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."

Comments

Big Whoop

[cheesybagel]

Twatter has always been like that. The loudest chirps to the top and nothing else.
It is a squawk box not a discussion site.

Re:Big Whoop

[mcmonkey]

The only "news" here is that the CEO of Twitter had never previously used Twitter.

Wrong tool for the job

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Put the CLIENT in the hands of the user!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Mostly Useless

[quanminoan]

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.

Use Cases

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter is not for talking with people.

It's for talking @people.

Re:Twitter is a dumpster fire

[110010001000]

I really wish world leaders (and leaders in general) wouldn't use "quick messaging platforms" at all. They are supposed to communicate thoughtfully, not "quickly".

How have they not noticed this before?

[bradley13]

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?

Re:Twitter is a dumpster fire

[apoc.famine]

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.

That's really not true. I haven't been on twitter more than a few times in my life, but I stay pretty well informed about what the important people tweet about. Our Newstainment industry has monetized scraping tweets off twitter and plastering them in their broadcasts and sprinkling them throughout their articles, often helpfully putting a clear screenshot of the tweet in larger font than the article, then typing the tweet out anyway just for fun so you get to read it twice.

Even formally serious journalists and publications have fallen into this trap. If they just fucking ignored the dumpsterfire that is twitter, nobody would know and nobody would care. Let the tweeters cannibalize themselves. But no, we need to pretend that twitter is important, and broadcast tweets through all mediums.

You don't need to follow twitter. It's nearly inescapable if you follow any sort of media at all. Here I am on /., and we're having a fucking discussion about the CEO of Twitter realizing that Twitter is a shitty way to communicate due to him tweeting a bunch of shit in an attempted interview. It's fucking inescapable. I did not need to go on Twitter to hear this story.

Re:Twitter in 2019????

[RedK]

Whoever learns from Twitter mistakes could possibly be something like a public forum though.

Except whenever someone tries, and aren't somewhat left of Mao and Marx, they are promptly reported to their hosting provider and payment processor and ultimately, to the domain registrar so they can get scrubbed from the Internet.

Ask SubscribeStar and Gab.ai how well trying to NOT inject politics worked out for them.