from the nothing-of-value-will-be-lost dept.
Twitter needs more people to tweet. In its desperation to make that happen, it's taking a page from old cookbooks on how to make pasta: Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.
So far not much is sticking, and that's bad news for Twitter because it needs to win over people who have little interest in tweeting. In July, it reported 316 million users were actively tweeting, just a 3 percent rise from three months before, and it warned investors not to expect " sustained meaningful growth." In October, the San Francisco-based company said the number of active users grew by a meager 1 percent.
Twitter's executives, including CEO Jack Dorsey, admit they've got a problem. The service is confusing, which makes it hard for tweeters to find other people and topics to follow. It's also viewed as a hotbed of abusive behavior, which intimidates both new and existing users.
Twitter also knows it needs a face-lift that will make it more visually appealing in a way that encourages regular people, and not just an in crowd of entertainers, politicos and hipsters, to use the service.
Twitter is for twits?
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:37AM
For twits and twats equally: no discrimination, not even a positive one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Sunday February 14 2016, @08:04AM
To me this comic [penny-arcade.com] perfectly illustrates why I no longer mess with twitter, its Tweeting Twits, Twats, and Trolls.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Sunday February 14 2016, @10:04AM
So, to be totally inclusive, TFT(itle) should read:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Touché) by frojack on Sunday February 14 2016, @10:46PM
I promise to REDOUBLE my efforts to NEVER join Twitter!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @09:08PM
Oh I twit you not, Twitter was always for twits all a twitter...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:37AM
They've got Anita Sarkeesian to help 'monitor' (censor) posts recently via their new "Trust and Safety Council."
Fuck'em.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:10AM
They've got Anita Sarkeesian
That decision alone has already alienated a lot of potential users, it's like trying to remove a hole in a sinking ship with a stick of dynamite.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:37AM
Actually, dynamite is quite safe to handle. You can cook on it if You have a shortage of wood. Just be careful to remove blasting caps, as they are the reason why dynamite explodes. Then You can quite safely plug the hole in a ship with dynamite.
And generally, getting the dynamite wet shouldn't be that much of a problem. True, getting it wet or even damp makes nitroglycerin "sweat out", but it should sweat out both outside the ship and inside. Keep the nytrogliceryn from building up an unstable amount, and You should be fine. Much better than having a hole in a ship.
Sarkeesian is more like smallpox than a stick of dynamite.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday February 14 2016, @03:13PM
Sarkeesian is more like smallpox than a stick of dynamite.
I like this comparison. In that vein, “gamers are dead” was like throwing a bunch of smallpox blankets at those of us assigned the male gender at birth (who apparently don't have an unlimited credit card of cisgendered privilege¹ unlike a certain bitch²) who like to play video games. Best to just walk away.
Sorry, Twitter. You've got some major problems with the social justice crowd, and your platform makes it all too easy for internet lynch mobs to get out the torches and pitchforks on the least little bit of misinformation and libel. Yes, some of us have had very negative experiences with various manifestations of the social justice crowd on college campuses and in the workplace. We would like to communicate those experiences in order to come to a meeting of minds and engage in a healing process (not kidding here). The pitchforks and torches are not the way forward.
Really, all I need is a way for my computer to load updates from sources I'm interested in like SETI, NASA, JPL, ESA, JAXA, ISRO, CNSA, CERN, Brookhaven, Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics, maybe LIGO yet, Sanders 2016, parts of Advocate.com, possibly The Root, and various others. If only there were a subscription-based syndication protocol. It doesn't need to be complicated! Perhaps some kind of Really Simple Syndication protocol would work!
I'll save the discussions about social justice for more high-brow environments like Soylent here where all opinions may be voiced (gripe about moderation as you wish). The internet is not a “safe space,” never will be, and while I was born a few days too late to know the Second Age of the Internet, when the men of Númenor posted their wisdom to Usenet, before Eternal September, I'm betting it still wasn't a “safe space” back then either. A safe space is support group behind closed doors, yeah, in meatspace. Oh my, did I just call Soylent high-brow? Ok, Soylent is high-brow!
¹ Clarification: Things are changing, but cisgendered privilege is still something that's stingily loaned here in flyover country. Terms and conditions may apply. Offer may be null and void in Redneckistan, except for all those dudes who thought I made a little hottie driving big truck… it's complicated. Basically cisgendered privilege is the privilege to successfully correct somebody who misgenders you. It's invariant (degenerate? what's the correct mathematical term I'm looking for? undefined as in x/0?) when somebody correctly genders you (as in those truck drivers—men and women—who gendered me female on first impression). Everybody misgenders somebody at some point as a completely honest mistake. I used to work with a guy when I flipped burgers who was consistently ma'amed when taking orders at the drive through despite being a man. It happens.
