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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?"
If your reason for not liking Twitter is "I don't really care what you had for breakfast," the problem isn't Twitter - it's that you need to find some more interesting friends.
Just like a telephone, its usefulness depends on who you have on the other end of the line.
The same thing can pretty much be said about the whole internet to be fair.
Most of our modern information delivery and socializing methods are actually pretty inventive and useful, until they are populated with the masses of morons that inhabit our Earth. And the one tweet the submitter linked to is a good example. It did actually have good information in it - Portugal scored a goal. But it was also filled with a bunch of personalized exclamation, which most people don't want to see.
The great thing is, you're not forced to view that person's Twitter feed. The hard part is finding one you ARE interested in.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Perhaps MSM likes Twitter because it's the equivalent of 1,000 monkeys with 1,000 typewriters. There are so many people saying so many things, that they can likely find a quote that states whatever they want to state, but they then get to claim somebody else said it. Deniability is probably easier than fact checking.
I'd also like to know the age of these "engineers".
I'm a 25 year old engineer and I love twitter, because I like to know what my friends are doing.
Most people that don't like twitter just don't understand it, or are the kind of people that don't accept tech to begin with. Twitter really isn't supposed to be for "normal" people. At least not until techy becomes the norm, which is happening.
-taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
They don't give a shit about Lindsay Lohan SCRAM (although the technology is interesting). They don't really care who killed Michael Jackson. And they probably think that Jesse James was an outlaw from the 1800's.
But they do seem to keep everything that civilization needs running . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
By now, we should be familiar with the issue at hand.
It happened when people started making "personal webpages". Then came blogs. Then Facebook et al. Now Twitter.
Basically, most of the world lives in the misguided assumption that at least a tiny fraction of the rest of the world is interested in them. Statistically speaking, that's not true. But we have this old tribal desire to "express ourselves", to communicate with the rest of the tribe.
There's a few billion people on the Internet today. How many of them may even theoretically care about your dog, your house, your opinion of last nights local television program, or, in fact, you? A high mark of a thousand, for most of us. 10,000 at most for everyone who's not at least a minor celebrity. Even those 10k are less than 0.0005% of the Internet population. ppm is a better measure than percent here. It's a single-digit ppm. For the majority of us, not even 1 ppm.
Or, in short, nobody(*) fucking cares. Not what the name of your dog is and not what you think about soccer.
Twitter is Geocities, only shorter, and with even less content.
(*) where "nobody" is equal, but not identical, to zero, for all practical purposes.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
what does it matter if only 16%, or 1.6%, or even 0.16% of all posts are any good?
The power of aggregates, filters, and search engines is that it doesn't matter what the signal to noise ratio is, you can quite easily cut through it all and find more of what you want.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Is really a quick way of saying that you don't want to bombarded by trivial details, irrelevant information or even relevant information. Just give me everything all at once and edit out the crap.
I don't care how interesting someone may be, getting updates about every little thing would be annoying; regardless of how relevant it may be.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
A better reason to hate Twitter is the obsolete 140-character limit
which in most cases also makes them vapid.
There is a large industry focused around making vapid two hour long movies.
The problem is not brevity.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So let's see in the past week via Twitter I received notes live minutes from the Austin City Council, received crime and real estate stats for my zip code, registered my concerns about regional mobility with our Capital Metro, and notified my extended family of several cute things the kids said. That's just stuff off the top of my head.
Twitter's a really useful tool. Much like the web, if all you're getting is what someone ate for breakfast, you're doing it wrong.
At the same time, I'm completely ok with the majority engineers not "getting" social networking technologies. It makes it easier for me to find work.
But the value in the product is not in the tech, it's in the marketing. The fact is, without major support from other major media outlets, twitter never would have survived.
Twitter is SOCIAL, Engineers are ANTI-SOCIAL, and you wonder why the two aren't a match made in heaven?
Twitter lacks any sort of competitive appeal, sex appeal, or intellectual appeal.
It is used to disseminate socially relevant knowledge, and humor.
Sports. Celebrity Gossip. One-Liners.
These are the cornerstones of twitter.
Having said that, if you want the truly great tweets, you need a reliable third party to sift through the junk and gather them for you.
Unfortunately this process has become increasingly inefficient with the demise of Conan's Late Night Twitter Tracker.
Apparently subsistence farmers and nomadic goat herders like it even less.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I find it actually leads to MORE succinct discourse. Minimalism leading towards conciseness.
Yes, but in the rare occasion I do tune into some sort of news, I want to hear REAL news, not what fluffyfanboi2002 had to say about a topic. If I want that shit, I'll go join twitter myself.
I find twitter unusable - seemingly every account I'm interested in reading - say for service announcements from my hosting provider - is filled with replies to other users, conversations I'm not a part of. Every single line is
@ someuser - Some text totally out of context
@ someuser - Some text totally out of context
@ someuser - Some text totally out of context
It's like being in a room with someone whose supposed to be making an announcement but are actually on their mobile phone - not interesting and terribly annoying.
Maybe I'm missing some option to turn that irrelevant waste off, but they've already lost me because of it.