Comments on: #RIP Twitter?

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 10:44:25 +0000

Seems Jack Dorsey has responded and stated that real-time Twitter isn’t going away. But everything that happened in the previous twelve hours shows just how little he’s trusted.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 02:21:01 +0000

Facebook works best when it’s used at arm’s length, as a syndicated for other media I do control. The network effects are only useful when you’re the one controlling them, and for the most part, you aren’t.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 19:26:12 +0000

Part of my disillusionment with Facebook was the way it encouraged you to connect with people you know in real life despite the fact many of they didn’t really have anything worthwhile to say; all they did was endlessly share superficial fluff and memes.

The other big problem was the mutual friend model that seems to encourage cliques and personal drama, which was why I eventually bailed because I’d had enough.

By: Serdar Yegulalp

Serdar Yegulalp — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 19:18:03 +0000

I’ve long felt that the biggest advantage RSS and blogs had was that nobody owned them. If you wanted to change blog hosts, off you go. There was an overhead involved in setting things up and maintaining them, but one of the unspoken advantages of such a high bar was that it kept out the people who weren’t really all that interested in having something to say. The original Web was self-curating, in the same way that the first home computers forced a certain degree of technical competence.

I don’t think we can have a total return to such things; it’s unrealistic to expect it at this point. But I do think people are finally realizing that they don’t own these things, can’t expect them to be run by people with their best interests at heart, and don’t leave them with any recourse if they go far afield.

If Twitter were an open source project akin to WordPress — where you paid for the privilege to be hosted on the most readily identifiable version of the product — we might not have had these problems. People could have forked off the software and started another version of it with more attention paid to things like harassment and crummy user experiences. Maybe that’s more the kind of thing we need.