Two of my must-follows, Amanda Palmer and Warren Ellis have both given up on twitter. Amanda was more specific that it was because of the hatred (and ironically she seems to have re-embraced facebook, algorithms and all), and Warren basically said “it’s turned to shit” about a year ago. If two people that tend to be out front on either audience-interaction or smart tech usage have given up, I feel like that’s a pretty bad sign.
Interestingly, they both continue to embrace email mailing lists as a way to disseminate info. I find it a bit funny how that’s come full circle to being one of the most useful communications methods again.
It’s more a matter of customer relations. If your customers are on twitter, post comments/complaints there and expect responses there, you really do have to engage with it. If it shut down, it wouldn’t be missed, but whilst it exists, it’s absolutely compulsory for companies’ representatives.
Imagine a twitterstorm about an alleged fault with a company’s product or service. Imagine if the company totally ignored it, refusing to get involved with the conversation. How would that look to their customers?
Hey, I’m not arguing with you. My comment was directed at @nungesser, who seemed to me to be saying that Twitter is great when one side uses it but it’s awful when the other side uses it.
(edit) I actually prefer discussing issues on a forum where I’m in the minority. Makes me think more carefully before I post (sometimes I fail) and motivates me to look for citations outside the libertarian circles I usually inhabit.
Any kind of communication tool can be used well or poorly. I was saying that its 140-character limitation has been used brilliantly by some people who see that as its virtue, and have made it a wonderful vessel for ideas, jokes, messages, poetry, and art that can easily spread quickly. And it’s unique among social media in that messages and replies can be sent and re-sent instantly regardless of “friend status”; anyone anywhere can instantly send messages to Trump or Kanye or whoever (whether they read them or not is up to them).
But its lethal combination of not requiring any authentication for users and complete lack of oversight means that it’s also the perfect tool for anonymous douchebag trollies, who’re quickly overtaking it.
Trump’s tweets get so much attention because Twitter has become such an important tool for spreading news quickly; this means that his insane crap takes on a level of importance it should never have.
Several areas of my local community still use LiveJournal as an essential communication tool. It’s used daily by the local government offices and officials as well as citizens to send out information. Honestly, after five minutes dealing with the blaring horribleness that is Facebook (and, yes, Twitter), getting local info via LiveJournal feels like walking into a quiet little cafe and getting the news from the locals over coffee.
Simply redirect to another form of outreach. Jesus, Twitter is like crack to corporations. Twitter is not indispensable no matter what your director of communications tells you. Has your company planned for the demise of Twitter because it is quickly coming to a crossroads that could be the end of its existence. Hence this thread.
Twitter may or may not survive*, but lazy and undiscriminating consumers of “news” (those consumers now including corporate news outlets themselves) will continue to be a large market for a long time to come.
[* I’m betting on “may not” mainly due to the company’s awful management]
When people ask about my (respectively moribund and non-existent) Twitter and Facebook accounts, I like to tell them that I’m on the anti-social network.
Amanda Palmer the artist, married to Neal Gaiman? Or another Amanda Palmer? Because the former uses Twitter a lot, and I follow both her and her husband. Unless this was something that happened very very recently and I missed it.
While I believe Neil Gaiman quit Twitter awhile back [edit: nope!], Amanda Palmer uses Twitter constantly. I saw some show updates from her just yesterday, though I haven’t followed her there for awhile (mostly because she posted so much I couldn’t keep up).
OH I know, I was using your comment as a springboard.
The main issue is people behaving badly. Less than people having different opinions and views. We have to interact every day with people who we disagree with on fundamental things, yet still manage it day to day just fine most of the time.
I don’t care how wrong your thinking is, as long as you’re polite about it I can tolerate you. Twitters issue is trolls and people who just want to be dicks making it worse and Twitter not having a means to limit their damage.
Please just make it go the way of Friendster, Myspace, Geocities and all the rest, and just topple gently into the deadpool. It should have died about 3 months after that first SXSW when the flaws became obvious. Really. Please just make it go away.
I think tools are a smaller part of the answer. Really, the way to fight the trolls is through policy decisions first and the tooling to support that comes later. So, the bigger problem is that no one knows of a way to fight the trolls and that’s probably because the people who can make the decisions don’t care enough to figure it out.
Well, there are wise uses of tools and poor uses of tools. Lots of people think gun laws go too far, until the angry drunk next door or the manic depressive upstairs starts stockpiling weapons. I actually think that neither the left nor the right should use social media to spread falsehoods and conspiracies, and that neither side should harass public figures with social media. All of this is really about proper rules for debate and discourse; while there are reasonable disagreements between right and left unfortunately the debate has plunged into disagreements between rationality and paranoia. The amount of anti-Semitic propaganda I’ve seen randomly on the web in the last year or two is pretty damn scary (and I mean blatantly and proudly anti-Semitic, not something that ‘kinda looks like a Star of David.’) Should virulent racism be respected as a valid political or social opinion that has equal time in a debate? Are David Duke or Richard Spencer serious political pundits, or rabble-rousers trying to use the veil of “equal rights for white people” to take away rights from minorities?
