7 ms·

Why I Don’t Use Twitter

57 points by edw519 17y ago

unalone 17y ago
Facebook's last redesign killed any lingering desires for me to use Twitter. I don't like the constant Twitter-hate some people think is necessary, but I don't feel the need to tweet, either.
- Legion 17y ago
  Facebook and Twitter are completely different. Don't see how a redesign of one would matter one iota for the other. Facebook is about one-to-one relationships. Yes, there are "groups" and "become a fan of X", but the essence of Facebook, as in other traditional social networking sites, are bi-directional relationships. When I "friend" you and you accept, we are "friends" in both directions. There are no one-way "friends". Twitter is broadcasting, one-to-many relationships. "Following" someone is a one-direction relationship. You can tell the people from older sites who don't grok this, insisting that all follows need be "followed back". But that fails to understand the power and appeal of Twitter. You can follow Oprah's Twitter feed, but you can't be Oprah's Facebook friend. (Replace "Oprah" with someone whose words you think hold value).
  - Legion 17y ago
    Also, something I left out: one of the most valuable parts of Twitter comes not from following certain people, but following a search term (or "hashtag"). Example: Michael Vick signing with the Eagles this past week. I found out about this from following the #NFL tag. I saw it there hours before even the first rumor blog picked it up, let alone ESPN. For something more appropriate for this site: following the #defcon tag was easily the best resource I had during that event while I was stuck at work. Anything interesting that happened appeared instantly there. Twitter is amazing for unfolding events. There's absolutely no counterpart to this on sites like Facebook, it's just a completely different focus.
    - pyre 17y ago
      > I saw it there hours before even the first rumor blog picked it up, let alone ESPN. Does it really matter that you got the rumor/news hours before the story 'hit'? I can understand that getting such news as fast as possible might be a utility if you are a sports gamble, or sports reporter... But for the vast majority of people, do those extra couple of hours really matter?
  - unalone 17y ago
    I don't follow news. All I would use Twitter for is broadcasting to and receiving from friends. Once I cared about letting other people see my thoughts; not any more. So to me, Facebook serves for what I want it to serve as. I'd imagine that's the case for others. As I said, I understand Twitter, I just don't see a need to use it.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
pibefision 17y ago
Totally agree. There is so much vanity & too much noise. Also, it's very difficult to have an interesting conversation. It's better to follow interesting people using a reader (i prefer Google Reader)
- ludwig 17y ago
  Why not do both? Some tidbits of information don't merit an entire blog post, but in aggregate they can be quite useful. I do agree with you regarding the noise level, but followcost.com has helped me a lot when deciding whether to follow someone or not. Incidentally, @newsycombinator on twitter has been one of my favorites, due to the steady stream of interesting links :-)
  - Periodic 17y ago
    Re: @newsycombinator But then you've thrown out the voting and the comments, which is the whole reason I come to news.ycombinator.com. Did this article get 100 points or 10? Does it have 50 comments or 5? Time is precious. I need context!
    - ludwig 17y ago
      Re: Re: @newsycombinator No, if it's interesting enough (which is most of the time), I'll actually visit the site again. But you're right, I do wish it linked to HN first instead of sending me directly to the article.
chrischen 17y ago
> (”Brunch at Hi-Spot at 1!”) becomes impersonal and meaningless when it’s sent to so many This somehow happens to all social networks. They try to be more open when what we really need is a closed network. I have > 300 friends on facebook (cause I just can't say no), constantly spammed with meaningless invitations like ("lost my phone need your number," and I barely know the guy/girl) and whatnot that i've finally completely stopped using facebook. Proud abstainer of facebook and twitter here.
symesc 17y ago
Why I Don't Care If You Don't Use Twitter: because if you don't get it, you just don't get it. It's ok.
- Periodic 17y ago
  I'm getting really tired of people saying, "just use Twitter, then you'll get it and you won't know how you lived without it." I tried, but I still don't get it. If I am just not using it "correctly", perhaps someone could enlighten me as to what I'm looking for?
  - barredo 17y ago
    If you don't get it it's fine. Nothing special, nor good nor bad.
  - brandonkm 17y ago
    > perhaps someone could enlighten me as to what I'm looking for? You're looking for information. If you tried out Twitter and you didn't get it, you probably weren't receiving the information you were looking for. Its really amazing how people hype up Twitter and then when someone tries it out "they don't get it". There isn't anything to get but updates about things you're interested in. What you get out of Twitter is directly correlated to how well you tune your twitterstream. Twitter is valuable to me because it provides me with real time news and updates about the things I'm interested in. It really is that simple.
  - seldo 17y ago
    If you don't get it, then perhaps it's not a good service for you. There's no law saying any website should be universally useful or popular.
    - pyre 17y ago
      That is true. On the other hand, saying that someone "just doesn't get it" until they've used it implies that anyone will 'get it' once they've used it for a while.
afed 17y ago
No one doing anything important uses Twitter.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
teeja 17y ago
He doesn't use Twitter because he can't rattle on and on for paragraphs saying what he could say in 140 chars or much less.
- astrec 17y ago
  Reminds me of a quote often attributed to Cicero, Pascal, Twain etc. I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
  - Periodic 17y ago
    Brevity is a skill. Different things require different amounts of space to adequately explore, and there are different depths you can go to for different audiences. This post was rather long, but I agree that 140 characters is generally too short. As an example, just look at the abuses of language that occur so that people can fit everything into their 140 character limit.
  - gruseom 17y ago
    Reminds me of a quote often attributed to Cicero, Pascal, Twain etc. In this case, for once, we have a definitive source: Letter XVI of Pascal's Provincial Letters: The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/letters-c.html#LETTER%20XVI http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/letters-... I haven't found any evidence that Mark Twain or Cicero said it. Especially in Twain's case, I suspect people just decided he said it because he's known to have been witty.
    - swombat 17y ago
