Why Engineers Don't Like Twitter

PabloSandoval48 writes, "A recent EE Times survey of 285 engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter. More than half indicated that the statement 'I don't really care what you had for breakfast' best sums up their feelings about it." Reader mattnyc99 notes a related article in which the authors analyzed the content of tweets during a recent World Cup game, finding 76% of them to be useless. "Out of 1,000 tweets with the #worldcup hashtag during the game, only 16 percent were legitimate news and 7.6 percent were deemed 'legitimate conversation' — which leaves 6 percent spam, 24 percent self-promotion, about 17 percent re-tweets, and a whopping 29 percent of useless observation (like this). Is the mainstream media making too big a deal out of the avalanche of World Cup tweets, or is the world literally flooding the zone?"

Comments

Well of course

[Monkeedude1212]

If you look at any of the content on the internet, you're going to get similar results. Even here on Slashdot, the number of posts I've seen regarding to our favourite N word goes through the roof, though we've luckily got a content rating system to keep most of them in check.

So you've got to objectively view Twitter in the same way you view any social media. For example, if a comment in slashdot is rated at -1, I'm usually not going to waste my time looking at it. Likewise, if there's hundreds of twitterers out there all tweeting, how do I know which ones to look at? Well, lucky for you, they've got their own ranking system. You can look for the people who are most followed, or you can search who you are interested in, and JUST follow them. It's surprisingly THAT easy.

I mean, how many of these engineers care for Youtube comments and 30 seconds Respond videos uploaded to youtube?

I could sit here all day and list things that engineers don't like about social sites, but that doesn't devalue the integrity of a social site.

Re:Twitter is useful?

[mwvdlee]

Luckily, most of the useless posts on /. are quickly moderated into oblivion. On Twatter, there is nothing to protect the reader.

Re:So?

[smellsofbikes]

I have a group of friends that post on an old BBS-like system, LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter. Same people, posting to all four places. I put them in that order because that's the order that shows their relative value to me. On the old BBS they post long, interesting discussions of their lives, a dozen paragraphs about the troubles one woman is going through having her mom involuntarily committed to an institution because of Alzheimer's and her conflicts with her relatives over the process, another dozen paragraphs about another friend's decision-making process about buying a TIG welder and why he chose the one he did. On Facebook, those same two people post things like "hey baby pics!", and on twitter they post "I like cheese!"

There isn't room on FB or Twitter to say stuff that has depth, and so many people are on them that you can't say anything controversial without offending someone. I haven't looked at FB for six months because my conservative religious aunt found it, and then me, and I have to deal with her for the rest of her life so I'm not going to be posting about my anarchist friends' orgy. I suppose I could spend the time to figure out how to build a filter that lets only a few people see it, or make another private FB account that prospective employers can't see, but why bother? I've got a bunch of friends on a BBS that nobody in the rest of the world will ever see and I can say anything I want there, with a 2 kilobyte post that lets me say *exactly* what I want to say.

The medium is part of the message, unrelated to the quality of a person's friends.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[El_Muerte_TDS]

I don't have to find out, I the "Long URL please" extension for Firefox.