Maybe, there's also something to be said for being pragmatic. You may not like the way the world is right now, but you still have to live in it, you know?
Except that his first words in the post are "About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter.", so that's just utter BS.
I may be biased because Alex Gaynor is a prominent member of the Django community and one of the pillars of what made it so elitist and hostile to contributions. But then again, I hate twitter too.
I can see why he would want to do that; I hate Facebook and only hold onto it for a few long distance family members, but realistically I could drop it and communicate with them via my wife's account. However, if I drop Facebook then I also drop the FB Pages associated with the websites I manage. While it's not a huge audience by any stretch, it's still important to me.
In another example, recently I stopped commenting on OS News threads altogether due to the recent political shenanigans (in short, the managing editor stopped posting operating system/tech news and focused solely on the gamergate saga). However, I do still check out the site from time to time, and ironically both the stories and the subsequent discussions have improved in the past week or so while he's been on vacation. Still, I'm soured from engaging with that community for a while yet, even though I have friends there.
So I can see him keeping his Twitter account and only using it to promote his blog, declining to engage in regular conversation. On the one hand, maybe it is a bit hypocritical, but on the other, he's using Twitter for exactly what he said it should be used for.
If you criticize the effects of cars on society, are you a hypocrite for driving? How about riding? If you critique capitalism and wish it would end, are you a hypocrite for buying?
That's always a low accusation to make primarily because it's ad hominem and completely irrelevant, but secondarily because it's an easy attack that requires a detailed defense.
If a person making billions from running tobacco companies doesn't smoke, prefers people he's around don't smoke, and thinks that it's a nasty habit, is he a hypocrite? What about if he makes money from a rise in sales of sugary candy but thinks people eat too much sugary candy? What if he makes money from selling housing but rents?
Wait, is this satire? His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article. He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled. What is this?
His blog comments were probably just like Twitter conversations: impossible to follow and appearing in an inconsistent order. Thus they had to go away. Also the jokes. Stop broadcasting jokes!
He certainly does not want to encourage conversation.
>Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities;
It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. That's not a community, that's an echo chamber with no disagreeing, no joking, no comments.
It's okay if he doesn't like Twitter and doesn't want to use it, but wishing for it to go away makes me uncomfortable. Why should he care if others use Twitter ?
I, for one, am happy with Twitter being alive even though I don't use it.
> It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does.
It's interesting that you say that, given that this is the same person who started a firestorm of drama by pull requesting gendered documentation in Node.js.
I did some quick research and found this [0]. It seems he rewrote some documentation changing "he/she/etc" to "they/them/etc". Doesn't seem like a terrible thing to do really. I had never particularly thought about the issue. The pull request was denied by another guy for some reason. I can't imagine caring if the "he"s get changed to "they"s.
Then everyone came out and started criticizing the other guy and it all blew up. I can see not necessarily spending time changing the documentation (it's certainly an easy task to set aside for later or not even think about in the first place) but to deny the pull request seems to be in bad taste in my opinion. It's not as if people who might normally use "he"s would see the the "they"s and have some sort of problem with it so if people want "they"s give the people "they"s if someone does it for you.
The pull request was rejected as part of nodejs's standard policy of rejecting small changes to the documentation or code comments. When isaacs merged it in manually, bnoordhuis reverted the commit because it broke the rules: all changes landing in master had to be signed-off by one of the head maintainers, and his wasn't.
If anything was in bad taste, it was the pull request itself. You don't just go to a project you have never contributed to and tell them they're using pronouns wrong. And who talks like this to people:
> I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really see why you wouldn't merge it if it's so trivial though. Surely making the library less hostile is worth a few seconds of our time to press the "merge" button?
Do you see what's going on there? It assumes as a premise that his pull request makes the library "less hostile" when everybody knows that's not a universally agreed upon premise. Now if you want to argue with that comment, you have to unwind it to argue with the premise, which is going to lead to an exhausting conversation. So instead, people don't usually do that. This behavior serves to exclude and alienate people that don't agree with his premises.
Alex Gaynor does this all the time and has been doing so at least since back when he posted on the Something Awful forums. Maybe he just wants everybody with views different than the ones he's adopted as part of his identity to just go away. In online communities where this sort of conversational tactic can't achieve that (Twitter, Hacker News), he leaves and publicly announces that those communities are beneath him.
(This opinion is not borne of confirmation bias: Thanks to him using different usernames in different contexts, I've managed to independently come to hate him for this sort of thing three different times before realizing it was the same person all along.)
It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does.
You say "seems," but it doesn't just seem like that, it is exactly that. The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves of (minor point, but I'll clarify because I don't want conversation to degrade to pedantics).
Why should he care if others use Twitter ?
If I had to jump into speculation, I'd say he cares because he feels excluded from a tool many of the rest of us can choose to ignore or live with.
>> The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves
"Safe space" is a much abused phrase. The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn?
It seems that some people will not hesitate to demand the complete absence of anything they find the least bit objectionable, all in the name of 'safe spaces'.
> The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn?
Offer a meaning of safe as it applies to physical harm. Let's see if we actually agree to that as easily as you presume we would first.
A space where you have no reasonable expectation of any form of personal injury, perhaps excluding self-inflicted harm caused by negligence (e.g. cutting off your own hand in the kitchen, but not somebody else cutting off your hand in the kitchen).
Great! In only 41 words, and seemingly off-the-cuff, you've crafted a perfectly reasonable definition of an 'acceptably physically safe space'.
The term 'safe' should never have been brought over like this to apply to psychological comfort. With physical safety, there is a clear and obvious event around which related concepts can be built: the event of physical damage to the body. We can point to those events, and it is easier to trace back a chain of cause-and-effect and discuss reasonable domains of responsibility.
With 'emotionally safe' spaces, there is no line that prevents the notion from being abused, and substituted for "the absence of anything I don't like".
And if you consider being offended to qualify as "unsafe" or "emotional and psychological harm," then anything you find offensive violates your "safe space" criteria.
I think that's the point. With a more community oriented system the line could be drawn at the single user's discretion. Like on Facebook. I don't agree with the author of the article that twitter should die, though.
Oh, I understand that the ability to draw that line himself is part of what he is seeking. I meant to say that the idea of 'safe spaces' can be used to conflate 'preventing harm' with 'indulging arbitrary wants' and even 'pandering to narcissists'. Unlike with physical safety, I don't see a line we can use to semi-objectively declare that one has left one domain of 'emotionally safe' and entered another domain.
Notice that I'm not arguing against the establishment of circumstances in which a person can feel safe! Only that we should pay attention to the language and how it is used, lest we become manipulated into an unhealthy dynamic, all in the name of pursuing a healthy dynamic.