² Fuck you, Brianna Wu. You're trans, goddess damn it! Admit it! Deal with it! Embrace it! And for goddess' sake, go to art school and learn how to represent the female form and capture the essence of the feminine instead of some Dead or Alive Beach Volley Ball-inspired adolescent fantasy!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:45PM
cis-gendered isn't a thing. You can't draw a line between things cis and things trans like that. And it certainly doesn't exist from it's own side. It's a construct that trans people invented to cram men into an even more restrictive set of gender norms. And it's hypocritical as hell.
If you want to say that somebody's biological sex matches with their gender identity, then you can say non-trans. Or just say male or female because most of the fucking time that's going to be the case. All this is is an effort to delegitimize people who through no fault of their own happened to be happy with both the sex and gender they were born into.
It's obnoxious, it's offensive and it needs to stop. I have no issues with trans people needing to have a way of differentiating when it's actually appropriate, but they can just use the term non-trans which is much more informative anyways. Plus, where do you even draw the line for cis-gender anyways?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday February 14 2016, @09:49PM
cis-gendered isn't a thing. You can't draw a line between things cis and things trans like that. And it certainly doesn't exist from it's own side.
You're correct!
It's a construct that trans people invented to cram men into an even more restrictive set of gender norms.
You're blaming the completely wrong demographic for this mess!
And it's hypocritical as hell…. Or just say male or female because most of the fucking time that's going to be the case.
No argument here.
All this is is an effort to delegitimize people who through no fault of their own happened to be happy with both the sex and gender they were born into.
Wrong. Second Wave Feminism had already created the “distinction” of “womyn-born-womyn.” This necessitated its deprecation and replacement by the terms cisgendered and transgendered in order to bring some women back on equal footing with other women.
It's obnoxious, it's offensive and it needs to stop.
Let me help! You're right. It's offensive as hell. The term shouldn't fucking exist. Here's what happened.
First of all, gender non-conforming individuals have been with us since forever, Joan of Arc being perhaps a popular early gender non-conforming celebrity of sorts or Mulan if you want a Disney princess along similar lines. (We celebrate women who take on male identities, particularly to fight in wars—not to evaluate if they really were trans men or not, merely stuck in time periods before HRT—Joan of Arc may have been.) Various aboriginal cultures also had (odd) reverence for gender non-conforming individuals with either reproductive system, elevating them to the status of “two-spirited” shamans, I believe with an implication that being of both genders also implied they perhaps had one foot in the spirit world and the other in the material world. I'm not an expert on these traditions.
Now, gender transition had been a thing for Western medicine more or less since the fifties [umich.edu] (warning: giant vagina at top of page! do not scroll up! well, unless you want to! Also disclaimer: while umich.edu hosts a valuable resource, the University of Michigan's gender program is nothing but a gatekeeper program to be avoided at all costs).
So ok! Here comes Second Wave Feminism! We're now roughly in the late 70s and early 80s. Suffrage had been acquired through effort of the “Amazons” as well as other strides such as women in the workplace. Things were really looking up for gender equality. Except then a group of feminists went full retard and became what we call TERFs today: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, except the notion wasn't quite so radical back then. Clearly, somebody assigned the male gender at birth could not possibly, really, actually understand womanhood, because they lacked a womb. (I remember my 10th grade English teacher was firmly in that camp to the point of assigning extra credit that assigned males were welcome to try but would be given automatic zeros on because of lack of a womb.)
So, already, I hope you're sensing that something is going terribly wrong here. You seem to be of the sentiment that body parts shouldn't fucking matter. Well, Second Wave Feminism decided to disagree with you. Suddenly, we had womyn-born-womyn and impostor rapists who were only allowed to attend the most superficial functions of the feminist movement!
This notion of the person assigned the incorrect gender at birth who is now coming to terms with their mental gender being an “impostor rapist” was further cemented into popular culture thanks to Hollywood. We get The Silence of the Lambs, a very good movie, btw! Too bad nobody listened to Dr. Lecter's diagnosis of Buffalo Bill and instead focused on the construction of his woman suit, a perfect metaphor in the mind of Second Wave Feminism to explain the phenomenon of a “man” who would undergo HRT and surgery to live as a woman. Clearly, only a mentally deranged serial killer would want to be a woman.
