yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. Twitter could front run wall street on Donald Trump tweets.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    It does seem like having early access to all tweets would be immensely valuable, even if it was only a second of lead time. (Sure, Trump tweets are valuable on their own, but market info has to be encoded into coarse-grained info about individually useless tweets as well.) Unless they have an explicit policy against it, Twitter must be selling this, right?
    - aetherson 10y ago
      New business model: For $1M per tweet, you can have a 50ms head-start on tweets from Trump. Just Trump, just one tier of headstart/pricing. You prepay for the next N tweets. You can set time-ranges (like, "when the markets are open") for when you want to pay for the headstart. I bet they could get a few tens of millions of revenue there. Probably HFT firms would at least experiment with it, right? Might get them into some serious regulatory crosshairs.
dglass 10y ago
powerful != profitable
Finnucane 10y ago
I don't have a Twitter account, so the only way I see it is if something gets reposted on my FB feed or some other media outlet. Which generally means someone notable and/or famous for some reason. Personally, I'm okay with this level of filtering.
creativityland 10y ago
I share the same feeling when using Twitter with a following mainly consisting of friends. If the sole purpose was to communicate with friends, why do so publicly on Twitter? There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.
dhimes 10y ago
When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Wow. I didn't even know he tweeted.
- WillyOnWheels 10y ago
  https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en is probably his most controversial tweet
  - dhimes 10y ago
    He definitely caught some shit for that one.
  - Grue3 10y ago
    And within a few replies somebody threatens to violently assault him. Says a lot about the platform, really.
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      What else can you say with 140 chars? It's heaven for snarky comments and trolls.
teej 10y ago
Care to share which of pg's tweets you found powerful? I would say that when pg has something to say, he takes to his blog. I dont think his tweets are within an order of magnitude as valuable as his blog. And for that reason I don't agree with your assessment of Twitter. I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.
- sbarre 10y ago
  Twitter simplifies re-broadcasting and discovery.. Only people who know Paul Graham will know about his blog, but his tweets can be re-broadcast to a much wider audience through re-tweeting, who can be exposed to him without having sought him out or known about him in the first place. I've discovered, and subsequently followed, probably half of my twitter feed through re-tweets from my existing feed. I have to imagine that's the same for a lot of others.
  - projektfu 10y ago
    That's funny. When I first started reading his blog, I had no idea who he was, and Twitter didn't exist yet. A friend emailed a link to me because he thought I should read it.
    - sbarre 10y ago
      I definitely wasn't implying that there are no other ways for people to discover content, and email is of course still a very popular way for that to happen. I still email links, and receive links by email, all the time ..
iak8god 10y ago
> The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world. The President of the United States, for instance.
coldpie 10y ago
Anyone have any thoughts on turning Twitter into a publicly funded utility? It's fraught with difficulties, and maybe unconstitutional, but as you say Twitter is an extremely powerful tool and it would be a tragedy to lose it just because it can't find a way to extract money from its users.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Public funding would be massively problematic (especially in this political climate), but I agree about wanting to conserve the utility even if it's not a good way to make money. I'm surprised that a distributed open alternative hasn't appeared by now.
  - wott 10y ago
    GNU social, and others.
- tigershark 10y ago
  Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter? If you really enjoy it finance it with your money. I already finance organisations that are much more worth my money than a glorified newsletter. It's a sad world in which we are living. If I had a twitter account probably I should have tweeted my really deep analysis in 140 chars. Wait for it.
  - coldpie 10y ago
    > Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter? No. I was proposing a thought experiment. Chill out, dude.
- tigershark 10y ago
  Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter? If you really enjoy it finance it with your money. I already finance organisations that are much more worth my money than a glorified newsletter. It's a sad world in which we are living. If I had a twitter account probably I should have tweeted my really deep analysis in 140 chars. Wait for it.
Pxtl 10y ago
I've found twitter works okay for discussing small scale events. Local journos tweet the goings on of city council and citizens and councillors and journos pile into the conversation. Muni politics is my hobby, but it does shine for this so I assume it extends to similar fields of small-scale news.
anigbrowl 10y ago
I find the exact same thing; on every other social platform you get out more or less what you put in and it's reasonably easy to build persistent acquaintances and even intimate friendships over time. I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem. Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof. As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you I don't have this problem, but the only people that follow me are typically my friends who may be interested in the things I have to say.
