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One of the disappointments for me about Twitter has been the lack of engagement. Many (most?) people use it as a broadcast medium. The longest, most engaged thr

One of the disappointments for me about Twitter has been the lack of engagement. Many (most?) people use it as a broadcast medium. The longest, most engaged threads I see are (big surprise, internet) trolling and fighting. Here's an idea: gamify engagement for verified accounts. If you're a big enough personality to have a verified account, you must @reply to, say, 1% of your followers before you can write another naked tweet. Or you can buy tokens that let you tweet without forced engagement, price determined in part by your follower count. For a normie like me, the novelty of seeing your favorite celeb or software hero or whoever on twitter quickly wears off once you realize they send tweets once in a blue moon and never reply. You might as well be on their mailing list instead.

abritinthebay 11y ago
While a novel idea... that would pretty much kill Twitter dead.
eterm 11y ago
Celebrities are only on Twitter because it is a broadcast mechanism. It is precisely the unidirectional nature of Twitter that meant it caught on for the media industry. Without that it would be nothing.
- Domenic_S 11y ago
  But we don't need another mechanism for celebrities to beam their thoughts into our heads, and I think that's become pretty evident by the slowdown in user adoption. Twitter could differentiate by being the place for celebrity engagement. Clearly some exceptions would have to be made, e.g. for news agencies and such.
  - jerf 11y ago
    Celebrity engagement is essentially impossible. The numbers don't work. No celebrity can "engage" with a million people when there's only 86,400 seconds in a day. If you don't like the "million", put whatever number you like in there that is still comfortably greater than the number of seconds in a day. Engagement doesn't scale. You can create the illusion of engagement, but that's all. Note the lack of the word "Twitter" in the reply up until this sentence. It's not even about Twitter. It's just generally impossible.
    - erehweb 11y ago
      Correct. However, the illusion of engagement can be powerful. e.g. Obama and Clinton campaigns were able to use dinner w/ candidate or famous supporters as a fund-raising lottery tool. Would people engage more with Twitter if they knew there was a small but real chance of getting a non-canned response from celebs?
      - Domenic_S 11y ago
        Exactly. Winning the lotto is essentially impossible as well, but millions still play because there's a (ever so small) non-zero chance they'll hit. This would basically be celeb lotto.
      - rhino369 11y ago
        But isn't that how Twitter works. There is a small chance the celebrity will tweet back at you.
        rmxt 11y ago
        Correction: There is a small chance that the celebrity/politician's publicity agent will tweet back at you. There is an even smaller chance the celebrity will tweet back at you. I think that this is part of the reason why it's really the "illusion of engagement" and not real engagement. The elite will perpetually be separated from the masses... the specific medium may change, but the separation will persist.
        jerf 11y ago
        But I think it's again worth highlighting that this "separation" isn't because they're in their ivory towers, but sheer simple math. Nobody can "engage" with millions of people. It's part of why Internet flash mobs destroying people's lives is something we need to figure out how to get a handle on culturally, and start stigmatizing, because nobody can "engage" with a mob to defend themselves. It's why even if you're only "Internet famous" and you're running a blog with thousands of readers, you can't afford to spend even a second a day on each of your readers. It's not really an "elite" problem.
  - Retra 11y ago
    That sounds completely impractical (unless you think form letters are engagement.)
  - omouse 11y ago
    Yep, the best reason to use Twitter is that it's far easier to broadcast and it's easy to reply to random followers. On Twitter it feels easier to have conversations and I think that's the core strength, not that it's just an activity stream.
pimlottc 11y ago
I think the real draw for following celebs on twitter is not that it isn't broadcast, but the idea that it's a more "unfiltered" broadcast; that it's more likely you're getting an off-the-cuff remark straight from the actual celebrity instead of a scripted press clipping from their PR flacks. At least, that's the illusion. And while there are plenty of "managed" accounts run by paid "ghost tweeters", there have also been enough embarrassing deleted tweets to show that at least some remarks are coming straight from the horse's mouth.

abritinthebay 11y ago

While a novel idea... that would pretty much kill Twitter dead.

eterm 11y ago

Celebrities are only on Twitter because it is a broadcast mechanism. It is precisely the unidirectional nature of Twitter that meant it caught on for the media industry. Without that it would be nothing.

Domenic_S 11y ago
But we don't need another mechanism for celebrities to beam their thoughts into our heads, and I think that's become pretty evident by the slowdown in user adoption. Twitter could differentiate by being the place for celebrity engagement. Clearly some exceptions would have to be made, e.g. for news agencies and such.
- jerf 11y ago
  Celebrity engagement is essentially impossible. The numbers don't work. No celebrity can "engage" with a million people when there's only 86,400 seconds in a day. If you don't like the "million", put whatever number you like in there that is still comfortably greater than the number of seconds in a day. Engagement doesn't scale. You can create the illusion of engagement, but that's all. Note the lack of the word "Twitter" in the reply up until this sentence. It's not even about Twitter. It's just generally impossible.
  - erehweb 11y ago
    Correct. However, the illusion of engagement can be powerful. e.g. Obama and Clinton campaigns were able to use dinner w/ candidate or famous supporters as a fund-raising lottery tool. Would people engage more with Twitter if they knew there was a small but real chance of getting a non-canned response from celebs?
    - Domenic_S 11y ago
      Exactly. Winning the lotto is essentially impossible as well, but millions still play because there's a (ever so small) non-zero chance they'll hit. This would basically be celeb lotto.
    - rhino369 11y ago
      But isn't that how Twitter works. There is a small chance the celebrity will tweet back at you.
      - rmxt 11y ago
        Correction: There is a small chance that the celebrity/politician's publicity agent will tweet back at you. There is an even smaller chance the celebrity will tweet back at you. I think that this is part of the reason why it's really the "illusion of engagement" and not real engagement. The elite will perpetually be separated from the masses... the specific medium may change, but the separation will persist.
        jerf 11y ago
        But I think it's again worth highlighting that this "separation" isn't because they're in their ivory towers, but sheer simple math. Nobody can "engage" with millions of people. It's part of why Internet flash mobs destroying people's lives is something we need to figure out how to get a handle on culturally, and start stigmatizing, because nobody can "engage" with a mob to defend themselves. It's why even if you're only "Internet famous" and you're running a blog with thousands of readers, you can't afford to spend even a second a day on each of your readers. It's not really an "elite" problem.
- Retra 11y ago
  That sounds completely impractical (unless you think form letters are engagement.)
- omouse 11y ago
  Yep, the best reason to use Twitter is that it's far easier to broadcast and it's easy to reply to random followers. On Twitter it feels easier to have conversations and I think that's the core strength, not that it's just an activity stream.

pimlottc 11y ago

I think the real draw for following celebs on twitter is not that it isn't broadcast, but the idea that it's a more "unfiltered" broadcast; that it's more likely you're getting an off-the-cuff remark straight from the actual celebrity instead of a scripted press clipping from their PR flacks. At least, that's the illusion. And while there are plenty of "managed" accounts run by paid "ghost tweeters", there have also been enough embarrassing deleted tweets to show that at least some remarks are coming straight from the horse's mouth.