See also Crocodile Dundee, Mrs. Doubtfire (yeah, I'm straying into the 90s but bear with me), and in particular, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, possibly one of the most fucking damaging productions to the GBT community in existence serving to do nothing more than to conflate gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual fetish, managing to tie all three together in cement shoes in an attempt to completely delegitimize gender transition and homosexuality and launch the hysteria that GBT folks are out to “recruit” and kidnap otherwise normal heterosexual people into a hellish, marriage-destroying freakshow, as far as I can tell.
Well, so we had the term womyn-born-womyn, and the womyn-born-womyn rejoiced (yay). It was absolutely clear to trans women like myself that there were spaces that were just simply fucking forbidden to me, such as the Grand Valley State University feminist club (I understand they did allow the occasional trans woman from the LGBT club but only on diplomatic missions to Alderaan, so to speak), because I did not have a womb, on pain of rape accusation.
At least, that's how I left things—and I was fine with that, no idea how the fuck “womyn-born-womyn” could possibly add to my life since they refused to study programming, maths, logic, and philosophy in favor of gazing at their own vaginas and thus shared no interests with me—until something happened on the left coast.
It's 2007 now and here comes Julia Serano! Her book Whipping Girl [wikipedia.org] is an absolutely mandatory prerequisite for using standing WTF is going on here and why I insist on using the term cisgendered.
What the term cisgendered does is deprecate the sexist term womyn-born-womyn. You're partially correct that it drags men into this catfight, since prior to 2007, men had just been men whether they had a dick or a cunt. It also brings so-called “womyn-born-womyn” down to the same level as my demographic. Now we all have qualifying adjectives! The high-and-mighty term womyn-born-womyn is transformed to merely be the term cisgenered as opposed to the other, equally valid medical circumstance of being transgendered.
That being said! I hope that at some point in the next 20 years, I'll hear that both cisgender and transgender have been deprecated or at least relegated to the doctor's office where they belong. Until then, keep a mental note that what I intend to do when I use the term cisgender is to illustrate the rift that Second Wave Feminism created and the TERFs proudly continue between my demographic and whatever kind of menstruation club they want to have.
So, as the late Paul Harvey would say, now you know the rest of the story. I'm sorry you seem to have heard a delusional version of the history of the term cisgendered. Perhaps you heard it from the perspective of a TERF, in which case I can understand that umbrage at its usage was communicated to you (with the unspoken reason for the umbrage: the goddess-like “womyn-born-womyn” being no more). However, the TERF viewpoint seems to be completely at odds with everything else you wrote.
(Note: MRAs, especially A Voice for Men, are smoking crack when it comes to this, just as bad as the TERFs, if not worse because they should know better. I have no idea how to remedy the situation except to ask for understanding from MRAs that it was Second Wave Feminism that even necessitated the term cisgendered in the first place. Sorry to drag you guys into the catfight I guess, but nobody uses the term womyn-born-womyn any more and I gather it makes me look like a much worse moonbat any time I use it.)
I have no issues with trans people needing to have a way of differentiating when it's actually appropriate, but they can just use the term non-trans which is much more informative anyways.
In a medical setting, it may be appropriate to catalog the genders of the conflicting body parts, noting surgeries to remove gonads (orchidecdomy, oophorectomy, etc). Perhaps with the advent of genetic medicine, it may be necessary to also make a note of chromosome configuration (XX, XY, XXY, XY androgen insensitive, XY 5α-reductase deficiency etc).
Plus, where do you even draw the line for cis-gender anyways?
If you're asking for a definition in a strict sense that can be validated with medical science, then no fucking clue. In general, I go by this rule of thumb: would this individual be admitted to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival? There are a number of conditions that can prevent an otherwise normal XX person from menstruating or having children, yet those people were let into the MWMF. There are (admittedly fewer) conditions that can cause an XY person to be assigned the female gender at birth and grow up into womanhood being completely unaware she's genetically XY, and those people were let into the MWMF as well. This perhaps underscores the problem your rhetorical question points to. Granted, the MWMF is no more because the participating artists got as tired of their hypocrisy as you seem to be with the word cisgendered, for pretty much the same reasons.
So, as best as I can define it is this simple rule, which will hopefully be obviated in the next decade or so. Assigned $gender at birth and currently living and identifying as $gender? Cisgendered. Assigned $gender at birth and currently living and identifying as −$gender? Transgendered. No degradation, disrespect, or delegitimization of any way of being intended—unless you're a womyn-born-womyn who can't give up the bigoted notion that being assigned the female gender at birth implies some state of having a “complete being,” far superior to all other circumstances of birth!
