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How Hard is it To Have a Conversation on Twitter? So Hard Even the CEO Can't Do It. (recode.net) 140

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Twitter wants to be the place for the most important public conversations online. It still has some serious work to do. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher agreed to conduct an interview Tuesday on Twitter, and it had all the makings of a great read: The CEO of one of the most influential and controversial tech platforms in the world taking questions from one of the industry's most ferocious reporters. The only problem? No one could follow along.

Despite the public interview, and a dedicated hashtag (#karajack) for the event, it didn't take long before the dozens of tweets between the two started to get confusing. They were listed out of order, other users started chiming in, and there was no way to properly follow the conversation thread. Swisher's questions about Twitter's complex abuse policies, and Dorsey's subsequent responses, were floating around my timeline along with the regular tech news and opinions I always look at. If you wanted to find a permanent thread of the chat, you had to visit one of either Kara or Jack's pages and continually refresh. It made for a difficult and confusing experience.

Dorsey even admitted so himself. "I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a "chaotic hellpit")," Swisher tweeted, referencing Recode's other co-founder, the now-retired Walt Mossberg. "Ok. Definitely not easy to follow the conversation," Dorsey replied. "Exactly why we are doing this. Fixing stuff like this will help I believe."
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How Hard is it To Have a Conversation on Twitter? So Hard Even the CEO Can't Do It. More

How Hard is it To Have a Conversation on Twitter? So Hard Even the CEO Can't Do It.

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  • Big Whoop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cheesybagel ( 670288 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @10:05AM (#58115142)

    Twatter has always been like that. The loudest chirps to the top and nothing else.
    It is a squawk box not a discussion site.

    • Re: Big Whoop (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It is merely for very high level easy to grasp ideas. I tweet that I bought a good lunch at a fast food place. The fast food place might retweet but they will never tweet the ingredients.

      • Why would you waste your time with that? You think people care?

        • If he's a celebrity, a few thousand dumbasses will care.
          Otherwise, no. Nobody cares.

        • Re: Big Whoop (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Just fun sharing details of your life with your friends. Try it sometime.

          • Isn't that just called talking? What you do when you hang out with your friends. Or by friends do you mean people you've never met and are happy with 240 characters of detail?

          • However most of Twitter is sharing the details of someone else's live with complete strangers.

    • Re:Big Whoop (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mcmonkey ( 96054 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @10:18AM (#58115212) Homepage

      The only "news" here is that the CEO of Twitter had never previously used Twitter.

      • Or never used twitter for a conversation. I use twitter, but only to follow a couple of topics/people I'm interested in, and occasionally add a short comment. It's a good medium for that kind of stuff.

      • The only "news" here is that the CEO of Twitter had never previously used Twitter.

        He's busy tooting on Mastodon [wikipedia.org] ... :-)

    • Yeah, I thought twitter was for just farting your thoughts into the wind, not actual discourse.

      • Twitter and facebook are tarbabies. Designed to entangle the 'look at me, look at me' crowd.

        They do it well. Thank dog for them. Can you imagine how bad the S/N ratio would be on the wider net without them?

        • Can you imagine how bad the S/N ratio would be on the wider net without them?

          Good point. Similar to fortnite i guess, while its a shit game it keeps all the kids busy so the rest of the games are better for the rest of us lol.

          • You were really intent on getting that Mindcraft server to yourself wern't you?

            They have been games popular with kids before, and they will be them after Fortnite, becomes the game for old people.

            • 'Old people' are as bored with 3d shooters/sneakers as we were with sprite games in the C-64 era.

              We were bored with Fortnite when it was Team Fortress free for all. It's all been done, decades ago. It's just sort of new to kids.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Also, "CEO" != "competent to use his own product".

    • Tweets are for twits. It's always been a useless platform.

  • Twitter in 2019???? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Wut. Twitter is in a death spiral. They've eliminated themselves from ever being a public square because of their ideology based tyrannical grip and Orwellian banning practices.

    Whoever learns from Twitter mistakes could possibly be something like a public forum though.

    • Re:Twitter in 2019???? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RedK ( 112790 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @11:50AM (#58115796)

      Whoever learns from Twitter mistakes could possibly be something like a public forum though.

