Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?...
What the hell happened to the internet that we gave up on the very concept of user control?
Normies happened.
The Internet used to be used by people who knew what the hell they were doing. Those who used it were called nerds and were outcasts to the society around them.
Then Steve Jobs gave every moron on the planet an Internet connection more neutered than AOL that they can carry around in their pocket. All of a sudden, EVERYONE is an "Internet user" and it became a race to the bottom to see how many newbies, idiots, luddites and imbeciles we can get using our platforms and viewing our ads. Features that make sense on a technological level are like fucking kryptonite to these users. Add one more button to their UI and watch them freak the fuck out like an autistic kid being asked to sit at a different desk.
Now the social outcasts are people like us who avoid all these "new, high tech" services because we actually want user control, privacy and features that make sense. Playing video games on your Windows machine and using the Internet to talk to your friends used to make you a nerd that nobody wants to talk to. Now that makes you a normal, maybe even popular person. If you want to be a social outcast that the normies make fun of today, you need to run Linux and ask your friends to communicate with you via email instead of Facebook.