> Oh, I understand that the ability to draw that line himself is part of what he is seeking.
Why, then, do you keep insisting that we should somehow "semi-objectively" declare one? There isn't even a clear line as to what is physically harmful. Why do you think that something as inherently subjective as emotional harm would have to be objectively defined to be considered?
As for "indulging arbitrary wants"; I bid you welcome to the social network business and wish you will have a pleasant stay.
> Why, then, do you keep insisting that we should somehow "semi-objectively" declare one?
It's very strange that you say 'why, then' while coupling these sentences, as if the existence of the first makes the second less sensible. Its exactly because of the existence of the first that we should consider the 2nd.
> There isn't even a clear line as to what is physically harmful
Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone. Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.
> inherently subjective as emotional harm would have to be objectively defined to be considered?
Oh, did someone say that, somewhere? Did someone say that something must be objectively defined in order to be _considered_? I wonder what that person might be thinking. Maybe they are constructing false dilemmas and straw men.
> Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone. Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.
The idea that emotional harm doesn't involve physical (even if not structural) damage to the body requires that emotions exist in a non-physical realm rather than being epiphenoma of physical states of the body.
The idea that so called emotional 'harm' cannot involve physical changes is not assumed in anything I've said.
The important thing here is that it is easy for reasonable, practical people to agree on what constitutes the act of physically harming another. Your own statement demonstrates that it is not so easy to draw a line on what constitutes 'emotional harm'. Which structural changes deserve the label "results of harm" ? The innate slipperiness of the concept is exploited by those who wish not only to 'protect' themselves from hearing unpleasant opinions, but also to elevate the act of silencing others to a righteous form of 'protection from harm'.
> It's very strange that you say 'why, then' while coupling these sentences, as if the existence of the first makes the second less sensible.
I'm not asking you why because I think that the two ideas are inherently tangled, but because I don't understand the relevance semi-objectively declaring a "line" has to the discussion.
> Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone.
Where is the line drawn when it comes to damaging one's body? Eating too much? Sleeping to little? Hitting someone in the face? Too little exercise? Bad ergonomics? Suicide? Watching TV? Smoking? When do you leave the domain of physically unsafe and enter the domain of physically safe?
> Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.
Surely you can see that this isn't an actual argument, and I won't respond to it as such. Explain how it is radically different and I will return to you.
> Oh, did someone say that, somewhere? Did someone say that something must be objectively defined in order to be _considered_?
No, you didn't outright say that, but it's the idea I got from your reasoning. Your argument seems to be that the phrase "safe spaces" is abused, and the only reasoning you support that conclusion with is based on the idea that emotional harm is hard to define. That seems like the opposite of the dictionary definition of considering something.
And his Twitter feed is nothing but promotional one-way blasts (not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts).
> not to mention his tweet-followers-following numbers are consistent with shady accounts
A ratio of 20:1 is consistent with sole individuals having some contextual visiblity within an ecosystem/community, e.g. being a lead developer on a language's primary alternative implementation, which he is (pypy). It's similar to David Nolen (Om, 20:1) or Armin Ronacher (Flask, 40:1).
> He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled.
That bothered me as well, especially his flippant attitude about it ("Comments are never going to happen. Stop trying to make comments happen"). I get the joke, it's from that Lindsay Lohan movie. But the cognitive dissonance that it creates is annoying.
He's basically saying "I want Twitter to die because they don't allow proper conversations to take place. Oh and by the way, don't bother commenting on my post because I don't believe in blog post conversations."
Between the two, I can only conclude that he has something very, very specific in mind as the proper form a community should assume. I wonder what it is.
I think it's pretty clear what he wants. He wants the ability to selectively include some people, and exclude others. Like Facebook, where you can set your privacy policy to "friends only" and then you only get comments from people you've mutually agreed to converse with.
This is defining a community in terms of its edges. He seems to believe that if you can't exclude anyone, you can't define a community. It's just, I don't know, a crowd.
Twitter doesn't work this way, and neither do website comments. Both invite anyone at all to speak to you.
I think you've nailed it. He isn't happy that Twitter has no boundaries or walls for him to build and maintain. It appears that in his mind, Twitter should go away since it doesn't serve his specific needs, never mind the 200 million+ other users who are happy with how it works.
I don't care for Twitter myself, but I'm not going to call for its demise just because I don't get much out of it. Obviously it has a prominent place as a major social media engine, and that's just fine. But then, it's not all about me.
I emailed him once. At the time, I was a big python fanatic, and had a few questions about pypy. He never replied. So I asked someone else, and wrote a blogpost on pypy.
More likely, Alex does not want to spend the time to provide moderation for a comments section. His stance is that Twitter is bad because the kind of community it creates—it would be silly for him to create a comment section that similarly failed to meet his expectations.
It is perfectly fine for Alex to criticize Twitter without providing his own alternative (though he does tacitly recommend using IRC and Facebook instead). Alex is a Rackspace employee who also is heavily involved in the Python community. The expectations on him for providing a space to talk are completely different than a company who's business is providing a communications platform.
The article is all about how he doesn't want to communicate with people unless they are in his specifically selected group of people he thinks is OK. So allowing blog comments would probably let anyone communicate, which is what he dislikes about Twitter. So I see the blog comments being disabled as more in line with his philosophy, at least.
It says send him an email. Maybe you think he's imposing undue restrictions on the conversation, but I don't think it's fair to say someone doesn't want a conversation because they would prefer to have it in one medium over the other. Plus comments need to be moderated, etc.
Are you actually engaging with his comments regarding Twitter or just whipping out a lame tu quoque?
> His Twitter account is linked in the header, and it just posted about this article.
Some people link their social media presences together so that posts made in one place get replicated on various socia media things, for the benefit of people who follow them on those social media things. That doesn't mean they have to enjoy that particular social media whatsit's experience, or can't criticize it.
The only thing that you can tell from comments being disabled is that he doesn't want to have this specific conversation on the specific venue that is comments to his blog post. Trying to extrapolate that into some stance of I HATE HAVING CONVERSATIONS is stupid.
Eh. I'm definitely a part of several communities on Twitter. It's just that they're micro-communities that are fluid in size and shape. If I'm talking business stuff I'll @shazow usually. If it's coding, usually @wolever, sometimes @shazow or @lnxprgr3, depending on the language/platform/etc.
The whole hashtag thing is ... pretty hit or miss. I wouldn't mind a better solution to that. But as weak as it is, it's how I found some of my closest twitter-friends, so it can definitely work.
Thankfully I haven't had to deal with any harassment issues (not famous, nor a noticeable minority), though sadly I don't doubt that they exist to some degree.
