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How Hard is it To Have a Conversation on Twitter? So Hard Even the CEO Can't Do It. (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Twitter wants to be the place for the most important public conversations online. It still has some serious work to do. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher agreed to conduct an interview Tuesday on Twitter, and it had all the makings of a great read: The CEO of one of the most influential and controversial tech platforms in the world taking questions from one of the industry's most ferocious reporters. The only problem? No one could follow along.
Despite the public interview, and a dedicated hashtag (#karajack) for the event, it didn't take long before the dozens of tweets between the two started to get confusing. They were listed out of order, other users started chiming in, and there was no way to properly follow the conversation thread. Swisher's questions about Twitter's complex abuse policies, and Dorsey's subsequent responses, were floating around my timeline along with the regular tech news and opinions I always look at. If you wanted to find a permanent thread of the chat, you had to visit one of either Kara or Jack's pages and continually refresh. It made for a difficult and confusing experience.
Dorsey even admitted so himself. "I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a "chaotic hellpit")," Swisher tweeted, referencing Recode's other co-founder, the now-retired Walt Mossberg. "Ok. Definitely not easy to follow the conversation," Dorsey replied. "Exactly why we are doing this. Fixing stuff like this will help I believe."
Despite the public interview, and a dedicated hashtag (#karajack) for the event, it didn't take long before the dozens of tweets between the two started to get confusing. They were listed out of order, other users started chiming in, and there was no way to properly follow the conversation thread. Swisher's questions about Twitter's complex abuse policies, and Dorsey's subsequent responses, were floating around my timeline along with the regular tech news and opinions I always look at. If you wanted to find a permanent thread of the chat, you had to visit one of either Kara or Jack's pages and continually refresh. It made for a difficult and confusing experience.
Dorsey even admitted so himself. "I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a "chaotic hellpit")," Swisher tweeted, referencing Recode's other co-founder, the now-retired Walt Mossberg. "Ok. Definitely not easy to follow the conversation," Dorsey replied. "Exactly why we are doing this. Fixing stuff like this will help I believe."
Twatter has always been like that. The loudest chirps to the top and nothing else.
It is a squawk box not a discussion site.
Wut. Twitter is in a death spiral. They've eliminated themselves from ever being a public square because of their ideology based tyrannical grip and Orwellian banning practices.
Whoever learns from Twitter mistakes could possibly be something like a public forum though.
Dorsey's had a disastrous week of interviews where he dodged the issue of biased enforcement of rules on Twitter, including one on Joe Rogan which prompted Joe to respond to the backlash (and try a do-over). In a great move by Joe, he had Tim Pool on, who gave much more honest and accurate assessment of the situation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
How hard is it to drive a nail with a rope? So hard even the CEO of We Make Ropes, Inc can't do it.
Back in usenet days, the reader could decide on which client they wanted to use, to get the features they wanted. Some supported threaded conversations, various killfile features, etc. You could pick.
Now, with these massively centralized services like Twitter, you get what is shoveled onto you and you will fucking like it.
We need to bring back DEcentralization and returning control over the presentation, features, and view to the user of the computer, not having Jack Dorsey deciding everyone's experience from on high. And it's not just twitter, it's all these web forums, inc slashdot, which dictate presentation and features to you. Shit, we had a better architecture for this on the internet in the goddamn 1980's!
What the hell happened to the internet that we gave up on the very concept of user control?
The only winning move is not to play.
Corporatism != Free Market
I never figured out why these tech companies haven't figured out threading conversations yet. Everything is flat, or one level deep and they rely on @ to tell you who the reply was to. The problem is that the reply is to a particular post, not a person in general and the post order is based on some criteria I can never figure out. It is almost as if it was constructed so it is easier to mine the data, and ignore everyone with narcissistic posts, rather than encourage conversations.
Anyone who's used Twitter more than casually could have predicted this. There are several high-level functions it desperately needs built on top of the assembly-language-like platform it is today, most notably:
1. Real conversation threading.
2. Segmentation of your follows, basically "lists" taken a step further so that you can tweet something and make it visible only to the people in your "politics" group and not your "cooking" or "sports" groups.
