4 ms·

I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter. But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account sinc

by 1ris 9y ago

I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter. But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you. If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still restricts verboseness. And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being twitter does not earn them any money. /edit: 1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like 4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.

hk__2 9y ago
> I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure) It’s written on your Twitter profile, FYI.
- 1ris 9y ago
  I'm not a active user and unfortunately don't care enough to go there, log in to check it. If feel like I tried to "get" twitter long before it was mainstream, that's all i wanted to say.
ianamartin 9y ago
Agree 100%. I've tried to really get into it many times. Maybe once a year or so, I'll tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to really 'get' twitter this time." The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person. I'm not terrible at saying things either. I think I have total fewer than 50 tweets and around 300 followers. 6 new followers per tweet seems like a pretty good rate of gaining attention. But I don't know anything about these people or how to engage with them. So I don't. Frankly, I do assign part of the blame for the rise of the internet outrage machine to twitter conditioning people's behavior, no matter how unintentional. The formulae is simple: find something you think is distasteful. Tweet about how it's evil or racist or sexist or communist or whatever bad thing you want to make sure people don't think you are. Sit back and watch all of the other people who don't want people to think they are that thing pick up their pitchforks and go to town against your target in the manner of something I can only describe as as mindless as a holy war. Now sit back, relax, and feel good: mission accomplished. The same things happen on Facebook and Reddit. But it's more obviously absurd on twitter. Social issues are too complex to be dealt with effectively in 140 or even 280 letters. The best you can do is point a finger at someone or some thing and throw a label at it. It really is garbage that's lowered the standards of discourse. Again, I don't think tha was ever twitter's intent. But that's the effect it's had. I understand the argument that various platforms we use are simply a reflection of society as it really exists and has always existed. And I disagree with it. Every social interaction has a reward potential. Obtaining those rewards is what generally drives behavior. The modes of interaction that we have in person generally reward positive social interactions. Both my parents are conservative, religious people working in a university environment. As I was growing up, they would have liberal and non-religious colleagues over for dinner because that was how university professors hung out after work 30 years ago. Disagreements were polite, thoughtful, and lengthy. This was a positive interaction for both sides of the debate. You get to sit down with someone who strongly disagrees with your foundational principles, eat dinner, and walk away respecting the other people even though you disagree. I'm not pining for the good old days or saying that technology is bad because human interaction promotes social behavior. But the behavioral reward is there: don't act like a dick, and you're colleagues will respect you. With twitter, on the other hand, the only behavioral reward available is attention--measured by likes and followers. And the easiest way to get that attention high is not through genuine, respectful, human interaction. The fastest way to being a twitter super star is anti social behavior: acting like a dick. Humans will always take the path of least resistance to the greatest reward. Whether that's using sloppy logic and false equivocations to label some thing you don't like as evil or if it's embracing the evil label, magnifying it, and claiming it as a right, either way, it represents the lowest form of discourse. And twitter is the emperor of low discourse. Facebook and Reddit are just wannabes. That's a lot of criticism for one of the world's largest communication platforms. You might ask if I have a solution to any of that. I don't. I'm not sure it needs a solution. Maybe twitter should just embrace what it is and accept that. Shit. I think that was more than 280 characters. Oh well. No one on twitter would read it anyway.
- visarga 9y ago
  I've had a different experience with Deep Learning related Twitter - I can talk to anyone and they reply back to me: authors of papers, celebs (for example, Andrej Karpathy who heads Tesla's self driving car had the time to write a line to poor me).
- wpietri 9y ago
  There's nothing wrong with mainly being a reader on Twitter. That's a valid and common way to use it.
nu11p01n73R 9y ago
I think the quality of the content really depend on the people we end up following. When I started Twitter, I started out with my school/college friends and some random tech blogs/site etc. My friends doesn't tweet a lot(Less people use Twitter in India compared to Facebook) or the sites that I follow mostly had crapy content, making my timeline looking awful. I stopped using Twitter. About a year before I came back to the platform, un-followed all of them and started following tech people. Mostly people from js/golang/python communities. Now my timeline has more quality content that I do not get time to read all of them(links to blogs etc). I do agree that at times there are some political opinions but not the majority so its okay.
- visarga 9y ago
  I've had a Twitter account since 2008 but couldn't quite see what was great about it. Recently, I have 'followed' a bunch of Deep Learning guys and it's a whole different thing. It's even more dynamic than /r/machinelearning, maybe the best place to discuss DL online.
wingerlang 9y ago
> It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other Really? My timeline is nothing but fun, informative and new content I usually want to see. Of course there's the occasional annoying retweet or sponsored tweets. You really need to follow only people who generally tweets what you're interested in and regularly trim people who seemed interesting but ended up annoying. For me it is best used as a constant buzz of more or less interesting material that you can look at very very briefly every now and then (I check it less than once per day).

by 1ris 9y ago

hk__2 9y ago

> I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure) It’s written on your Twitter profile, FYI.