And just to be snippy, I find it amusing that he's so against comments on blogs, preferring that you write your own blog post. Isn't that exactly like Twitter? Everyone has their own medium, none of which are explicitly connected...
It's not at all exactly like twitter, for one a text that needs to stand on its own (a blog post) will require far more work to be of any sort of quality than a simple reply on twitter.
> I think Twitter is defined by the fact that it's about broadcast.
Writing on a blog with comments off is 100% broadcast with no built-in solution for conversations to form. Twitter has a (flawed) way, so twitter is actually LESS about broadcast than this blog.
> Communities are, above all else, defined by membership, the ability for people to identify as a part of one, and to participate in activities, and share things and experiences with the group.
How does a reader proclaim membership in this blog. Sign up for comments? Post comments? Nope. How does a reader participate? How does a reader share their experiences with the group? Far easier on Twitter than here.
> Every user floats by themselves, interacting with who they please.
Every reader of the blog floats by themselves, interacting with nobody.
> Try following a multi-party conversation using any of the official clients;
How is THIS possible on the blog? You can email the author, sure, but you aren't going to see or be able to reply to anyone else that emailed him.
There's also the widely-repeated quote of "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Length is not necessarily indicative of amount of thought.
Disagree. Twitter is immensely valuable for me to quickly communicate with people in my "community" (the Javascript tech world), as well as keep up on news in areas I'm interested in: the Javascript tech world & a few others.
He also clearly doesn't understand how to use lists to create his own communities. I have lists for devs, friends, funnies, etc. With a little effort you can have these communities on tap in columns. Hey, if you're lazy, you can even subscribe to other's lists and put them in a column too.
Twitter is not hard for conversation, so long as you can put together concise thoughts. I'll agree it does become a pain when you need to explain a lot, but that's why we have links and a multitude of platforms to record our thoughts.
I don't necessarily agree that Twitter users can't build communities. A friend of mine writes for a sports blog specific to an NFL team. His twitter account (and @replies) show that he is a part of a very strong community around the team. The tweets from these super-fans aren't just missives shouted into space, these people use Twitter almost solely as a response tool to each other. Their tweets look very much like something you'd see on IRC or a message board.
I guess another way of phrasing the original article's claim is that although communities do form, they have no straightforward way to exclude strangers, interlopers, and even griefers: and except for incessant use of hashtags (which could eat up valuable space), there's no simple way for a person who is part of multiple communities to direct comments to only one community.
That's a recipe for both serendipity and uncomfortable moments (or worse) if someone has strong opinions on, say, computer science, religion, and animal rights. People who chose to follow them over one thing will constantly see their opinions on other things. That might be great under some circumstances because it will promote more interesting and broader discussions or lead people to learn about ideas that they wouldn't have naturally come across in their own filter bubble. But it might produce some serious disruption in the conversation too, especially if that person's views are offensive or upsetting to some readers.
I know a Twitter user writes a lot about computer science and a lot about sex and sexuality. I find both sets of posts frequently insightful, but the latter would be off-topic in a forum devoted only to computer science, and they do sometimes produce offense.
It seems like the best case for avoiding really bad forms of conflict is when a group of people tweet almost exclusively on a single topic that outsiders don't find upsetting or offensive (or simply don't know about). But a lot of people do want to have at least some discussions that others will inevitably be offended by, and the broadcast medium can be a challenge for that if you didn't want to get into it with the strangers (or for that matter have some of them insult you, threaten you, or even dox you).
An example: I remember a blog written by an Orthodox Jew on theology and also cultural and political issues within the Orthodox community.
Periodically commenters would come by who would take exception to gender relations in the Orthodox world, or to the idea that there is a God who created the world and revealed his will to the Jewish people, who are uniquely continuing to follow it. The author would ban these commenters. His theory was that people are entitled to debate those topics somewhere, but that he wanted to have productive discussions on his blog with people who shared his basic premises.
It's easy for me see two different points of view about this: that it creates a "filter bubble" of the sort described by Eli Pariser, where the Orthodox (and people with other beliefs, for that matter, in their own blog communities) never see their faith questioned, and have a subjective experience that their beliefs are "normal" and don't hear about the substance of criticisms or objections to them. Or that it actually allows discussions about the topics that the audience of that blog mainly wants to discuss, without having every single thread turn into a debate about the existence of God, whether the Torah is divine, and whether Orthodoxy should adopt gender egalitarianism.
I think one idea here is that Twitter only makes one of these two options practical: the one where every thread can conceivably go off in the direction of a bunch of strangers saying that your basic beliefs are wrong (or even that you are a bad person).
Twitter has a great feature of showing you the @reply messages by the people you follow, only if you follow that same person as well.
For example, if you sent me an @reply message to me ( @djloche ) that message would only show up in the feeds of your followers IF they followed me as well. This means you can have a conversation about the latest film with me, the party last night with your co-workers, and a pancake recipe with a friend that really loves pancakes - and there won't be any cross conversation unless there is a natural crossover in the social groups.
I guess that helps quite a lot in preventing group conflicts from getting out of hand accidentally. It seems like a weaker control if someone is deliberately trying to get involved in a conversation where other people would see them as unwelcome.
That's a good point, that is clearer to what the article is trying to say.
Defining a community by its ability to exclude is interesting. Twitter just puts the impetus to exclude on a personal level (person A blocks person B) rather than on a community level (person B is banned from this IRC channel)
Yes, I think that's right. And some unmoderated mailing lists and newsgroups have also favored that approach (with killfiles), but even there there is potentially a stronger threshold for joining (you have to deliberately subscribe to the list or group) and stronger recourse for extreme misbehavior (at least on mailing lists, where someone can be banned from the list).
I agree. The hockey and baseball Twittersphere is awash in conversations. I've made a number of real-life friends through Twitter in these communities.
Sports is perhaps a special case in that people routinely disagree with each other without one being right and one being wrong. Trash talking is expected and is easily ignored (or it can be part of the fun).
I totally agree with this guy. At least, I mostly do. I'm not sure if I care if it goes away, but I've drastically cut back on my use of it mainly for the reasons he outlines. I think he's onto something.
I am not a huge twitter fan. I watched the http://foundation.bz/ interview with Biz Stone, and he seems like he has integrity. I think some of the management of twitter is a bit dubious, but the core function of the application is rather valuable. It is a good way to keep track of people & events. It makes it easy to broadcast things like occupy, arabspring, ebola, charities, entrepreneurs, etc. It is a good way for people to collectively contribute ideas such as news. It isn't really meant to be a social network. What the author purports to be a bug, is actually like the key usecase/feature of twitter. I don't regularly use it, and am pretty ambivalent, but I understand the value.