- dtornabene 10y ago
  I did the same a year ago, largely agree with this, though I would note that it has been extremely useful to follow journalists (and comedy people/funny users). Specifically in regard to journalists however, I feel, just barely, that its worth it. One is able to gain a sense of what these people actually feel, away from an editorial board. Which is both enlightening and highly useful, if you actually devote time to reading journalism. Its also been very useful for organizing, as in, "there is a rally ya'll, come to such and such, like, now". More than once I've missed emails or other communications that would have pulled me into an action, meeting or other event but saw references to it on twitter and was able to make it at the last minute.
joeblau 10y ago
This type of statement reminds me of being in the music business (for the short period of time I was in it). Everyone would always hype their artist as the best thing since sliced bread. "You gotta hear this guy" "She's got an amazing voice" "They are so powerful". While I heard a lot of amazing talent — the fact of the matter was that they weren't "It". No matter how much marketing and promotion went behind them, they never grew beyond a decent sized market segment. I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
mfukar 10y ago
Can't tell if you're serious or just have an aptitude at this.
acveilleux 10y ago
Instagram has notionally the same dynamic as twitter but somehow they do a lot better at convincing their eye balls that they are welcome on the platform and have a voice. Or at least it seems to me.
tarr11 10y ago
It is interesting that PG doesnt participate here anymore, at all. Wonder why?
- positr0n 10y ago
  He used to. His comments and posts and slowed down over the years though. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
boobsbr 10y ago
> On twitter, I speak into the void. My sentiment as well, why I never got into Twitter at all.
camus2 10y ago
People use Twitter to broadcast something without wanting to have a real discussion about the thing they just said. There is no discussion possible on Twitter, as the "threads" quickly devolve into an unintelligible mess. You say something to the public, then you're done. It's purely a channel for viral marketing (also called "push", that word says it all).
genericpseudo 10y ago
News is not monetizable because real, actual news is depressing and no-one wants to run ads for chocolate next to pictures of starving kids. It's always been the fluff which drew the ads; the lifestyle and sports content.
brightball 10y ago
It's basically a publishing system. On Twitter I generally put only professional broadcasting related items for 90% of the content. Blog posts, that kind've thing. I rarely even read it. There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter. It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.
EliRivers 10y ago
I don't use twitter so if I'm wrong about this, I stand by to be corrected, but with twitter, I thought you can only reach people who have already chosen to listen to you. It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.
- psyc 10y ago
  Twitter lets you mention anybody. Unless they've blocked you, they will be notified that you mentioned them. It's like /u/username on Reddit, but on Twitter it's the standard way to address people.
kisstheblade 10y ago
Twitter is only useful because "normal" media makes news about notable tweets. I surely don't get my information from twitter. Would seem silly to get all my information (or "important" information from "powerful" people) from a hundred character sound bites.
- jdminhbg 10y ago
  When people talk about getting their news from Twitter, they don't literally mean they never leave Twitter for information. 140 characters is enough for a headline and a link; you click through to articles that interest you.
puranjay 10y ago
A man became the most powerful person on the planet using Twitter, so yeah, it is very effective! Trump doesn't do Snapchat videos. He does 3AM tweets.
Spooky23 10y ago
Twitter is a tragedy of the commons type scenario. It's an amazing way to connect, but ultimately it's a loudspeaker for loudmouths. It needs to die.
PutinIsEvil 10y ago
"Many of the most influential people" Besides the question of whether Paul Graham is an actually influtential person outside tech bubble- can you name some of these people you're talking about, @the_economist? Also, let me know what measure you're ranking them important on, @the_economist.
philwelch 10y ago
There's another side to Twitter: > I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them. > They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me. > So we filter our inputs. > ... > Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear. > ... > Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money. http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-harassment-abuse-and.html http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-haras...
- gottam 10y ago
  To fix this "problem" they've been spending money on human moderators to filter content, tags, and ban people. They're spending money on employees to remove discussions and eyes from the site, which counter intuitive if their goal is to become profitable, nor does it solve the problem ultimately.
Mikeb85 10y ago
And if Twitter goes away, there will be another platform to take its place.
martin-adams 10y ago
Yes, I've noticed the BBC quoting tweets as part of their news reporting on a regular basis. It really is an influential tool.
wodenokoto 10y ago
In Denmark, Twitter penetration has been fairly weak, while Facebook has been extraordinary. Last I heard numbers, it was something like 80% of the population checked Facebook at least once a week. Here most politicians and other "influential people" will take to Facebook when they want to be heard.

