There is only one way to “play” Twitter, and the only real gain is that “No one is learning anything, except to remain connected to the machine.” 

Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context. We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable. Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.

As we all know, people are less awful when they are not anonymous. I believe that the most undervalued real estate on the internet is Twitter profiles.

The lack of innovation in the core Twitter product has been a weakness for years, but now it presents an opportunity to support a subscription fee.

Neither Snap nor Pinterest is free of issues, but to date, nobody has rallied a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol using tastefully curated photos of bathroom remodelings.

As a general corporate principle, you don’t want to have to list “We occasionally act as a handmaid to sedition” in the risk-factors section of your Form 10-K.

A 2018 MIT study co-authored by the company’s own former chief media scientist found that false news stories on Twitter are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories and spread across the network at least six times faster.

The stock isn’t even worth that much, relatively speaking. On the day of Twitter’s initial public offering, in 2013, shares closed at $44.90. On January 28, they closed at $51.57. That’s an increase of about 1.9 percent per year — barely more than the rate of inflation. Facebook has nearly sextupled over that period. Even the New York Times Company, once thought doomed by the rise of social media, has almost quadrupled. As a business proposition, Twitter’s decade-long experiment in monetizing rage and disinformation has failed.

Economists call this a "network effect": the more people there are on Twitter, the more reason there is to be on Twitter and the harder it is to leave. But technologists have another name for this: "lock in." The more you pour into Twitter, the more it costs you to leave. Economists have a name for that cost: the "switching cost."

scroll through Twitter and zone out for a little bit

Twitter threads gave illness a name and a face, grounding the dread in particular bodies and disparate — if often overlapping — experiences. They placed these experiences in history, creating an archive of disease, fear, rage, and hope that will persist even as these feelings — and some of these people — have passed.

I started working on a social immune system for twitter leveraging their API. Eventually, I realized that trying to build an elaborate sandcastle on someone else’s private beach isn’t the smartest of plays.

The insurrection isn’t just being televised. It’s being orchestrated, promoted, and broadcast on the platforms of companies with a collective value in the trillions of dollars.

The current intellectual sphere (centered on Twitter) makes interaction even easier. Its cost is an eroding sense of community.

Oh, and from a language/design perspective, you can actually turn regular words in a sentence into channels, just as many people do with @replies. For example: I’m coming to #barcamp later today.

It also enforces actual use in the wild of tags, since no evidence of a tag will exist without it first being used in conversation. This means that representing channels in tagclouds across the site that grow and fade over time, and are contextual to all of Twitter or to a single user, is the ideal interface for displaying this information.

Every time someone uses a channel tag to mark a status, not only do we know something specific about that status, but others can eavesdrop on the context of it and then join in the channel and contribute as well. Rather than trying to ping-pong discussion between one or more individuals with daisy-chained @replies, using a simple #reply means that people not in the @reply queue will be able to follow along, as people do with Flickr or Delicious tags. Furthermore, topics that enter into existing channels will become visible to those who have previously joined in the discussion. And, perhaps best of all, anyone can choose to leave or remove topics that don’t interest them.

Is there a better way to use Twitter?

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The Wired Classroom: Leveraging Technology to Engage Adult Learners

Screenshots are disposable, but highlights are forever.

With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well.

What I dwell on the most regarding syndication is the Twitter stuff. I look back at the analytics on this site at the end of every year and look at where the traffic came from — every year, Twitter is a teeny-weeny itty-bitty slice of the pie. Measuring traffic alone, that’s nowhere near the amount of effort we put into making the stuff we’re tweeting there. I always rationalize it to myself in other ways. I feel like Twitter is one of the major ways I stay updated with the industry and it’s a major source of ideas for articles.

As someone who writes social media for work, I am deeply rooted in the practice of writing a unique intro when I share a post to Twitter, not directly syndicating it with whatever text I started the article with. For me that feels good enough (not saving that unique share to my site) since including the link means any likes and comments about the article come back to my blog thanks to Bridgy, but maybe someone will convince me otherwise ;)

being able to follow links to “follow a conversation” that is threaded on Twitter.

Recall Twitter in the early days, when it was somewhat of a harmless but somewhat inert status update service.

time travel back to pre-product-market-fit Twitter

What changed Twitter, for me, was the launch of Favstar and Favrd (both now defunct, ruthlessly murdered by Twitter), these global leaderboards that suddenly turned the service into a competition to compose the most globally popular tweets.

