Comment by MikeGale
8 years ago
That is not my experience, and therein may lie an answer.
Twitter can be what you make it. You can follow a small group of tweeters who are balanced, post infrequently and have attitudes that work for you. Or not.
Thinking that your life on twitter is defined almost entirely by Twitter and that you have little responsibility guarantees that you will be buffeted about on a stream, not of your making. Self fulfilling prophesy.
Twitter can't measure even the things that matter to you, specifically, let alone get measurements close to your own.
They can try to put together a "good default" mechanism that does better, BUT the real contribution they can make is to better help those who can know what they want. Better enable people who want to control it for themselves.
If we end up there, this RFP, could do good.
The question is which experience is the outlier.
Social media has a problem in that everybody wants to participate, but the vast majority of people have nothing of value to add. So the signal:noise ratio is going to inherently end up very poor. If you look at message groups with significant barriers to entry you rarely if ever get this sort of 'Twitter-effect'.
For instance, I have little other alternative than using Twitter if I'd like to see comments from Elon Musk. And then in looking for his comments within his tweets (as Twitter decided to remove the ability to simply click on tweets + replies when logged out, thanks Twitter) it's full of complete trash. People begging for money, scammers trying to get people to send them eth, people making inane comments, and then some 1% or so actually half interesting comments. e.g. see: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/968614419784613888
There's no real solution other than adding a barrier to entry, but of course the reason people like Elon post on Twitter is because of its userbase size. It's a free marketing tool. Which goes back to the problem mentioned that on Twitter the users are not the customer, but the product. And so Twitter has no incentive to fix its idiocracy since that's what's driving its success.
Twitter can be what you make it. You can follow a small group of tweeters who are balanced, post infrequently and have attitudes that work for you. Or not.
But the experience is not under your control. Anyone can choose to take something you say, screenshot it, and try to brigade you. A sarcastic remark to a friend or an in joke or one part of an ongoing conversation is ripe for this, and people on Twitter are actively looking for opportunities to do it.