Alright, so twitter is terrible because its 'broadcast' instead of 'communities', and you don't like 'broadcast' but you like 'communities', so twitter should go away.
a) "I hope Twitter genuinely ceases to be."
b) "I want a product that enables me to build and participate
in communities[...]."
Having a product that enables b) doesn't mean a) must happen. Why come to that conclusion. Because you don't like participating in it, it should cease to be?
I don't get how people come to conclusions like this. It feels very self absorbed to conclude a) from b). Maybe I'm just allergic to opinion pieces with hyperbolic titles.
I don't want to speak for the author, but an argument could be made that a product that:
1) Is massively popular; and
2) Has design flaws that actively sabotage conversation
... could lead to a situation where "B would be better if A went away," due to network effects. No matter how good an alternative B you build, people will keep on suffering with A despite its limitations, because that's where all the other people are. The existence of A sucks away oxygen that B needs to grow.
Exactly. Shotgun-blast your puerile thoughts to your dozens/hundreds/millions of followers. Don't bother reading any responses it might garner—they're going to be just as base.
Now you're in the habit of just shotgunning statements into the crowd, so when you do the same thing on Facebook, you've forgotten how to engage in a more lengthy, rational discussion.
Or, even worse, you've grown up with Twitter and don't understand that people can have lengthy, meaningful conversations via the internet.
Basically because of this Twitter has been a place to share "interesting" links, pictures, jokes, and complaints. There's no discussion, no thought, no ability to back-n-forth. Worse is everything is very public so I have to be super duper careful that what I say doesn't get back to me professionally. There is no "private community" or anything. I find twitter useless except as a means to scream really loud not caring if anyone hears it.
There is no shortage of intelligent, rational material on Twitter. It's all about who you follow. I choose to not follow anyone who posts junk. It is true that I can't do anything about foul responses except just ignore them.
Twitter doesn't have a design flaw, it sets out to do what it wants and it does so spectacularly. Twitter is a platform for announcements not for conversations (although many try to use it for that very thing).
People who think twitter is a conversation platform are #doingitwrong. Period. People who try to use twitter for conversations and get angry when it doesn't work well or some random stranger barges in and starts hurting their feelings obviously need to realize that there are a ton of other platforms that solve their problem. Namely message boards, any form of chat (irc, IM, etc), blogs, etc.
People use twitter for announcements and then for comments on those announcements. Very few people have actual conversations. When a conversation does happen, it's usually the root poster agreeing (or disagreeing) with the person that tweeted at them. I don't see anyone going to twitter with the initial intent of conversing with someone. Nobody goes onto their computer and says "Hey I'm gonna go message this person on twitter so we can have a conversation"
Tell that to my mobile phone provider, who no longer accepts email as a viable support request path, but insists on me starting up a conversation with them on twitter or facebook (I don't have facebook, so that leaves twitter), requiring private information (so I have to 'follow' them first, and they have to 'follow' me in return), is one D away from exposing private info and in general totally unsuitable for the purpose.
One simple solution: send them an old school registered letter. They'll have to read it, or at least sign for it. In that letter you can let them know how displeased you are, and announce that you will a) continue to send registered letters and b) will change telco as soon as you can.
Conversation (yes, often about announcements) is the main thing I use twitter for. To me twitter, at its best, is basically a giant irc channel with some filtering features.
Now you've seen one. I think you're confusing emergent with wrong, tbh.
You're just flat out wrong. That's why there's a tab dedicated to replies. Twitter conversations can be incredibly interesting and benefit all participants by being public. Twitter's setup hugely encourages @ing people in your tweets.
Except conversations are badly broken. So many people don't hit the actual reply, so conversations get cut off, often restarted, and thus become fragmented, which makes them hard to follow and participate in. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn't. I think this is what the OP was talking about.
But this is not a problem of the platform, but of how users are using the platform. I rarely have conversations on twitter (i.e. most are just a couple of replies long at most) but I occasionally have a 20+ post. If you hit proper reply, it works. If you don't, it doesn't (or does really badly), but this is a user fault, not a platform fault.
If users have difficulty properly using the platform, the platform is at fault. An arbitrarily naive user should never have to fight the platform to do what he wants.
Also consider when there's say four people tagged in a conversation, and then someone needs the extra characters to make their point and they remove one of the names, then that person loses the context too.
Also, conversations look different when you're looking at them from one of your lists, or if the people you are following are different than the people I follow.
So many clunky issues that you need to be on top of for it to make sense, and this is what's lost on the general person.
This is one of the many examples of Twitter not knowing what Twitter is. Twitter is a product that was a success in spite of the efforts of its founders.
That explains why a new user would choose Twitter today. It doesn't explain why people started using it for conversations in the first place, years ago when the network was new and small.
That's kind of non sequitur, isn't it? Thats like saying Myspace is doing a good job of giving users what they want now, because at some point in the past it did.
No, it's not "obviously ok" for conversations if "millions of people use it that way". What kind of strange thought process leads to that conclusion?
It's only "obviously ok" if (a AND b), where:
(a) "millions of people use it that way"
(b) it's productive and beneficial when used that way.
The (a) is only enough to show that Twitter serves a need people have for certain coversational structure (short messages). Doesn't prove that it's the best tool imaginable tool for the purpose or thats it's the pinnacle where evolution in such networks stops.
Actually, this very thread started with a FA saying that it's not (b).
People don't generally voluntarily use a service unless it is beneficial to them in some way. It's not like millions of people are being forced to use Twitter for conversations.
Edit to add: also, I didn't try to "prove that it's the best tool imaginable tool for the purpose or thats it's the pinnacle where evolution in such networks stops." I just said it's ok.
>it sets out to do what it wants and it does so spectacularly.
That sounds post hoc. It, of course, is what it is and does what it does, but do you have any evidence that this result was well-calculated or planned?
Have you intentionally left out Facebook in your list of alternatives? Because I think that is where many discussions have moved to, and it's pretty good for that. Articles posted by news pages have kinda-threaded comments, and Facebook's trademark "Like" button fits in well, too. I think that's a good example of how sites can evolve (so Twitter could, too).
Sorry to be pedantic but perfectly executing a flawed design doesn't mean the design isn't flawed.
I agree twitter is not suitable for conversations, and also don't understand why it must go away. Like you said, it does one thing and it does it well.
Has design flaws that actively sabotage conversation
I've never thought of Twitter as a platform about having a conversation. Its a strange mix of a soapbox and some messaging but its inherently a public medium with the ability to have a public conversations but thats not its focus, its why brands love it, but its not Snapchat/Facebook or Google+.
That's a bit like saying "I wish cell phone B would go away, because I prefer cell phone A, and if cell phone A was the only one people could buy, it would be cheaper for me to buy because of economies of scale."
