Twitter for Dummies (i.e. me)

doctorfrog on 26/8/2015 at 07:45

It seems like a promotional tool mostly. Get people on there, get them to use it, then celebrities/companies of all stripes use it to promote things to people who are on there using it. It's also used by TV news to make them seem relevant.

I tried to use it to follow a few game developers for game updates or whatever, but it's mostly retweets of inner-circle conversations or things they're promoting. So I followed some celebrities I was interested in and it's mostly retweets or things they're promoting. Ok, I get it, you got to hustle. So I followed a few sites and it was like going to their web site and reading article titles (on a randomized list filled with other things).

I either don't really understand it, or I do and it's just not useful to me. You know what stands out the most to me? The ads. I was scrolling past stuff I didn't care about looking for stuff to see and the only thing that snagged me was advertising. There wasn't any way to get rid of the ads, so I removed the app from my phone.

I think I'm just becoming an old guy retreating to the toilet with a copy of the newspaper, because now I just go to Metafilter and read an article linked from there.

Aja on 27/8/2015 at 15:23

Breaking news will often be reported on twitter before anything else, so it can be useful if want to learn about a current event that hasn't made it into the news cycle yet. Otherwise my twitter feed seems to be an endless stream of egotistical self-styled comedians, philosophers, and political activists, and reading it usually leaves me feeling depressed. I'm not sure there's anything to get; either you enjoy being privy to others' constant musings and sharing your own or you don't.

faetal on 27/8/2015 at 17:44

You can follow and unfollow at a whim though, so if you find your feed depressing, prune it a bit.

242 on 27/8/2015 at 19:54

It's basically about quick(est) delivery of news. IMO, Twitter is a great thing.

Yakoob on 29/8/2015 at 00:10

Quote Posted by Aja

Inline Image:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/seismic_waves.png

doctorfrog on 5/9/2015 at 07:24

I'm not being incredulous, but what value to you personally is it that you get the news 1 minute, 1 hour, or even a day, sooner than you otherwise would have? And what kinds of news are we talking about? Sports scores? Celebrity news? International news?

And from that, what value is it to people in general? How is it generally valuable to scour a Twitter feed for something that might be more valuable if you get it slightly sooner had you just waited for it to show up among slower media?

And if we're talking about natural disasters, is browsing a Twitter feed really better than getting an automated text, a radio alert, or some other relatively archaic technology?

faetal on 5/9/2015 at 10:59

For me it's more that you get what's happening in a more raw fashion, rather than the media-treated version. You get a lot of eye-witness "on the ground" tweets from people actually going through e.g. police brutality without the press doing its usual thing of massaging the language to portray it in the way which fits the editorial agenda.

Yakoob on 5/9/2015 at 22:13

Faetal, i see your point, in gaming circles it was interesting to see comments from reporters right in mile of E3 sometimes, and I know a lot of people follow on the ground correspondents in foreign dander zones.

I am like doctor frog, I genuinely don't care to know RIGHT NOW and the hassle of constantly filtering through so many silly tweets in real time just to make sure you don't miss out or having to research right ppl to follow just isn't worth it. I prefer to dip.in n out of my feed whenever I feel like it, or stick to normal websites.

But we are a dying breed as we do live in an instant gratification society where everyone checks their phone every 5 minutes. So twitter is a perfect platform to takie advantage of that, especially if you install the app. Not my cup o tea tho; i already get annoyingly ocd with 5 jillion different messengers different groups of my friends use and trying to keep up with new messages heh.

faetal on 5/9/2015 at 22:35

For me it's not about instant gratification or being first on the scene. It's more about wanting to see the word cloud rather than the story.

Tony_Tarantula on 6/9/2015 at 14:44

Quote Posted by doctorfrog

For 99% of people there's no value whatsoever. It's only interesting to people like those who manage large portfolios(or otherwise work in high finance), high level government officials, first responders, newscasters, etc. Very few people have any use to know it in 1 minute after vs 1 day after.

In most cases the value isn't from the speed but from the ability to gain narcissistic validation. Notice that most "social media" are carefully crafted to prevent negative quantitative feedback from being sent to users. You can always "like" but you can never "dislike" a post.

But you know...the usual reaction you get when you point these things out:

[video=youtube;znGBU5oODz8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znGBU5oODz8[/video]