How Twitter Made the Tech World's Most Unlikely Comeback (buzzfeed.com) 128
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed: Two years ago, people were writing eulogies for Twitter. Rudderless and without product direction, the company was losing users and advertisers, and seemed unable to contain a metastasizing trolling crisis that was destroying its credibility. Employees left by the dozens and then got laid off by the hundreds. It tried to sell, and failed at that too. The press, Wall Street, and the public were merciless. The New Yorker declared it "The End of Twitter." Analyst Michael Nathanson said that at $14 per share there was "no compelling reason to own the stock," and his counterparts applied "sell" ratings in bunches. Over a single weekend in February 2016, more than one million people tweeted "#RIPTwitter."
But then, even as those eulogies were being published, things started changing. Twitter began beating earnings expectations. Star ex-employees trickled back in, finding a new, more positive internal culture than the toxic one they'd left. Advertisers came back too, as did users. The company finally began addressing its trolling problem. And its stock, once unappealing to analysts like Nathanson at $14, is now trading above $46. It's still somewhat taboo to say it, but it's no longer possible to deny it: Twitter is making an unexpected, somewhat miraculous comeback. It is the first major consumer social company to lose users and start growing again in a meaningful way. The report mentions four major factors that led to Twitter's resurgence: "Its acceptance it would never be Facebook, leading to a decision to focus on news as Facebook pulled back. Its move to aggressively add premium live video to its service. Its CEO Jack Dorsey's directive to its product team to rethink everything. And a key component of many great comebacks: luck."
But then, even as those eulogies were being published, things started changing. Twitter began beating earnings expectations. Star ex-employees trickled back in, finding a new, more positive internal culture than the toxic one they'd left. Advertisers came back too, as did users. The company finally began addressing its trolling problem. And its stock, once unappealing to analysts like Nathanson at $14, is now trading above $46. It's still somewhat taboo to say it, but it's no longer possible to deny it: Twitter is making an unexpected, somewhat miraculous comeback. It is the first major consumer social company to lose users and start growing again in a meaningful way. The report mentions four major factors that led to Twitter's resurgence: "Its acceptance it would never be Facebook, leading to a decision to focus on news as Facebook pulled back. Its move to aggressively add premium live video to its service. Its CEO Jack Dorsey's directive to its product team to rethink everything. And a key component of many great comebacks: luck."
Microsoftism (Score:2)
No real UNIX/LINUX nerd would be caught dead saying "PS C:\Users\cdreimer> dir"
130 years ago they would have said "Your Slip is Showin, Ma'am."
Few crackers are hackers; few hackers are crackers (Score:2)
"hackers" are people who hack systems.
"crackers" [urbandictionary.com], on the other hand, are southern rednecks.
learn the difference. Few crackers are hackers, and few hackers are crackers.
News? (Score:4, Interesting)
leading to a decision to focus on news as Facebook pulled back
I really don't use Twitter much, but where is the news on Twitter? Do I actively need to subscribe to news vendors?
All I ever see are posts by random tech-personalities telling me what kind of coffee they like and how their projects are travelling. Is that the 'news' they're referring to?
Re:News? (Score:4, Informative)
Given that Twitter is the opt-in-bubble taken to the extreme, I'm going to blame you for what news you get. Not that I follow news on twitter, but certainly newspapers quote twitter a lot. And not just the tweeter-in-chief's
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In that respect, most of the journalists seem to be doing their jobs when it co
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I've been looking for someone who understands how YouTube rights work. Does uploading to YouTube include a license for Google to sell/allow TV networks to play it without additional compensation? I've tried reading the license, and I cannot parse it.
High profile Twitter tweeter totally touts Twitter (Score:2)
...but certainly newspapers quote twitter a lot. And not just the tweeter-in-chief's
Given that a certain high-profile tweeter is tweeting tweets that regularly make headlines-- and thus giving Twitter effectively free advertising almost every day-- I think it's no surprise that Twitter is making a rally.
You can't buy that kind of advertising.
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Twitter is accessible from raw SMS, it can be the best way to get immediate news from some breaking event. Millions of users out there are tweeting trivia, but if you're that one guy who finds himself a close witness to a bombing that day, you scoop the world, even if your only communication channel is a flip phone connected to a crappy cell provider.
And of course it helps that there's this person in Washington who does nothing but tweet.
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Because Twitter is accessible from raw SMS
Really? I've never heard of that. Is it like an RSS feed?
- Dohzer, Twitter User Level: 0.5.
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I thought that was the original twitter idea. It was for group communication before phones regularly got GPRS data.