      Except whenever someone tries, and aren't somewhat left of Mao and Marx, they are promptly reported to their hosting provider and payment processor and ultimately, to the domain registrar so they can get scrubbed from the Internet.

      Ask SubscribeStar and Gab.ai how well trying to NOT inject politics worked out for them.

      • Oh quit your hyperbole.

      • Ask SubscribeStar and Gab.ai how well trying to NOT inject politics worked out for them.

        LOL What?!?

        Gab was *specifically* created to cater to far-right politics; like that was the ENTIRE POINT of the site!

  • Dorsey Dodges Questions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @10:14AM (#58115196)
    Dorsey's had a disastrous week of interviews where he dodged the issue of biased enforcement of rules on Twitter, including one on Joe Rogan which prompted Joe to respond to the backlash (and try a do-over). In a great move by Joe, he had Tim Pool on, who gave much more honest and accurate assessment of the situation:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Wrong tool for the job (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How hard is it to drive a nail with a rope? So hard even the CEO of We Make Ropes, Inc can't do it.

    • How hard is it to drive a nail with a rope?

      Hold my beer / challenge accepted.

      That's the kind of stuff a mythbuster-style show could do.

    • How hard is it to drive a nail with a rope? So hard even the CEO of We Make Ropes, Inc can't do it.

      Very true. The point is that somehow the CEO of We Make Ropes, Inc. didn't realize that until he actually tried to do it.

  • Put the CLIENT in the hands of the user! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @10:19AM (#58115216)

    Back in usenet days, the reader could decide on which client they wanted to use, to get the features they wanted. Some supported threaded conversations, various killfile features, etc. You could pick.

    Now, with these massively centralized services like Twitter, you get what is shoveled onto you and you will fucking like it.

    We need to bring back DEcentralization and returning control over the presentation, features, and view to the user of the computer, not having Jack Dorsey deciding everyone's experience from on high. And it's not just twitter, it's all these web forums, inc slashdot, which dictate presentation and features to you. Shit, we had a better architecture for this on the internet in the goddamn 1980's!

    What the hell happened to the internet that we gave up on the very concept of user control?

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What the hell happened to the internet that we gave up on the very concept of user control?

      Normies happened.

      The Internet used to be used by people who knew what the hell they were doing. Those who used it were called nerds and were outcasts to the society around them.

      Then Steve Jobs gave every moron on the planet an Internet connection more neutered than AOL that they can carry around in their pocket. All of a sudden, EVERYONE is an "Internet user" and it became a race to the bottom to see how many newbies, idiots, luddites and imbeciles we can get using our platforms and viewing our ads. Feat

      • The Internet used to be used by people who knew what the hell they were doing

        Are you drunk, Anonymous Coward? I first got on usenet around 1992 / 1993. Even back then the "internet" was a cesspool of rude neckbearded know-it-all "comic book guys," with SPAM starting to run rampant.

        Or are you talking about ARPANET - Back when there was a good four to five-dozen people online?

    • Re:Put the CLIENT in the hands of the user! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Cid Highwind ( 9258 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @12:01PM (#58115860) Homepage

      Spam happened.

      Client-side filtering sucked in 1995 (and it's not much better now). USENET became an exercise in shouting at each other across a vast swamp of scams and penis pill ads, and everyone moved on to web forums where there was an admin with the power to ban spammers.

      Libertarian utopias are all ultimately doomed by the real world being full of assholes.

    • What the hell happened to the internet that we gave up on the very concept of user control?

      We found out that the users were too luserish to be trusted with control.

    • Every time I criticize the shit situation with modern web technology, some AC tough guy has to chime in and remind me that the world is run by users and stop bitching and deal with shit technology. Seems you can't have a conversation here either.

    • What the hell happened to the internet that we gave up on the very concept of user control?

      1. Most people find user control too hard.
      2. Service providers discovered there was money to be had in taking the control the users didn't want.

  • The only winning move is not to play.

  • I never figured out why these tech companies haven't figured out threading conversations yet. Everything is flat, or one level deep and they rely on @ to tell you who the reply was to. The problem is that the reply is to a particular post, not a person in general and the post order is based on some criteria I can never figure out. It is almost as if it was constructed so it is easier to mine the data, and ignore everyone with narcissistic posts, rather than encourage conversations.

