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Comment by wmccullough | Hacker News Reader

I'm was never at the level described by the author, but I left Twitter for the same thing. I too am a creator and I'd get retweets with very little action. That was a huge moment for me because I realized the reality of Twitter. It's one giant bullshit factory.

You can even tell how much it affects the minds of people who are prolific other places. Writers for tech blogs stop writing about useful shit and start writing about the reactions of twitter posts. You can see how the self obsession causes people to try to craft those perfect 140 characters. Everyone thinks they are a comedian.

In the end I found that no matter how diverse your followership, Twitter is a hopeless echo chamber populated by twentysomethings with no real life experience who are chomping at the bit to eat you alive if you don't conform to the enforced political correctness of the moment.

I'll never go back.

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> You can even tell how much it affects the minds of people who are prolific other places. Writers for tech blogs stop writing about useful shit and start writing about the reactions of twitter posts. You can see how the self obsession causes people to try to craft those perfect 140 characters. Everyone thinks they are a comedian. In the end I found that no matter how diverse your followership, Twitter is a hopeless echo chamber populated by twentysomethings with no real life experience who are chomping at the bit to eat you alive if you don't conform to the enforced political correctness of the moment.

I wouldn't quite go that far; I barely use Twitter - the concept is not appealing to me and I really don't care for the type of interaction it enables, but to call it an echo chamber is basically the same as calling the Internet an echo chamber. You are limited by your decisions on who you want to associate with and who you want to read. The suggestions may be tailored to you, but ultimately you pick. Anyone can find an echo chamber for themselves on Twitter.

Many businesses have found a lot of value in Twitter - status accounts, event updates, and so on are handled really well through Twitter as the platform lends itself to subscription via text as well; I've used it successfully in the past for such purposes and we never had a problem with it.

How you decide to invest yourself in the system will determine your experience. The social interaction part of twitter isn't for me because it's not really the kind of conversations I like and I find the format limiting. But that doesn't mean it's a bad system, it's just not my cup of tea,

I think you've actually touched on the precise nature of the problem. It's GREAT as a marketing and PR platform. It SUCKS as an interpersonal communication medium.

Well, one of the author's points was that it didn't work for him as a marketing platform. Perhaps he was doing it wrong?

Yeah, that part surprised me. I use Twitter primarily as a way of keeping up with creators whose work I enjoy. I regularly click links from them, because that is why I follow them. I was surprised to see that with 50,000 followers, not a single one actually wanted to consume what this person creates; or perhaps their followers find other avenues to consuming the author's content.

To be fair about my original point, what you're talking about is when the author tried to use it as a sales tool. Maybe I'm just being pedantic? Anyway, it's lousy for that too.

Maybe I don't appreciate the distinction between "sales tool" and "marketing platform". I'm willing to learn.

"status accounts, event updates, and so on are handled really well through Twitter"

But Twitter doesn't even guarantee that your followers will see all of these updates.¹ Wouldn't RSS or email be more reliable?

¹https://lee-phillips.org/tsb009009009/

To clarify, we used it for our system status updates and notifications at one of my last places of employment (small university, ~3500 userbase). We didn't have a lot of official followers, but our SMS subscribers, as reported by the various departments and persons of interest across the campus, was sufficient enough to ensure we had a strong and reliable network for notifications.

During all our checks, we never had anyone complains they didn't get the notification via the normal Twitter update or SMS.

Per your link, the opening paragraph seems to summarize that it's "possible", but there really hasn't been evidence. I would frankly assume the same for all services.

In our use-case with the notification, we wanted a redundant system along side our System Status Dashboard (which supported RSS) in order to allow people to check in case the Dashboard was inaccessible. (e.g., consider a scenario where campus intranet goes down and different buildings cannot get an outgoing connection past their switch - redundant update from Twitter allows for this)

Plus, quite frankly, most of our target audience wouldn't bother with RSS :p I know and you know it's easy, but we needed to get people who had little to no technical education quickly connected. It was a lot easier to tell them "text 40404 follow [account]" than to set up the rest.

I think there is more to it than that now. I think how you market on Twitter is totally unique from the way you do it anywhere else. Success on that medium, depending on the thing you are marketing, can become predicated on a number of things.