      It is very likely that this was said by many, many people throughout history. Great ideas are rarely picked up by a single great person. See this extract from the introduction to a book about Borges' short stories, posted in my blog at http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great-bloggers-steal http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great... : [Borges’s] sources are innumerable and unexpected. [He] has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: ‘Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.’ Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): ‘We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’ But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): ‘God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’”
pavs 17y ago
Why I don't use techcrunch: Its always about twitter.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- timr 17y ago
  I'm going to infer that 30 people dislike TechCrunch so intensely that they're willing to vote for any negative remark, because otherwise, I can't find any insight in your comment. There are many possible intelligent criticisms to be directed toward TechCrunch, but "always about Twitter" has never been at the top of my list.
  - tdavis 17y ago
    Mostly people upvote things they agree with and ignore the quality and insight of the comment entirely. The exact opposite of how it's supposed to be, but even HN is subject to herd mentality and so on.
  - pavs 17y ago
    You don't have a problem with a guy rambling about why he doesn't use twitter in 100s of words. But you have a problem with another guy rambling about why he doesn't use techcrunch in 140 characters or less? There is very little to nothing insightful to add to a discussion about why some guy doesn't like twitter. twitter is not for everyone the same way facebook is not for everyone, IM is not for everyone, IRC is not for everyone. If it's not for you, its not for you. What insightful discussion you could possibly have about this? I added a not very insightful comment on a not very insightful topic. Which is what it deserves. I haven't been following TC for sometime, but until few months ago, when I was actually following them a majority of their story was about twitter.
    - timr 17y ago
      At least the article made some interesting arguments about the value of twitter, the feature-completeness of twitter, and so on. What did the comment add?
redorb 17y ago
My reason for using twitter is on my site that provides vital information on weather, its the easiest way for me to currently connect to all my followers cell phones...
cbarning 17y ago
Funny how this was posted by them to Twitter and drives more traffic to TechCrunch than digg. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/for-techcrunch-twitter-traffic-a-statistical-breakdown/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/for-techcrunch-twitter-...
alex_c 17y ago
The Onion did it 9 years ago: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694 http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694
zmimon 17y ago
Funny, I dislike twitter but nobody else seems to share my reasons. My main reason is that it's a closed centralized service. I suppose somebody will say "it's not closed, it has an open API" and that misses the point: it's closed in the sense that you or I can't start a Twitter service and integrate it on equal terms with the original Twitter. Email / SMTP provided us a successful model and XMPP followed later to show how to do it for real-time messaging. It would have been easy to build Twitter on top of these standards, or to extend them in open ways if necessary. Instead Twitter is a giant step backwards into a time when technology and services were controlled by single vendors. We grew out of that and I thought we would never go back. I'm horrified that the tech digerati are all enthusiastically embracing a headlong rush back into it. I can't understand why nobody seems to care - it's like the enthusiastic embrace of the Iraq war by the media - there's hardly a critical voice to be heard, and yet I can see it will only be a short space of time before people are all realizing the cage they have built for themselves and asking what everyone was thinking.
- al3x 17y ago
  Actually, we at Twitter are thinking quite a bit about exactly this.
  - aaronz3 17y ago
    I was brainstorming a bit about this the other day as well, but I don't have the time/resources to do anything with it. Why can't we have a digital identity that isn't attached to a particular service? If I want to change cell providers I can take my phone number with me, but if I want to switch ISPs/Email providers I have to get a new email address. It would be useful (and in the interest of competition) to provide a way to contact your identity, and you can configure your identity to dispatch messages to whatever service you happen to use at that given time (somewhat ala Google Voice maybe?)
- Andys 17y ago
  Twitter, when you get down to it, is like IRC where everyone has their own channel. When you "follow" a friend, you are joining their channel. IRC is decentralised and is an open, free protocol. I would prefer to keep using IRC but I have started using twitter for the same reason I had to install MSN messenger - to keep in contact with friends who can't or won't use IRC.
hschenker 17y ago
I don't use Twitter myself (either to follow anyone or to post my own stories), but I work for a large tech company, and I fundamentally disagree with the article's first assertion: > Tweets have no value For my organization, tweets do very much have a value - they help us measure the day-to-day sentiment of people interested in our company (customers, prospects, media, partners). Our PR person sends a weekly update of all company-related tweets, organized by topic. (We don't yet categorize by actual sentiment, but that would be fairly simple to do. Since company-related tweets still typically number fewer than 100 a week, it's easy to judge overall sentiment without an algorithm.) For our use case, at least, Twitter is pure genius. They've taken the natural human tendency to want to share thoughts and ideas with others (in spite of my own introverted personality, studies show the majority of humans are extroverted); they've made it VERY easy for people to do so (there's no guilt in NOT writing a long thesis, since you're limited to 140 characters); and they've built a platform that makes it easy to measure and organize people's thoughts and ideas by topic and sentiment. Whether that'll allow them to ever turn a profit, who knows.
ironsam 17y ago
Twitter is the slap bracelet of the aughts.
idlewords 17y ago
I tried Twitter for a few months as a personal service and found it useless and noisy. But as a method of monitoring support requests and chatter about my project, it's been invaluable. I think the site offers a lot of value as a kind of customer support hotline.
jrockway 17y ago
"My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." Oh sorry, but that's the tone of voice I used to read this article.