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday February 15 2016, @03:59AM
Interesting, my whole point about cis-gendered and boxes is more that it's how the term is being used currently. Or at least it's the way that I see it used at present. It has little to do with the history of the term, but more to do with it being used as a pointless replacement for trans and popping up in places where there's no point in distinguishing.
I do see your point about the trans community as the use of the term just undermines their point of view that they are the gender they claim to be even if their reproductive organs don't match. I'll have to take a look at that book.
And don't get me started on "womyn." That racist bullshit should never have gotten started and shows a shocking lack of research as woman does not derive from the German word for man. That's "Der Mann" and woman derives from the other "Man" as in roughly equivalent to one or a gender-free generic person.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday February 17 2016, @02:02AM
Twitter would have a share price of approximately if it brought back RSS support.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday February 14 2016, @08:44PM
That needs a bit of elaboration. Modern commercial dynamite may be that safe (I don't know), but the original certainly wasn't, and at least up through the 1930's when dynamite aged it tended to sweat nitroglycerine, when make it quite sensitive to jolts.
A brief search seems to indicate that probably even modern dynamite will sweat if it doesn't get "turned" appropriately. And if you run across some, you don't try to handle it even carefully, you call in an expert.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by toygeek on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:41AM
Twitter can die in a fire and I will dance on its grave.
"It's also viewed as a hotbed of abusive behavior, which intimidates both new and existing users."
That's in incorrect statement. It isn't *viewed* as a hotbed of abusive behavior, it *IS* a hotbed of abusive behavior.
There is no Sig. Okay, maybe a short one. http://miscdotgeek.com
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:43AM
If you don't use Twitter, you don't exist in our modern world of social media.
You want to exist, don't you?
Of course you do.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:48AM
You want to exist, don't you?
I think, therefore, I am.
I think.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aristarchus on Sunday February 14 2016, @09:25AM
You want to exist, don't you?
I think, therefore, I am.
I think.
Descartes is rolling in his grave, if he still has one after what happened in Sweden and with the Revolution and all (there was a rather good popular book on this recently.)
No, the correct syllogism is : "I do not think, therefore I use Twitter. Twitter does not think, therefore existence is unnecessary. Since existence is unnecessary, I do not need to use Twitter." Thus the conundrum. The more users Twitter has, the fewer users Twitter has. Kierkegaard summed this up nicely, quoting the Danish business man who said, "We lose money on every deal, but we make it up by volume."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @10:10AM
Make him meet Tesla, maybe something good gets out of it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @01:52PM
I tweet , therefore, I am annoying .
There, fixed that for you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:50AM
Instead of desperately lurching from one failed initiative to the next, why not embrace your core competency and accept what Twitter has always been? It's a low-bandwidth text (and now image) exchange service where users can create their own subscription feed of content the find interesting. You're companies core product is essentially a proprietary RSS reader platform, Jack. Your running something closer to Usenet than Facebook. If you had a company that run a Newsgroup service and graded them on how well they operated like Facebook they'd look like a horrible company. But the thing is, many people find Newsgroups highly valuable. There are people who want that. Also, realizing this you would have kept your staff to a sane headcount. You don't need 3000+ people to run a text messaging service. The core software has been written. It works. It scales. Infrastructure is a commodity product you buy from other people who can do that sort of thing better than you can. You need a few engineers, a small ad-sales team, and someone to make coffee.
Confusing? Abusive users? Get the fuck out. It's Simpler than Facebook. Comment threads could be better, but that can be tweaked slowly over time. And there's already a suite of settings and tools to manage your interactions with other people. Twitter is as abusive as you let it be. There should be a notice when you sign in that this is a PUBLIC forum and that things you tweet are broadcast to EVERYONE on the service who searches for the words or hashtags you use. If you shout crazy or stupid things in public, don't be surprised when you're called an idiot and gently corrected :^)
So you've got a choice, Jack. You could operate a company that successfully delivers a product that hundreds of millions of people enjoy, or you could ruin it by trying to be something you're not. Sadly, I'm absolutely positive you'll be forced down the latter path until TWTR becomes so devalued that it gets snatched up by Microsoft or Google for cash.
Shouldn't have gone public.
(Score: 2) by julian on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:55AM
Lots of typos. That's one similarity between Twitter and SN: no edit button!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tftp on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:02AM
That's one similarity between Twitter and SN: no edit button!
There is no "edit" button in speech.
