Around when Elon bought twitter he said (paraphrased) that twitter was the realtime news platform. It’s something I feel like is true in a way that should be true for other social media platforms but isn’t.
For example, say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401 might in this example surface tweets from other drivers on the highway talking about traffic and/or posts about an accident they came across.
Nothing about this sort of interaction is baked into the protocol as far as I can tell yet FB insta snap etc don’t work this way.
I want to piggyback to compare TikTok and YouTube. It is so much easier to post a quick fifteen second clip on TikTok on their mobile app. Compare to the same on YouTube, I feel a lot more friction. I don't know if it is justified but maybe I haven't used TikTok enough to be afraid there. For example, I learned early on that a video of a party with music playing in the background is a bad idea™ on YouTube.
1) the low friction leading to more mundane things being posted
2) the norm being text content not from people you necessarily follow / people who aren’t “celebrities” so mundane relatable things tend to bubble up.
I do wonder if one day video understanding LLMs will be able to understand what a photo/video is about and show you content that’s relevant to you
Maybe thats a good thing. It forces content to be posted to X directly instead of click baiting you into ad infested, paywalled, dark pattern websites.
Links are incredibly useful. Leaving aside the dubious benefit of the idea that we want everything to "be inside the same app" (an idea that is essentially 'platform lock-in rephrased as a feature'), a huge amount of useful content is already on web pages with URLs. The ability to share those resources quickly is essential. There's zero benefit to forcing users into copying and pasting existing text into a medium with extreme formatting limitations and no ability to handle dynamic content or inline images. And there is negative benefit from moving content from the open web to a site that requires a login.
> Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, chose the name “World Wide Web” because he wanted to emphasize that, in this global hypertext system, anything could link to anything else
Berners-Lee was brought up as a rejoinder to various decision makers who originally agreed to implement it, being that the www is more original than twitter, and fwiw he's not an American.
It's quite exasperating to find someone arguing that there is some benefit to regression towards applications which don't link into other applications. Why be on the web at all?
If someone limits your options to only two, or even one source of resources, are you better off?
This discussion thread emerged from the suggestion of "maybe that's a good thing." Is it?
It's a question of trust, competition, and whether there's so much destruction of honest competition that only the destructive and twisted competition remains, keeping people afraid to venture into the unknown, willing to perpetuate the cycle of destroying competitors and endangering civilization itself.
This comment is so deep in the comment chain that it makes no sense to talk generally about this when the thread starting comments are available for you to reply too…
Are we not talking about opinion vs opinion ? What twitter engineers think is good for twitter vs what web engineers think is good for the web ? I don't really follow what your assertion is, I would be happy to elaborate my position if you elaborate yours.
Now there is. Didn't used to be, and it cost a startling amount of money for that to be the case, and it was done to achieve a purpose rather than to make Twitter better at being Twitter. Something of a pyrrhic victory, that.
If you suppress posts where people include the source you are effectively promoting posts that do not include their sources. This gives more power to people who post opinion as fact and outright trolls. It is the fundamental problems with Twitter today, shitposters get amplified while people who try to refute with sources get suppressed.
the funny thing about your post is that twitter itself is now an ad infested, paywalled, dark pattern website/app.
If you think it isn't paywalled you're thinking about it too superficially, you are paying by volunteering to be the product in the form of having an active account, and without an active account the site/app is effectively completely useless for about a year now.
This might've been true when Twitter was still Twitter, but now it's X, it has dropped below the average - it IS the ad-infested, paywalled, dark pattern website. Linking out is (even more of) a positive.
> Nothing about this sort of interaction is baked into the protocol as far as I can tell yet FB insta snap etc don’t work this way.
Neither does Twitter.
Its search is frequently broken to push whatever the new version of their algorithm decides to push. If Musk so wishes your entire feed will be just his rants (something I experienced a few weeks ago).
Pre-Musk and pre-algorithm Twitter was a good source of news, as it was near-realtime, and relevant to you. Now? No.
Something that really pissed me off is how much of a "support channel" it became for things like my internet provider. If the internet went down their twitter was often the only place you could get info.
It's hard to communicate without first agreeing on the medium of communication.
When joining a group its easiest to simply adopt the choice the group has already made.
Companies chose Twitter because lots of people (their customers) already used it. If their customers move, and indicate a preference, they'll happily move too.
Personally I don't use Twitter. Lots of businesses post on Twitter, and they're welcome to do so.
I do use WhatsApp. Which has traditionally been business unfriendly. The odd business will connect with me that way, but that's rare.
Email, web, phone, IRL - these all seem to be working well here, but your mileage may vary.
Hopefully you have some choices.
The thing is that one did not need to be Twitter user to check updates from company on Twitter when needed. This is no longer that easy. That is why some companies (in my country, like train company) move to platforms that can be viewed without account. There are no many users there but anyone can follow link there when he needs it.
Yet Twitter now X is just our modern day 4chan owned by the richest man in the world.
Never have ever seen such insane things (people shot point blank in the head & the gruesomeness of it) I didnt need to see (scrolling thru) and all thanks to X.
> Nothing about this sort of interaction is baked into the protocol as far as I can tell yet FB insta snap etc don’t work this way.
It's baked into the UI. Public by default.
Facebook is personal by default. You post stuff on 'your feed', you view 'your friends' updates.
Late in the game Facebook realised this was a problem and has tried to cram other stuff into people's feeds - viral content. And people hate it. People want their Facebook feed to be stuff from people they know and they see the other injected content (meme groups, assorted interest groups, comics, etc) as little more than extra adverts.
Contrastingly Twitter was always the public firehose and so while many people do not care for it, those that do, are opting into it, not trying to opt out.
What's amazing is it seems nobody (big/public) is trying to really make a thing which is personal as you describe. It's all twitter rip-offs, microblogging narcissistic megaphone attempts.
I don't care a bit about bluesky, and while I check on my Mastodon feed a few times a week I don't interact there much either. This "look at me, whole world!" phenomenon is of very little interest to me. I despise what Meta has become, but I don't see an alternative yet to FB.
> For example, say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401 might in this example surface tweets from other drivers on the highway talking about traffic and/or posts about an accident they came across.
The problem I have on Twitter now is that folks hijack that and post tweets about totally unrelated stuff (usually crypto). Take you example that there is a huge wreck on the 401 and you want to find out what's going on. Go on Twitter and the top post will be something like:
"Get your Airdrop to $NEWCRYPTO Today. iPhone 12, 401 Crash, Cute Cats"
> say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401
Takes a lot of good faith to not think the above implies they’re searching twitter while sitting in traffic in a car they’re driving. They never said “I can ask a passenger to search…” or anything of the sort.
Only takes a lot of good faith if you assume the worst in people. But yes, I’m married and sometimes while my wife is driving I’ll use my phone.
More importantly though it was just a randomly picked use case. Whether twitter is a good news platform or not doesn’t depend on whether it is used while driving
English is not my first language and I clearly understand that it implies that that-person wants to know why the cars are not moving (traffic) while sitting in a car as a driver or passenger.
Maybe he's interested in realtime offers for cryptocurrencies or 1/10 of a thread with videos you wouldn't believe! Premise was good, execution terrible, and ever since Musk took over it's suffocated in spam with a spice of right wingery to it.
For example, say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401 might in this example surface tweets from other drivers on the highway talking about traffic and/or posts about an accident they came across.
Nothing about this sort of interaction is baked into the protocol as far as I can tell yet FB insta snap etc don’t work this way.