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I don't think Twitter is a conversational medium, essentially. It certainly isn't a good one, for complex conversations. It's hard to find the horse-and-boogi

I don't think Twitter is a conversational medium, essentially. It certainly isn't a good one, for complex conversations. It's hard to find the horse-and-boogie analogy for something that's essentially new, but bumper sticker, or billboard is more apt. On the public utility front... email exists, RSS exists, the www exists... all open platforms, public by some (the right) definitions. The problem is that an open field (especially when there're multi-$bn opportunities) is innovative, resourceful and will often outcompete the public utility. How are you going to stop the next twitter from winning the get users game, ban texting apps?

theNJR 8y ago
NPR and PBS didn't invent anything, they used an established technology to be a not-for-profit public good. The National Public Internet wouldn't be breaking ground, it would be using social media for the public good.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  That is all fine. You could have public (state owned) websites, apps, social networks and such. I'd argue that wikipedia, lichess and such are public services already. I personally have more confidence in that sort of a model (os, community run, etc) than a traditional public service model, but there's room in the bed for three. The problem is the same though. These services need to do more than just exist. They need popularity. It's very well to say "twitter should be a public service." I have no doubt that it could be. But, it'd still need to outcompete commercial competition.
  - Shivetya 8y ago
    Oh fuck no. the last thing we want is state owned and operated social networks and apps. whats next, swipe left to report hate speech? swipe right to report suspicious activity. a site where every picture is subject to scrutiny by government agencies because they were submitted to same? the idea that twitter should be a public utility vastly over exaggerates its impact in the life of the average person, American or not. If anything that message is tailor made to boost the value of the company. there is nothing twitter is doing that cannot be replicated, you just need time, good marketing, and money. Three needs of every successful business.
WorldMaker 8y ago
> I don't think Twitter is a conversational medium, essentially. As a very early Twitter adopter, I keep thinking this may be a fundamental breakdown in any consideration of what Twitter actually is as a product. Early Twitter was a conversation facilitator for pushing people to bump up in person (at for instance conferences, tracking a general zeitgeist of where interesting people were), or into more conversive media such as blogs / forums / IM / IRC. Early Twitter staff even knew this as this is partly the very motivating use cases the platform was built to enable. (The old 140 character limit to make sure that SMS notifications, and sending/responding to Tweets via SMS, were always an option, partly because of that push to in-person meetups in the era of dumb phones. Having mostly dropped out of Twitter in 2018, it's not a surprise to me that most of my remaining interactions with it are old SMS notifications I intentionally left on over the years, as that was the product I originally signed on for.) A lot of the "we need to be our own conversational medium" standpoint from "modern" Twitter stems almost directly from "we need to monetize as many ads as possible". It's a bad fit for what Twitter was as a product originally, and it's creating so many of these gulfs where people forget that "let's take this conversation off Twitter" is a valid option, much less the best way to handle things more complex than bite-size soundbites. (It's working out for now for Twitter's investors, but how long until they burn out their reputation by being a toxic "conversation medium", because they are bad at being a "conversation medium" yet they need to be a "conversation medium" to sell ads?)
yyyymmddhhmmss 8y ago
Kara lacks a certain subtlety (or is it dignity?) when it comes to journalism. She regularly puts her own esteem above her work.
cabalamat 8y ago
> RSS exists Which Twitter dropped support for in 2012. > How are you going to stop the next twitter from winning the get users game, ban texting apps? Hopefully the next Twitter will be the ActivityPub-powered Fediverse. But say something wins big on the Fediverse, becoming bigger than everything else, and pivots to make itself a walled garden, with all the drawbacks of Facebook/Twitter? How could we stop that? Maybe one possibility would to put all content on the Fediverse under a copyright license similar in principle to the GPL, where any website that copies its content has to allow its own user-generated content to be accessed under the same terms.

theNJR 8y ago

NPR and PBS didn't invent anything, they used an established technology to be a not-for-profit public good. The National Public Internet wouldn't be breaking ground, it would be using social media for the public good.

dalbasal 8y ago
That is all fine. You could have public (state owned) websites, apps, social networks and such. I'd argue that wikipedia, lichess and such are public services already. I personally have more confidence in that sort of a model (os, community run, etc) than a traditional public service model, but there's room in the bed for three. The problem is the same though. These services need to do more than just exist. They need popularity. It's very well to say "twitter should be a public service." I have no doubt that it could be. But, it'd still need to outcompete commercial competition.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  Oh fuck no. the last thing we want is state owned and operated social networks and apps. whats next, swipe left to report hate speech? swipe right to report suspicious activity. a site where every picture is subject to scrutiny by government agencies because they were submitted to same? the idea that twitter should be a public utility vastly over exaggerates its impact in the life of the average person, American or not. If anything that message is tailor made to boost the value of the company. there is nothing twitter is doing that cannot be replicated, you just need time, good marketing, and money. Three needs of every successful business.

WorldMaker 8y ago

> I don't think Twitter is a conversational medium, essentially. As a very early Twitter adopter, I keep thinking this may be a fundamental breakdown in any consideration of what Twitter actually is as a product. Early Twitter was a conversation facilitator for pushing people to bump up in person (at for instance conferences, tracking a general zeitgeist of where interesting people were), or into more conversive media such as blogs / forums / IM / IRC. Early Twitter staff even knew this as this is partly the very motivating use cases the platform was built to enable. (The old 140 character limit to make sure that SMS notifications, and sending/responding to Tweets via SMS, were always an option, partly because of that push to in-person meetups in the era of dumb phones. Having mostly dropped out of Twitter in 2018, it's not a surprise to me that most of my remaining interactions with it are old SMS notifications I intentionally left on over the years, as that was the product I originally signed on for.) A lot of the "we need to be our own conversational medium" standpoint from "modern" Twitter stems almost directly from "we need to monetize as many ads as possible". It's a bad fit for what Twitter was as a product originally, and it's creating so many of these gulfs where people forget that "let's take this conversation off Twitter" is a valid option, much less the best way to handle things more complex than bite-size soundbites. (It's working out for now for Twitter's investors, but how long until they burn out their reputation by being a toxic "conversation medium", because they are bad at being a "conversation medium" yet they need to be a "conversation medium" to sell ads?)

yyyymmddhhmmss 8y ago

Kara lacks a certain subtlety (or is it dignity?) when it comes to journalism. She regularly puts her own esteem above her work.

cabalamat 8y ago

> RSS exists Which Twitter dropped support for in 2012. > How are you going to stop the next twitter from winning the get users game, ban texting apps? Hopefully the next Twitter will be the ActivityPub-powered Fediverse. But say something wins big on the Fediverse, becoming bigger than everything else, and pivots to make itself a walled garden, with all the drawbacks of Facebook/Twitter? How could we stop that? Maybe one possibility would to put all content on the Fediverse under a copyright license similar in principle to the GPL, where any website that copies its content has to allow its own user-generated content to be accessed under the same terms.