wslh 10y ago

Linus Torvalds uses Google+. Compare https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds to https://twitter.com/Linus__Torvalds/with_replies?lang=en https://twitter.com/Linus__Torvalds/with_replies?lang=en Which means that different people in different communities choose different communication tools for reasons that are not obvious.

Navarr 10y ago
Robert Scoble uses Facebook. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble Twitter: https://twitter.com/Scobleizer https://twitter.com/Scobleizer Of note for Scoble is that there's much more room to talk on Facebook than twitter. I wonder if that's a similar reason that Torvalds uses G+
- problems 10y ago
  Quite probably, G+ also doesn't beg for login like Facebook does sometimes so it's easier to use without an account.
  - oxryly1 10y ago
    Oddly, when I clicked on Linus's G+ link it redirected me to a G+ advertising sequence, complete with web popups. I had to click a second time to actually get there. I think that may be my biggest issue with G+ (despite so few people using it)... they keep changing it. Facebook evolves much more slowly, so it's much more predictable and comfortable to the distracted and comfort-seeking social media user like myself. G+ is constantly experimenting and I can't easily pin down exactly what it is...
bluedino 10y ago
Carmack used to, didn't he? Until Facebook hired him?
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  Carmack uses Twitter a lot. But he uses Facebook for longer posts.
pasbesoin 10y ago
Torvalds. David Brin. Tim O'Reilly (although Tim uses or used to use multiple platforms in an ongoing fashion). Randall Schwartz. A few others I'm not thinking of right now. Plus garnered a bit of a "tech"/thinker corner. I don't know whether it has any remaining vibrancy/growth, at this point, or whether its mostly a matter of inertia combined with the crapitude of other platforms for the particular communicating they are doing. Too bad Plus was so thoroughly hosed from the start by political agendas. OT: At Christmas, I stopped accessing Facebook. I thought it would be for a few days or a week. Coming up on two months, soon, and I haven't been able to make myself go back. Even with a relatively small set of FB friends whom I actually, personally know, and who are nice and not rabid and actually respond meaningfully to some of my own contributions, there. In some ways, the impersonal, more technical content on Plus (and here, and etc.) is easier. There is no "missing aspect" as there is with FB engagement with friends. Twitter? Gave up on that years ago. Tim O'Reilly had an interesting post or two about some of its positive, community aspects, in its early days. But now, it just mostly seems a megaphone for the loud and discontent. And then, too, anywhere Trump et al. are and that seems to aid his lying megalomania. I'm not inclined to lend it the (incremental) support of my participation. If he's a particular indication of their future, well, then, welcome to the gutter, Twitter.
- waynecolvin 10y ago
  Are you sure there weren't some sort of recruitment effort with at least some of those guys... Though you do see some tech pages out there, maybe because of Hangouts? shrug I didn't know Tim O'Reilly was on G+ but ALL these recent posts are pop-politics and ugly at that! I thought you were referring to all Google services being tied in.
  - pasbesoin 10y ago
    I don't know. Good point. I expect some, e.g. O'Reilly, were actively solicited. I don't spend too much time in Plus. Brin has had a lot of political stuff, recently, although he's a bit mixed and individual in his opinions and they do tend to tie back to points modeled in his sci-fi writing. O'Reilly I see less frequently. I suppose he's getting more "elder statesman", too. Torvalds actually addresses some tech stuff. Though he has personal stuff, too -- he does not use it as a "tech blog". Reminds me some of Tim Bray's "Ongoing" blog -- self-hosted -- that I haven't been to in a while. A personal take, on both tech and other stuff in his life. Whatever the topic, informed, intelligent, and thoughtful. Creative, too. I don't think Plus is in any kind of a steady state. Even what I wrote about, may well be in decline. Maybe it was better a few years ago. Regardless, this year's politics have really shocked a lot of people, and this is spilling over into erstwhile non-political venues.
supergreg 10y ago
Is there a service that can aggregate posts from people in Google+, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, patreon, etc?
- chei0iaV 10y ago
  There was, it was called RSS, which all these services had.
- bjelkeman-again 10y ago
  The closest I get is the Flipboard app.

