Twitter is so powerful. When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Not Facebook. Not Hacker News. Not reddit.
The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.
I find the exact same thing; on every other social platform you get out more or less what you put in and it's reasonably easy to build persistent acquaintances and even intimate friendships over time.
I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.
As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
I did the same a year ago, largely agree with this, though I would note that it has been extremely useful to follow journalists (and comedy people/funny users). Specifically in regard to journalists however, I feel, just barely, that its worth it. One is able to gain a sense of what these people actually feel, away from an editorial board. Which is both enlightening and highly useful, if you actually devote time to reading journalism. Its also been very useful for organizing, as in, "there is a rally ya'll, come to such and such, like, now". More than once I've missed emails or other communications that would have pulled me into an action, meeting or other event but saw references to it on twitter and was able to make it at the last minute.
One interesting comment during the debate was that many (liberal) journalists use Twitter as a side platform on which they feel comfortable voicing more personal views. While it is an acceptable practice in their circles, conservative readers often point to those tweets as evidence of liberal bias in the industry. Regardless of the professional ethical consensus, it may be a cause of distrust, and suggests a general problem of liberal journalists preaching to the choir.
Eh, I'm kind of in the Colbert (although far more to the left) view of "reality has a well known liberal bias". It was a great joke, and I think got to the heart of the screeching about "bias" from "conservatives" (reactionaries). I find the idea that there is a neutral impartial view laughable, honestly. But then, I'm a commie, so shrug.
A final thought as well, I think, whatever your politics, that much of the liberal bias talk from the right, especially the now unmasked far right, was simply language policing. It was an attempt to set the terms of the debate and pull the frame as far right as possible, which seemed to have been largely successful in my opinion. Thanks for the link and the comment, I'll check it out!
I get the idea behind the "reality has a well known liberal bias" shibboleth. I think, however, that a more accurate and less self-serving formulation is that reality is non-partisan. Reality doesn't care about anyone's cherished political views.
It's certainly contributed to the irreparable ending of the relationship between conservatives and the MSM (to the detriment of both, and society itself). But conservative journalists and pundits are no less shy about spouting off, provided they work for a conservative outlet. I think what you don't see is journalists at mainstream (read: liberal) outlets who happen to be conservative, instead of token conservative pundits like @DouthatNYT, expressing their views publicly.
I'm like you. I would rather a tweet than email from a stranger. It just feels less intrusive and better for quick a back and forth with a bit of personality.
It's interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.
It does seem like having early access to all tweets would be immensely valuable, even if it was only a second of lead time. (Sure, Trump tweets are valuable on their own, but market info has to be encoded into coarse-grained info about individually useless tweets as well.) Unless they have an explicit policy against it, Twitter must be selling this, right?
New business model: For $1M per tweet, you can have a 50ms head-start on tweets from Trump. Just Trump, just one tier of headstart/pricing. You prepay for the next N tweets. You can set time-ranges (like, "when the markets are open") for when you want to pay for the headstart.
I bet they could get a few tens of millions of revenue there. Probably HFT firms would at least experiment with it, right?
Might get them into some serious regulatory crosshairs.
> In 1983, Switzer was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an alleged civil violation of the laws prohibiting "insider trading" of securities. He defended himself as having innocently overheard the information while lounging on the bleacher behind some corporate insiders—at a stadium where Switzer was watching his elder son compete in a track meet. The case was tried in Oklahoma City United States District Court (before a special U.S. District Judge appointed from Kansas). The case was dismissed at the conclusion of the Government's case for its failure to demonstrate that there had been any purposeful disclosure to Switzer.
The situation is even more clear for Twitter. If I'm a marine biologist making the world's most detailed measurements of the ocean, I can clearly use this info to buy or sell stock in a fishing company, even if I don't release that info publicly. Likewise, I can sell that info to someone else who makes the trades.
After reviewing the info you provided, I beleive you are mainly right. The only exception i can think of would be a situation where trump possesed inside information due to his position, then shared it via twitter early. That would be a violation, but it gets complex, and im having trouble formulating the exact line.
Prices are not nonpublic info. You can get them a number of ways without using bloomberg. Most people in finance believe in at least semi-efficient markets which means prices are not material anyway
It's reminiscent of the way that broadcast news was transformed as profit became a motive (basically the themes that are explored in the movie 'Network').
News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network's identities (and had enormous reach).
Local ad networks masquerading as news organizations. Record labels and newspapers have a lot in common; they were global logistics companies first (the core competence of Atlantic was shipping highly-processed petrochemical discs around the world) and media companies not really at all.