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
To be cruel, the hula hoop made a comeback, the yoyo made a comeback, lots of fads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] made a comeback but a pet rock is still a pet rock. Twitter for attention seeks to climb up their tree and tweet out, 'my tree', 'my tree', 'my tree'. All still an exercise in narcissistic futility, which twit can get the most twits to follow them. Twitter serves no purpose better served by other means, if people did in public exactly what they did on twitter ie stand on random street corners, at random intervals, to scream at passers by and continue to do this regularly, we would lock them up.
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It's the microblogging format. I invented it once (also) as an art project in 1995, but using blank business cards at a coffee table. People should jot something on a card, and leave for others to see. It's that short little message, which can be scanned through for something good. It's the focus. Which worked wonders for the miracle on the Hudson, a single Tweet and photo from someone right there. It is those moments. Now excuse me whilst I put on my Jon Ham voice and start talking about Carousels. But tha
bellyflop acrobatics (Score:2)
All you can do with 140 characters is tweak the reader's autobiographical memory to construct an emotionally laden simulacrum. This is basic information theory. The densest compression possible requires the receiving side to have a detailed model of the message space (descriptive world) in which the communication is embedded.
Twitter is a lot like a quarterback calling an audible at the line of scrimmage. "17 cobra 56 blue 88 hut hut." To some degree the QB can fashion entirely unique plays: "cobra" might b
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Clearly you're not a geologist. A pet rock is not just for PetRockDay, but it's for life. Longer than your species' life. Longer, indeed. than your phylum's life.
[hugs my 3 billion year old Scourian amphibolitite ; caresses my billion year old stromatolites]
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You can find some in depth analysis on things by a few people. One that comes to mind is https://twitter.com/SethAbrams... [twitter.com] Most of his threaded posts seem to be fairly well researched
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You can find some in depth analysis on things by a few people.
No, you can't. Because 140 characters (or whatever they've now raised it to.) is not in-depth. It's the exact opposite.
In-depth requires paragraphs or pages, which is the antithesis of Twitter.
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What the fuck is wrong with people? That's pretty unreadable garbage. Why do you prefer a dozen different snippits with all the clutter of single tweets around them interspersed with images that don't add to the conversation to a couple of dense paragraphs? For fucks sake, the content doesn't even take up 1/3 the width of the page, so it's even longer and harder to read than it has to be.
It just blows my mind that people not only accept this, but prefer it.
If you want to write a couple of paragraphs, twitte
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I really feel that not having the attention span to read/write a few solid paragraphs is a huge problem with the world today. You don't get the rapid spread of misinformation that way. You don't get people who understand only part of the discussion that way. Not being able to sit down and write some long, coherent passages significantly reduces your ability to share your thoughts. Not being able to sit down and read said passages limits your ability to understand the world.
See also: the medium is the message.
So "Jonathan Schwartz @OpenJonath
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No, you can't. Because 140 characters (or whatever they've now raised it to.) is not in-depth. It's the exact opposite.
Yeah, it's certainly not in depth in itself, but tweets often link to articles which are in-depth
I think the character limit is one of it's greatest strengths (so it baffles me that they increased it), because it forces people to be concise and get to the damn point, rather than a wall of text that people give up reading after the second sentence (if they even bother trying to read it at all), like some people's Facebook posts.
On the other hand, being that concise can often lead to misunderstandings which
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Is that a bug or a feature?
Without polarization (and Trump) they are probably (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Without polarization (and Trump) they are proba (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, I was going to blame Trump for this growth, but it seems that's not the case. Revenue has been mostly flat since 2015 [statista.com].
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well, they spend a third of it running their website (!) and most of the rest goes to employee salaries, benefits and stock options, with a little profit left over.
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They spend the remainder on worrying if the staff is diverse enough and all 77 genders are represented. Personally I now identify as a wine cork.
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They spend the remainder on worrying if the staff is diverse enough and all 77 genders are represented. Personally I now identify as a wine cork.
In the last few months I have started seeing forms with fields like "Gender Assigned at Birth". This is likely both an attempt to be somewhat "politically correct" while at the same time allowing them to move on with business as usual and not having to try to keep up with the insanity.
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A president is president of the entire country. This behaviour, that of trying to stoke hatred and rage is not the sign of a leader, unless your talking the leader of some rabid cult.
Coming from a likely Democrat that is just so rich. Stoking racial divide and general victimhood is the hallmark of the Democratic party and Obama & Clinton are masters of the art.
Nah, they're amateurs, Trump took them to school. Of course, maybe that supports your argument, since he was a Democrat for nearly all of his life, until it became clear that the Republican party was easier to hack.
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Is there some way to auto-tag any post referring to politics?
I'd very much like to filter them out.
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"But surely some who calls her opponents "deplorables" isn't trying to stoke hatred now are they?"
Clinton said that once in a private meeting. Trump insults Democrats on a daily bases on Twitter.
"Obama made his entire political career on seeding racial tension. "
By being black? He talked about race at times the issue came up, but not excessive.