jeron 10y ago

I agree with this, Twitter is still the best place for celebrities to interact with their fans. Elon Musk for example has unveiled more than a few of his ideas and dropped details of his products on Twitter instead of anywhere else.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
There's no reason he couldn't do the same with a mailing list. Twitter might have value, but no route to profitability. Edit: Y'all are super salty about Twitter falling apart. Sad!
- detaro 10y ago
  Twitter is way better for directly hype-building around those tweets. Although maybe a mailing list could be marketed in a similar way, of done cleverly.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Twitter might be better, but it appears it can't make money from "being better" than a mailing list. You can be the best platform in the world, and if you don't make money, you're going under.
- jkaunisv1 10y ago
  The interaction is completely different. I can check on Elon's twitter whenever I want without having to subscribe. People can have conversations around his tweets without spamming strangers' inboxen. I can send you a link to one of his tweets and you can pass it on to whoever you want without exposing my address to your friends. I have no idea why you would compare the two.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    You just described a mailing list with a web frontend. Perfect example: NANOG (North American network ops group) Massive mailing list. Web enabled. Trivial cost. Deep links possible to share. EDIT: And more than 160 characters! Hallelujah! A format an actual discussion can take place in. I compare the two because I'm old, tech is cyclic, and everyone reinvents the wheel. Twitter is, clearly, not special, and can't justify its valuation.

mtw 10y ago

It's interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.

schnevets 10y ago
And a Snap is volatile and even more frivolous! Maybe they're even MORE valuable!
- sjg007 10y ago
  Snapchat has a novel engagement mechanism. Short multimedia interactive ads in a captured setting. The format has potential. The Snapstream keeps people hooked. It's basically a next gen Facebook but more private.
danjoc 10y ago
>yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. Twitter could front run wall street on Donald Trump tweets.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  It does seem like having early access to all tweets would be immensely valuable, even if it was only a second of lead time. (Sure, Trump tweets are valuable on their own, but market info has to be encoded into coarse-grained info about individually useless tweets as well.) Unless they have an explicit policy against it, Twitter must be selling this, right?
  - aetherson 10y ago
    New business model: For $1M per tweet, you can have a 50ms head-start on tweets from Trump. Just Trump, just one tier of headstart/pricing. You prepay for the next N tweets. You can set time-ranges (like, "when the markets are open") for when you want to pay for the headstart. I bet they could get a few tens of millions of revenue there. Probably HFT firms would at least experiment with it, right? Might get them into some serious regulatory crosshairs.

dglass 10y ago

powerful != profitable

Finnucane 10y ago

I don't have a Twitter account, so the only way I see it is if something gets reposted on my FB feed or some other media outlet. Which generally means someone notable and/or famous for some reason. Personally, I'm okay with this level of filtering.

creativityland 10y ago

I share the same feeling when using Twitter with a following mainly consisting of friends. If the sole purpose was to communicate with friends, why do so publicly on Twitter? There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.

dhimes 10y ago

When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Wow. I didn't even know he tweeted.