(Score: 2) by julian on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:03AM
Wikipedia seems to have figured it out. Allow revisions, but keep a complete history of all changes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Sunday February 14 2016, @10:16AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Sunday February 14 2016, @12:01PM
present both edits, but have it cost karma, and don't allow edits if the karma drops below a threshold (say 15). This would keep abusive edits to a minimum and also allow for good writers to become better..
Just my reflexive thought on how to do it
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:49AM
Lots of typos - but it's legible and rationale. That's better than most tweets I've ever read.
Basically, you're saying that if they fired everyone above a certain pay grade, as well as eliminate moderation, then Twitter would have some value, and be sustainable. That's how I read it, anyway. And, I agree.
That moronic formula of "growth" just makes no sense. Adding another twenty CEO's and a vice president of kissing the board's ass adds no value to any company.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Sunday February 14 2016, @09:55AM
Lots of typos - but it's legible and rationale
Usually, the irony is not this thick. Are you alright, Runaway?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Sunday February 14 2016, @01:29PM
Spring is around the corner. Maybe he is twitterpated. :-)
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday February 15 2016, @07:59AM
And once again I am sent reeling, seeking for a reference by a fellow (or sister, but sisters are fellows, so never mind) Soylentil! Twitterpated? "Pate" is a very archaic reference to the head, or the top of the head, and never to be confused with Pâté, which is the mash up of exploded goose liver and should be illegal. Shallow-pates, I seem to recall Immanuel Kant using this term, or perhaps it was Hegel or at the very least Marx allegedly quoting Hegel. But none of that matters now. Twitter- pated, a head all a "Twitter". Appropriate, descriptive, and quite possibly the way is really is in those Southern Regions that never do actually experience the true deathly influence of the North. For them, it always is just about sex. In the North, it is always about Mukluk, or Lutefisk, or some mode of survival equally disgusting. But none the less effective. Twitter-pated: wait! It comes back to me! Bambi!! In the spring, it's all about sex, Twitterpated? Ah, I need a smoke.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday February 15 2016, @10:50AM
I'd hate to see how you react to the warning "may cause constipation" ;)
My guess is that they use "twitterpated" as what should better have ben phrased "twitstipated" (which seems like an oddly apt portmanteau)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:57AM
If you shout crazy or stupid things in public, don't be surprised when you're called an idiot and gently corrected
Oh hell no. You're not going to be gently corrected, you fetid sack of shit. Fuck you and the sanctimonious horse you rode in on. In fact, I'm gonna make you rape your fucking horse! In the ass!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:16AM
What about the other horse, the non-fucking one?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:19AM
Most tweets disapate with no one paying attention - like a fart in the wind - but make a stinky one on a still day and someone will complain
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @10:03AM
Most tweets dissapate with no one paying attention - like a fart in the wind
I am having flashback: a young Keanu Reeves stands before the great Athenian philosopher, So-Crates, and opines: "All we are is farts in the wind." Background music swell, full on Kansas: "I close, my, eyes! Nothing left before us but the endless sea! But some, thing, stinks! Who could have left us with such olfactory misery? We are nothing but farts in the wind, totally nothing but farts -- in -- the - wind." Whoa! Heavy, Dude!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by M. Baranczak on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:09AM
Instead of desperately lurching from one failed initiative to the next, why not embrace your core competency and accept what Twitter has always been?
Because the bright minds that run the business world have convinced themselves that anything short of constant and rapid growth represents failure. Think about it - they've gained 9 million users over 3 months... and this is supposed to be a "problem"? They're failing to reach their goals, because the goals are completely unrealistic. They'll just keep flailing around, until they sink.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:43AM
Which is why I closed with the unwisdom of going public. A private company can act more wisely in this current mad world. Although they may have needed the money to stay operating at all. That's probably more to do with their mismanagement however. There is a need they service which can make money. It's never going to be a behemoth like Facebook or Google, but it could have been a respectable company operating a useful service while making a nice profit for the small group of founders and employees. They currently employ around 3900 (as of 2015). They're never going to be the type of company that can support that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Sunday February 14 2016, @03:01PM
It's not Jack's choice, though. His choices are limited to what will make the investor funds continue flowing; these are only partially related to what twitter users actually want. I never really recall him asking what people wanted. He was brought back to fix some sort of issue they had that seems to stem from wall street, and not Twitter itself.
