Twitter: When the network is the thing | Hacker News Reader

Twitter: When the network is the thing

eugenewei.com

25 pointsdtawfik110 comments

This claims that the network makes twitter, not the 140 character limit. Well, it was that 140 character limit made the network in the first place.

The author describes reasons why the 140 character limit is a problem (e.g. you can't have long conversations), in which they absolutely miss the point. Twitter is not meant to solve all of your communication needs. The 140 character limit allows Twitter to be a reliable source of quick bits of information - you can dive deeper if you want, but it's a great cursory overview.

Tools don't have to solve every problem. They can (and probably should) solve one specific problem really well. Twitter does that.

Network aside, I thought the debate originally arose from the fact that few are sure about which problem twitter currently tries to solve.

I'm not a twitter power user but I have the feeling that if they keep solving just this problem Facebook/reddit will soon absorb what Twitter makes great for me. (Which means: the network)

Twitter is a feed, like RSS and co, but centralized thus without the need to maintain one's own blog.

So yes it is not meant to be used as a conversation tool. Its biggest problem is in my opinion is curation. If I follow someone on twitter because he tweets about Javascript or Web Security, I don't want to hear about the toys he bought for his babies, his vacations or any activities unrelated to the subject that made me follow that person. Twitter needs some kind of a channel system, hashtags are a poor way to filter tweets. Too much noise.

That's basically why I stopped using it and went back to RSS. If common people understood how RSS works, they would not need twitter.

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you follow people within categories

One small nit pick: this is exactly what he's saying he doesn't want. He wants a way to be able to filter out content based on topic, not based on users. Putting a user in a category doesn't magically filter their baby pictures out of their discussion of algorithmic filters. Maybe automatic topic tagging? Combine that with being able to put topics on an ignore list and you would have my interest in a hurry.

Following that user in "web development" instead of "everything" (a la twitter) will solve his issue. You follow people within categories, you don't associate people with categories.

I probably didn't phrase it correctly, I stand corrected.

When you share or save something on tree, you have to choose one of the 20 categories: tech, business, news&society, art&design, music, etc... In turn, people will see that you shared in X or Y and can decide to follow you exclusively in this X or Y category. Your feed is actually a multi-feed (depending on how many categories you decided to follow people in, up to 20).

> If common people understood how RSS works, they would not need twitter.

RSS is a one-way broadcast medium, and isn't used nor ideal for small updates, comments, musings that do not need web pages.

Twitter is a two way protocol if you like. It's not like rss a one way street.

The idea that it was meant for something is not really very useful. Twitter is meant to be whatever makes them survive even if they have to pivot away to something completely different.

The 140 character limit allows Twitter to be a reliable source of quick bits of information - you can dive deeper if you want, but it's a great cursory overview.

That quick bit of information lights up our dopamine receptors like nothing else. It's designed to be addictive. Diving in deeper is difficult and time consuming. For example, I find following conversation threads on twitter to be impossible. I suspect this is by design. It wouldn't be that difficult to design twitter so whole threads are easily readable. But reading and following whole threads isn't as addictive. The preferred method of consuming twitter seems to be following a large number of people and/or hashtags. This results in disjointed bits of somewhat related information being streamed to you at a high rate of fire. Like a news ticker on steroids.

I'm reminded of when Facebook first eliminated the formatting constraints on status updates, so that users could simply enter text instead of adapting their message to the "___ is __ing" convention. At the time, I'm sure there was some Slate article decrying the move because it would make Facebook just another website.

Personally, I tended to agree: it seemed like some of the quirky charm of Facebook had been needlessly killed. But I was wrong. The communicative potential of Facebook never would have ripened if status updates had remained so constricted. The original novelty of the medium itself gave way to the sustained novelty of diverse messages.

What does that mean for Twitter? I'm not sure.

Its ongoing success chastens me, because when I heard about it, the idea sounded idiotic. Why use a protocol that imposed a 140 character limit? Well, there is clearly some utility, given how many active users Twitter has. But it is also obvious that many of those same users are frustrated by the limitations of what they can express.

If I were running Twitter, I would take a middle path: Keep the 140 character limit on "Tweets" but integrate a new type of public message without a character limit. (Perhaps the 'subject line' of the new message class would be a Tweet, which would expand into the full text when clicked.) This seems like the best way to provide users an easier means of expressing themselves without destroying Twitter as they know it.

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