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I hope Twitter doesn't go away. I was a very late adopter of Twitter because I always thought that Twitter and Facebook were the same. They are not. Twitter is

I hope Twitter doesn't go away. I was a very late adopter of Twitter because I always thought that Twitter and Facebook were the same. They are not. Twitter is slowly replacing my RSS and news reader. Twitter is not a community thing, it's about broadcasting (in real-time, if you need it, most people don't, they are just addicted). That's why I don't tweet and I'm just following 11 accounts. I don't even follow friends, I just follow who has something to broadcast. Twitter is great for that. Facebook is more noisy by concept. Their focus in communities and friends makes broadcasting side noisy. I had to turn off almost all my friends/likes wall notifications, I don't have the time or will to read that one friend that I meet once a year went to the restaurant or played a game. It's just too much noise. That's why FB is nowadays mostly a chat/email friends app (and FB knows it: they bought whatsapp).

ForHackernews 12y ago
I'm just the opposite, I hope Twitter does go away. I think it's been bad for marketing, bad for activism, bad for internet discourse in general. Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  > Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation. I have a friend who switched to Twitter a few years ago and whenever the fact that I don't use it comes up, I mention that I just can't deal with the inevitable dumbing-down and loss of context that comes with such an idiotic limitation. It's a medium designed for soundbites instead of consideration and "wit"[1] instead of intelligence. His go-to explanation is that the limitations force people to be concise and choose their words carefully. Either he's rationalizing or he's extremely naive about the quality of discourse on the Internet. [1] I mean that in the most negative way possible. "Perceived wit" might be a better term to use here: I've often seen things like pleasing sentence structure used to cover a lack of veracity, a la "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". or "YesAllWomen". While not inherently incorrect, I've seen both of those used a massive number of times in situations where they're entirely irrelevant or inaccurate. And yet, because it comes across as pithy and clever, they dominate the conversation.
basch 12y ago
that just means you have the tools configured differently. twitter can be a noisy firehose, and facebook can be delightfully refined. take a look at two of my interest lists on facebook. http://i.imgur.com/LRK7Wi9.png http://i.imgur.com/LRK7Wi9.png (the left column is this list http://i.imgur.com/BCkOXCN.png http://i.imgur.com/BCkOXCN.png) if you have noise problems it s because you follow noisy sources, which is true of both platforms.
- galfarragem 12y ago
  I still find the 140 characters 'news' easier to skim.
  - basch 12y ago
    I dont like that conversation and posts are singular datatypes. If I am going to skim, I want chronological rivers of text. My screen should be JUST headlines, everything else is noise. http://techmeme.com/river http://techmeme.com/river http://mediagazer.com/river http://mediagazer.com/river http://hckrnews.com http://hckrnews.com Ive also reduced my skimming vs reading, I just dont actually learn as much. If I skim all day, and you asked me what I read, 90% of it is forgotten. Skimming headlines is like a continual huff that never gets you anywhere. Longform is the way to go. http://longform.org/ http://longform.org/ http://longreads.com/ http://longreads.com/ https://readability.com/topreads/ https://readability.com/topreads/ https://www.instapaper.com/daily https://www.instapaper.com/daily http://medium.com http://medium.com
nsxwolf 12y ago
I don't want the concept of Twitter to go away, but I'd like to see that concept become federated. One company should not own this.
- oldmanjay 12y ago
  What's your reasoning? I'm always a little wary engaging this sort of statement because it often turns into a moralizing rabbit hole, but I'm also curious what you even mean. Certainly no one is precluded from making a copycat service, excluding that no one really desires to duplicate the investment and work given the likely outcome that no one would care. And it's also pretty clear that there are many services that get fairly close already. Given that, I'm just wondering what you could mean.
  - function_seven 12y ago
    Not the grandparent, but I'll share my reasoning via an alternate universe: Imagine if e-mail was owned by HP. (In this alternate universe, someone at Digital invented it. Digital > Compaq > HP) All email accounts are created at hp.com, everyone's email address is janedoe@hp.com, or bobspizza4344@hp.com, etc. If you pay $240 a year for Enterprise E-mail®, then you can customize the domain name, but hp.com still handles all the sending, receiving, and storage. You don't have a say in that. Other companies have their own versions of "E-mail", variously called "MS Mail Plus for Windows Live 365™" or "iMail™", but you can't send message between them, so they're only used for niche internal communications. Everyone has an account at hp.com. You have to if you want to talk to anybody. Some people tried to make an e-mail client once, but HP revoked their API key, so it doesn't work anymore. You have to use HP's e-mail client. This is how Twitter is (and instant messaging as well, which is a shame. I thought XMPP was going to be our savior in that front, but Google saw to that). For me it's not so much a moral issue, but a practical one. E-mail is vastly better because it's open and interoperable. The WWW is way better than AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve were.
    - RestlessMind 12y ago
      But there is no money in making an open and interoperable platform. Or to be more accurate, there is a lot more money in having a closed and proprietary platform, which you can milk for years if not decades. Ultimately, majority of people do not care whether the underlying platform is closed or open - they just want a product that works fine (eg. Facebook). So one of the rare ways open platforms can win over closed ones is if someone invests a lot in an open platform and offers a product with quality on par to those with closed platforms. But it seems money drives a lot more effort in aggregate[1] than some desire to make the world a better place. So a vast majority of times, we see better products coming out of "entities" (corporations, people) motivated by money, which will do all it can to protect it's money source. Closing the platform seems a perfectly logical thing to do in that case. [1] I define it as total man-hours spent on something.

