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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

> Twitter is the world’s most important social network.

I see sentiment like this and it just reminds me of how insular journalism is. Twitter is incredibly popular amongst journalists and a certain kind of person, but does that really make it "the most important" social network?

Facebook has an order of magnitude more daily active users. It might not have the appeal to news and political junkies of Twitter, but it's intimately involved in the lives of a billion people.

Calling Twitter the world's most important social network is like calling The New Yorker the world's most important media outlet. It's a niche product for a certain group of journalistically-influential people.

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I understand what you're saying, but it's sort of reductive and begging the question to say it's only journalistically-influential people, because in fact Twitter has minted a new class of influential people. Plus, it has also decreased the distance between celebrities and their followers to an unprecedented level.

Sure, "important" is a loaded term, and if you define it as Wall Street does (money), or in terms of Facebook's own KPI (daily active users), then Facebook is far more important. However if you presented the top 1% of viral Facebook posts against the top 1% of viral Tweets, I think you would be hard-pressed to find many people that thought the Facebook posts were more "important". Twitter's problem is that this is very very difficult to quantify, and therefore they get judged by Facebook's chosen KPI, which is frankly nothing but a race to the bottom, because Facebook is taking an unreasonable amount of people's time right now, and there's a way in which the product drives an addictive loop rather than adding any real value.

I definitely agree with you re: insular journalism, though I think Twitter has been more present during world events than FB ever has. For instance, allowing people to mass communicate during crisis. It's much better at breaking news than FB ever has been, which I would say is more important, and IMO the Twitter team needs to recognize that and quit trying to become FB.

> allowing people to mass communicate during crisis.

I'm not so sure about this. I think Safety Check has vastly more usage than Twitter during crises.

Twitter historically dominated the real-time game, but I'm increasingly seeing Facebook do a good job of it as well.

it's better at public events, sure - you see stuff break on twitter because you can SEE it. But the useful part of FB is largely hidden from you. During world events the vast, vast majority of stuff people say on FB is private, but Twitter is more or less public by default. So I would disagree that FB is less "present" -- maybe to you, yes, but systemically and worldwide, I don't think so.

A majority of my news feed posts on Facebook is made up of headline tweets from twitter. I think twitter definitely is the most influential news feed.

My friends don't use twitter so I don't think I've seen a tweet on Facebook in the last month. It's all who you and your friends are

if your news feed was the most important in the world, maybe...

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