WillyOnWheels 10y ago
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en is probably his most controversial tweet
- dhimes 10y ago
  He definitely caught some shit for that one.
- Grue3 10y ago
  And within a few replies somebody threatens to violently assault him. Says a lot about the platform, really.
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    What else can you say with 140 chars? It's heaven for snarky comments and trolls.

teej 10y ago

Care to share which of pg's tweets you found powerful? I would say that when pg has something to say, he takes to his blog. I dont think his tweets are within an order of magnitude as valuable as his blog. And for that reason I don't agree with your assessment of Twitter. I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.

sbarre 10y ago
Twitter simplifies re-broadcasting and discovery.. Only people who know Paul Graham will know about his blog, but his tweets can be re-broadcast to a much wider audience through re-tweeting, who can be exposed to him without having sought him out or known about him in the first place. I've discovered, and subsequently followed, probably half of my twitter feed through re-tweets from my existing feed. I have to imagine that's the same for a lot of others.
- projektfu 10y ago
  That's funny. When I first started reading his blog, I had no idea who he was, and Twitter didn't exist yet. A friend emailed a link to me because he thought I should read it.
  - sbarre 10y ago
    I definitely wasn't implying that there are no other ways for people to discover content, and email is of course still a very popular way for that to happen. I still email links, and receive links by email, all the time ..

iak8god 10y ago

> The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world. The President of the United States, for instance.

coldpie 10y ago

Anyone have any thoughts on turning Twitter into a publicly funded utility? It's fraught with difficulties, and maybe unconstitutional, but as you say Twitter is an extremely powerful tool and it would be a tragedy to lose it just because it can't find a way to extract money from its users.

anigbrowl 10y ago
Public funding would be massively problematic (especially in this political climate), but I agree about wanting to conserve the utility even if it's not a good way to make money. I'm surprised that a distributed open alternative hasn't appeared by now.
- wott 10y ago
  GNU social, and others.
tigershark 10y ago
Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter? If you really enjoy it finance it with your money. I already finance organisations that are much more worth my money than a glorified newsletter. It's a sad world in which we are living. If I had a twitter account probably I should have tweeted my really deep analysis in 140 chars. Wait for it.
- coldpie 10y ago
  > Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter? No. I was proposing a thought experiment. Chill out, dude.
tigershark 10y ago
Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter? If you really enjoy it finance it with your money. I already finance organisations that are much more worth my money than a glorified newsletter. It's a sad world in which we are living. If I had a twitter account probably I should have tweeted my really deep analysis in 140 chars. Wait for it.

Pxtl 10y ago

I've found twitter works okay for discussing small scale events. Local journos tweet the goings on of city council and citizens and councillors and journos pile into the conversation. Muni politics is my hobby, but it does shine for this so I assume it extends to similar fields of small-scale news.

anigbrowl 10y ago

I find the exact same thing; on every other social platform you get out more or less what you put in and it's reasonably easy to build persistent acquaintances and even intimate friendships over time. I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem. Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof. As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you I don't have this problem, but the only people that follow me are typically my friends who may be interested in the things I have to say.
dtornabene 10y ago
I did the same a year ago, largely agree with this, though I would note that it has been extremely useful to follow journalists (and comedy people/funny users). Specifically in regard to journalists however, I feel, just barely, that its worth it. One is able to gain a sense of what these people actually feel, away from an editorial board. Which is both enlightening and highly useful, if you actually devote time to reading journalism. Its also been very useful for organizing, as in, "there is a rally ya'll, come to such and such, like, now". More than once I've missed emails or other communications that would have pulled me into an action, meeting or other event but saw references to it on twitter and was able to make it at the last minute.