57 points by edw519 17y ago

Facebook's last redesign killed any lingering desires for me to use Twitter. I don't like the constant Twitter-hate some people think is necessary, but I don't feel the need to tweet, either.

Legion 17y ago
Facebook and Twitter are completely different. Don't see how a redesign of one would matter one iota for the other. Facebook is about one-to-one relationships. Yes, there are "groups" and "become a fan of X", but the essence of Facebook, as in other traditional social networking sites, are bi-directional relationships. When I "friend" you and you accept, we are "friends" in both directions. There are no one-way "friends". Twitter is broadcasting, one-to-many relationships. "Following" someone is a one-direction relationship. You can tell the people from older sites who don't grok this, insisting that all follows need be "followed back". But that fails to understand the power and appeal of Twitter. You can follow Oprah's Twitter feed, but you can't be Oprah's Facebook friend. (Replace "Oprah" with someone whose words you think hold value).
- Legion 17y ago
  Also, something I left out: one of the most valuable parts of Twitter comes not from following certain people, but following a search term (or "hashtag"). Example: Michael Vick signing with the Eagles this past week. I found out about this from following the #NFL tag. I saw it there hours before even the first rumor blog picked it up, let alone ESPN. For something more appropriate for this site: following the #defcon tag was easily the best resource I had during that event while I was stuck at work. Anything interesting that happened appeared instantly there. Twitter is amazing for unfolding events. There's absolutely no counterpart to this on sites like Facebook, it's just a completely different focus.
  - pyre 17y ago
    > I saw it there hours before even the first rumor blog picked it up, let alone ESPN. Does it really matter that you got the rumor/news hours before the story 'hit'? I can understand that getting such news as fast as possible might be a utility if you are a sports gamble, or sports reporter... But for the vast majority of people, do those extra couple of hours really matter?
- unalone 17y ago
  I don't follow news. All I would use Twitter for is broadcasting to and receiving from friends. Once I cared about letting other people see my thoughts; not any more. So to me, Facebook serves for what I want it to serve as. I'd imagine that's the case for others. As I said, I understand Twitter, I just don't see a need to use it.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

