Yeah, IRC channels never existed. I think I lost a few IQ points on this article.
Are bookmarks really not a thing anymore? Is such basic browser functionality, such as back buttons and bookmarks passé today? I mean, I guess we all collectively forgot IRC ever existed. Or Usenet. Or RSS. Why not forget bookmarks exist as well. Oh right. None of that can be monetized.
The internet is fucking doomed. We've moved from the promise of open networks, federated protocols, and decentralization to centralized services, advertising everywhere, and tracking your every movement to sell to the highest bidder. And people are worried Twitter might die. Yeah, it's really so sad they won't live another day to track you or sell you useless shit. Sob story of the eyeball economy, right there folks.
The only common thing between IRC channels and hashtags is that they’re prefixed by a hash character. That’s all.
Huh? Hashtags are only superficially related to IRC channels. For one, you don't need to be "joined" to a hashtag to see messages on it.
Twitter hashtags are global in scope which makes many of them useless due to dilution.
I encountered a particular Twitter hashtag the other day: #fog
Imagine every global reference to fog being tagged thus. It's a mess.
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A hashtag is a way of grouping messages together, not a discrete conversational area with its own topic, access rules, and administrators.
Can I reply back to an RSS feed? No? Then I guess that's not identical either.
Can I access usenet without clunky, ancient software? Is it mobile friendly at all? No? Then I guess that's also not equivalent.
You simply can't argue there wasn't a solid history predating Twitter, across RFCs of using @name for users and #name for topics -- whether or not a topic (channel) in IRC resembles a hashtag.
Also, the bit of the grandparent's rant about the decline of open channels and standards for communication (which definitely has happened) isn't diminished by adding on an explanation for why it occurred (there's no money in creating a sufficiently polished mobile UX for a decentralized service and protocol that nobody owns).
> A hashtag is a way of grouping messages together
Like IRC channels.
> not a discrete conversational area with its own topic, access rules, and administrators.
And?
> Can I reply back to an RSS feed? No? Then I guess that's not identical either.
I never made any such claim.
> Can I access usenet without clunky, ancient software?
Uh. Yes? That's the beauty of RSS, IRC, and Usenet. You get choice in the clients that you use.
140 character limits and SMS aren't clunky and ancient?? Really???? The article even mentions the torture of posting links. Such modern software, that crumbles under the mighty URL.
> Is it mobile friendly at all?
Of course Usenet is "mobile friendly". You fetch news when you have internet and can read it off-line at your leisure. If anything, it's the most "mobile friendly" protocol in existence.
Pinboard would disagree with you
But when I really study things most of the stuff that people think as fundamentally part of the service was instead added by the community and initially rejected by those running Twitter like use of the pound sign.
In fact when you look at when Twitter really slowed its growth was when they turned their back on that very community, especially developers. Anyone here actually believe that their experience with Twitter wouldn't be far better if there were still independent clients?
Twitter imho would be far better served to improve the service for those using it than randomly try throwing stuff at the wall in an attempt to broaden its appeal.
Here's my proposal:
Twitter Rooms: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a
Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
Twitter's strategy is to have lots of people to like it rather than to have a smaller group love it.
Twitter itself reminds me a lot of IRC actually, albeit with a fancy interface draped over it and a a low character limit.
Now, whether you consider that an improvement, is just your irrelevant (irrelevant to Twitter) opinion. I think we really need to draw a distinction between opinions that are thrown around and decisions that are backed up by data, and give benefit of the doubt.
* The “While you were away” list of tweets
* Auto showing images
* The analytics being available for everybody
* Muting accounts
* Blocking retweets (but allowing normal tweets) from specific accounts.
When you favorite a tweet, you mostly do so for your
own consumption. It is a way for you to tell yourself
that this tweet is something you want to get back to,
or remember for later use.
I saw the article was much longer, but the author lost me at that point.
I favorite a tweet to tell the tweeter that I liked what they said. I know they're gonna get an email saying I favorited their tweet.
I've totally forgotten that someone could use favoriting as a bookmarking system; I'm too busy to go back and look at lists of bookmarked tweets.
Then after about 4 years somebody pointed out that it actually stored your favourites. And that meant you could use them as a kind of bookmark. Well! Who'd have thought? (I don't use Internet Explorer, which is my excuse for not spotting the favourite = bookmark connection.)
That's just me though, and I don't GAFF if it's public.
But the fact that its name sounded like a bookmark means lots of people used it that way anyway.
