Twitter C/D

yea remember how the google logo redesign ruined all our lives? me neither

i stopped using google now i just shout into a coffee cup

facebook announced they have a billion daily users imo mark zuckerberg shd be assassinated he flew too close to the sun

i use RTs for signal boosting or sharing joeks, sometimes they're good for sharing worthwhile responses to something you said that wouldn't otherwise be seen by your followers, otherwise i use it in a 'i wish i had tweeted this' way

I use tweetbot with the iOS share sheet function if I want to save tweets. Mostly with pocket.

http://i.imgur.com/Za4NAWF.png

The custom Twitter emojis for livetweeting TV shows / live events way more grating than hearts imho

yeah imo the worst thing twitter has done to their product is just keep adding more crap

tweet : fav ratio basically the most dependable metric i have for judging character

I should tweet more, only tweeted like 5k times and been a member since November 2006

full disclosure: patron sailor's tweets where I do really mean *heart* button.

But most of the time, I starred stuff as an armchair curator of what's enlivening this world wide web of ours. And I did look at everyone else's star's to find cool shit. Ned Raggett was an excellent source.

Now all his hearts are gonna be personal stuff about sunsets, not about cool record stores being burned to the ground, etc.

now if u want it done u have to burn the cool record store to the ground yrself

tweet : fav ratio basically the most dependable metric i have for judging character

idgi, how does one judge based on this

i have never looked at ppls favs before suspect its a p uncommon behaviors, heres a good article abt it on maxs new blog tho http://nymag.com/following/2015/11/guys-we-can-see-you-liking-sexy-instagram-pics.html

btw i tried it out and found someone faving hot teens pics and they were weed themed hot teens lmao

not the same but one day my gf grilled me when she saw a selfie by @_blotty (hot girl on twitter) on my tl over my shoulder, like "why do you follow her?!" and i was like uhhhhh

can't wait for ilx to find my instagram faves, the endless stream of hot bikini pics

Welcome to Following, New York Magazine's new limited-run site about internet culture, social media, and the many weird and fascinating things people do online.

could someone explain what 'limited-run' means in this context?

popup

it's only running for like a month

I looked at the instagram likes of people I follow and was pleasantly surprised there was no hot teen pics but otoh there were a lot of boring grams being liked

i RT a lot and almost never fav/like anything -- at any given moment i have a small number of favs that are usually things i just want to bookmark, or a rare instance where i want to give positive feedback but don't want to RT or have nothing to say in response.

pro tip: if you want to keep a list of hot instagram pics, have a pervo friend with instagram who you message occasionally and say "whoa check out these hot pics". then when you want to see hot pics, you look at their faves.

xps thx

can't wait for ilx to find my instagram faves, the endless stream of hot bikini pics

― μpright mammal (mh), Thursday, November 5, 2015 11:03 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We'll never find them if they're not on Flickr.

;-)

funny you mention that, a friend mentioned flickr was over a decade old and I spent some time browsing through pics yesterday

time flies

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/conversation-smoosh-twitter-decay/412867/?single_page=true

Bonnie Stewart writes:

"I think visibility has a lot to do with it. Media surveillance of Twitter to create (not just disseminate) news, the way hashtags allow strangers to gather and galvanize over areas of shared interest, the fact that the stream or feed is made up of a constant flow of discrete speech acts with limited context […]—all these things made it feel like a powder keg in hot weather a year ago.

Now, it’s just Twitter. It’s a space where all contexts are collapsed and all ideas can be mob-amplified or end up pulled for a Buzzfeed article. And I’ve adjusted accordingly and I am careful about what I say and some of that is good because frankly the world does not need to hear me pronounce on every single thing I don’t know much about. Twitter’s affordances still render it powerful—but that very power and capacity to curry visibility, both within its own space and within broader media spaces, also render it challenging."

In the final paragraphs of this article, let me assert something I have very little data to support: At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.” The public knows about conversation smoosh, and that constitutes, I think, a major problem for Twitter the Company. New products like Moments—which collects tweets, images, and video into little summaries—are not going to fix that.

I’m not sure anything can fix it, honestly. But I wonder if Twitter can’t arrange a de-smooshing, at least a little bit, by creating more forms of private-ness on the site. Separating the private and the public could, in turn, delineate “speech-like” and “print-like” tweets. Twitter’s offered locked accounts for a long time, but it has always been default public. (For a few early years, a pane on Twitter.com displayed every tweet.) Making it so an individual tweet’s publicness can be toggled on or off might help users feel more comfortable spending time there. And pushing new users toward secret accounts that can toggle individual tweets public might even allay some of their fears.

