4 ms·
The article title is misleading, they haven't "quit twitter", they're just no longer archiving every public tweet (except for a select few, e.g. those that are
by teh_klev 9y ago
The article title is misleading, they haven't "quit twitter", they're just no longer archiving every public tweet (except for a select few, e.g. those that are likely to be historically interesting/noteworthy - e.g. Trump's twitter utterances).
Perhaps the title should be editorialised to something like:
"Library of Congress announce a change in collections practice for Twitter"
edit:
@dang - how about changing the link to:
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/ https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-arch...
or
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/files/2017/12/2017dec_twitter_white-paper.pdf https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/files/2017/12/2017dec_twitter_whit...
- tw1010 9y agoMisleading, maybe, but I don't think many were confused about the actual meaning of the headline (I certainly wasn't).
- fermienrico 9y agoSo you actually read it as "The library of congress quits archiving Twitter"? Hmm...
- tw1010 9y agoYes. But I had heard of the news story about them starting to archive twitter. If I hadn't, maybe I would be more confused. Why would the library of congress quit twitter, I thought, and why would it even be a worthy enough event to warrant a news article? If they didn't find value in it, they would just stop posting. Why would a neutral government agency take something like a political stance against twitter? If I was wrong, yes, it definitely was news worthy. But occam's razor, and the law of clickbait, led me to the conclusion that most likely, it means that they've stopped archiving tweets, and not that they have deleted their account.
- teh_klev 9y agoHmmm...I dunno, I initially wondered if the current White House residents had issued a diktat shutting down their twitter account. Not an unimaginable thing in these strange times.
- francisofascii 9y agoI and probably many others read it as the twitter account @librarycongress being deactivated.
- aylmao 9y agoThe tone of the article seems also rather biased against Twitter. For example, it mentions; > “Today, we announce a change in collections practice for Twitter. Effective Jan. 1, 2018, the Library will acquire tweets on a selective basis—similar to our collections of web sites.” The phrasing was elegant, but the sentiment was nonetheless familiar: “Quitting this shit!!!!” No. That's not at all the sentiment I get from that. The volume has probably grown too big and it makes little sense to archive spend money archiving all of it.
- teh_klev 9y agoYep, the New Yorker article seems to be trying to make a fuss out of something that isn't there.
- forgottenpass 9y agoThese days I find the relationship between writers and twitter more interesting than twitter itself. It's like they still haven't internalized the properties of the medium that were well-understood back in 2010. Maybe they're just the voice of perspectives that are more widespread, but every news or pop culture take I see about twitter seems to be born from the unexpectedly-complicated relationship they seem to have with becoming yet another head in an unimaginably large crowd of people. Where everyone can talk to everyone, anyone, or nobody in particular.
- dang 9y agoI agree. URL changed from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-library-of-congress-quits-twitter https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-libra..., which points to this.
- teh_klev 9y agoAppreciated.