What you describe Twitter to be is easy enough to understand. What Twitter is, well, I already admitted elsewhere I have no idea what they are trying to turn it into or expect it to be. I do know it's not a product I would benefit from using and don't wish to get interrupted with alerts from it about recommended headlines from people like Trump or whatever. It's just seems to be an egotistical echo chamber to me; I get enough of that out of real life as it is.
The real people he is worried about are the shareholders--the people investing in the company, big and small, seem to equate success with "user growth".
Not the product success itself -- not that it does something better than anything else, or that it can do something really well and tie it into useful conveniences the whole family will enjoy -- but growth.
Growth is necessary because someday if they make money knowing the product is free, it is because they will serve ads to people. They need more people to serve ads to. There is no level of profit that they can rest at and be a darling because they are profitable, because it is not enough on Wall Street's view of silicon valley (and many other places) to simply provide a good enough product people like to use regularly. It has to be met with high rates of growth. I'm not seeing those ads, and if I was a user, I could. So, I need to be a user for twitter to survive because apparently the ads they do show aren't enough to sustain their current business strategy.
For some reason, if you run out of people to get to sign up, you're a failure. If you can't get people to stop using the old product and buying the new one, you're a failure. That is why they give away the razor handle and charge for the blades; it's why subscription as a service is important to create a baseline of revenue generation... Twitter can't do those, so they need more users to fuel growth and further investment, lacking any actual reliable service or function that is a must-have for people.
I strongly believe that if it was a private firm, they couldn't be where they are today, and they wouldn't have the problems they have because of where they are today and being stupid with money. Different problems, perhaps, but definitely not the failures created by the demands they be a successful ponzi scheme.
Perhaps what they need to do is focus on a small set of services, do them very well, and entertain the notion of being purchased by some other company that needs a small set of services like SMS alternatives, that are done very well. Then he can go and dream up his next failures and win millions in funding based on his success of knowing when to stop and cashing out.
(Christ, hyperturtle is awake indeed. Sorry about that wall of text I guess the coffee kicked in. As a disclaimer I am an entreprenuer and know the dangers of spreading oneself too thin and the temptations of money with strings attached that are delusionally infeasible to uphold.)
Twitter is the story of that pizza place on the corner that grew too fast, opened a bunch of neighborhood pizza joints, and closed because they somehow lost what made them popular when they started caring less about the pizza and the quality of the ingredients while focusing on advertising about their 120 years of combined pizza experience, and stopped caring about the people buying them, stopped letting kids leave empty water jugs with signs that say "please donate 25 cents so we can help buy new jerseys" and then match the donations with jersey's with the pizza chains name on the back in small lettering... because it turns into being more about the money they can borrow, and then the worry of having to pay it back.
Then, they are called upon to start making payments when unrelated economic factors shake the market (even though pizza sales were on the wane due to overlapping restaurant service areas and poor reviews due to quality problems) and the bank calls the loan in out of a generalized market based fear since they have no concept what the pizza taste like or what's going on internally there. The place collapses and a tiny pizzeria moves into the same place, because the at the bankruptcy sale, the pizza ovens were cheap. The story then starts anew "under new management".
(Yow, hyperturtle's coffee kicked in)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:54AM
Maybe Twitter has just saturated the market. Most of the people who would want to use Twitter are. Those that don't never will. Only fools expect continuous growth in a finite system.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:01AM
It's not a finite system while ugly bitches continue to spawn loud morons out of their yeasty cunts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:19AM
A loud moron is a loud moron, no matter if spawn by an ugly or gorgeous bitch with yeasty cunt.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:48AM
Don't talk about your mother that way!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 14 2016, @08:40AM
Also, I'd say 3% in three months is still a quite substantial growth.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by forkazoo on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:39PM
Yeah it seems like if they can't make a solid, profitable business with 300 million users, they won't be able to do it with 600 million users either. And if they can make it work with 300 million users, why the fuck does anybody care about the growth rate? The obsession with pretending exponential growth is sustainable in the long term is terrible for the economy in the long term.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:11AM
Tweeting: Someone once wrote that people want to see themselves as the stars in their own personal film. That seems to be what Twitter supports: You can tweet your thoughts and the tiniest happenings in your life, any time and all the time. The whole world can follow your fascinating life. Most people grow out of that kind of "me" mentality by the end of their teenage years.
Following: What about famous people? They have interesting lives! Or do they? Let's be real, they pay someone to tweet, and those tweets don't reflect the ordinary reality of their lives. How many people read tabloids? It's the same audience.
