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.

Re:Big Whoop

[religionofpeas]

Or never used twitter for a conversation. I use twitter, but only to follow a couple of topics/people I'm interested in, and occasionally add a short comment. It's a good medium for that kind of stuff.

Re: Big Whoop

[stealth_finger]

Isn't that just called talking? What you do when you hang out with your friends. Or by friends do you mean people you've never met and are happy with 240 characters of detail?

Twitter in 2019????

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Dorsey Dodges Questions

[Kunedog]

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?...

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.

Re:Wrong tool for the job

[DontBeAMoran]

How hard is it to drive a nail with a rope?

Hold my beer / challenge accepted.

That's the kind of stuff a mythbuster-style show could do.

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?

Re:Put the CLIENT in the hands of the user!

[Cid Highwind]

Spam happened.

Client-side filtering sucked in 1995 (and it's not much better now). USENET became an exercise in shouting at each other across a vast swamp of scams and penis pill ads, and everyone moved on to web forums where there was an admin with the power to ban spammers.

Libertarian utopias are all ultimately doomed by the real world being full of assholes.

Re:Put the CLIENT in the hands of the user!

[Chris Mattern]

What the hell happened to the internet that we gave up on the very concept of user control?

1. Most people find user control too hard.
2. Service providers discovered there was money to be had in taking the control the users didn't want.

No kidding. YouTube too.

[110010001000]

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.

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.

Re:Mostly Useless

[110010001000]

On the contrary: sometimes Musk points out the sexual preferences of people he doesn't like.

Use Cases

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter is not for talking with people.

It's for talking @people.

Re:Use Cases

[alvinrod]

Someone might want to tell the #meToo people if we're moving away from "hashtag" and back to "pound". I think it kind of changes their message.

Twitter is a dumpster fire

[DarkOx]

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.

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".

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 is a dumpster fire

[omnichad]

Our President has proven that our race toward a leader like Zaphod Beeblebrox was inevitable.

Re:Twitter is a dumpster fire

[thereddaikon]

The irony being that before Twitter and Trump people waxed about how great it would be if we had leaders who bypassed all the media talking point BS and just told us what they really thought. Now they want a return to talking heads. I for one am loving it. I think its incredibly refreshing and everyone else can't seem to get a handle on what Trump is doing. Trust in the media has predictably tanked ever since. But the same celebrities who before made jokes about talking heads and teleprompters hate that one guy who isn't any of that.

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?

2 questions on this

[pgmrdlm]

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?