I've never been able to understand Twitter's popularity. To me, it's like a website's comment section without the attached content. And most of the stuff I've seen on Twitter is only slightly better than YouTube comments, and often worse. I know there are lots of Twitter users here -- seriously, I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic, I just don't get the appeal. What am I missing?
Twitter is not like random comments section, because you can build your own network of interesting people by following only what genuinely interests you. There are a lot of great people on Twitter working on products you or I use every day that share good commentary or tease what's coming, curate links that I'll probably be interested in reading or share a "heads up" if there's something to be vary of, reporters following a story, bands for upcoming plans etc. etc.
It's also interesting to follow some people you strongly disagree with just to see their day to day thinking, what they're reading and how they may've come to their conclusions.
You can also share a request/call into action/product you just launched etc. with your network and they'll spread it for you if you provide them with an interesting feed and generally quality stuff - must be a quality list of people you follow/they follow etc.
It's like your own personal humint if you know how to take advantage of it.
If you just engage with a bunch of random people, it's not that useful indeed.
As a frontend developer it has been quite easy since the industry leaders are all very active on Twitter. My rule of thumb is to unfollow people who tweet out of context to why I follow them.
Yep. Twitter should have incorporated the concept of user switching to their UI by now. Trying to avoid (US/gender) politics by unfollowing technical leader people has left me with a, let's say, very manageable set of people to follow.
This would be largely avoidable if there was easy way to switch to a secondary/tertiary user to vent off thoughts that aren't the beef.
Twitter gives you the ability to curate yourself a feed from comments of people you deem interesting enough to follow and keep up-to-date with, as far as I know. I mostly use it for my literary pursuits, and being able to follow editors, agents, and authors at the same time with minimal hassle has made twitter very useful to the fiction scene.
Alternatively, in the tech world, it gives you live updates on various developers that people look up to. technologies you want to keep up with, and updates on exciting open source software.
A word of warning. You think you're curating it yourself, but the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased towards finding you an opinion you already agree with.
This is why a) social media is often characterised as a narcissistic echo chamber, and b) why it becomes so rapidly toxic when two naturally opposed communities coincide on a topic.
A wonderful petri dish for anthropologists, but not a medium we'll be proud of fifty years from now.
> ...the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased...
That depends entirely on how you use Twitter.
Find people you know or have heard of other places and think are smart/interesting/important/etc. Follow people they retweet. Repeat. Meet Kevin Bacon.
Fighting human psycology, sociology, and site design through individual conscious will scales poorly.
Your friends and FOAFs are not likely to exercise the same level of control as you're expressing. I've consistently observed this even among a carefully curated set of sources on several SocMed sites.
The problem with Twitter, IMO, is that it's a fire hose. Let's say that I decide to follow John Carmack. I'm interested in his thoughts on technical topics and especially articles or posts that he may have written. Instead, I get all of that plus* the inspirational quotes he posts every morning, his political opinions, his thoughts on current events, etc. None of which I care about, and none of which (AFAIK) Twitter gives me the ability to filter.
*I don't know if John Carmack actually posts anything of the sort, just a hypothetical.
Is there a comparable service that has a public/private feed? I guess Facebook wall posts would be the closest, but you can't publicly follow people there.
>[Twitter] is a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
It's a shame that, instead of seeing themselves as a protocol, twitter decided they were another "P" word: platform.
I think Twitter could have become ubiquitous, like Facebook or email, had it not gone the platform route and started to shut down third party apps. But then, how do you make money as a protocol?
IMO it's the appeal of having an audience. Get followers, get recognition for your thoughts - get recognition for yourself.
I really think the reason Facebook first exploded in popularity (I was just entering college when it rolled out so have some first-hand experience) was because a whole lot of college age people love to show off pictures of themselves doing cool things, they want the audience. I won't comment on how Facebook has changed, but the original appeal was close to why Instagram is so popular today.
It feels good to have an audience, whether it's for your thoughts or pictures of your life. Not here to judge that as good or bad.
I don't know if it's just me, but these days instead of seeing inane photos of my friends, all I see are photo's my friends liked (especially if they have 1.5k other likes).
I don't "like" anything on fb so it's not just fb deciding for me what I want to see. I think that it's moving closer and closer to curated TV than a true social network
Interesting that nobody has mentioned (yet) the social aspect of Twitter, for which it was originally developed - like SMS but on the web.
I use it to stay in touch with people I've worked with, other people in my sector who I've met at events, and with friends and acquaintances who live in other places. There's also people I've met on Twitter who have gone on to become friends 'irl'.
I was writing about this for some friends recently. A lot of people don't "get" twitter because it's a very multi-purpose tool; it's not built around a central use case.
I find there are 5 useful ways to think about twitter:
1. It’s a way to follow people you’re most interested in. (Friends, authors, celebrities, professional mentors, restaurants you like.)
2. It’s a way to follow publishers of content you like. (Comedians, news, industry pubs, local events aggregators, food bloggers, magazines.)
3. It’s a tool for actively finding content you like or things you want. (Discussion about a show you like, jobs, deals, feedback.)
4. It’s a platform to get people interested in what you have to say, and be followed by those that already are.
5. It’s a quick, accessible opportunity to communicate with a peer, influencer, business, or supporters.
If you're interested in the rest of what I shared with friends (more actionable stuff on how to find what you want, how to handle noise, skimming other basics), you can find that here - https://medium.com/@jayneely/how-you-can-use-twitter-a-guide... - but the above is probably what's most interesting to the HN crowd.
It's a great place for me to talk to other furries. Not sure how that translates to an eleven-figure business.
I suppose I can try to make a more general case for it. Twitter is the global community of people who have some specific thing in their brain that is also in your brain. It's not the place to share life updates with your college buddies and cousins. It's a place to find people who have a specific niche interest you share, and to share in the thoughts that you all don't necessarily want to express to the people you interact with day-to-day. Unlike Facebook, you can actually meet people there. And it doesn't require the sustained attention (I won't dare call it obsession) of places like forums and LiveJournal so a wider crowd is willing to use it. I still don't know if it's an eleven-figure business, but I'm glad it exists. It makes me feel more connected to the world.
You're missing friends on Twitter. I use it a lot because a lot of my friends are there; it's sort of like an asynchronous semi-public IRC channel where I decide who's in it. They, and whatever random thoughts they happen to feel like broadcasting on Twitter, are the "content".
It's a social network. If you're not being social it's pretty goddamn boring.
It's not without its flaws - nuanced, lengthy discourse is pretty much impossible thanks to that 140-character limit - but it's been a great way to keep up with my friends on an informal basis.
You could say the same thing about random conversation. Which is what twitter is, it's conversation. But you get to choose who you follow on twitter, it's not like you just sign up and get a firehose stream of random tweets. It's a great way to keep up on your friends and interesting people.