ForHackernews 12y ago

I'm just the opposite, I hope Twitter does go away. I think it's been bad for marketing, bad for activism, bad for internet discourse in general. Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation.

wutbrodo 12y ago
> Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation. I have a friend who switched to Twitter a few years ago and whenever the fact that I don't use it comes up, I mention that I just can't deal with the inevitable dumbing-down and loss of context that comes with such an idiotic limitation. It's a medium designed for soundbites instead of consideration and "wit"[1] instead of intelligence. His go-to explanation is that the limitations force people to be concise and choose their words carefully. Either he's rationalizing or he's extremely naive about the quality of discourse on the Internet. [1] I mean that in the most negative way possible. "Perceived wit" might be a better term to use here: I've often seen things like pleasing sentence structure used to cover a lack of veracity, a la "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". or "YesAllWomen". While not inherently incorrect, I've seen both of those used a massive number of times in situations where they're entirely irrelevant or inaccurate. And yet, because it comes across as pithy and clever, they dominate the conversation.

basch 12y ago

that just means you have the tools configured differently. twitter can be a noisy firehose, and facebook can be delightfully refined. take a look at two of my interest lists on facebook. http://i.imgur.com/LRK7Wi9.png http://i.imgur.com/LRK7Wi9.png (the left column is this list http://i.imgur.com/BCkOXCN.png http://i.imgur.com/BCkOXCN.png) if you have noise problems it s because you follow noisy sources, which is true of both platforms.

galfarragem 12y ago
I still find the 140 characters 'news' easier to skim.
- basch 12y ago
  I dont like that conversation and posts are singular datatypes. If I am going to skim, I want chronological rivers of text. My screen should be JUST headlines, everything else is noise. http://techmeme.com/river http://techmeme.com/river http://mediagazer.com/river http://mediagazer.com/river http://hckrnews.com http://hckrnews.com Ive also reduced my skimming vs reading, I just dont actually learn as much. If I skim all day, and you asked me what I read, 90% of it is forgotten. Skimming headlines is like a continual huff that never gets you anywhere. Longform is the way to go. http://longform.org/ http://longform.org/ http://longreads.com/ http://longreads.com/ https://readability.com/topreads/ https://readability.com/topreads/ https://www.instapaper.com/daily https://www.instapaper.com/daily http://medium.com http://medium.com

nsxwolf 12y ago

I don't want the concept of Twitter to go away, but I'd like to see that concept become federated. One company should not own this.

oldmanjay 12y ago
What's your reasoning? I'm always a little wary engaging this sort of statement because it often turns into a moralizing rabbit hole, but I'm also curious what you even mean. Certainly no one is precluded from making a copycat service, excluding that no one really desires to duplicate the investment and work given the likely outcome that no one would care. And it's also pretty clear that there are many services that get fairly close already. Given that, I'm just wondering what you could mean.
- function_seven 12y ago
  Not the grandparent, but I'll share my reasoning via an alternate universe: Imagine if e-mail was owned by HP. (In this alternate universe, someone at Digital invented it. Digital > Compaq > HP) All email accounts are created at hp.com, everyone's email address is janedoe@hp.com, or bobspizza4344@hp.com, etc. If you pay $240 a year for Enterprise E-mail®, then you can customize the domain name, but hp.com still handles all the sending, receiving, and storage. You don't have a say in that. Other companies have their own versions of "E-mail", variously called "MS Mail Plus for Windows Live 365™" or "iMail™", but you can't send message between them, so they're only used for niche internal communications. Everyone has an account at hp.com. You have to if you want to talk to anybody. Some people tried to make an e-mail client once, but HP revoked their API key, so it doesn't work anymore. You have to use HP's e-mail client. This is how Twitter is (and instant messaging as well, which is a shame. I thought XMPP was going to be our savior in that front, but Google saw to that). For me it's not so much a moral issue, but a practical one. E-mail is vastly better because it's open and interoperable. The WWW is way better than AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve were.
  - RestlessMind 12y ago
    But there is no money in making an open and interoperable platform. Or to be more accurate, there is a lot more money in having a closed and proprietary platform, which you can milk for years if not decades. Ultimately, majority of people do not care whether the underlying platform is closed or open - they just want a product that works fine (eg. Facebook). So one of the rare ways open platforms can win over closed ones is if someone invests a lot in an open platform and offers a product with quality on par to those with closed platforms. But it seems money drives a lot more effort in aggregate[1] than some desire to make the world a better place. So a vast majority of times, we see better products coming out of "entities" (corporations, people) motivated by money, which will do all it can to protect it's money source. Closing the platform seems a perfectly logical thing to do in that case. [1] I define it as total man-hours spent on something.