4 ms·

My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. I want twit

My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. I want twitter to be a feed of thoughts an opinions from people I respect, or important updates from companies I'm interested in. I see a secondary value from twitter by people contributing to a conversation around an event, be that a sports game, a site outage, a traffic jam or an unfolding natural disaster. Filtering out / systemically discouragingly a lot of the countless low-value/self promotional posts alongside a better hashtag (channel) view would be a great start.

alexose 10y ago
I used to work for a (terrific!) company that uses all kinds of natural language processing tools on Twitter data: http://crimsonhexagon.com/ http://crimsonhexagon.com/ Without getting into specifics, I was constantly blown away by the trends we were able to discover just with simple techniques. Twitter sells its data, so it really only pencils out for analytics companies like Crimson Hexagon to be B2B. If I were Twitter, I might recognize this as an opportunity to build good in-house filtering tools that are available to their users.
m-j-fox 10y ago
Yeah. By becoming a big company, Twitter missed her calling as a profitable, sustainable, 5-person operation a la Craigslist. Celebrities and others trying to make a career on the platform ruined it as a small interest-group informal discussion side channel.
timdellinger 10y ago
I think that Twitter and Facebook have similar problems - the choices that users make tend to ruin the experience for those users. People choose to follow (and continue following) folks who clutter up the feed.
artursapek 10y ago
> My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. This just reflects real life. It's not a Twitter problem.
dustinmr 10y ago
Sounds like you want RSS and blogs.
Uhhrrr 10y ago
Yes! It would be nice to set a "like" threshold on high-volume accounts, so I only see the top 10% of their tweets.
Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
So much this. I manage (using Echofon) by muting large numbers of people and casting them into 'talkative' and 'very-talkative' lists, which I glance at occasionally. The less frenetic tweeters then make up my main always-on feed. But it's a horrible hack for something that is so fundamental to the user experience. Twitter could be so much better by fixing a few low-hanging UX fruit like this. Three others: * let me zoom in on a picture without having to right-click and "Open image in new tab". I can't believe I actually have to point this out. * text docs as attachments (like pics/videos). A stream of tweets from the same author, replying to each other is kinda cute once, not so much the next n000 times. * it would be nice if any videos actually played in my incredibly weird rare browser (some thing called Chromium)
NumberCruncher 10y ago
>> those whose who have something worth saying tend to ...write books. It was never so easy buying books like today, so I don't get why I should waste my time reading #random #unimportant #stuff written by some social media managing intern from Bangalore.
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  No but seriously... so much this. Pardon my casualness. Whenever we strive for both 'quality' (of information, talk/debate, etc.) and 'brevity', we end up with the exact opposite of books: traits d'esprit as they say in french, #randomWordPlays of the empty kind that made Levi Strauss hypothesize that humans didn't really form sentences but rather patched together chunks of expressions they had memorized (he was proven wrong by linguistics later on, but damn was his assumption so impeccably fitting much of the anthropological data). See any bland instance of "cheesy jpeg + logically flawed pensum" boasting thousands of likes/reshares circa 2017 to prove this point. It's nothing new either, for as long as documented human societies existed, mind-numbing memes apparently were part of the landscape. For about as long, some (always much fewer) people prefered reading books. Or even writing them. I don't think Twitter can ever be anywhere but at the far opposite side of books and quality discourse. Or it would become something else. Twitter is meant for remarks, quick-shot killer moves, and plugs. It's basically an ad board for opinion, and you've made a sale when someone likes/shares your tweet. Some people might defigure the sacred columns with a Shakespeare quote here and there, but vandalizing its culture is the only way to make a smart tweet. I think it's OK that Twitter is 'dumb', as in non-filtering. Neutral towards speech, unpurposed. We need that too, just like we need curated libraries. It's fine that people have a place to vent and unwind. So long as they don't mistake that for an actual forum of opinion, let alone representative of anything but the few 'influencers' and their circles.
rcraft 10y ago
Honest question - why not just unfollow those people that incessantly tweet worthless information? I'm not saying its easy to find quality Twitter users to follow - but its certainly easy to unfollow bad users. Twitter could certainly improve their algorithms that recommend people to follow, surface good content, etc.
azernik 10y ago
> My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. "He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know." I originally thought this was an Israeli saying, because that's the only people I've heard quote it (usually journalists, referring to bloviating politicians). Turns it it's originally Laozi.
- derrida 10y ago
  ...who had an awful lot of good stuff to say. :-)
jpindar 10y ago
>I want twitter to be a feed of thoughts an opinions from people I respect, or important updates from companies I'm interested in. That's EXACTLY what is is for me... because I only follow people I respect and companies I'm interested in.