What newspapers had was a lock on the business now owned by Craigslist, with the transport and fulfillment network (newsagents and delivery vans!) being the key asset. Once that went away they were no longer businesses.
They didn't see it that way, but that's because their core business was so good they could afford to delude themselves - it didn't matter that they didn't know what they were really doing, the business model was that powerful. Google is remarkably similar in many ways.
The networks were given broadcast spectrum in return for one hour a day of public service, which took the form of news broadcasts. This was taken quite seriously by the original owners of the networks as a solemn duty to inform the public. They built large, global news gathering organizations that were a source of pride to them personally. They practically competed to lose the most money on news. (IIRC, by the mid-80's losses were in the $300m/yr ballpark.)
By 1987, a number of factors - changes in ownership for the big 3 networks, upstart FOX network, the increasing importance of celebrity anchors on ratings, deregulation of media ownership laws and other factors - caused a mass shift towards looking at news as profit centers.
Ken Auletta's "Three Blind Mice" is excellent. (At least on recollection. It profoundly changed my understanding of the media when I read it 25 years ago.)
Newspapers have never had such constraints but there were laws limiting the concentration of ownership aimed at making sure people had diverse influences in any one market. For instance, TV channels could not be owned by the same company that owned a newspaper in the same market. I don't know enough off the top of my head to expand more usefully on that.
Also just got James Fallows' book "Breaking the News" – he's one of my favorite writers at the Atlantic, and so far it's a great book – don't know if it talks about this aspect of the news, but still worth checking out.
You can reach people on Twitter, but there's some question as to how much you can influence people. Periodically I see articles from people with hundreds of thousands of followers who admit to being unable to translate that into sales, or hits to their site, or votes, or whatever.
Twitter is a great platform to keep your name in the public consciousness. So... indispensable if you're a Kardashian. Other than that, though, it's not clear. A lot of people are wasting a lot of time building up a subscriber account that ends up being meaningless.
Facebook makes money because people give it a lot more information than they give twitter. Too much, IMO.
Snapchat has a novel engagement mechanism. Short multimedia interactive ads in a captured setting. The format has potential. The Snapstream keeps people hooked. It's basically a next gen Facebook but more private.
Look at all the articles written when Beyonce posts her pregnant body on Instagram as an example. we only think twitter has so much influence because thats where a lot of techies hang out.
Care to share which of pg's tweets you found powerful? I would say that when pg has something to say, he takes to his blog. I dont think his tweets are within an order of magnitude as valuable as his blog. And for that reason I don't agree with your assessment of Twitter.
I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.
Twitter simplifies re-broadcasting and discovery..
Only people who know Paul Graham will know about his blog, but his tweets can be re-broadcast to a much wider audience through re-tweeting, who can be exposed to him without having sought him out or known about him in the first place.
I've discovered, and subsequently followed, probably half of my twitter feed through re-tweets from my existing feed.
I have to imagine that's the same for a lot of others.
That's funny. When I first started reading his blog, I had no idea who he was, and Twitter didn't exist yet. A friend emailed a link to me because he thought I should read it.
I definitely wasn't implying that there are no other ways for people to discover content, and email is of course still a very popular way for that to happen.
I still email links, and receive links by email, all the time ..
Torvalds. David Brin. Tim O'Reilly (although Tim uses or used to use multiple platforms in an ongoing fashion). Randall Schwartz. A few others I'm not thinking of right now.
Plus garnered a bit of a "tech"/thinker corner. I don't know whether it has any remaining vibrancy/growth, at this point, or whether its mostly a matter of inertia combined with the crapitude of other platforms for the particular communicating they are doing.
Too bad Plus was so thoroughly hosed from the start by political agendas.
OT: At Christmas, I stopped accessing Facebook. I thought it would be for a few days or a week. Coming up on two months, soon, and I haven't been able to make myself go back. Even with a relatively small set of FB friends whom I actually, personally know, and who are nice and not rabid and actually respond meaningfully to some of my own contributions, there.
In some ways, the impersonal, more technical content on Plus (and here, and etc.) is easier. There is no "missing aspect" as there is with FB engagement with friends.
Twitter? Gave up on that years ago. Tim O'Reilly had an interesting post or two about some of its positive, community aspects, in its early days. But now, it just mostly seems a megaphone for the loud and discontent.
And then, too, anywhere Trump et al. are and that seems to aid his lying megalomania. I'm not inclined to lend it the (incremental) support of my participation.
If he's a particular indication of their future, well, then, welcome to the gutter, Twitter.
Are you sure there weren't some sort of recruitment effort with at least some of those guys... Though you do see some tech pages out there, maybe because of Hangouts? shrug
I didn't know Tim O'Reilly was on G+ but ALL these recent posts are pop-politics and ugly at that! I thought you were referring to all Google services being tied in.