No, it's like "I wish cell phone B would go away" because I prefer cell phone A, and I think cell phone B is POISONOUS to community and discussion, and leads to a worse society.
The trouble is that "worse society" is defined by the preferences of the speaker, not the aggregate preferences of everyone in society including the thousands (millions?) of users contently using Twitter in ways the speaker dislikes.
I don't see how that's problematic at all. If my ideal society is different from that of most other people, it still doesn't mean I'm not entitled to my own opinion.
I'm not suggesting that he's not entitled to his opinion and to voice it. I just think that it's a poor justification for action, and it's also slightly troubling for someone to earnestly desire a service with which millions of people are happy to disappear because it would make that one person happy.
>The trouble is that "worse society" is defined by the preferences of the speaker, not the aggregate preferences of everyone in society including the thousands (millions?) of users contently using Twitter in ways the speaker dislikes.
Yeah, and what's the issue with that?
The very idea behind a "society" is that its members take certain decisions about whats OK and what's not. Not everybody has to agree, but everybody can try to convince society for what he thinks it's best or what should be stopped.
That "millions are doing it" is also not an argument. 2/3 of Americans did smoke, and yet it's now banned in most public places and looked down upon. Thousands of businesses did "seggregation" too.
What Alex does is start a discussion and voice his dislike and wish for X to stop. He doesn't rule over anybody, and doesn't force people to stop X with violence.
Because twitter boosts "negative social behavior" (wtf? by whose definition?) you want a platform that allows people to report natural disasters, broadcast their products/movements, report corruption, communicate with their fan base, etc. to die?
Also, let's all ignore that fact that twitter is used by a ton of government dissidents living in totalitarian governments to broadcast the oppression that occurs there.
I'd like them to use a more open platform. I can get rss feeds of the tweets, but if Twitter drops the ball at any point all that communication infrastructure dies with it. Businesses aligning with your use case, especially a twitter user (who represents nil profit individually) is a fleeting thing.
Twitter doesn't need to go away. I feel I'm not missing out on much by not using Twitter. Facebook is sort of forced upon me because I'd miss on a bunch of social activities if I didn't use it.
With Twitter it exists and sometimes I use it. My life is not negatively impacted by avoiding it.
>Having a product that enables b) doesn't mean a) must happen. Why come to that conclusion. Because you don't like participating in it, it should cease to be? I don't get how people come to conclusions like this. It feels very self absorbed to conclude a) from b). Maybe I'm just allergic to opinion pieces with hyperbolic titles.
No, it's simply that you ignore the fact that he didn't state his opinion as a conclusion in the form: (b) -> (a), nor he claimed (b)->(a) is some kind of deduction by itself.
He just stated (a) and (b), which are independent thoughts. The link, if any, is his belief that social networks who don't work with communities are inherently bad (thus (a)).
Why they are bad? That's what he provides his arguments about in the whole f... article.
But then you might accidentally find yourself in an unsafe space one day. Its better to convert enough people to your opinions about safe spaces, and eventually force the world to conform to your vision.
I can't disagree with you, even if I really want to. I'm the same way, I want people to stop using Twitter, because I don't want to use it. I went to dotgo this month, much of the last minute communication was on Twitter, which is a really annoying platform to navigate when you don't have an account. I want to get other people of the platforms that I don't use, so I'm not forced to deal with them myself.
Being push towards technologies, behaviors and trends you don't like can be extremely frustrating. In the end me being bitter about Twitter, JavaScript, smartphones, tablets and all the other stuff I really don't care about isn't going to change public opinion. I comfort myself in the fact that Twitter will be dead soon if they continue to lose money.
I suspect Mr Gaynor is tapping into a simmering feeling that many have that Twitter is inadequate for most communication needs (at least among technical crowds), and that there are now many, many more interesting alternatives now. He clearly cares a lot about his #Brand and being the among first person to say how uncool Twitter or FB or MySpace is becoming might very well boost his Klout score.
I agree that Twitter is inadequate for serious communications and is the last place I go to read deeply on anything, but that doesn't mean it's not immensely useful and fun to many others outside my communities. I don't usually find myself hoping that things I don't use "cease to be". I think Gaynor must just be addressing his own social circles here and speaking hyperbolically.
Slightly side topic - does anyone else feel like they "need" to use Twitter because it's a good distribution platform (the "human RSS"), but generally don't particularly enjoy it?
I personally find myself thinking "oh maybe I should post that stupid comment that's in my head on Twitter...last time I did it I got X followers, so I should probably continue to do it"
yup. I'm worse than the author here, I've never understood twitter. It's bad for writing because of the limitation, it's bad to keep track of something because of all the noise, it's bad for discussions, it's bad for communities, etc...
The only good things that I can come up with are: broadcasting, stalking someone, press 2.0.
And yes I do use it, I have a twitter account with 600+ followers (I don't even know if they're called followers) and I just use it to promote and promote, and I dislike it so much that I miss on a lot of promotion by ignoring it most of the time.
Twitter is an example of product design by technical limitations, not what people need.
Nevertheless, they hit very well, b/c the two were somewhat closely aligned for a decade or so. Now that it's being strained, some of its limitations are showing...
...But no matter what, I do not predict its imminent demise... Especially since they are mainly a technical layer, there is still a world of protocols they can implement on top of it to make it more like e.g. IRC, or whatever other comm. network people desire.
Then again CB radio rose and fell quite hard without ever completely going away.
That's what I like about Twitter-- it's a global cocktail party. People tweet to one another about anything regardless of whether they know each other or what their relative socioeconomic background is.
It is what it is. It's not for everyone. But the net is more interesting with it than without it.
It's kind of ridiculous and solipsistic to declare that something that exists for a purpose you don't care about shouldn't exist at all. I prefer Twitter to other social networks and haven't had any problems with it. (Though Twitter should improve the situation for people who do get harassed. You can't eliminate all anonymity on the internet.)
I'm also not interested in the shallow/faux "communities" that are more easily facilitated by Facebook but I have no problem with allowing it to exist and I can't imagine censoring it as a whole due to the parts I don't like. Or even writing up a blog post about doing so.
I'm another person who doesn't use Twitter, however I do have an account. And frankly, I fail to see many use cases. But I also acknowledge that the few use cases are powerful.
1. On the ground reporting
2. Messages to group of friends, like where to meet
3. Coordinating group efforts outside friends list in X social media
4. Warnings related to specific area/time
5. Error logs related to web services
6. Command/Control of hidden machines
7. Complaints to companies with sensitive web presence
>About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter. Though I'd been thinking about it for a while, ultimately leaving was a snap decision for me. Lately I've been reflecting on why I hate Twitter so much.
