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.