    • YouTube order is like Google order, in that it is weighted by what they think you want to see through a combination of age and apparent relevance, and of course ad placement.

      What's super duper sad about Twitter is that they can't manage chronological order even when they're trying. Google actually can, they just generally don't want to. Posts on G+ would appear chronologically, for example. Maybe that's the real reason plus is going away, users expect posts to appear in chronological order, and that's not w

  • Mostly Useless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quanminoan ( 812306 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @10:28AM (#58115286)

    Twitter is mostly a platform for recreational outrage, hardly any threads there are positive contributions. Even a few I follow (for example Musk) don't say anything of any importance, just meme dumps and inane comments. Only thing I find useful are people I respect posting links to content outside twitter.

  • cloud of birds (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    it's called twitter after the sounds birds make, who would want to try and have a conversation there?

  • Use Cases (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @10:31AM (#58115304)

    Twitter is not for talking with people.

    It's for talking @people.

  • Twitter is a dumpster fire (Score:3)

    by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @10:33AM (#58115312) Journal

    Its literally garbage. It survives because it was the first quick messaging platform and its difficult to for anyone to move on because a handful of important people like POTUS use it. Since you have to follow twitter anyway if your interesting in seeing what those handful of folks post it make using anything else a tough sell.

    I really wish Donald would just pick ANY other platform. All the press would then be forced to watch that platform. Which would make them use it too. A lot of other world leaders would likely be forced to follow as well; leading to a twitter destroying snow ball.

    • Re:Twitter is a dumpster fire (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @10:36AM (#58115338) Homepage Journal
      I really wish world leaders (and leaders in general) wouldn't use "quick messaging platforms" at all. They are supposed to communicate thoughtfully, not "quickly".

      • Our President has proven that our race toward a leader like Zaphod Beeblebrox [wikipedia.org] was inevitable.

      • The irony being that before Twitter and Trump people waxed about how great it would be if we had leaders who bypassed all the media talking point BS and just told us what they really thought. Now they want a return to talking heads. I for one am loving it. I think its incredibly refreshing and everyone else can't seem to get a handle on what Trump is doing. Trust in the media has predictably tanked ever since. But the same celebrities who before made jokes about talking heads and teleprompters hate that one

    • Re:Twitter is a dumpster fire (Score:5, Insightful)

      by apoc.famine ( 621563 ) <apoc.famine@NOSPAM.gmail.com> on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @11:30AM (#58115640) Journal

      Since you have to follow twitter anyway if your interesting in seeing what those handful of folks post it make using anything else a tough sell.

      That's really not true. I haven't been on twitter more than a few times in my life, but I stay pretty well informed about what the important people tweet about. Our Newstainment industry has monetized scraping tweets off twitter and plastering them in their broadcasts and sprinkling them throughout their articles, often helpfully putting a clear screenshot of the tweet in larger font than the article, then typing the tweet out anyway just for fun so you get to read it twice.

      Even formally serious journalists and publications have fallen into this trap. If they just fucking ignored the dumpsterfire that is twitter, nobody would know and nobody would care. Let the tweeters cannibalize themselves. But no, we need to pretend that twitter is important, and broadcast tweets through all mediums.

      You don't need to follow twitter. It's nearly inescapable if you follow any sort of media at all. Here I am on /., and we're having a fucking discussion about the CEO of Twitter realizing that Twitter is a shitty way to communicate due to him tweeting a bunch of shit in an attempted interview. It's fucking inescapable. I did not need to go on Twitter to hear this story.

  • How have they not noticed this before? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @10:41AM (#58115358) Homepage

    I've tried to like Twitter (or, for that matter, Twitter clones like Gab) a few times. The attempt never lasts more than a couple of days, because it's just chaos. Like trying to listen to a conversation or a single person all the way across a crowded bar. There's just no coherency - the signal is totally drowned out by the noise.

    How have they not noticed this before? Actually, how does Twitter still exist?

    • Twitter users are all mental middle schoolers. They are creatures of the noise. They like it.

