Why is Twitter Destroying Itself? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Twitter Destroying Itself?

theatlantic.com

38 pointsytNumbers22 comments

This Atlantic blog piece engages so little with the question in its headline (it really doesn't engage at all, except by means of a flimsy metaphor in the last graf of the piece) that you have to assume someone else at the Atlantic wrote this headline. That's often the case at big publications; authors write reasonable pieces, and then editors slap crazy headlines on them to maximize views.

An Atlantic blog post that merely pondered the question of "Why is Twitter willing to alienate new Tumblr users" would obviously not drive as many views; people (rightly) don't expect random bloggers at The Atlantic to have a lot of insight into that question, and the only reason you'd want to read someone grappling with that question is if there was some promise that they'd have an answer.

The Atlantic's mostly poor coverage of technology issues is synecdochic of the decline of the whole publication in the wake of its pivot towards online journalism. They built a website with a pretty firm wall between The Atlantic Monthly and The Atlantic (Website), recruited some blog writers, and got some of their correspondants (Fallows, in particular) to write alongside them. Gradually, the blog writers seem to have swallowed the whole place, driving it towards Huffington-esque short-form provocations instead of essays and journalism; this mentality has infected the Monthly as well.

The same fate, of becoming a second-rate version of Slate with a reputation propped up by a second-rate version of The New Yorker, interestingly hasn't seemed to have befallen The New Yorker itself.

The piece isn't Pulitzer material, but I think the headline is reasonable. The fundamental thing that makes a bazaar successful is the network effect -- it's a commons. Teenagers hang out at the mall because that's where their friends are.

When you start capriciously kicking various people out of your bazaar, it's reasonable to ask why you are destroying yourself.

The question the piece asks in its headline is, "why is Twitter destroying itself?". It's not until the very last graf of the piece where an allusion is made to a bazaar (actually, a town, but stipulated). But you have to support the argument that Twitter is, or needs to be, a bazaar, to tie that to the headline.

I simultaneously don't think Twitter needs to be a bazaar to avoid its destruction, and don't think denying find-friends to Tumblr is particularly good evidence for/against their long-term bazaar-i-ness.

> that you have to assume someone else at the Atlantic wrote this headline

In the newspaper industry, that's common practice. It takes a different skill set to sum up an article in a small amount of words and to write said article.

Agreed on the link bait title, pretty sure you misused "synecdochic". Synecdoche is like metaphor, but the former I've only seen used to explicitly refer to figures of speech, like a simile, while the latter is used interchangeably with "symbolic", so a thing could be metaphoric, but only written or oral communications could be synecdochic.

A small instance of a larger concept that does a good job of illustrating the contours of that larger concept; a part for the whole.

(Who the hell would downvote your comment? Weird! I fixed that.)

Right, I'm with you there, but I would say that referring to "the crown" in place of the King would be synecdochic (the expression is synecdochic), but the crown, in itself, isn't synecdochic of the king.

When people say "the crown" when referencing a monarch and their administration, that's a textbook synecdoche. Similarly, when people refer to the number of "seats" in an enterprise, as with a "10 seat license", that is also a synecdoche; obviously, the licensor could care less about seats per se; you pay even if you use a standing desk. :)

I am unapologetic about introducing this confusing word into the thread, as this discussion is more interesting than the blog post we're commenting on.

The word "synecdochic" exists and you can use it in this context, but it's a matter of lightning and lightning bug. Isn't the word "emblematic" more appropriate? We're not just using a part to signify the whole; we're stating that the part typifies the whole, and "emblematic" embodies both of those meanings. Besides, it's less likely to confuse, and applying Occam's razor to language, the best word is the simplest one that most closely approximates the intended meaning.

Similarly to rhizome, I appreciate your use of a word I hadn't seen in a long while (and that HN spellcheckers flag), and I agree this is much more interesting than the article, but I would have gone with something in {emblematic, symptomatic, representative}.

I'm holding firm in claiming that synecdoche should be reserved for referencing oral or written expressions, viz., intentional usages of a part to indicate the whole.

Thanks for a little diversion :)

I think the poor quality of their tech coverage, which quality is indeed a "symptom" of a problem, isn't the whole story. The total fact of their tech coverage --- that they feel the need to do it at all at any level of quality --- is more important to me, and so "symptomatic" didn't seem right. But I wrote unclearly enough that "symptomatic" is a better word in the context of my original comment.

I do own the fact that "synecdochic" is never a good word to use in clear writing. :)

I appreciate the use, but in this context I think the word you're looking for is "emblematic."

You're obviously right that "emblematic" would be clearer writing.

Betteridge's Law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

This headline doesn't pose a yes/no question. More generally: at this point, do you still think it's helpful to remind people of this Wikipedia article?

Sure, and by analogy the reply would be "it isn't."

It seems dumb in the same way that vertical integration is often seen to be inferior to horizontal integration.

If for instance Twitter is doing this to support Posterous, a tumblr competitor, this will probably harm Twitter more than it will support Posterous.

When I heard they cut of Instagram, I figured it was to support TwitPic (or?) which again seems to be a losing move for them.

Because they haven't properly understood how to monetize since day 1

They are by many accounts significantly (as in, not just pro-forma) profitable.

This guy just joined Tumblr on Monday? Doesn't this kind of discredit his opinion?

The article doesn't work if he's a long-time Tumblr user, because find-friends is something you typically do when you first join.

It isn't.

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