pibefision 17y ago

Totally agree. There is so much vanity & too much noise. Also, it's very difficult to have an interesting conversation. It's better to follow interesting people using a reader (i prefer Google Reader)

ludwig 17y ago
Why not do both? Some tidbits of information don't merit an entire blog post, but in aggregate they can be quite useful. I do agree with you regarding the noise level, but followcost.com has helped me a lot when deciding whether to follow someone or not. Incidentally, @newsycombinator on twitter has been one of my favorites, due to the steady stream of interesting links :-)
- Periodic 17y ago
  Re: @newsycombinator But then you've thrown out the voting and the comments, which is the whole reason I come to news.ycombinator.com. Did this article get 100 points or 10? Does it have 50 comments or 5? Time is precious. I need context!
  - ludwig 17y ago
    Re: Re: @newsycombinator No, if it's interesting enough (which is most of the time), I'll actually visit the site again. But you're right, I do wish it linked to HN first instead of sending me directly to the article.

chrischen 17y ago

> (”Brunch at Hi-Spot at 1!”) becomes impersonal and meaningless when it’s sent to so many This somehow happens to all social networks. They try to be more open when what we really need is a closed network. I have > 300 friends on facebook (cause I just can't say no), constantly spammed with meaningless invitations like ("lost my phone need your number," and I barely know the guy/girl) and whatnot that i've finally completely stopped using facebook. Proud abstainer of facebook and twitter here.

symesc 17y ago

Why I Don't Care If You Don't Use Twitter: because if you don't get it, you just don't get it. It's ok.

Periodic 17y ago
I'm getting really tired of people saying, "just use Twitter, then you'll get it and you won't know how you lived without it." I tried, but I still don't get it. If I am just not using it "correctly", perhaps someone could enlighten me as to what I'm looking for?
- barredo 17y ago
  If you don't get it it's fine. Nothing special, nor good nor bad.
- brandonkm 17y ago
  > perhaps someone could enlighten me as to what I'm looking for? You're looking for information. If you tried out Twitter and you didn't get it, you probably weren't receiving the information you were looking for. Its really amazing how people hype up Twitter and then when someone tries it out "they don't get it". There isn't anything to get but updates about things you're interested in. What you get out of Twitter is directly correlated to how well you tune your twitterstream. Twitter is valuable to me because it provides me with real time news and updates about the things I'm interested in. It really is that simple.
- seldo 17y ago
  If you don't get it, then perhaps it's not a good service for you. There's no law saying any website should be universally useful or popular.
  - pyre 17y ago
    That is true. On the other hand, saying that someone "just doesn't get it" until they've used it implies that anyone will 'get it' once they've used it for a while.

afed 17y ago

No one doing anything important uses Twitter.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

teeja 17y ago

He doesn't use Twitter because he can't rattle on and on for paragraphs saying what he could say in 140 chars or much less.

astrec 17y ago
Reminds me of a quote often attributed to Cicero, Pascal, Twain etc. I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
- Periodic 17y ago
  Brevity is a skill. Different things require different amounts of space to adequately explore, and there are different depths you can go to for different audiences. This post was rather long, but I agree that 140 characters is generally too short. As an example, just look at the abuses of language that occur so that people can fit everything into their 140 character limit.
- gruseom 17y ago
  Reminds me of a quote often attributed to Cicero, Pascal, Twain etc. In this case, for once, we have a definitive source: Letter XVI of Pascal's Provincial Letters: The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/letters-c.html#LETTER%20XVI http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/letters-... I haven't found any evidence that Mark Twain or Cicero said it. Especially in Twain's case, I suspect people just decided he said it because he's known to have been witty.
  - swombat 17y ago
    It is very likely that this was said by many, many people throughout history. Great ideas are rarely picked up by a single great person. See this extract from the introduction to a book about Borges' short stories, posted in my blog at http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great-bloggers-steal http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great... : [Borges’s] sources are innumerable and unexpected. [He] has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: ‘Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.’ Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): ‘We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’ But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): ‘God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’”