Instagram, despite not having any official reshare option, allows near unlimited hashtag spamming, and that allows for more deterministic, self-generated distribution. Twitter also isn't as great for spreading visual memes because of its stubborn attachment to cropping photos to maintain a certain level of tweet density per phone screen.

But that post-digital lens asks us to look beyond the “twitter is a cesspool” argument.

In 2018, according to the Pew Research Center, ninety-seven per cent of all tweets posted by American adults about national politics were posted by ten per cent of tweeters. A disproportionate number of the people in Twitter’s town hall are the sorts of people who were eligible to vote in 1820, before the first, Jackson-era expansion of the electorate: the wealthy, the educated, and the hyperpartisan. Twitter isn’t the future of American democracy; it’s the past.

Tweeting is to talking what polling is to voting.

“Using Twitter to bypass traditional media and directly reach voters is definitely a good thing,” Newt Gingrich said, in 2009.

That said: I will try to work out using webmentions to reply to folks replies that get backfed to my site, using my site’s comments. We’ll see.

To that point, I've also basically not refollowed any news accounts or "official" corporate accounts. Anything I need to know about major headlines gets surfaced through other channels, or even just other parts of Twitter, so I don't need to see social media updates from media companies whose entire economic model is predicated on causing me enough stress to click through to their sites.

It turns out, I don't mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.

So far coming back to Twitter has felt like visiting your hometown: it’s great to visit but it’s also a reminder of how much you enjoy not living there anymore.

Here’s my pitch for a Dumb Twitter app: The app forces you to tweet at the original 140 character tweet length. You can reply. You can’t like or retweet. You most certainly can’t quote tweet. There is no private DMing. Linear tweet stream only.

I avoid the outrage engine fueled by retweets.

It’s the same old story – if you spend a lot of time trying to become famous, then you become famous, but you won’t have spent any time doing anything worth being famous for.

(Roose, who has since deleted his tweet as part of a routine purge of tweets older than 30 days, told me it was intended simply as an observation, not a full analysis of the trends.)

Without a retweet button, Wetherell said, brands “would certainly be less inclined to have a financial relationship with [a platform]. And when you're Twitter and that's vastly your primary source of income, that might be a challenge.”

M.B can’t be reduced to stereotypes, of course. But there’s also a bar to entry into this social-media network, and it’s a distinctly technophilic, first-world, Western bar.

Tagging systems were “folksonomies:” chaotic, self-organizing categorization schemes that grew from the bottom up.

When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order.

Schemas aren't neutral

That approach: build protocols, not platforms.

The author and literary critic Sam Anderson has written: “Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions.”

Regular readers of Gillmor's eJournal will recognize his commitment to user participation. "One of the things I'm sure about in journalism right now is that my readers know more than I do," he says. "To the extent that I can take advantage of that in a way that does something for everyone involved ó that strikes me as pretty cool." One fascinating aspect of Gillmor's Weblog is how he lifts the veil from the workings of the journalism profession. "There have been occasions where I put up a note saying, 'I'm working on the following and here's what I think I know,' and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I'm on the right track, I'm wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing pieces," he says. "That's a pretty interesting thing. Many thousands more people read my column in the newspaper than online, but I do hear back from a fair number of people from the Weblog."

Maybe of interest for some readers here: With your plugin, it's also straightforward to import the "tweets.csv" file from the official Twitter archive, which contains all the tweets (and a lot of metadata) from one's personal account. Still don't know what to do with this in TiddlyWiki, but there is certainly potential...

mmentary. It also includes many annotated newspaper and magazine articles.An articMaha Bali2 weeks agowould be nice to include a screenshot. Also, I feel like I need to read up on Cambodian history to understand the significance of this particular royal - you don’t explicitly talk about how he is using power here. Was he trying to influence public opinion, was he just annotating for his own knowledge and learning, what kind of power is at play here?(I also wonder if the whole leaders having “right to express freely their view” does not work to anyone’s favor in the case of Donald Trump, so I would contest this strongly. That freedom of expression for political leaders maybe should be weighted differently than for the general population, no? As it has broader consequences for the entire country or even the world…