I don't know. Good point. I expect some, e.g. O'Reilly, were actively solicited.
I don't spend too much time in Plus. Brin has had a lot of political stuff, recently, although he's a bit mixed and individual in his opinions and they do tend to tie back to points modeled in his sci-fi writing.
O'Reilly I see less frequently. I suppose he's getting more "elder statesman", too.
Torvalds actually addresses some tech stuff. Though he has personal stuff, too -- he does not use it as a "tech blog".
Reminds me some of Tim Bray's "Ongoing" blog -- self-hosted -- that I haven't been to in a while. A personal take, on both tech and other stuff in his life. Whatever the topic, informed, intelligent, and thoughtful. Creative, too.
I don't think Plus is in any kind of a steady state. Even what I wrote about, may well be in decline. Maybe it was better a few years ago.
Regardless, this year's politics have really shocked a lot of people, and this is spilling over into erstwhile non-political venues.
Oddly, when I clicked on Linus's G+ link it redirected me to a G+ advertising sequence, complete with web popups. I had to click a second time to actually get there.
I think that may be my biggest issue with G+ (despite so few people using it)... they keep changing it. Facebook evolves much more slowly, so it's much more predictable and comfortable to the distracted and comfort-seeking social media user like myself. G+ is constantly experimenting and I can't easily pin down exactly what it is...
I agree with this, Twitter is still the best place for celebrities to interact with their fans. Elon Musk for example has unveiled more than a few of his ideas and dropped details of his products on Twitter instead of anywhere else.
Which is something of a strength and weakness of Twitter. It can be used for conversations but the 140 character limit makes it tough. As a result, Twitter is generally best used for people who are broadcasting things to a group of interested followers. If that doesn't describe you (either as a follower or a followee) then you're probably not going to find Twitter very useful.
I don't like that it forces me to go to a page to see everything they've posted. The whole reason I subscribe to things is to see all of those things. I can choose to hide things, they don't give me the choice to see everything. To me Facebook is fundamentally broken in that way.
Which a mailing list would accomplish the same thing. In fact, I would prefer I just receive email directly from people I follow, rather than a separate stupid app.
The reach of mailing lists is orders of magnitude smaller.
People have to sign up for a mailing list; and people who aren't signed up generally don't get your content. This is a stark contrast with Twitter, where content is shared at a significantly higher rate. I don't necessarily have to subscribe to a certain source to get content from them, if someone in my network decides to share that content. When was the last time you received a message that was sent over a mailing list that someone forwarded to your inbox?
I don't follow Elon Musk, but if he puts out an important tweet someone I follow will retweet him putting his content in my feed. An Elon tweet with some big announcement easily reaches an audience of millions. No mailing list has that kind of reach.
Yes but there's no reason it couldn't, I believe was somebody's point. Twitter doesn't do anything that's not possible by other means. Following is conceptually the same as subscribing. Sharing or retweeting is the same as forwarding. You're only describing differences in usage patterns, and network effects from popularity of the network. Not discounting those at all, just noticing nothing unique has been demonstrated.
The interaction is completely different. I can check on Elon's twitter whenever I want without having to subscribe. People can have conversations around his tweets without spamming strangers' inboxen. I can send you a link to one of his tweets and you can pass it on to whoever you want without exposing my address to your friends. I have no idea why you would compare the two.
You just described a mailing list with a web frontend. Perfect example: NANOG (North American network ops group)
Massive mailing list. Web enabled. Trivial cost. Deep links possible to share. EDIT: And more than 160 characters! Hallelujah! A format an actual discussion can take place in.
I compare the two because I'm old, tech is cyclic, and everyone reinvents the wheel. Twitter is, clearly, not special, and can't justify its valuation.
I use twitter to get instant updates on current news from reporters sitting in WH briefing rooms and other breaking news unfiltered from the people on the ground. I like reading quotes from what is happening real time and being able to respond before it even hits the live NBC news feed.
You just aren't going to ever have that with a mailing list. If you could we would be doing it.
Obviously it could be styled differently/"better" for mass consumption, but that aside, it still exposes private emails and full names of the participants.
And I think the character limit is part of what makes it valuable...I don't really want to read an essay, the forced concision is great for a lot of the use cases. And getting back to Elon, he probably doesn't want to engage in deep discussion with all those randoms, he wants to drop a juicy tidbit, build excitement and let the discussion happen elsewhere. When he has something more to say, he writes a blog post and tweets a link.
I'm actually not defending Twitter's valuation or business prospects, just the value or uniqueness of the service relative to something like a mailing list. I'm still not convinced they're so similar.