(I sometimes use them as "read receipts" because I am excessively social and this causes me serious problems online. Faving something tells the person who wrote it that I saw it without me having to actually talk to them. This reconciles my need to communicate with my need to reduce the degree to which my chattiness routinely used to make me the center of some shitshow for reasons beyond my ability to fathom.)
Chrome doesn't even use the term favorites. It uses the (more accurate, imo) term bookmarks.
That being said, I've used 'like's' in that way too, so I don't particularly care about this change.
A lot of broad statements being thrown around by both the author of this article and the people in this thread. I used favorites in exactly this way, and I'm not a marketer.
Is there a list of my Facebook likes for later access? I don't know, I've never even thought about it before because I don't "like" things that I want to access later, I do it to show others that I like the post.
Is anyone really, actually, demonstrably confused by this change?
This post is spot on.
It's a journey, I think, that developers and users are taking right now. We're both searching for the right language to express ourselves, a language that we can use to our advantage. Are we converging on a common language between startup owners and users? No I don't think we are - but perhaps we should be.
Interestingly enough, downvoting to express disagreement is not against the hacker news guidelines[1].
A few subreddits I visit pop up a message right next to the comment when you downvote it, saying you should only do so when it does not contribute to the discussion. I think that's a pretty good solution for educating users about the intended purpose of downvoting. I also think HN's idea of only letting older users downvote is a healthy idea.
An upvote and a like and a favorite (heart?) all serve different needs across networks, but they generally mean the same thing within a network.
I think for a system like this to make sense, there should be some amount of conditioning. On HN, for example, I abhor downvotes without context, especially when it's clear that the downvote is more an expression of disagreement rather than an indication that the comment detrimented the conversation.
But this still makes Twitter very different from Facebook. On Twitter, I follow people who tweet about interesting things or who share some common interest with me. Facebook, on the other hand, is something I use to talk to the people I met at high school and Uni. Thus Twitter is always a fun place to go to, filled with content that will appeal to me. Facebook, on the other hand, is mostly lowest-common-denominator plagiarised content and life updates I probably don't care much about.
Facebook is a place that represents some of your existing relationships. Twitter is a place where you make new ones.
Especially for sports, when I'm watching a game I usually have twitter open to see people's jokes & analysis. Sometimes, I look at the moment the day after just cause I'm curious, but the moment doesn't reflect my game experience at all.
Here is the twitter moment for the 1st day of the NBA season. https://twitter.com/i/moments/659130295396896768 -- its mostly just pictures from official nba and team accounts. There are no jokes, and there is very little analysis. It has some random highlights from games. But the biggest highlight of the night ( game winning block on Lebron ) is missing for some reason.
Same with this moment on the most recent GOP debate: https://twitter.com/i/moments/659492422137827328?lang=en There are no jokes at all. There had to have been at least 1 donald trump joke out there that should have been included.
I think they are working on curation tools so anyone can curate moments, and I think that will really help if enough interesting people take the time to do it. But I really think it could be the newspaper or the 'reddit' of a lot of topics.
I originally used them as "favourites" (for links that I was interested in but didn't have time to read now) but others didn't. Twitter catered for the majority and made the list of your favourites harder to get at and started putting things you favourite into other people's timelines.
Whilst I preferred how it was originally it is clear to me that this change was motivated by how the community at large used the feature.
> Favorite (old) = neutral statement related to the importance of the tweet for you. It's mostly a bookmark, not really an endorsement.
> Favoriting a tweet didn't mean it was her favorite (as Twitter apparently believes)
Oh yeah? If that's true, that's a terrible UX. Any time you have to say "xxx doesn't actually mean xxx", you should stop and think extra hard about what you're saying. "Favoriting" a tweet should mean exactly what it says it means.
And considering how favoriting a tweet notifies the recipient, and a person's favorites are public, I don't buy that favoriting a tweet was a neutral reaction to a tweet. If I got a notification that said Bob favorited tweet yyy, I would take that to mean endorsement.
Just because some users are using it as a bookmarking service doesn't mean that's what most people use it as or what Twitter intends it to be used as.
Yet their corporate masters differ. Tumblr, the company, totally gets Tumblr, the community. They understand why the site is popular, what people want. Twitter, though, believes it is Facebook.
The problem here is that Twitter is slow to respond to these usage patterns; we don’t really know if they realize how people use their product and they seem to try random things to satisfy investors and/or users.
"Last year it had a revenue of $1.4 billion, but it's [sic] operational costs was [sic] $1.9 billion"
How on earth could it cost 1.9 Billion to run "Twitter"? 50 WhatsApp engineers and 100 Elixer servers could handle everything. That's just insane. They need to cut costs NOW.