It took me a minute to figure out he never worked for Twitter and that he just quit _using_ Twitter.
250 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/Alex_Gaynor
Not to mention the big Twitter logo linking to his profile at the top of his blog.
But still, yeah.
https://twitter.com/alex_gaynor/status/524683684180271106
But even if they were, there's a certain irony to decrying Twitter while syndicating yourself on it.
I may be biased because Alex Gaynor is a prominent member of the Django community and one of the pillars of what made it so elitist and hostile to contributions. But then again, I hate twitter too.
In another example, recently I stopped commenting on OS News threads altogether due to the recent political shenanigans (in short, the managing editor stopped posting operating system/tech news and focused solely on the gamergate saga). However, I do still check out the site from time to time, and ironically both the stories and the subsequent discussions have improved in the past week or so while he's been on vacation. Still, I'm soured from engaging with that community for a while yet, even though I have friends there.
So I can see him keeping his Twitter account and only using it to promote his blog, declining to engage in regular conversation. On the one hand, maybe it is a bit hypocritical, but on the other, he's using Twitter for exactly what he said it should be used for.
That's always a low accusation to make primarily because it's ad hominem and completely irrelevant, but secondarily because it's an easy attack that requires a detailed defense.
If a person making billions from running tobacco companies doesn't smoke, prefers people he's around don't smoke, and thinks that it's a nasty habit, is he a hypocrite? What about if he makes money from a rise in sales of sugary candy but thinks people eat too much sugary candy? What if he makes money from selling housing but rents?
edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8535040
1.) a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion
2.) a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings
He certainly does not want to encourage conversation.
>Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities;
It seems that what this person wants is that everyone he talks to think like he does. That's not a community, that's an echo chamber with no disagreeing, no joking, no comments.
It's okay if he doesn't like Twitter and doesn't want to use it, but wishing for it to go away makes me uncomfortable. Why should he care if others use Twitter ? I, for one, am happy with Twitter being alive even though I don't use it.
It's interesting that you say that, given that this is the same person who started a firestorm of drama by pull requesting gendered documentation in Node.js.
Then everyone came out and started criticizing the other guy and it all blew up. I can see not necessarily spending time changing the documentation (it's certainly an easy task to set aside for later or not even think about in the first place) but to deny the pull request seems to be in bad taste in my opinion. It's not as if people who might normally use "he"s would see the the "they"s and have some sort of problem with it so if people want "they"s give the people "they"s if someone does it for you.
[0] - http://www.dailydot.com/news/github-gendered-pronoun-debate/
> I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really see why you wouldn't merge it if it's so trivial though. Surely making the library less hostile is worth a few seconds of our time to press the "merge" button?
Do you see what's going on there? It assumes as a premise that his pull request makes the library "less hostile" when everybody knows that's not a universally agreed upon premise. Now if you want to argue with that comment, you have to unwind it to argue with the premise, which is going to lead to an exhausting conversation. So instead, people don't usually do that. This behavior serves to exclude and alienate people that don't agree with his premises.
Alex Gaynor does this all the time and has been doing so at least since back when he posted on the Something Awful forums. Maybe he just wants everybody with views different than the ones he's adopted as part of his identity to just go away. In online communities where this sort of conversational tactic can't achieve that (Twitter, Hacker News), he leaves and publicly announces that those communities are beneath him.
(This opinion is not borne of confirmation bias: Thanks to him using different usernames in different contexts, I've managed to independently come to hate him for this sort of thing three different times before realizing it was the same person all along.)
News: https://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/slap-fight-in-node-js-land/
The drama pull request in question: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
Alex authored the commit that 804d40e reverted, and when the drama was going down Alex rallied the troops on Twitter.
You say "seems," but it doesn't just seem like that, it is exactly that. The terminology he uses is "safe space." It doesn't mean zero joking or disagreement, but only the type and levels he approves of (minor point, but I'll clarify because I don't want conversation to degrade to pedantics).
Why should he care if others use Twitter ?
If I had to jump into speculation, I'd say he cares because he feels excluded from a tool many of the rest of us can choose to ignore or live with.
"Safe space" is a much abused phrase. The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn?
It seems that some people will not hesitate to demand the complete absence of anything they find the least bit objectionable, all in the name of 'safe spaces'.
Offer a meaning of safe as it applies to physical harm. Let's see if we actually agree to that as easily as you presume we would first.
The term 'safe' should never have been brought over like this to apply to psychological comfort. With physical safety, there is a clear and obvious event around which related concepts can be built: the event of physical damage to the body. We can point to those events, and it is easier to trace back a chain of cause-and-effect and discuss reasonable domains of responsibility.
With 'emotionally safe' spaces, there is no line that prevents the notion from being abused, and substituted for "the absence of anything I don't like".
I think that's the point. With a more community oriented system the line could be drawn at the single user's discretion. Like on Facebook. I don't agree with the author of the article that twitter should die, though.
Notice that I'm not arguing against the establishment of circumstances in which a person can feel safe! Only that we should pay attention to the language and how it is used, lest we become manipulated into an unhealthy dynamic, all in the name of pursuing a healthy dynamic.
Why, then, do you keep insisting that we should somehow "semi-objectively" declare one? There isn't even a clear line as to what is physically harmful. Why do you think that something as inherently subjective as emotional harm would have to be objectively defined to be considered?
As for "indulging arbitrary wants"; I bid you welcome to the social network business and wish you will have a pleasant stay.
It's very strange that you say 'why, then' while coupling these sentences, as if the existence of the first makes the second less sensible. Its exactly because of the existence of the first that we should consider the 2nd.
> There isn't even a clear line as to what is physically harmful
Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone. Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.
> inherently subjective as emotional harm would have to be objectively defined to be considered?
Oh, did someone say that, somewhere? Did someone say that something must be objectively defined in order to be _considered_? I wonder what that person might be thinking. Maybe they are constructing false dilemmas and straw men.
The idea that emotional harm doesn't involve physical (even if not structural) damage to the body requires that emotions exist in a non-physical realm rather than being epiphenoma of physical states of the body.
The important thing here is that it is easy for reasonable, practical people to agree on what constitutes the act of physically harming another. Your own statement demonstrates that it is not so easy to draw a line on what constitutes 'emotional harm'. Which structural changes deserve the label "results of harm" ? The innate slipperiness of the concept is exploited by those who wish not only to 'protect' themselves from hearing unpleasant opinions, but also to elevate the act of silencing others to a righteous form of 'protection from harm'.
I'm not asking you why because I think that the two ideas are inherently tangled, but because I don't understand the relevance semi-objectively declaring a "line" has to the discussion.
> Obviously, physically damaging one's body works as one line - a line - for physically harming someone.