1ris 9y ago
I'm not a active user and unfortunately don't care enough to go there, log in to check it. If feel like I tried to "get" twitter long before it was mainstream, that's all i wanted to say.

ianamartin 9y ago

Agree 100%. I've tried to really get into it many times. Maybe once a year or so, I'll tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to really 'get' twitter this time." The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person. I'm not terrible at saying things either. I think I have total fewer than 50 tweets and around 300 followers. 6 new followers per tweet seems like a pretty good rate of gaining attention. But I don't know anything about these people or how to engage with them. So I don't. Frankly, I do assign part of the blame for the rise of the internet outrage machine to twitter conditioning people's behavior, no matter how unintentional. The formulae is simple: find something you think is distasteful. Tweet about how it's evil or racist or sexist or communist or whatever bad thing you want to make sure people don't think you are. Sit back and watch all of the other people who don't want people to think they are that thing pick up their pitchforks and go to town against your target in the manner of something I can only describe as as mindless as a holy war. Now sit back, relax, and feel good: mission accomplished. The same things happen on Facebook and Reddit. But it's more obviously absurd on twitter. Social issues are too complex to be dealt with effectively in 140 or even 280 letters. The best you can do is point a finger at someone or some thing and throw a label at it. It really is garbage that's lowered the standards of discourse. Again, I don't think tha was ever twitter's intent. But that's the effect it's had. I understand the argument that various platforms we use are simply a reflection of society as it really exists and has always existed. And I disagree with it. Every social interaction has a reward potential. Obtaining those rewards is what generally drives behavior. The modes of interaction that we have in person generally reward positive social interactions. Both my parents are conservative, religious people working in a university environment. As I was growing up, they would have liberal and non-religious colleagues over for dinner because that was how university professors hung out after work 30 years ago. Disagreements were polite, thoughtful, and lengthy. This was a positive interaction for both sides of the debate. You get to sit down with someone who strongly disagrees with your foundational principles, eat dinner, and walk away respecting the other people even though you disagree. I'm not pining for the good old days or saying that technology is bad because human interaction promotes social behavior. But the behavioral reward is there: don't act like a dick, and you're colleagues will respect you. With twitter, on the other hand, the only behavioral reward available is attention--measured by likes and followers. And the easiest way to get that attention high is not through genuine, respectful, human interaction. The fastest way to being a twitter super star is anti social behavior: acting like a dick. Humans will always take the path of least resistance to the greatest reward. Whether that's using sloppy logic and false equivocations to label some thing you don't like as evil or if it's embracing the evil label, magnifying it, and claiming it as a right, either way, it represents the lowest form of discourse. And twitter is the emperor of low discourse. Facebook and Reddit are just wannabes. That's a lot of criticism for one of the world's largest communication platforms. You might ask if I have a solution to any of that. I don't. I'm not sure it needs a solution. Maybe twitter should just embrace what it is and accept that. Shit. I think that was more than 280 characters. Oh well. No one on twitter would read it anyway.

visarga 9y ago
I've had a different experience with Deep Learning related Twitter - I can talk to anyone and they reply back to me: authors of papers, celebs (for example, Andrej Karpathy who heads Tesla's self driving car had the time to write a line to poor me).
wpietri 9y ago
There's nothing wrong with mainly being a reader on Twitter. That's a valid and common way to use it.

nu11p01n73R 9y ago

I think the quality of the content really depend on the people we end up following. When I started Twitter, I started out with my school/college friends and some random tech blogs/site etc. My friends doesn't tweet a lot(Less people use Twitter in India compared to Facebook) or the sites that I follow mostly had crapy content, making my timeline looking awful. I stopped using Twitter. About a year before I came back to the platform, un-followed all of them and started following tech people. Mostly people from js/golang/python communities. Now my timeline has more quality content that I do not get time to read all of them(links to blogs etc). I do agree that at times there are some political opinions but not the majority so its okay.

visarga 9y ago
I've had a Twitter account since 2008 but couldn't quite see what was great about it. Recently, I have 'followed' a bunch of Deep Learning guys and it's a whole different thing. It's even more dynamic than /r/machinelearning, maybe the best place to discuss DL online.

wingerlang 9y ago

> It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other Really? My timeline is nothing but fun, informative and new content I usually want to see. Of course there's the occasional annoying retweet or sponsored tweets. You really need to follow only people who generally tweets what you're interested in and regularly trim people who seemed interesting but ended up annoying. For me it is best used as a constant buzz of more or less interesting material that you can look at very very briefly every now and then (I check it less than once per day).