joeblau 10y ago

This type of statement reminds me of being in the music business (for the short period of time I was in it). Everyone would always hype their artist as the best thing since sliced bread. "You gotta hear this guy" "She's got an amazing voice" "They are so powerful". While I heard a lot of amazing talent — the fact of the matter was that they weren't "It". No matter how much marketing and promotion went behind them, they never grew beyond a decent sized market segment. I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.

mfukar 10y ago

Can't tell if you're serious or just have an aptitude at this.

acveilleux 10y ago

Instagram has notionally the same dynamic as twitter but somehow they do a lot better at convincing their eye balls that they are welcome on the platform and have a voice. Or at least it seems to me.

tarr11 10y ago

It is interesting that PG doesnt participate here anymore, at all. Wonder why?

positr0n 10y ago
He used to. His comments and posts and slowed down over the years though. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

boobsbr 10y ago

> On twitter, I speak into the void. My sentiment as well, why I never got into Twitter at all.

camus2 10y ago

People use Twitter to broadcast something without wanting to have a real discussion about the thing they just said. There is no discussion possible on Twitter, as the "threads" quickly devolve into an unintelligible mess. You say something to the public, then you're done. It's purely a channel for viral marketing (also called "push", that word says it all).

genericpseudo 10y ago

News is not monetizable because real, actual news is depressing and no-one wants to run ads for chocolate next to pictures of starving kids. It's always been the fluff which drew the ads; the lifestyle and sports content.

brightball 10y ago

It's basically a publishing system. On Twitter I generally put only professional broadcasting related items for 90% of the content. Blog posts, that kind've thing. I rarely even read it. There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter. It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.

EliRivers 10y ago

I don't use twitter so if I'm wrong about this, I stand by to be corrected, but with twitter, I thought you can only reach people who have already chosen to listen to you. It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.

psyc 10y ago
Twitter lets you mention anybody. Unless they've blocked you, they will be notified that you mentioned them. It's like /u/username on Reddit, but on Twitter it's the standard way to address people.

kisstheblade 10y ago

Twitter is only useful because "normal" media makes news about notable tweets. I surely don't get my information from twitter. Would seem silly to get all my information (or "important" information from "powerful" people) from a hundred character sound bites.

jdminhbg 10y ago
When people talk about getting their news from Twitter, they don't literally mean they never leave Twitter for information. 140 characters is enough for a headline and a link; you click through to articles that interest you.

puranjay 10y ago

A man became the most powerful person on the planet using Twitter, so yeah, it is very effective! Trump doesn't do Snapchat videos. He does 3AM tweets.

Spooky23 10y ago

Twitter is a tragedy of the commons type scenario. It's an amazing way to connect, but ultimately it's a loudspeaker for loudmouths. It needs to die.

PutinIsEvil 10y ago

"Many of the most influential people" Besides the question of whether Paul Graham is an actually influtential person outside tech bubble- can you name some of these people you're talking about, @the_economist? Also, let me know what measure you're ranking them important on, @the_economist.

philwelch 10y ago

There's another side to Twitter: > I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them. > They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me. > So we filter our inputs. > ... > Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear. > ... > Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money. http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-harassment-abuse-and.html http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-haras...

gottam 10y ago
To fix this "problem" they've been spending money on human moderators to filter content, tags, and ban people. They're spending money on employees to remove discussions and eyes from the site, which counter intuitive if their goal is to become profitable, nor does it solve the problem ultimately.

Mikeb85 10y ago

And if Twitter goes away, there will be another platform to take its place.

martin-adams 10y ago

Yes, I've noticed the BBC quoting tweets as part of their news reporting on a regular basis. It really is an influential tool.

wodenokoto 10y ago

In Denmark, Twitter penetration has been fairly weak, while Facebook has been extraordinary. Last I heard numbers, it was something like 80% of the population checked Facebook at least once a week. Here most politicians and other "influential people" will take to Facebook when they want to be heard.