For example, I've witnessed game developers who were making truly beautiful things, who got stonewalled because they wouldn't drink the current koolaid. That flavor of koolaid at the moment happens to be the results of the election and defining where you stand. A few years back, I saw great indie companies getting blackballed because of anything less than purist views on subjects like gamergate.

I do think you can penetrate and market well on Twitter, but it comes with quite a few ifs. Maybe this comes, for the first time, with having a marketing platform with instant human feedback (note: I did not say customer).

I won't deny that it can be a very divisive platform, and unfortunately people are not always very good at divorcing the product from the artist for certain subjects. It can be a weird disconnect to do so, and I'm not a stranger to it as a fan of Burzum. (Great music, but Varg Vikernes definitely has some distasteful and wrong positions imho). Not everyone is comfortable with that, and I understand that aspect; sometimes our conscious doesn't allow us to cross wires like that and it doesn't sit well to have this sort of inconsistency between "I like the product, but I don't want to support the creator because of X".

Quite frankly, I'm not sure I see the problem with people adhering to their beliefs and standards, and a call for boycott is one of the methods for expressing distaste. It's one tool of many. I may not agree with what people decide to boycott or for the reason they do, but it's their choice to do so. Being on Twitter puts you in a public forum and as such, you are vulnerable and accessible by such protests, and this is how it should be. Counter groups are perfectly allowed to form, and the artist is not stopped from being an arist. (Varg may be an exception here, but I do not doubt that quite a few people really disagreed with his political and social viewpoints, and yet he kept doing what he did regardless, and they kept listening. Those that were too put off just stopped)

Twitter allows for the sort of witch-hunts for any such thing a group desires to be done instantly, with very little cost to the person posting, and with very few reprecussions. We see it from the mass boycotts to unmitigated and open racism on the platform. It's part of the rush and the good feeling of social media, the feel of being part of a crowd or a part of something bigger. I get that it's intimidating, but that's part of being connected to an entire world and audience - sometimes the audience disapproves, and they disapprove harshly.

> I saw great indie companies getting blackballed because of anything less than purist views on subjects like gamergate.

I think that's ok. We used to have a notion that a product is just a product, and we should all just pretend the people making it are apolitical and enjoy the product on its own merits.

But that leads to a world where resources pool up in random places. This guy has a billion dollars because he makes a beverage a lot of people like? Why? Are beverage skills the barometer for deciding how resources are allocated?

I should note that this system works OK when there is an additional pool of public resources that people can rely on. If private revenue is "spending cash" but the state still controls its natural resources, and cities have a commons, and extended families take care of each other, things are kind of OK.

But that's over now, we are privatizing 100% of resources, so now revenue really has to be a perfect proxy for how we think resources should be allocated, from a social/moral perspective.

So now we are moving to a world where that guy needs to not only make a nice beverage but he needs to show that he shares our values, because we're not just buying a soda, we are deciding who will starve, which ecosystems will be destroyed, and what kinds of people will be unemployed.

If someone needs an indie game maker to disavow feminist commentators in order to feel comfortable buying a game... well, I disagree with the moral stance, but I support very much that person's right to spend their money and influence that way. We have no other choice in a capitalist system.

> to call it an echo chamber is basically the same as calling the Internet an echo chamber

I would argue that there are fundamental aspects of Twitter's design that make it particularly bad in these respects: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/

Surely you realize that perhaps you're taking your bad experience and extrapolating it to the rest of Twitter?

Saying that Twitter is a "giant bullshit factory" "populated by twentysomethings with no real life experience" is a generalization that invalidates everyone who doesn't fall into your stereotype.

I also wouldn't go that far. I follow the literary scene on twitter and have had no experiences with bullshit, and there certainly aren't very many 20somethings with no life experience among editors, published authors, and literary agents! What party lines? I guess the last big thing was when vox day called nk jemisin a half-savage when she decried him for being racist and part of sfwa. I guess if that's there party line then sure?

I'd like to emphasize that all these social media platforms are >giant bullshit factories.

I, myself, am getting too caught up in it all.

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