I’m with you 100%. The Twitter product has always been a clunky pile of bullshit for me. But somehow it became the default public space and choice of celebrities, etc and I think that has been 98% of its appeal.
Yea. Used it for four things. To keep up to date with creators I like, to keep up to date with friends, to keep up to date with a bunch of webcomics and to randomly rant into the void when I felt like it.
About 15 years ago, I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone. I joined Twitter because I like to try new apps as early as possible. It turned out to be a great place to talk about live music in my city, amongst other things. I met all my friends on Twitter.
At that time in my city, it was very much the town square that Elon wants it to be now. It was a place to discuss events in realtime; especially sporting events.
I suspect the advantage for Twitter was that you could communicate with people you didn’t know directly like celebrities, authors, politicians, etc. Not just write to them, but they write back because sending off a short message is much easier than making a call or writing a letter. Sometimes that is an unhealthy parasocial relationship but, it doesn’t have to be.
Kevin Smith basically started writing the movie Tusk in a collaborative way with Twitter.
Perhaps you are aware there is an ongoing event, say for example a football game, or an election, or an outage of your email service provider. You go to one of these “scream into the void” social sites, search on the topic, and learn what people are saying about it. Maybe someone knows what’s really going on, maybe some of those people have some interesting insights and you engage with them, not unlike you and I are engaging right now. Others can observe, perhaps contribute, and after the event has concluded, everyone goes their own way. Hopefully in the end the interactions are beneficial for all.
Me too. Tried twitter way back in the early days of it. Never found it useful. Others did though obviously, which I don’t understand, but they did. What I find interesting is the seeming need to replace it with something similar. Why? Is it like gradually kicking an addiction by switching to something slightly less bad, but not going full cold turkey?
I just… I could never comprehend twitter (or Mastadon, or bluesky for that matter).
The whole structure of the conversation feel like people shouting into an open auditorium. And everyone is shouting at once.
I just do not see the appeal.
I’m with you 100%. The Twitter product has always been a clunky pile of bullshit for me. But somehow it became the default public space and choice of celebrities, etc and I think that has been 98% of its appeal.
Yea. Used it for four things. To keep up to date with creators I like, to keep up to date with friends, to keep up to date with a bunch of webcomics and to randomly rant into the void when I felt like it.
About 15 years ago, I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone. I joined Twitter because I like to try new apps as early as possible. It turned out to be a great place to talk about live music in my city, amongst other things. I met all my friends on Twitter.
At that time in my city, it was very much the town square that Elon wants it to be now. It was a place to discuss events in realtime; especially sporting events.
I suspect the advantage for Twitter was that you could communicate with people you didn’t know directly like celebrities, authors, politicians, etc. Not just write to them, but they write back because sending off a short message is much easier than making a call or writing a letter. Sometimes that is an unhealthy parasocial relationship but, it doesn’t have to be.
Kevin Smith basically started writing the movie Tusk in a collaborative way with Twitter.
Me too but here’s one useful function:
Perhaps you are aware there is an ongoing event, say for example a football game, or an election, or an outage of your email service provider. You go to one of these “scream into the void” social sites, search on the topic, and learn what people are saying about it. Maybe someone knows what’s really going on, maybe some of those people have some interesting insights and you engage with them, not unlike you and I are engaging right now. Others can observe, perhaps contribute, and after the event has concluded, everyone goes their own way. Hopefully in the end the interactions are beneficial for all.
Thats a job for ‘journalists’ these days.
Agree, it’s like I had a feed for reading only instagram/facebook comments. No, thanks
Seems to me like you comprehend it perfectly!
I also never really saw the appeal. And I closed the account I’d barely used since 2007 (When it was primarily for announcing you were pooping and Lifehacker told me you could make lists with remember the milk) when the first buddy bought it.
I occasionally tried to use it for getting near real time news about things, but I guess I sucked at following the right people.
Now, with privacy badger, I never have to interact even when sites embed xits (if we’re going with xitter, then it’s full of xits, right?).
Me too. Tried twitter way back in the early days of it. Never found it useful. Others did though obviously, which I don’t understand, but they did. What I find interesting is the seeming need to replace it with something similar. Why? Is it like gradually kicking an addiction by switching to something slightly less bad, but not going full cold turkey?
Oh yeah. Why? Yeah… yeah I could never imagine leaving one toxic social media and then trying to find a similar replacement…