Where is the line drawn when it comes to damaging one's body? Eating too much? Sleeping to little? Hitting someone in the face? Too little exercise? Bad ergonomics? Suicide? Watching TV? Smoking? When do you leave the domain of physically unsafe and enter the domain of physically safe?
> Surely you can see how radically different this is from so called 'emotional harm'.
Surely you can see that this isn't an actual argument, and I won't respond to it as such. Explain how it is radically different and I will return to you.
> Oh, did someone say that, somewhere? Did someone say that something must be objectively defined in order to be _considered_?
No, you didn't outright say that, but it's the idea I got from your reasoning. Your argument seems to be that the phrase "safe spaces" is abused, and the only reasoning you support that conclusion with is based on the idea that emotional harm is hard to define. That seems like the opposite of the dictionary definition of considering something.
The irony.
A ratio of 20:1 is consistent with sole individuals having some contextual visiblity within an ecosystem/community, e.g. being a lead developer on a language's primary alternative implementation, which he is (pypy). It's similar to David Nolen (Om, 20:1) or Armin Ronacher (Flask, 40:1).
That bothered me as well, especially his flippant attitude about it ("Comments are never going to happen. Stop trying to make comments happen"). I get the joke, it's from that Lindsay Lohan movie. But the cognitive dissonance that it creates is annoying.
He's basically saying "I want Twitter to die because they don't allow proper conversations to take place. Oh and by the way, don't bother commenting on my post because I don't believe in blog post conversations."
This is defining a community in terms of its edges. He seems to believe that if you can't exclude anyone, you can't define a community. It's just, I don't know, a crowd.
Twitter doesn't work this way, and neither do website comments. Both invite anyone at all to speak to you.
I don't care for Twitter myself, but I'm not going to call for its demise just because I don't get much out of it. Obviously it has a prominent place as a major social media engine, and that's just fine. But then, it's not all about me.
Does that mean he doesn't want communication to happen?
It is perfectly fine for Alex to criticize Twitter without providing his own alternative (though he does tacitly recommend using IRC and Facebook instead). Alex is a Rackspace employee who also is heavily involved in the Python community. The expectations on him for providing a space to talk are completely different than a company who's business is providing a communications platform.
Are you actually engaging with his comments regarding Twitter or just whipping out a lame tu quoque?
Some people link their social media presences together so that posts made in one place get replicated on various socia media things, for the benefit of people who follow them on those social media things. That doesn't mean they have to enjoy that particular social media whatsit's experience, or can't criticize it.
The only thing that you can tell from comments being disabled is that he doesn't want to have this specific conversation on the specific venue that is comments to his blog post. Trying to extrapolate that into some stance of I HATE HAVING CONVERSATIONS is stupid.
It is hypocritical to use it and exclaim that it shouldn't be used.
The whole hashtag thing is ... pretty hit or miss. I wouldn't mind a better solution to that. But as weak as it is, it's how I found some of my closest twitter-friends, so it can definitely work.
Thankfully I haven't had to deal with any harassment issues (not famous, nor a noticeable minority), though sadly I don't doubt that they exist to some degree.
And just to be snippy, I find it amusing that he's so against comments on blogs, preferring that you write your own blog post. Isn't that exactly like Twitter? Everyone has their own medium, none of which are explicitly connected...
> I think Twitter is defined by the fact that it's about broadcast.
Writing on a blog with comments off is 100% broadcast with no built-in solution for conversations to form. Twitter has a (flawed) way, so twitter is actually LESS about broadcast than this blog.
> Communities are, above all else, defined by membership, the ability for people to identify as a part of one, and to participate in activities, and share things and experiences with the group.
How does a reader proclaim membership in this blog. Sign up for comments? Post comments? Nope. How does a reader participate? How does a reader share their experiences with the group? Far easier on Twitter than here.
> Every user floats by themselves, interacting with who they please.
Every reader of the blog floats by themselves, interacting with nobody.
> Try following a multi-party conversation using any of the official clients;
How is THIS possible on the blog? You can email the author, sure, but you aren't going to see or be able to reply to anyone else that emailed him.
There's also the widely-repeated quote of "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Length is not necessarily indicative of amount of thought.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
Twitter is not hard for conversation, so long as you can put together concise thoughts. I'll agree it does become a pain when you need to explain a lot, but that's why we have links and a multitude of platforms to record our thoughts.
That's a recipe for both serendipity and uncomfortable moments (or worse) if someone has strong opinions on, say, computer science, religion, and animal rights. People who chose to follow them over one thing will constantly see their opinions on other things. That might be great under some circumstances because it will promote more interesting and broader discussions or lead people to learn about ideas that they wouldn't have naturally come across in their own filter bubble. But it might produce some serious disruption in the conversation too, especially if that person's views are offensive or upsetting to some readers.
I know a Twitter user writes a lot about computer science and a lot about sex and sexuality. I find both sets of posts frequently insightful, but the latter would be off-topic in a forum devoted only to computer science, and they do sometimes produce offense.
It seems like the best case for avoiding really bad forms of conflict is when a group of people tweet almost exclusively on a single topic that outsiders don't find upsetting or offensive (or simply don't know about). But a lot of people do want to have at least some discussions that others will inevitably be offended by, and the broadcast medium can be a challenge for that if you didn't want to get into it with the strangers (or for that matter have some of them insult you, threaten you, or even dox you).
Periodically commenters would come by who would take exception to gender relations in the Orthodox world, or to the idea that there is a God who created the world and revealed his will to the Jewish people, who are uniquely continuing to follow it. The author would ban these commenters. His theory was that people are entitled to debate those topics somewhere, but that he wanted to have productive discussions on his blog with people who shared his basic premises.
It's easy for me see two different points of view about this: that it creates a "filter bubble" of the sort described by Eli Pariser, where the Orthodox (and people with other beliefs, for that matter, in their own blog communities) never see their faith questioned, and have a subjective experience that their beliefs are "normal" and don't hear about the substance of criticisms or objections to them. Or that it actually allows discussions about the topics that the audience of that blog mainly wants to discuss, without having every single thread turn into a debate about the existence of God, whether the Torah is divine, and whether Orthodoxy should adopt gender egalitarianism.
I think one idea here is that Twitter only makes one of these two options practical: the one where every thread can conceivably go off in the direction of a bunch of strangers saying that your basic beliefs are wrong (or even that you are a bad person).
For example, if you sent me an @reply message to me ( @djloche ) that message would only show up in the feeds of your followers IF they followed me as well. This means you can have a conversation about the latest film with me, the party last night with your co-workers, and a pancake recipe with a friend that really loves pancakes - and there won't be any cross conversation unless there is a natural crossover in the social groups.
