Twitter C/D

∞ wants a ∞ character limit

i suspect ∞ has never actually used twitter

schlump, the many facets you speak to do not add enough substance and creates a world where everything is a passing trend. GUYS WHITE COP KILLED BLACK MAN. LOOK AT THIS PERV LOOKING UP THIS GIRLS SKIRT. @BarackObama MONKEY. Where millions of useless tweets ensue.

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Friday, May 22, 2015 6:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like does he realize that you can choose who to follow, is he following racist upskirt accounts

i suspect his profile pic is the egg xp

is twitter bad because somewhere on it there is a racist upskirt tweet, is twitter subject to the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, do you have to have any understanding of the actual functionality of the platform before concocting dismissive theories about why its bad

twitter the company is bad because they don't pay attention to the really bad tweets that are targeted at ppl

twitter is good though

twitters abuse moderation policy is very bad

ty for the reply ∞
i still feel like you are setting a weird standard twitter doesn’t have to meet to be useful, though. like it doesn’t have to be a complete ecosystem. if it’s an inherently insubstantial medium that has to lean on other things to be able to support complexity, that’s still okay. if you get to a stage of dming somebody to ask their e-mail, it still played a part in that conversation, twitter as part of a healthy diet. if there’s a necessarily convoluted strand of conversation it can’t easily accommodate, it’s akin to all other specific strands of interaction; dynamically more suited than some things than others, the same way talking in groups is different from talking one-on-one or writing an e-mail’s different to writing a letter. really, though, i still kind of dispute that; even if space limitations restrict rebuttals, publicity and transparency and reach and democracy aid them, improve them, & this is still a net plus in what the medium is doing to help me understand stuff (five discrete points instead of one comprehensively stated point, say).

& yeah i mean the short attention span/everything is a passing trend thing just isn’t twitter, i don’t think. it’s just the world. it would have been as salient a criticism of any other mechanism for relaying information ever, tv news frothier than newspaper writing. it is a like a long now critique of snapchat. there is always going to be a vast quantity of meaningless everything, & anything so quintessentially abundant obviously at least offers you the option of exposing yourself to just firehose-intensity everythingness. but i don’t think everything’s prone to misinterpretation just because it’s succinct, or if it is then those pedantic corrections are at least sometimes useful, a venue where fairly standard boilerplate absolutes are more publicly punctured, pithily & meaningfully) (i was trying to link, here, to somebody tweeting some reporter who'd asked how a list of white writers editors might hire would go down politically, somebody-but-i-can’t-find-who describing this as “a masthead”; can anyone remember where this is).

& i don’t know if it’s cliquey or not. i remember ryan talking bout it being unusual among social networks in exposing users to how good they were at it, like in its content being contextless in a meaningful way, where good things without stature could grow. & yeah like most anything maybe doesn’t use its constraints well, but i don’t know, my feed is the full of engaging stuff that does & things that don’t need to to be valuable. it's so useful.

Can't be bothered with twitter or infinity but I feel like twitter is mostly shit surely because aphoristic content is the hardest to do well (cf [shade redacted]) but the good stuff will be v good

like every dislikable band surely the problem is the fans

I hate Twitter bc it is addictive and somehow never filling; it (like social media broadly) ruined the output of a lot of great and smart bloggers/writers; it magnifies petty understandings and career anxiety; performative tweeting has become a way of getting work that gives the illusion of depth while offering very little; because few regular folks can understand it which is negatively shaping the writing Twitter power users create; because important conversations are lost or forgotten bc of the ephemeral nature of the medium; etc

Otoh it has undoubtedly been responsible for advanced networking linkedin could only dream of, and obv supporting positive social movements like blacklivesmatter

Performatively tweeting your brand is one of life's gr8 pleasures

I'm not advanced enough for twitter but I enjoy that aspect of (sorry) facebook

Deej what do you mean by few regular folks can understand it

I mean following the path of discussion requires an investment of both time and understanding; really it's a bunch of overlapping communities with their own values and rhetorical approaches, it's not made for a general audience. This is why it's fun / addictive, like ilx on steroids. But it's also like, a lot of important convos happen that only make their way to, like, my mom sitting back home in Illinois via a wack thinkpiece that attempts to translate the conversation via a trolly headline

And the second part of that was that I think a lot of heavy Twitter users who are writers forget that it's their job to communicate with regular ppl who don't spend 12 hours a day on Twitter

It siphons away conversations from our creative output and leaves them as half-realized thoughts that successfully relieves the urge to create and simultaneously produces nothing of value

Feel like those important convos have traditionally taken place in settings even less visible to the average deej's mom than twitter tbh? There are a lot of issues whose prominence seems down to twitter

Can't speak to the latter point I don't read a lot of "pieces" tbh

yah that's true, although I hate Twitter I do not think it's purely a force for evil at all, I think on balance it's actually very ambiguous

apart from gifted aphorists, im tempted to argue that twitter is less a communication platform where "conversations" can happen so much as it is a signaling mechanism for indicating that such conversations are happening somewhere else (and maybe it'll even direct you to them). it's like twitter is less about content or ideas per se than ~awareness~ of ideas/content. in semiotic terms it's very much a "indexical" medium (ie, pointing).

on the other hand making an essentializing claim about any communicational medium is a fool's errand since pushing against their supposed limits and forms is what such mediums do, to a large extent.

maybe it's just my feed though. a good majority of what appears in my timeline includes a link, a picture, etc.