The barrier for a follow is so much lower than a mailing list. I am not going to sign up for a mailing list from a random comedian to send me their tour dates that 98% of the time aren't relevant to me. But I will put up with them Tweeting those date if their other Tweets are funny.
Twitter also has this element of being like a river you can dip into whenever you're inclined and ignore the rest of the time. As you say, I do subscribe to some newsletters and mailing lists but it's very easy to get overloaded and/or end up filtering things to a folder that you never look at. Twitter seems to strike a reasonable balance of utility/effort/distraction/etc. for a lot of things that email-oriented methods really don't.
Ah right..
Like that story last week about the writer that got so addicted to twitter that she had to close her account?
From my point of view it doesn't seem so easy and balanced.
I'm missing something..
You just said that you won't click a button to signup a newsletter that delivers you funny jokes and the tour dates of a random comedian, but you are more than happy to press a button to get exactly the same things but with the limitations that the funny jokes must be less than 140 chars.
There must be a reason if I never used and understood twitter at all..
Emails require more of my attention and they arrive whenever they are sent. Tweets require zero attention, they are easy to ignore, and I never see them unless I specifically seek them out by opening Twitter. Basically Twitter is much more voluntary than email.
I get this, but it's kind of funny to hear someone say Twitter's unique value proposition is that you can ignore it. As a non-user I must be extracting tons of value from it then! It's the poor users I feel sorry for!
Just joking around. But, not completely. The value you speak of is really the ability to spend your time on something potentially more worthwhile. People forget social media has an opportunity cost.
Twitter is way better for directly hype-building around those tweets. Although maybe a mailing list could be marketed in a similar way, of done cleverly.
> I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them.
> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
> So we filter our inputs.
> ...
> Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear.
> ...
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
To fix this "problem" they've been spending money on human moderators to filter content, tags, and ban people. They're spending money on employees to remove discussions and eyes from the site, which counter intuitive if their goal is to become profitable, nor does it solve the problem ultimately.
I don't have a Twitter account, so the only way I see it is if something gets reposted on my FB feed or some other media outlet. Which generally means someone notable and/or famous for some reason. Personally, I'm okay with this level of filtering.
Twitter is only useful because "normal" media makes news about notable tweets.
I surely don't get my information from twitter. Would seem silly to get all my information (or "important" information from "powerful" people) from a hundred character sound bites.
When people talk about getting their news from Twitter, they don't literally mean they never leave Twitter for information. 140 characters is enough for a headline and a link; you click through to articles that interest you.
Instagram has notionally the same dynamic as twitter but somehow they do a lot better at convincing their eye balls that they are welcome on the platform and have a voice. Or at least it seems to me.
I share the same feeling when using Twitter with a following mainly consisting of friends. If the sole purpose was to communicate with friends, why do so publicly on Twitter?
There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.
It's basically a publishing system. On Twitter I generally put only professional broadcasting related items for 90% of the content. Blog posts, that kind've thing. I rarely even read it.
There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter.
It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.
I've found twitter works okay for discussing small scale events. Local journos tweet the goings on of city council and citizens and councillors and journos pile into the conversation. Muni politics is my hobby, but it does shine for this so I assume it extends to similar fields of small-scale news.
This type of statement reminds me of being in the music business (for the short period of time I was in it). Everyone would always hype their artist as the best thing since sliced bread. "You gotta hear this guy" "She's got an amazing voice" "They are so powerful". While I heard a lot of amazing talent — the fact of the matter was that they weren't "It". No matter how much marketing and promotion went behind them, they never grew beyond a decent sized market segment.
I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
I don't use twitter so if I'm wrong about this, I stand by to be corrected, but with twitter, I thought you can only reach people who have already chosen to listen to you.
It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.
Twitter lets you mention anybody. Unless they've blocked you, they will be notified that you mentioned them. It's like /u/username on Reddit, but on Twitter it's the standard way to address people.
Anyone have any thoughts on turning Twitter into a publicly funded utility? It's fraught with difficulties, and maybe unconstitutional, but as you say Twitter is an extremely powerful tool and it would be a tragedy to lose it just because it can't find a way to extract money from its users.
Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter?
If you really enjoy it finance it with your money.
I already finance organisations that are much more worth my money than a glorified newsletter.
It's a sad world in which we are living.
If I had a twitter account probably I should have tweeted my really deep analysis in 140 chars.
Wait for it.
Public funding would be massively problematic (especially in this political climate), but I agree about wanting to conserve the utility even if it's not a good way to make money. I'm surprised that a distributed open alternative hasn't appeared by now.
The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.