That's the negative, but there are places where twitter is appropriate Live news, sports tickers, a few other things. There is a real, solid business model under all the hype. Fifty employees, a valuation in the tens of millions, and you'd have a solid, sustainable business. Anything beyond that is just greed, and isn't going to work.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:16AM
Speak for yourself, loser. I'm so fucking awesome, I don't even need a Twitter feed, or an account on your shitty news site. Everything is about me, and I am the greatest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:22AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:31AM
Haha. This post makes me almost want to sign up for a Twitter account. Almost.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:56AM
Your Refusal to Join Twitter is Taking a Toll
Excellent [giphy.com]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday February 14 2016, @08:41AM
Why exactly does Twitter need more people to tweet? Most people don't have anything useful to say, so we should be thankful they aren't tweeting, not the other way around.
From what I can tell, Twitter is like a micro-RSS platform. You subscribe to interesting sources, then you get useful information continuously. If anything, Twitter needs LESS people tweeting, and less tweets in general, and hopefully higher quality tweets on average. Everything else is just wallpaper (e.g., whether or not really long tweets are allowed or the old limit restored), if you don't have a fucking house with solid walls to put them on, you're literally living in a house made of wallpaper, no wonder people will start poking holes.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 14 2016, @08:54AM
Because it can be given a number, and a big number is more impressive.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @09:53AM
Make more noise everyone! I can't hear you?!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by inertnet on Sunday February 14 2016, @12:12PM
Don't force introverts to join twitter. Let us move along, there's nothing to see there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:57PM
/join #IRC_rooms
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Sunday February 14 2016, @12:58PM
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=12073&cid=301129 [soylentnews.org]
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday February 14 2016, @01:43PM
The service is confusing, which makes it hard for tweeters to find other people and topics to follow....
Twitter also knows it needs a face-lift that will make it more visually appealing in a way
So do something inherently complicated, in a way that lower IQ people can understand and use as fully as the higher IQ people. Like making a GUI for sendmail fixes all of sendmails problems, or writing in fingerpaint makes LISP kid friendly.
So you made a flexible and versatile tool for reasonably intelligent extroverted people to murmur meaningless noise at each other. You can't dumb that down without getting rid of your existing users. If you turn it into "yo" then you lose 300M not gain 5B. Advanced social networking, for that type of people, is like diffeqs for "us" STEM type people, its kinda required for some tasks and acts as a filter. The filtering effect is important. I work near enough to a "lower income" area, and back when I had the twitter app installed for fun there was a view of "nearby tweets" and it turns out idiots aren't very interesting to read. The last thing twitter needs is the SNR dropping 20-30 dB by a flood of 80 IQ tweets, noise doesn't add value to a conversation.
Likewise the recent hard push to censorship doesn't add much to conversations. You end up with the meme of the Amnesty International club from high school, where about 3% of the population mindlessly repeat signals to each other but there's no content the rest of the population could possibly be interested in.
"We" as an economy can't make visually appealing websites in 2016. We can make giant grotesque abominations by web designers that solely impress other web designers with their cleverness. But in 2016 nobody could possibly release the google search page. We're stuck with something like yahoo's clutterpile homepage for everything.
So the long term Twitter strategy according to the cnet guy is to redesign the site to make www.yahoo.com look uncluttered by comparison, while dumbing the service down so the valuable 80 IQ market segment finds it usable, where its a SJW hugbox for a microscopic fraction of the population can holiness signal each other. Meanwhile 99.9% of the population will turn around and run like hell. Makes you think the cnet guy is shorting the stock or has friends/family who are shorting the stock...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:45PM
As a geek who recently joined Twitter. The interface was pretty simple.
The thing I did find confusing was why my main stream was flooded with people I don't follow. "This is recommended, this is trending now, etc." They assume people want to follow everyone, and have a dashboard that's never silent; and force it on them.
Twitter is shooting themselves in the foot with that. I had to go out of my way to create a private list just to properly see what the 4 people I follow post.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday February 14 2016, @01:59PM
it's taking a page from old cookbooks
The current social media bubble is another old cookbook idea of demand compression. Demand compression is when you sell a generation's worth of houses in five years and then some of the dumber participants wonder why sales tanked for a decade after. Or at the store, you put TP on sale in giant bulk packs, and wonder why nobody bought much TP the week after the sale. The demand compressed in time, leaving a gap of no (or at least less) demand.