Defining a community by its ability to exclude is interesting. Twitter just puts the impetus to exclude on a personal level (person A blocks person B) rather than on a community level (person B is banned from this IRC channel)
I don't get how people come to conclusions like this. It feels very self absorbed to conclude a) from b). Maybe I'm just allergic to opinion pieces with hyperbolic titles.
1) Is massively popular; and
2) Has design flaws that actively sabotage conversation
... could lead to a situation where "B would be better if A went away," due to network effects. No matter how good an alternative B you build, people will keep on suffering with A despite its limitations, because that's where all the other people are. The existence of A sucks away oxygen that B needs to grow.
Now you're in the habit of just shotgunning statements into the crowd, so when you do the same thing on Facebook, you've forgotten how to engage in a more lengthy, rational discussion.
Or, even worse, you've grown up with Twitter and don't understand that people can have lengthy, meaningful conversations via the internet.
They're almost invariably not with tech people, though.
People who think twitter is a conversation platform are #doingitwrong. Period. People who try to use twitter for conversations and get angry when it doesn't work well or some random stranger barges in and starts hurting their feelings obviously need to realize that there are a ton of other platforms that solve their problem. Namely message boards, any form of chat (irc, IM, etc), blogs, etc.
If millions of people insist on using your product as a conversation platform, it is a conversation platform, no matter what you intended it to be.
A thing is what it is.
Twitter isn't a conversation platform
Who is your provider btw? That sort of bad acting should be named and shamed (on a platform like twitter perhaps?)
Now you've seen one. I think you're confusing emergent with wrong, tbh.
Also, conversations look different when you're looking at them from one of your lists, or if the people you are following are different than the people I follow.
So many clunky issues that you need to be on top of for it to make sense, and this is what's lost on the general person.
They're you're either blind or not looking very hard.
Twitter is a conversation platform. A shitty one perhaps, but one nontheless.
It's only "obviously ok" if (a AND b), where:
(a) "millions of people use it that way"
(b) it's productive and beneficial when used that way.
The (a) is only enough to show that Twitter serves a need people have for certain coversational structure (short messages). Doesn't prove that it's the best tool imaginable tool for the purpose or thats it's the pinnacle where evolution in such networks stops.
Actually, this very thread started with a FA saying that it's not (b).
Edit to add: also, I didn't try to "prove that it's the best tool imaginable tool for the purpose or thats it's the pinnacle where evolution in such networks stops." I just said it's ok.
People are not always the best to judge what benefits them. Case in point: everything from Bush, to heroin addicts, to fast food, to Justin Bieber.
Ah, but that depends on what your definition "\"is\" is" is.
I hope this makes you feel better!
And that depends on what your definition of "\\" is.
That sounds post hoc. It, of course, is what it is and does what it does, but do you have any evidence that this result was well-calculated or planned?
IMO they could have been the killer app. That potential fell a little short and it's just another marketing funnel for TV people.
I agree twitter is not suitable for conversations, and also don't understand why it must go away. Like you said, it does one thing and it does it well.
I've never thought of Twitter as a platform about having a conversation. Its a strange mix of a soapbox and some messaging but its inherently a public medium with the ability to have a public conversations but thats not its focus, its why brands love it, but its not Snapchat/Facebook or Google+.
That's, by the way, is his whole point.
Just people people are OK using X now, doesn't mean wanting to take X down is bad, or will necessarily hurt people.
Yeah, and what's the issue with that?
The very idea behind a "society" is that its members take certain decisions about whats OK and what's not. Not everybody has to agree, but everybody can try to convince society for what he thinks it's best or what should be stopped.
That "millions are doing it" is also not an argument. 2/3 of Americans did smoke, and yet it's now banned in most public places and looked down upon. Thousands of businesses did "seggregation" too.
What Alex does is start a discussion and voice his dislike and wish for X to stop. He doesn't rule over anybody, and doesn't force people to stop X with violence.
So I see no problem there.
Because twitter boosts "negative social behavior" (wtf? by whose definition?) you want a platform that allows people to report natural disasters, broadcast their products/movements, report corruption, communicate with their fan base, etc. to die?
Also, let's all ignore that fact that twitter is used by a ton of government dissidents living in totalitarian governments to broadcast the oppression that occurs there.
No, it's simply that you ignore the fact that he didn't state his opinion as a conclusion in the form: (b) -> (a), nor he claimed (b)->(a) is some kind of deduction by itself.
He just stated (a) and (b), which are independent thoughts. The link, if any, is his belief that social networks who don't work with communities are inherently bad (thus (a)).
Why they are bad? That's what he provides his arguments about in the whole f... article.
I never directly communicate with people on Twitter.
Being push towards technologies, behaviors and trends you don't like can be extremely frustrating. In the end me being bitter about Twitter, JavaScript, smartphones, tablets and all the other stuff I really don't care about isn't going to change public opinion. I comfort myself in the fact that Twitter will be dead soon if they continue to lose money.
Can you elaborate why you are bitter about the above?
I agree that Twitter is inadequate for serious communications and is the last place I go to read deeply on anything, but that doesn't mean it's not immensely useful and fun to many others outside my communities. I don't usually find myself hoping that things I don't use "cease to be". I think Gaynor must just be addressing his own social circles here and speaking hyperbolically.
The end game for twitter will look in the shape and form of a buyout at a huge discount by an already hugely profitable company.
I personally find myself thinking "oh maybe I should post that stupid comment that's in my head on Twitter...last time I did it I got X followers, so I should probably continue to do it"
The only good things that I can come up with are: broadcasting, stalking someone, press 2.0.
And yes I do use it, I have a twitter account with 600+ followers (I don't even know if they're called followers) and I just use it to promote and promote, and I dislike it so much that I miss on a lot of promotion by ignoring it most of the time.
I'd say it's good for sharing intel within communities, just not for in-depth discussion (other sites are good for that).
Nevertheless, they hit very well, b/c the two were somewhat closely aligned for a decade or so. Now that it's being strained, some of its limitations are showing...
...But no matter what, I do not predict its imminent demise... Especially since they are mainly a technical layer, there is still a world of protocols they can implement on top of it to make it more like e.g. IRC, or whatever other comm. network people desire.
Then again CB radio rose and fell quite hard without ever completely going away.
/end self-promotion
It is what it is. It's not for everyone. But the net is more interesting with it than without it.
I'm also not interested in the shallow/faux "communities" that are more easily facilitated by Facebook but I have no problem with allowing it to exist and I can't imagine censoring it as a whole due to the parts I don't like. Or even writing up a blog post about doing so.
It took me a minute to figure out he never worked for Twitter and that he just quit _using_ Twitter.
Last I checked oct 21st's not "seven months ago"
What gives?