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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.
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
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
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.
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 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.