Twitter is mostly a platform for recreational outrage, hardly any threads there are positive contributions. Even a few I follow (for example Musk) don't say anything of any importance, just meme dumps and inane comments. Only thing I find useful are people I respect posting links to content outside twitter.
it's called twitter after the sounds birds make, who would want to try and have a conversation there?
Twitter is not for talking with people.
It's for talking @people.
Its literally garbage. It survives because it was the first quick messaging platform and its difficult to for anyone to move on because a handful of important people like POTUS use it. Since you have to follow twitter anyway if your interesting in seeing what those handful of folks post it make using anything else a tough sell.
I really wish Donald would just pick ANY other platform. All the press would then be forced to watch that platform. Which would make them use it too. A lot of other world leaders would likely be forced to follow as well; leading to a twitter destroying snow ball.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I've tried to like Twitter (or, for that matter, Twitter clones like Gab) a few times. The attempt never lasts more than a couple of days, because it's just chaos. Like trying to listen to a conversation or a single person all the way across a crowded bar. There's just no coherency - the signal is totally drowned out by the noise.
How have they not noticed this before? Actually, how does Twitter still exist?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Twitter sucks, nothing but negativity, I found no joy in using it. It was worse than Facebook. :D
L'Idiot
I never understood Twitter from the start. If you can compile your rant into a few lines I guess it works. I don't see any other use for it.
2 Corinthians 6:17, Revelation 18:4
But yes this is pretty obvious. It's very common to get tweets and rebuttals with no context, proclamations of people you've never heard of getting blocked without knowing why.. But I just slide down to something that makes sense. It's not a problem for me. It's really only a problem for people trying to hold conversations on twitter, which is never what it was designed for.
The main purpose of any social media site should be to drive traffic to another site or service from a commercial perspective. The media itself should be limited, anything not quickly consumed is too engaging to the user and keeps from, again, driving traffic. It's the same with conversations. If you want to have an in-depth conversation then pick a different medium. If you want to tell a quick joke or express an opinion then social media is for you.
Nobody uses Twitter for conversations! It's 150 chars for christs sake. It literally stemmed from SMS, the medium that always made you call the other person anyways. I use Twitter to insult filthy D-List E-Celebs like Lele Pons. Thats what it's for! To make fun of vapid has beens who think they move something in the world by advertising shit for minimum income.
Sometimes I think Slashdot needs a "No Shiat Sherlock" tag/icon. Amazing nobody can post meaningful content with a 200 character limit or whatever it is. I do not have a Twitter account (or any other social media account). To me, Twitter always seemed to be for people with 10 second attention spans.
Like anybody in his right mind would take
this 'platform' in a serious way....
All garbage all the time. A wannabe
clone / echo of facebook. (yes, I know
the 'difference'....)
All noise all the time.
1. Twitter is a huge time-waster with no redeeming factors.
2. People that waste their time on Twitter obviously don't have enough to DO.
3. Interviewing about time-wasters are time-wasters themselves.
4. "ferocious" is an odd way to be thought of....how about contributor to wasting time?
Wow-my opinion of Twitter just dropped lower (if that is even possible)!
How in the world did they not THINK or TEST this before doing it in public? Of course it doesn't work...oh wait, they didn't really care if it worked, it was all about the publicity to try to get newbies or suckers to join/follow/continue using Twatter.
1). Who the hell use's Twitter anymore anyway? Que the AC bigots.
2). Who the hell would want to have a conversation on twitter?
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
There is a place and time for anonymity. Having discussion like the above is not it. When anonymity is lost, ppl act nicer towards each other. Likewise, the lying and belligerent attitudes stop. Basically, when somebody values their ID, then and only then, do we see civility. There are plenty of conversations where anonymity is needed. In fact, that tweet thread should have ppl requiring vetted certificate OR an upgraded by a number of vetted certificates of an anonymous posting. Finally, the vetting of ppl today is a joke. It really needs to be done in person, such as at the USPO, similar to obtaining a passport.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It "worked" for the Orange CEO.