So normally a genealogist has a lifelong hobby of it and at some point they spend a couple weeks at a depository library searching microfilm/fiche to print (at some expense) family census records for research purposes. But its a continuous stream of a "fad" like fanaticism for a few weeks or months, and society wide there's only a couple people doing this at any given time per library, so it scales nicely. But once a website like ancestry puts new census records online, you get an insane short term pulse of the whole freaking community appearing the same month to do their research all at the same time. Like when the decade fed census records are released and there's a megapulse of a zillion people searching and tagging like madmen for weeks, maybe months, then demand drops to normal continuous load, which is roughly zero.
Now technologically we've figured out how to do this with cloud computing and other buzzwords. But the cultural world and business world have not figured it out. So once people burn out "70s CB fad" style on friend-ing all acquaintances or coworkers or trolling or posting noise or holiness signalling, that activity will collapse, and even worse there may be minimum viable activity level below which you can't have a functioning social structure, online or off, and the level might drop below that minimum viable level.
This plays into competitors. "Nobody would use GNUSocial because none of their friends use it". Well when twitter is as unused as 70s bell bottoms and disco balls and CB radios, that won't be a problem now, will it? And at some point in the last decade, none of anyones friends used twitter either.
So the entire world simultaneously has eternal September on facebook... but September ends... and the "normal" level of traffic might not be able to sustain any business at all, much less billion dollar unicorns. The true value of a "post september" FB or twitter might very well be zero.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Sunday February 14 2016, @02:01PM
the only way you can get a complaint to a company!!!
In fact, some companies will try and get you to spring off Twitter to a "private" chat site, to prevent airing uncomfortable complaints....
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday February 14 2016, @05:01PM
The problem seems to be growth versus saturation. When something starts from zero, growth is always huge, and that's what the media trumpets. Look at digital books. A few years ago, growth was astronomical because they were new and people were checking them out. So the media took this growth trend and projected the end of physical books as everyone moved to digital books. Yet the growth plateaued as the market for people who wanted digital books was quickly saturated. Once a market is saturated, there's no room for much more growth. We're seeing this with Apple. Their iPhone market is basically saturated (they basically sell to the top 20% of America in terms of income or wannabes). They came out with the iPad, and quickly saturated the market of people who wanted an expensive toy, then the iPad Mini (nature's most perfect device) to create more market. Now they're shooting blanks, coming out with a watch at a time when their own iPhone means you don't need to wear a watch (unless you want a status thing like a Patek Phillipe or something, but you don't need it to tell time) and that whatever it was thing last year that was like a bigger iPad. Apple has saturated the device market and can't come up with something new right now. So we have Twitter, who has saturated the market of people who have anything to say. Where do they go for growth? People who aren't using Twitter have to reason to use it, or they'd be using it already. When these markets get saturated, that's the end of big growth, which is what the media and investors want, but you can't sustain it past the saturation point.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:15PM
Now they're shooting blanks, coming out with a watch at a time when their own iPhone means you don't need to wear a watch (unless you want a status thing like a Patek Phillipe or something, but you don't need it to tell time)
Pocket watches predated wristwatches, but wristwatches eclipsed pocket watches after World War I [wikipedia.org] for a reason. A phone is like a pocket watch and shares its disadvantages as a timepiece, such as needing a free hand.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday February 14 2016, @08:55PM
The trouble with that analogy is that nobody's figured out a useful interface that will fit on a watch, but perform like an iPhone. And they probably won't. VR is likely to succeed before that happens, and then there won't be the need for the miniturized interface.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Monday February 15 2016, @12:14AM
Yes, I find it very confusing why someone would want to text the internet and get firehose-sandblasted with other people's irrelevant, inane opinions on random bullshit.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bogsnoticus on Monday February 15 2016, @01:40AM
Nothing of relevance can ever be given justice and truly explained within an arbitrary one hundred and twenty eight character li
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Monday February 15 2016, @01:57AM
Every now and then I have another go at using twitter; however, every time I use twitter I find myself wondering what the hell it is for. New tweets com in so often that you can't really keep up in any meaningful fashion if you subscribe to anything interesting; or you are subscribed to so few things as to make it worthless.
When android was relatively new I subscribed to a bunch of android related feeds; recently when I decided to give twitter another go I was getting so many tweets from those (plus a bunch of other stuff) that it was just noise. So I culled my subscriptions back from approx 150 to 30ish. But now my twitter feed is very focused on science (physics / astronomy) related feeds.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by MrNemesis on Monday February 15 2016, @04:58PM
BBC is running a story at the moment about how Stephen Fry has flounced from Twitter [bbc.co.uk] regarding his treatment over an offhand comment at the BAFTAs. Fry was one of the biggest and most well-known proponents of twitter in the UK and his labelling of its current form as will ring true for far too many:
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."