Or maybe nothing can be done.

—all these things made it feel like a powder keg in hot weather a year ago.

Now, it’s just Twitter.

lol when i joined twitter one year ago everyone was writing shit like this. its like the thinkpiece equiv of youtube comments about back in the day

that makes sense, as the subtitle says: "The social network fundamentally changed in early 2014. And that’s causing big problems for the company."

From another message board:

The problem with letting Twitter be Twitter is that Twitter took money on the promise of being something other that just Twitter.

Or to put it in analogy form. You give me $500,000 to buy you a Ferrari and I give you a Toyota Corolla.

You complain that I haven't held up my end of the bargain and I point out that the Corolla is a perfectly fine car that can get you from point a to point b and even has some strengths when compared to the Ferrari, so why are you complaining?

That's the point Twitter is at right now. They took the money to be something other than what they are right now. If Twitter wants to be just Twitter, that's fine, but you'll need to cut their 20 Billion market cap down to somewhere around a 3-4 Billion market cap, I don't have a model with me right now.

well i've got a model waiting for me so i'll just say this

o shit we're expecting startups to be worth their market capitalization now?

tweet : fav ratio basically the most dependable metric i have for judging character

idgi, how does one judge based on this

― gwyneth anger (patron sailor), Thursday, November 5, 2015 12:43 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i guess i mean that tweeting is talking & faving is listening.

Twitter lost me completely when it defaulted to top posts/what you missed (similar to Facebook's top stories vs most recent). The good thing about social media was relatively low mediation - I could see what all the people I'm following have said, or search for what people have said about something interesting (or follow your trending hashtags list), but don't decide the important stuff for me.

x-post now but that is... not what fave-ing is.

A fave used in that way is pretty much the opposite of listening, it is this perfunctory machine motion used to create the illusion of interaction in the mind of the interacter, without actually expending any effort or communicating any genuine emotion.

But thanks for explaining that, because it's one of the mysteries of Twitter interaction solved for me. That a much *better* way of judging ... not "character" but actual level of friendship with a person is to compare the ratio of how much they reply to how much they fave. Because that responds a way of seeing how much they *actually* engage emotionally, versus how much they provide this superficial machine-like engagement metric that really signifies nothing. People who just fave a lot, without ever actually speaking to me... it seems a very insincere way of interacting with people and I just find it weird and kinda off-putting, to be honest. I try not to follow people who do that.

I am, as you can probably guess, anti-heart. Taking a fairly polysemic symbol with multiple semiotic interpretations and replacing it with a closed, limited, one-meaning symbol is a limiting of function, and a removal, not an addition. I've seen a lot of people objecting to the heart as claiming it's the infantilisation of the internet. I agree with that, but not for the same reasons they do - it's not because it's twee or "girly" to click a heart. It's because limiting the meanings of your interactions to one pre-defined message is limiting and therefore infantilising.

It's not even the most irritating thing that's happened on social media this week: that would be Tumblr unilaterally removing the "reply" button and replacing it with... nothing.

That has had the effect of turning what was previously an interactive medium with differing levels of privacy into the functional equivalent of a television set. Between this and removing nested conversations, I'm just convinced that the people designing the site have absolutely no idea how its users actually *use* the site.

I think you're being uncharitable about fav'ing Branwell. Sometimes I fav rather than reply out of a kind of.. modesty? Like - I like what you said, however I don't have anything very valuable to say in response that would merit actual typing, so I'm keeping schtum, but I want you to know that I read it.

Yeah most ppl I follow and haven't even met (and will ever meet) (when they are people and not cinemas). Sometime I type something to what they've said, sometimes I might fave when I have nothing but like it (or even love it, so the heart vs star thing is an almighty shrug). Certainly don't think about it in terms of level of friendship - totally unbothered by the fact some people don't follow me back. Sometimes they do and its nice but not a necessity.

I certainly type something to a random person I follow if I feel like it (as I was doing on Corbyn just now), or on Tarkovsky's Mirror. Sometime there is a particle of interaction sometimes not.

With twitter I feel informed and entertained - it sometimes take more of my time than it should but that's something for me to change. So a lot like television but with a channel that often is worth a visit.

