5 ms·

Is there anyone using Twitter with some expectation of having private conversations? I mean even the name of the service indicates the total opposite. I doubt

Is there anyone using Twitter with some expectation of having private conversations? I mean even the name of the service indicates the total opposite. I doubt Twitter would even exist without its current nature. 40% of Twitter users are lurkers and according to Twitter they have 500 million dormant users (people that visit Twitter without signing in).

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
The problem is, sometimes you don't have a choice because the people you need to talk to are only reachable through Twitter. I once bought tickets for a sold-out conference that way (at face value, not a scalper, just someone who had a ticket and couldn't go). I had to wire the money and would only learn at the entrance to the conference whether I got scammed or not. A quick scroll down the Twitter timeline of that person convinced me that I can most likely trust them, while at the same time clearly showing how much of a privacy disaster Twitter is.
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  But this is tricky too. Like for example asking for user support via Twitter. People choose to expose the privacy of their purchases as long as they can gain some audience for their frustrations and solve their problem.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Do you mean that the person you bought the tickets from had obviously misunderstood the context that they were posting messages into? I follow a few dozen people and don't observe ~any~ misunderstanding that it is very public. There's people that like to share, but they are obviously clear on what they are doing.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    I don't think the person misunderstood. I think they did realize that what they were saying was public, but didn't care too much - they just wanted to get a message to a specific person, and Twitter made the easiest way to do so to say it publicly. As a result, a lot of such messages ended up being public, and while each of them was innocent, all of them taken together were saying a lot about that person. And the latter may have been an implication that the person didn't realize.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

The problem is, sometimes you don't have a choice because the people you need to talk to are only reachable through Twitter. I once bought tickets for a sold-out conference that way (at face value, not a scalper, just someone who had a ticket and couldn't go). I had to wire the money and would only learn at the entrance to the conference whether I got scammed or not. A quick scroll down the Twitter timeline of that person convinced me that I can most likely trust them, while at the same time clearly showing how much of a privacy disaster Twitter is.

whoisjuan 6y ago
But this is tricky too. Like for example asking for user support via Twitter. People choose to expose the privacy of their purchases as long as they can gain some audience for their frustrations and solve their problem.
maxerickson 6y ago
Do you mean that the person you bought the tickets from had obviously misunderstood the context that they were posting messages into? I follow a few dozen people and don't observe ~any~ misunderstanding that it is very public. There's people that like to share, but they are obviously clear on what they are doing.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  I don't think the person misunderstood. I think they did realize that what they were saying was public, but didn't care too much - they just wanted to get a message to a specific person, and Twitter made the easiest way to do so to say it publicly. As a result, a lot of such messages ended up being public, and while each of them was innocent, all of them taken together were saying a lot about that person. And the latter may have been an implication that the person didn't realize.