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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."
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?...
The only "news" here is that the CEO of Twitter had never previously used Twitter.
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?
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.
Twitter is not for talking with people.
It's for talking @people.