Tracer, am I correct in assuming that when you use the fave in that way, you are doing it with someone that you also share actual twitter replies and conversations with, (or even IRL exchanges with) as well as just fave-ing them? Like, that's fair enough. It's an "I've read and understood" the same way that people often use the fave to end a conversation, after exchanging a couple of replies, then ending with a fave is like the polite "goodbye" before you hang up the phone - "I concur with what you've said, but I've nothing more to add to the conversation." That is fair enough.

But I'm talking about people who follow me, but never have any other interactions except the fave. That I find weird, and slightly creepy, like, what are you doing, watching me like a television? It's the kind of interaction one uses with people one does not actually know, e.g. celebrities. A pop star posts a photo and you don't know them so of course you're not going to reply, you just fave the photo. (It's the kind of "engagement" platforms want you to have with "brands"l not a way you interact with human beings.) But if it's someone I know, and their only method of interaction with me is to star the occasional tweet, instead of talking to me... like, do they really think that is somehow performing friendship at me? It is not communicating anything except the fact that you are clicking buttons at me. I readjust my conception of that relationship as "not real; purely performative" and adjust my expectations accordingly.

I certainly understand that social media relationships are not translatable with real-world interactions. People can be great to be with in person, and not-great on social media, and vice versa. But I do think, from reading this thread, that there are ways people behave on social media that they *believe* to be expressing one thing; but being on the receiving end of them actually communicates something totally different!

It's not a perfect analogy, but it's kind of like the difference between listening and eavesdropping?

Listening is a two-sided activity as part of a conversation, an exchange. If one person just speaks and the other just sticks stars or hearts on them, that is not actually a conversation, and it's a very poor basis for a friendship.

(It's not perfect because of the asymmetrical nature of twitter, eavesdropping is its very nature.)

It's a balance between replies and fav'ing. Like Tracer sometimes I fav without conversation, other times I pepper the conversation with fav's. Sometimes I converse and then end the conversation with a fav. It's like a good bye, I need to end this conversation right now. Sometimes I fav, retweet, then converse.

It's a mechanism that people can use any which way they please. That bugs twitter that they just can't say, here is what this button does to new users. It's evolved into what is essentially parallel to some sort of visual/audible feedback that you have in real life conversations. A nod, an uh huh, that's right, a good bye.

But if it's someone I know, and their only method of interaction with me is to star the occasional tweet, instead of talking to me

Its strange...but it depends. If you meet them IRL every now and then and feels good then I'd cast it as a bad-habit picked up while online. And there are many of those.

It would definitely be weird if someone I've never met faved (fav'd?) a bunch of stuff on the reg and never otherwise corresponded. Maybe that kind of thing happens more when you've got a shitload of followers (which I don't)

I'm going to star carrying around a bunch of star stickers and placing them on people's foreheads when they say something awesome.

I don't have a ton of followers either. Maybe it's just another of those weird internet things that just doesn't happen to men. I've no idea!

(I think probably not. I think it is one of those things about mismatches in terms of understanding the shallowness or depth of acquaintance. But I could be wrong.)

Funny, I've never really thought of Twitter as a forum for conversation. If one breaks out that's fine but it usually feels like a postscript to the original tweet. And I love getting fav'd by anyone - strangers, friends, quasi-friends. I don't generally expect replies to anything, so I guess I'm fine with people "watching me like television" as Branwell says - which also describes how I approach the people I follow. (I'll fave a lot though).

A pop star posts a photo and you don't know them so of course you're not going to reply, you just fave the photo
This is exactly something I would NOT fave - pop stars don't need any extra validation from me

I will miss the Twitter stars. I've always felt a star was more difficult to get from your followers than, say, a heart on Instagram (definitely statistically true) so a starred tweet was more of an achievement. Now I imagine the Twitter hearts will become like devalued stars.

wow I sure left twitter at the right time

it's interesting to me how fickle people's relationship to twitter is: "oh, now it's a heart? i'm fucking out of here" or "they put top posts at the top of the feed now? unacceptable level of mediation--COUNT ME OUT." these reactions are hilarious and incomprehensible to me. i love twitter and am super addicted to it. there's nothing else like it and i don't think there's anything feature that would fundamentally change its function or my relationship to it

the "while you were away" thing is like 3 tweets that are very easy to ignore