龜 twit renaissance in full bloom

Thanks, d-40, for putting it better than I did. I agree with just about everything you've said.

I hate Twitter bc it is addictive and somehow never filling; it (like social media broadly) ruined the output of a lot of great and smart bloggers/writers; it magnifies petty understandings and career anxiety; performative tweeting has become a way of getting work that gives the illusion of depth while offering very little; because few regular folks can understand it which is negatively shaping the writing Twitter power users create; because important conversations are lost or forgotten bc of the ephemeral nature of the medium; etc

Otoh it has undoubtedly been responsible for advanced networking linkedin could only dream of, and obv supporting positive social movements like blacklivesmatter

― Keith Mozart (D-40), Saturday, May 23, 2015 6:30 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ryan otm

Schlump, of course you can tailor Twitter to be the most engaging, thought-provoking, and interesting timeline you can think of, but that is not my point.

I am criticising how people generally use Twitter and how it facilitates link-baity headlines and content. Twitter is like eating a bag of chips. So, yes, in short, you and most people are right in saying that Twitter is what you make of it, but the constraints and format (medium) facilitate a type of content that has little depth. It's like saying, "Well, if you like chips we've thought of our customers and have come up with a great vegetable option just for you!" The most pragmatic thing would be to stop eating chips because there are far better options, comparatively.

youre wrong and v obvs uniformed

The most pragmatic thing would be to stop eating chips because there are far better options, comparatively.

I don't think there are, frankly. it's an ideal way for people I know and people I like to direct me to content that I enjoy. that's how I use it anyway.

twitter as junk food is the most common entry level ass face criticism of the medium deduced by people who are sure it just must be that way because well its... short? serious usage of the term clickbait (its clickbait not link-bait fwiw) is a clear signal of lack of engagement with the topic too

Thanks, d-40, for putting it better than I did. I agree with just about everything you've said.

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Wednesday, May 27, 2015 3:27 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hes saying a totally different thing than you!

which i disagree with too fwiw, deejs description is m/l accurate if overly negative, but having a power user info network is actually extremely tight

the best twitter thing i did recently is follow like a gazillion rare book archivists. so much fun stuff!

wow u r indulging in terrible junk food all this previously unavailable access to experts why wld u do that its bad

lag∞tm

like ∞ if twitter is so insubstantial why do its heaviest users tend to be people with expertise, why has it become so engrained in so many creative interesting fields, why do writers use it so much

when analyzing twitter it might be worth considering that writing short is actually good not bad (hint)

#brevityisthesoulofwit

common-entry level-ass face criticism

r.i.p. hyphens, thanks twitter

:|

when analyzing twitter it might be worth considering that writing short is actually good not bad (hint)

― lag∞n, Wednesday, May 27, 2015 3:39 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe if the info wasn't ultimately ephemeral

but: lol longreads, i do like long writing, sometimes. it's hard to advocate for that now when everyone filler-writes to keep their jobs

which i disagree with too fwiw, deejs description is m/l accurate if overly negative, but having a power user info network is actually extremely tight

― lag∞n, Wednesday, May 27, 2015 3:21 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tight from the POV of another user, but not from ppl who don't have time to invest in understanding its byways, or for those who finds their ideas lifted, or lost in the archive, etc

pfft do i look like n00b babysitter

anyway twitter is just one part of the internet let it do its thing

what you mean i should stop hacking twitter dot com. no way jose.

I have no idea what this "power user info network" is and this seems to be getting into how a very, very small subset of twitter's users (professional/semi-professional writers) use it, which is um perhaps not indicative of how the majority of users use it

yeah but if u think ryan was otm then i don't think you know how the majority of users use it either

ppl use twitter to 'hang out on,' not to be directed other places.

I'm old, I don't know anybody who "hangs out"

my observation is that the majority of twitter usage and content is generated by power users, that it has a much more top heavy distribution than say facebook or instagram, power users dont have to be writers they cld be just ordinary civilians with 5k followers, or heavy hitters in whatever industries (i follow a lot of design and dev ppl)

there are plenty of ppl who check in occasionally have like 65 followers and have made 650 tweets but where most of twitter is actually happening is amongst ppl who are on there all day every day, which explains twitters inability to grow past a certain point despite spending billions of dollars and trying everything

ppl use twitter to 'hang out on,' not to be directed other places.

― Keith Mozart (D-40), Wednesday, May 27, 2015 5:19 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk i use it for both, the majority of my reading prob originates from twitter links

where most of twitter is actually happening is amongst ppl who are on there all day every day, which explains twitters inability to grow past a certain point

huh weird this would not have occurred to me but makes sense