alexose 10y ago

I used to work for a (terrific!) company that uses all kinds of natural language processing tools on Twitter data: http://crimsonhexagon.com/ http://crimsonhexagon.com/ Without getting into specifics, I was constantly blown away by the trends we were able to discover just with simple techniques. Twitter sells its data, so it really only pencils out for analytics companies like Crimson Hexagon to be B2B. If I were Twitter, I might recognize this as an opportunity to build good in-house filtering tools that are available to their users.

m-j-fox 10y ago

Yeah. By becoming a big company, Twitter missed her calling as a profitable, sustainable, 5-person operation a la Craigslist. Celebrities and others trying to make a career on the platform ruined it as a small interest-group informal discussion side channel.

timdellinger 10y ago

I think that Twitter and Facebook have similar problems - the choices that users make tend to ruin the experience for those users. People choose to follow (and continue following) folks who clutter up the feed.

artursapek 10y ago

> My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. This just reflects real life. It's not a Twitter problem.

dustinmr 10y ago

Sounds like you want RSS and blogs.

Uhhrrr 10y ago

Yes! It would be nice to set a "like" threshold on high-volume accounts, so I only see the top 10% of their tweets.

Doctor_Fegg 10y ago

So much this. I manage (using Echofon) by muting large numbers of people and casting them into 'talkative' and 'very-talkative' lists, which I glance at occasionally. The less frenetic tweeters then make up my main always-on feed. But it's a horrible hack for something that is so fundamental to the user experience. Twitter could be so much better by fixing a few low-hanging UX fruit like this. Three others: * let me zoom in on a picture without having to right-click and "Open image in new tab". I can't believe I actually have to point this out. * text docs as attachments (like pics/videos). A stream of tweets from the same author, replying to each other is kinda cute once, not so much the next n000 times. * it would be nice if any videos actually played in my incredibly weird rare browser (some thing called Chromium)

NumberCruncher 10y ago

>> those whose who have something worth saying tend to ...write books. It was never so easy buying books like today, so I don't get why I should waste my time reading #random #unimportant #stuff written by some social media managing intern from Bangalore.

K0SM0S 10y ago
No but seriously... so much this. Pardon my casualness. Whenever we strive for both 'quality' (of information, talk/debate, etc.) and 'brevity', we end up with the exact opposite of books: traits d'esprit as they say in french, #randomWordPlays of the empty kind that made Levi Strauss hypothesize that humans didn't really form sentences but rather patched together chunks of expressions they had memorized (he was proven wrong by linguistics later on, but damn was his assumption so impeccably fitting much of the anthropological data). See any bland instance of "cheesy jpeg + logically flawed pensum" boasting thousands of likes/reshares circa 2017 to prove this point. It's nothing new either, for as long as documented human societies existed, mind-numbing memes apparently were part of the landscape. For about as long, some (always much fewer) people prefered reading books. Or even writing them. I don't think Twitter can ever be anywhere but at the far opposite side of books and quality discourse. Or it would become something else. Twitter is meant for remarks, quick-shot killer moves, and plugs. It's basically an ad board for opinion, and you've made a sale when someone likes/shares your tweet. Some people might defigure the sacred columns with a Shakespeare quote here and there, but vandalizing its culture is the only way to make a smart tweet. I think it's OK that Twitter is 'dumb', as in non-filtering. Neutral towards speech, unpurposed. We need that too, just like we need curated libraries. It's fine that people have a place to vent and unwind. So long as they don't mistake that for an actual forum of opinion, let alone representative of anything but the few 'influencers' and their circles.

rcraft 10y ago

Honest question - why not just unfollow those people that incessantly tweet worthless information? I'm not saying its easy to find quality Twitter users to follow - but its certainly easy to unfollow bad users. Twitter could certainly improve their algorithms that recommend people to follow, surface good content, etc.

azernik 10y ago

> My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. "He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know." I originally thought this was an Israeli saying, because that's the only people I've heard quote it (usually journalists, referring to bloviating politicians). Turns it it's originally Laozi.

derrida 10y ago
...who had an awful lot of good stuff to say. :-)

jpindar 10y ago

>I want twitter to be a feed of thoughts an opinions from people I respect, or important updates from companies I'm interested in. That's EXACTLY what is is for me... because I only follow people I respect and companies I'm interested in.