Mob Rule: How Users Took Over Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Mob Rule: How Users Took Over Twitter

wired.com

11 pointskakooljay9 comments

It didn’t take long for Twitter users to respond: How dare Twitter mess with … Twitter. A self-described “social, search, and viral marketing scientist” named Dan Zarrella posted a passionate cri de coeur, writing that Twitter was about to “completely eviscerate most of the value out of retweets.” That night, Zarrella created a Twitter hashtag — another grassroots Twitter convention, which lets users group their conversations — called #saveretweets. A few tweeters liked the plan, but the general consensus was summed up by one user skilled in Twitter’s uncompromising brevity: “Very bad plan we hates it.”

When reading articles like this I always get the impression that what Twitter users like most is to tweet about Twitter. It's all meta and self-referential.

And Self Important. I think most of the reason Twitter gets so much face time on the blogs is because people using it want to believe they're on the ground floor of some kind of revolution. So it becomes a self-referential cycle of pumping yourself up by making Twitter into a cause you're a part of.

The real relevance of the "retweet controversy" is that the changes were a no-brainer (if people can edit a retweet they can claim the original tweeter said something s/he didn't). The uproar was really just that the users felt they should be consulted before anything is changed.

Only two percent of all tweets contain the word Twitter. The trend is actually going down if you can see the six-month view.

http://trendistic.com/twitter

Add in the word 'tweet' and 'retweet' and you're sitting at around 3% of all tweets (give or take). For reference, this is about 5-10 times higher than any other common term I checked (facebook, google, internet, car, obama, etc.) For futher reference, the words 'work' and 'new' both come in around the same amount (3-4%)

Yes, but look at how the word "tweet" is used. Calling it self-referential is a bit of a stretch, it just means "message" within twitter.

Better, it's like saying "FWD" in email. It's just meta-data.

It's a silly test to begin with. It doesn't take into account shortened URLs which are a big part of the Twitter discussion. It can't take into account phrases like "Democratization of News" or "New Media". It doesn't even take into account stemming ("tweeet" has a dramatically different graph than "tweeting")

It just doesn't prove a thing

So basically they Wired is just writing about user-driven feature requests and spinning it into a "mob rule" meme? I'm not sure if that's what the article is about because I couldn't read past the capitalized "Retweet Incident" without cringing.

Well this is basically what Wired does with most of their articles - take a fairly normal and standard thing that exists in just about every medium and find a way to make it sounds like A Really Big Event in the headline.

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