4 ms·

This is sad, but true. You can't ask the public to draw a line between your personal and professional life. A good rule of thumb I was taught that if you would

by cykho 14y ago

This is sad, but true. You can't ask the public to draw a line between your personal and professional life. A good rule of thumb I was taught that if you wouldn't want to see it on the cover of the New York Times then don't write it!

smacktoward 14y ago
The problem here isn't the notion of personal Twitter accounts. It's Twitter itself. Twitter is designed to be encourage users to post things without thinking too hard about it. So they do, and sometimes that results in them saying stupid things that they would never have said if there had been even a tiny speed bump along the way to force them to think about it. Then they get in trouble if they're lucky, or lose their jobs/suffer social ostracism if they're not so lucky. This is nothing new, it's been happening for as long as Twitter has been around. I can remember it happening to political pundit Ezra Klein back in 2008: http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/is-ezra-klein-in-trouble-at-msnbc_b10038 http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/is-ezra-klein-in-troub... The problem is that Twitter's design is at odds with its actual nature. It's designed to feel breezy and conversational, but it's really about publishing, with all the permanence and exposure that implies. If you say something dumb in a conversation, it floats away on the wind unless someone else involved makes a concerted effort to tell people about it. If you say something dumb on Twitter, the ease of re-tweeting can make it blow up into a Big Thing in minutes. If people keep shooting themselves in the foot with significant real-world consequences while using your application, year after year, it seems reasonable that at some point people would start wondering whether it was the fault of the application instead of the users. But Twitter apparently has not reached that point yet. (If you want a more fleshed-out version of this argument, I wrote one here a couple of months ago: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/ http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/)
- TrevorJ 14y ago
  I don't buy this argument. Communicating verbally requires far less friction than posting to Twitter does, and yet professionals have managed to not say everything that crosses their mind when it isn't appropriate.
  - incision 14y ago
    I think the parent addressed this pretty clearly. "If you say something dumb in a conversation, it floats away on the wind unless someone else involved makes a concerted effort to tell people about it."
    - yuhong 14y ago
      That don't make Twitter not a good idea. The problems needs to be fixed properly.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    Or not..... comments about "legitimate rape" come to mind.

by cykho 14y ago

smacktoward 14y ago

The problem here isn't the notion of personal Twitter accounts. It's Twitter itself. Twitter is designed to be encourage users to post things without thinking too hard about it. So they do, and sometimes that results in them saying stupid things that they would never have said if there had been even a tiny speed bump along the way to force them to think about it. Then they get in trouble if they're lucky, or lose their jobs/suffer social ostracism if they're not so lucky. This is nothing new, it's been happening for as long as Twitter has been around. I can remember it happening to political pundit Ezra Klein back in 2008: http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/is-ezra-klein-in-trouble-at-msnbc_b10038 http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/is-ezra-klein-in-troub... The problem is that Twitter's design is at odds with its actual nature. It's designed to feel breezy and conversational, but it's really about publishing, with all the permanence and exposure that implies. If you say something dumb in a conversation, it floats away on the wind unless someone else involved makes a concerted effort to tell people about it. If you say something dumb on Twitter, the ease of re-tweeting can make it blow up into a Big Thing in minutes. If people keep shooting themselves in the foot with significant real-world consequences while using your application, year after year, it seems reasonable that at some point people would start wondering whether it was the fault of the application instead of the users. But Twitter apparently has not reached that point yet. (If you want a more fleshed-out version of this argument, I wrote one here a couple of months ago: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/ http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/)

TrevorJ 14y ago
I don't buy this argument. Communicating verbally requires far less friction than posting to Twitter does, and yet professionals have managed to not say everything that crosses their mind when it isn't appropriate.
- incision 14y ago
  I think the parent addressed this pretty clearly. "If you say something dumb in a conversation, it floats away on the wind unless someone else involved makes a concerted effort to tell people about it."
  - yuhong 14y ago
    That don't make Twitter not a good idea. The problems needs to be fixed properly.
- ams6110 14y ago
  Or not..... comments about "legitimate rape" come to mind.