pavs 17y ago

Why I don't use techcrunch: Its always about twitter.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
timr 17y ago
I'm going to infer that 30 people dislike TechCrunch so intensely that they're willing to vote for any negative remark, because otherwise, I can't find any insight in your comment. There are many possible intelligent criticisms to be directed toward TechCrunch, but "always about Twitter" has never been at the top of my list.
- tdavis 17y ago
  Mostly people upvote things they agree with and ignore the quality and insight of the comment entirely. The exact opposite of how it's supposed to be, but even HN is subject to herd mentality and so on.
- pavs 17y ago
  You don't have a problem with a guy rambling about why he doesn't use twitter in 100s of words. But you have a problem with another guy rambling about why he doesn't use techcrunch in 140 characters or less? There is very little to nothing insightful to add to a discussion about why some guy doesn't like twitter. twitter is not for everyone the same way facebook is not for everyone, IM is not for everyone, IRC is not for everyone. If it's not for you, its not for you. What insightful discussion you could possibly have about this? I added a not very insightful comment on a not very insightful topic. Which is what it deserves. I haven't been following TC for sometime, but until few months ago, when I was actually following them a majority of their story was about twitter.
  - timr 17y ago
    At least the article made some interesting arguments about the value of twitter, the feature-completeness of twitter, and so on. What did the comment add?

redorb 17y ago

My reason for using twitter is on my site that provides vital information on weather, its the easiest way for me to currently connect to all my followers cell phones...

cbarning 17y ago

Funny how this was posted by them to Twitter and drives more traffic to TechCrunch than digg. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/for-techcrunch-twitter-traffic-a-statistical-breakdown/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/for-techcrunch-twitter-...

alex_c 17y ago

The Onion did it 9 years ago: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694 http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694

zmimon 17y ago

Funny, I dislike twitter but nobody else seems to share my reasons. My main reason is that it's a closed centralized service. I suppose somebody will say "it's not closed, it has an open API" and that misses the point: it's closed in the sense that you or I can't start a Twitter service and integrate it on equal terms with the original Twitter. Email / SMTP provided us a successful model and XMPP followed later to show how to do it for real-time messaging. It would have been easy to build Twitter on top of these standards, or to extend them in open ways if necessary. Instead Twitter is a giant step backwards into a time when technology and services were controlled by single vendors. We grew out of that and I thought we would never go back. I'm horrified that the tech digerati are all enthusiastically embracing a headlong rush back into it. I can't understand why nobody seems to care - it's like the enthusiastic embrace of the Iraq war by the media - there's hardly a critical voice to be heard, and yet I can see it will only be a short space of time before people are all realizing the cage they have built for themselves and asking what everyone was thinking.

al3x 17y ago
Actually, we at Twitter are thinking quite a bit about exactly this.
- aaronz3 17y ago
  I was brainstorming a bit about this the other day as well, but I don't have the time/resources to do anything with it. Why can't we have a digital identity that isn't attached to a particular service? If I want to change cell providers I can take my phone number with me, but if I want to switch ISPs/Email providers I have to get a new email address. It would be useful (and in the interest of competition) to provide a way to contact your identity, and you can configure your identity to dispatch messages to whatever service you happen to use at that given time (somewhat ala Google Voice maybe?)
Andys 17y ago
Twitter, when you get down to it, is like IRC where everyone has their own channel. When you "follow" a friend, you are joining their channel. IRC is decentralised and is an open, free protocol. I would prefer to keep using IRC but I have started using twitter for the same reason I had to install MSN messenger - to keep in contact with friends who can't or won't use IRC.

hschenker 17y ago

I don't use Twitter myself (either to follow anyone or to post my own stories), but I work for a large tech company, and I fundamentally disagree with the article's first assertion: > Tweets have no value For my organization, tweets do very much have a value - they help us measure the day-to-day sentiment of people interested in our company (customers, prospects, media, partners). Our PR person sends a weekly update of all company-related tweets, organized by topic. (We don't yet categorize by actual sentiment, but that would be fairly simple to do. Since company-related tweets still typically number fewer than 100 a week, it's easy to judge overall sentiment without an algorithm.) For our use case, at least, Twitter is pure genius. They've taken the natural human tendency to want to share thoughts and ideas with others (in spite of my own introverted personality, studies show the majority of humans are extroverted); they've made it VERY easy for people to do so (there's no guilt in NOT writing a long thesis, since you're limited to 140 characters); and they've built a platform that makes it easy to measure and organize people's thoughts and ideas by topic and sentiment. Whether that'll allow them to ever turn a profit, who knows.

ironsam 17y ago

Twitter is the slap bracelet of the aughts.

idlewords 17y ago

I tried Twitter for a few months as a personal service and found it useless and noisy. But as a method of monitoring support requests and chatter about my project, it's been invaluable. I think the site offers a lot of value as a kind of customer support hotline.

jrockway 17y ago

"My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." Oh sorry, but that's the tone of voice I used to read this article.