      If they weren't, they would have left, like you did.

    • The half joking theory I have is high frequency trading algorithms are all hooked into Twitter and it has been beneficial to to the HFT firms so they keep investing in twitter just to keep at alive. The insanity of the stock market for the last year is just a reflection on HFT thinking twitter is a reality and acting accordingly while everyone else disagreeing with that assessment and making moves in the other direction.
      A little bit of evidence of that is Apple stock crashing on the news Jobs died and Ni

    • Twitter still exists because Trump posts on it. If he didn't it would have disappeared in 2017.

      It's actually hilarious most of the time. Some idiot "journalist" posts Martians have landed in Boise and before you know it every news site on the planet is carrying the story, without any of them actually checking for sources or corroboration.

      Then it comes out it was a hoax or that it was actually a movie was being filmed there and all of the news site pretend like it never happened. And then they wonder why onl

  • Twitter sucks, nothing but negativity, I found no joy in using it. It was worse than Facebook. :D

  • But yes this is pretty obvious. It's very common to get tweets and rebuttals with no context, proclamations of people you've never heard of getting blocked without knowing why.. But I just slide down to something that makes sense. It's not a problem for me. It's really only a problem for people trying to hold conversations on twitter, which is never what it was designed for.
  • The main purpose of any social media site should be to drive traffic to another site or service from a commercial perspective. The media itself should be limited, anything not quickly consumed is too engaging to the user and keeps from, again, driving traffic. It's the same with conversations. If you want to have an in-depth conversation then pick a different medium. If you want to tell a quick joke or express an opinion then social media is for you.

  • 2 questions on this (Score:3)

    by pgmrdlm ( 1642279 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @11:51AM (#58115806) Journal
    1). Who the hell use's Twitter anymore anyway? Que the AC bigots.

    2). Who the hell would want to have a conversation on twitter?
  • There is a place and time for anonymity. Having discussion like the above is not it. When anonymity is lost, ppl act nicer towards each other. Likewise, the lying and belligerent attitudes stop. Basically, when somebody values their ID, then and only then, do we see civility. There are plenty of conversations where anonymity is needed. In fact, that tweet thread should have ppl requiring vetted certificate OR an upgraded by a number of vetted certificates of an anonymous posting. Finally, the vetting of pp

  • It "worked" for the Orange CEO.

  • So Hard Even the CEO Can't Do It.

    When did CEOs become so much smarter than the rest of us? In my experience the vast majority of CEOs is simply more greedy and sociopathic than the rest of us, intelligence is not a variable in that equation nor is competence. A whole legion of these people managed to backstab their way to the top of the food chain in the years leading up to the that oopsie-daisy in 2007 where they crashed the world economy. Not exactly a shining example of intelligence that ...

  • The protocol they use was invented to send very short messages to a pager*. What conceivable reason would you use that now?

    I suppose it's for people like Trump (here's 140 char, tell me everything that you've ever learned), but all I see is that it encourages people to become illiterate. Maybe it's appropriate for 16 yr olds to tweet "same to you!", but an intelligent conversation? Really?

    Oh, but email is sooooo old....

  • God, if only we could figure out some way to represent a conversation with replies in a chronological order. Too bad no one's ever thought of that before.

  • I found Twitter confusing as a medium for discussion.

    Then I realized that it's just a text-based MMORPG.

  • Is this a surprise to anyone? The only shock here is that people actually use twitter.

    A newsletter app with a character limit? Some ad-hoc-turned-features like hastags and name drops? THIS became a major tech company!?
    Twitter is made for shout-outs and declarations.

    "Pizza is good".

    "Shoutout to my favorite pizza: Deep dish".

    Slogans, catchphrases, snide retorts. Twitter is made for low-effort shit-posts. It is the cheap pulp magazine of the modern telecommunications age. And some people like that. A lot

  • Seriously.

    When Jack doesn't want to actually answer a question, he'll lie, or dance around the question.

    It really doesn't matter though.

    Twitter is a Bay Area company pushing Bay Area ideology and "morality".

    And if you are an evil "wrongthink" purveyor of a dissenting opinion, fuck you, and you're banned.

    #WretchedHive

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