Table-ized A.I.
So Hard Even the CEO Can't Do It.
When did CEOs become so much smarter than the rest of us? In my experience the vast majority of CEOs is simply more greedy and sociopathic than the rest of us, intelligence is not a variable in that equation nor is competence. A whole legion of these people managed to backstab their way to the top of the food chain in the years leading up to the that oopsie-daisy in 2007 where they crashed the world economy. Not exactly a shining example of intelligence that ...
Twitter is essentially a giant chat forum. Not so different from this one here. This medium has never been good for having a conversation, its sorta kinda works but more like trying to have a conversation in a very public place where anyone can join and essentially disrupt.
The protocol they use was invented to send very short messages to a pager*. What conceivable reason would you use that now?
I suppose it's for people like Trump (here's 140 char, tell me everything that you've ever learned), but all I see is that it encourages people to become illiterate. Maybe it's appropriate for 16 yr olds to tweet "same to you!", but an intelligent conversation? Really?
Oh, but email is sooooo old....
A nice searchable archive of usenet. Also an ok web interface for posting if I recall.
I disagree. Correct terminology for twitter users is twats not twits.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It is for broadcasting a message to followers in one shot. That is all.
Want a conversation? Pick up the phone, and make a call.
The CEO of Twitter basically just admitted that he has never actually used Twitter before.
If I owned any Twitter stock right now I would be selling it just on principle. Like the ad agencies back in the day, if you don't use the products you are supporting they throw you out.
We've been discussing this for 5+ years on IRC2P, and it has been discussed elsewhere as well...
What is needed is an nntp/usenet backend that can decentralize by making all posts magnet links with only the metadata of the post as an index being shuttled around. Then when a usenet client requests access to a thread or group, the server can pulls all related magnets up to its cutoff date into the client, while also allowing universal caching/peering of all posts by anyone willing to dedicate the bandwidth.
As a followup to this, because the faggy normies can't use boring clients anymore: We need metadata posts/extensions to usenet that allow moderators to set css and web overlays for their usenet rooms so they can be prettified (and a vector of attack) for normies who need the aesthetics as much as the content.
As a final step, we need integrated cryptographic signing as an option so that twitter/reddit style user identities are available. Makes it easier to deal with spammers since most would be unwilling to generate a billion keys just to spam, and if they do, any reused keys make it easy to clean up all spam sent with the same key. There is of course the potential for censorship, but that is already here today and only people caching the magnets and archiving into cold storage can help ensure that doesn't lead to the sanitizing of history.
God, if only we could figure out some way to represent a conversation with replies in a chronological order. Too bad no one's ever thought of that before.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Spamflooder
What does the National Enquirer have on Jack Dorsey?
Oh, wait.....
Should be issuing press releases.
As part of a carefully managed public relations strategy.
Like a grownup
I found Twitter confusing as a medium for discussion.
Then I realized that it's just a text-based MMORPG.
Is this a surprise to anyone? The only shock here is that people actually use twitter.
A newsletter app with a character limit? Some ad-hoc-turned-features like hastags and name drops? THIS became a major tech company!?
Twitter is made for shout-outs and declarations.
"Pizza is good".
"Shoutout to my favorite pizza: Deep dish".
Slogans, catchphrases, snide retorts. Twitter is made for low-effort shit-posts. It is the cheap pulp magazine of the modern telecommunications age. And some people like that. A lot of people. Because it doesn't take a lot of effort to read. There's not much there. The messages are short and the idea aren't going to be deep or nuanced or backed by citation because there just ain't enough room for that. It's full of twits.
News At 11.
Seriously.
When Jack doesn't want to actually answer a question, he'll lie, or dance around the question.
It really doesn't matter though.
Twitter is a Bay Area company pushing Bay Area ideology and "morality".
And if you are an evil "wrongthink" purveyor of a dissenting opinion, fuck you, and you're banned.
#WretchedHive
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!