Guess who has control of the presidency and both houses of congress and is failing to reform immigration though the House as we speak?
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Clinton and Obama were what gave us Trump. Without them, he never would have been elected*. That the right is now playing the same game as the left and they don't like it is largely irrelevant. It was Clinton who back in 2008 only conceded when the DNC promised her the nomination after Obama. It was Obama who allowed the likes of Lois Lerner to smother the political opposition with the power of the tax man. It was Obama who attempted to gaslight the illegal arms numbers with Fast and Furious, only to be bro
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No. But if he had a son it would have looked like Trayvon.
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Just say what you really want to call him: an orange n!gger.
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Glad I searched for Trump before posting nearly the same thing. However, "hundreds of millions..."...nah, Twitter was mostly used by the media already, all we needed to do was let them keep reading his meanderings. Personally, I haven't ever tweeted, nor will I "follow" these narcissists that feel the need to tell the world when they're on the shitter.
Twitter is important (Score:3)
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All other reviews get banned. Every new movie is always great on Twitter.
I say gnutoo inTheLoo (Score:2)
Does this include promoting GNU/Linux and bashing "M$" [slashdot.org]? And whatever happened to DeadZero anyway?
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Twitter has changed our democracy. It used to be that you only got a couple of opinions from the people that the TV or newspapers decided to interview, and that was usually a soundbite at most. Now you can not only see what every politician is saying, but you can interact with them and even shape their opinions.
Thanks to Twitter I have far more influence over politics than I ever have had before.
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Let me fix this for you:
Twitter hasn't changed our democracy, but it certainly can give that appearance to those who can't do critical thinking. It used to be that you only got a couple of opinions from the people that the TV or newspapers decided to interview, and that was usually a soundbite at most, created by a politician's staffer and relayed via the journalist to you. Now you can not only see what every politician's staffer is saying, but you can interact with their staffer which allows you to think that you could even shape their opinions.
Thanks to Twitter I think I have far more influence over politics than I ever have had before.
Because that's the problem with Twitter, isn't it? You have no idea who is writing those tweets, even if they are posting from a verified account.
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I had Zero interest in Twitter, until that great President put it on the map.
Democrats: Al Gore Invented the Internet
Republicans: Donald Trump Resurrected Twitter.
Fact.
Yeah, they sure addressed their trolling problem (Score:1)
They kicked all the small-time trolls and kept the biggest of them all [twitter.com].
Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter didn't get better. Facebook got worse. This is what really happened. With the privacy controversy surrounding Facebook, and no other real social media contender at a similar scale, investors switched their portfolios from Facebook to Twitter by default.
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Kind of like our election: D- vs. F
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I have yet to use twitter and have no desire too
And so, by slashdot logic, no one else uses it either, right?
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But (Score:1)
it is just full of twats.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Will they be able to discipline themselves? (Score:2)
Haha, no one gives a shit about arbitrary and subjective "morals", they're bad for business. Free speech is better
Re: Will they be able to discipline themselves? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless the speech is conservative, in which case it is called "hate speech" and a mob is called out to squelch it with bats.
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You mean violence like this [washingtontimes.com]
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Why don't the right-wing snowflakes just make their own social media platform instead of whining and throwing tantrums? But then they might have to go to a 'liberal' college full of 'book learning', maybe even move to California with all the hippies. Why do that when it's easier to just whine on platforms that left-wing people put the effort in to make?
Make Twitter Great Again (Score:1)
Trump winning the elections is the best thing that has ever happened to Twitter and the worst thing that has ever happened to the world.
Twitter is useless (Score:1)
\o/ (Score:1)
This indicates to me that more than one million people turned to Twitter to demonstrate that Twitter is on the decline. What more could one do to put forward a self evident falsehood?
Disclaimer: I don't use Twitter.
Two years ago... then (Score:1)
Trump Happened.
Coincidence that Twitter became relevant again ?
Like drinking from a firehose (Score:2)
I tried Twitter out several years ago, but it sure feels like I'm trying to drink from a firehose.
I work on a computer all day long, so I'm not too interested in spending any more time than necessary using them during my down time. I'm definitely not one of these people walking around staring at their phones or constantly checking for updates during the day.
Those of you who do use Twitter, how do you deal with the deluge of messages and improve the signal to noise ratio?
No usefulness (Score:1)
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BSD was born of an unholy alliance between AT&T and "The Regents of the University of California." Then along came "The SCO Group" and started throwing shit and rotten eggs, until they mired in it. Poor BSD was abandoned by the New Culture.
OIn December 26, 1995 my Win 95 hard drive died. I put in a *huge* 250 mb Maxtor and installed Linux. Caldera CND. Soon I went to Red Hat,
Ubuntu and now Mint. I never paid much attention to BSD. All the Action was (and is) in Linux. Windows is proprietary, onl