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> and wants to see Twitter add value to society in some way. Define "add value", because otherwise I'm laughing hard at this notion. If you define it purely
by Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> and wants to see Twitter add value to society in some way.
Define "add value", because otherwise I'm laughing hard at this notion.
If you define it purely as "produce a product that people enjoy using or find useful", then sure, it adds value.
But at a higher level, asking if it's a net positive on society as a whole, and I'd say Twitter will never succeed at that. Social media has caused a breakdown in political discourse where people no longer seek to understand, but instead seek to "win", and Twitter's short message limit completely eliminated any possibility of actual conversations in favor of 140-character[0] zingers that are nothing more than ridiculous straw men. Nuance is a thing of the past.
[0] I know it's 280 now, but for the longest time it was 140, and I'm not sure the difference really matters. It's still incredibly limiting.
- mulmen 5y agoI’m not convinced Twitter changed political discourse. It just lowered the price of a microphone to a point that I can get public-transit levels of discourse without leaving my home.
- sangnoir 5y ago> Define "add value", because otherwise I'm laughing hard at this notion. I have a NLP/linguistics hobby,and Twitter has been a fantastic gold mine for generating corpora for "low-resource[1]" languages. No other social network is as open as Twitter is to scraping such information, and I have no confidence this will be the case if it's taken private to "unlock value". Hell, I even planned to use a Twitter bot to generate parallel corpora (for translations) since Twitter provides easy and free access to native speakers of almost every language that is currently spoken on this planet. I'm just a filthy casual, I bet there are hundreds (or thousands) of PhDs and papers that would not have been possible without Twitter; I have no doubt that Twitter adds value to society by virtue of its breadth and openness. Sadly, Twitter is also is detrimental to society, by virtue of its breadth and openness; but I know which side is easier to monetized. 1. https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/62868/high-low-resources-language-what-does-it-mean https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/62868/high-l...
- cnelsenmilt 5y agoI agree with you, certainly, but you must see that a shareholder could believe that Twitter has this potential under current management but wouldn't under Musk, or under a different management but still not with Musk. Whether they are mistaken can only be determined by playing out the future.