I don't do the twitter and never have. About the closest I come is watching a YouTube video on how to fix my leaky faucet or smoke the "perfect" brisket. Thank God I never joined all that silliness. Reading Seaside Joe also counts as my version of twitter. In fact, Seaside Joe has all but ruined my use of Bleacher Report. Between the SJ content and the comments...this is the place to be if you dig the Hawks. Kenneth picking Witherspoon...well...that just sealed the deal.
I am aware that there is an invention called Twitter, and that on this invention they tweet tweets. I am to Twitter what Vincent Vega is to Television.
IMO, the essential prerequisite for publishing on Twitter is the fervent belief that a bunch of people really, really need to hear what the writer thinks about whatever happens to pop top of mind. In days of yore, giving in to such a belief was thought to always degenerate into braggadocio. Like gossip, it was not regarded as a virtue. Like any ball of worms, those self-important thoughts will expand to fill the available can.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Some organizations use it to broadcast important messages. There were, and are, other ways to get that done without being susceptible to trackers and social network analysis. As with Facebook & all the rest: when you use Twitter, YOU are the product.
When Twitter first appeared, it seemed clear to me that the only appropriate word for a user was "twit". I have seen nothing that would cause me to change my opinion in that matter. Although a twit I may be, it has not ever been for that reason.
Getting a critical mass of users on Twitter comes down to a platform that readily supports trolling and button-pushing. To get roughly 4% of the world to sign up for that—even given repressive regimes, pre-literacy, illiteracy, and unavailability of (or disinterest in) technology—doesn’t seem like that heavy a lift for anyone with the resources.
Quite the rant. Due to the overwhelming amount of Seahawk content we have previously received it is easy to overlook the lack of it in this post. Should have included a Clark update though.
I opened a Twitter account to follow John Clayton and Dave Boling. Somehow that didn't work very well for me and I haven't been on that platform for years. I honestly don't think I've read 1K tweets total, ever. In fact, I skip over the tweets that Joe imbeds in this news letter, so they don't count against my total tweet count. I'm "friends" with some old friends and a few other pretty interesting people and groups on Facebook though so I understand the attraction.
My only reason for posting this is a deep emotional need for Seaside Joe to validate my existence and formally acknowledging that I'm a really cool person.
I was on a business trip to JSC one time around 1990 when one of the guys excitedly showed me a thing called "Mosaic". I thought it was just a toy until I found out weather radar was available in near real time. THEN it was cool.
When I was first on Twitter (in the very early days of Twitter) I put my "Twitter feed" into my course sites, and I would link course resources or news articles and make comments directed to my students. It was a cool resource. And I met some cool people there, helped edit a book on nuclear energy as a result of a contact made. But watching it morph into a hate-fueled disinformation platform has been depressing. Getting off of it completely was the best thing I have done for myself, over a year ago now.
Sorry, Doug, this app's reply setup is a little confusing to me sometimes. I was referring to Paul G's statement he doesn't know anyone who isn't disillusioned. So, I am exhibit a of disillusionment, not exhibit a of lowest common denominator. But, thanks for the uplifting comment!
Since Elon said he was stepping down and turning over Twitter to someone else to manage he doesn't seem to have stepped away at all. I have no idea how they can calculate how many tweets a user reads when scrolling through pages of them to find a particular tweet doesn't allow for reading. Half the tweets in my feed are retweets of the same original tweet and I'm sure not going to read it 50 times.
He can limit the tweets all he wants. Twitter information has become so unreliable that it has rapidly lost its once solid resource for news. The problem is none of the other attempts at creating a replacement have been successful because they are designed so differently the navigation through comments is bulky enough to cause people to go back to twitter.
Elon is destroying what made Twitter popular, and it won't get better under him. It also won't disappear. I have read MySpace still exists, so if that can survive, so can Twitter.
You can find the reasoning behind the limitation fairly quickly but a very very rough summary:
Twitters contract with Google Cloud services expired June 30th
Elon did not want to pay a reported bill in the region of $1bil and was trying to migrate all of Twitters servers and engineering off of Google
This meant embeded tweets, videos, links and so on all broke, because Twitter fired most of it's engineering team and couldn't get this done ahead of the June 30 deadline
This rash of linking errors forced far above normal server requests, flooding Twitters servers
Rather than paying Google (or AWS for example) for short term coverage, Twitter implements usage restrictions vs their entire backend crashing under the strain
[Side note: Elon is very clearly moving twitter towards a vaslty reduced userbase, but one that has a decent paid-user %, rather than it's historic open-to-all social media platform]
Haha. And I was about to comment about how clever Musk was to keep finding ways to boost exposure, whether you like him or not. Your added info goes to show that sometimes more news/info is a good thing (so long as it’s not fake news).
I don't have an actual comment on NFL Twitter - I quite happily stopped using twitter when Elon bought it, and never really used it for NFL stuff anyway. Certainly i never read the average persons twitter takes on anything. Quite happy existing pretty much free of all social media.
I'm sure the reality is a bit more complex, but just enough context that this wasn't Elon being outright weird and instead a reaction to some tech mess-up related to his "world leading business skills".
I don't do the twitter and never have. About the closest I come is watching a YouTube video on how to fix my leaky faucet or smoke the "perfect" brisket. Thank God I never joined all that silliness. Reading Seaside Joe also counts as my version of twitter. In fact, Seaside Joe has all but ruined my use of Bleacher Report. Between the SJ content and the comments...this is the place to be if you dig the Hawks. Kenneth picking Witherspoon...well...that just sealed the deal.
I am aware that there is an invention called Twitter, and that on this invention they tweet tweets. I am to Twitter what Vincent Vega is to Television.
IMO, the essential prerequisite for publishing on Twitter is the fervent belief that a bunch of people really, really need to hear what the writer thinks about whatever happens to pop top of mind. In days of yore, giving in to such a belief was thought to always degenerate into braggadocio. Like gossip, it was not regarded as a virtue. Like any ball of worms, those self-important thoughts will expand to fill the available can.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Some organizations use it to broadcast important messages. There were, and are, other ways to get that done without being susceptible to trackers and social network analysis. As with Facebook & all the rest: when you use Twitter, YOU are the product.
When Twitter first appeared, it seemed clear to me that the only appropriate word for a user was "twit". I have seen nothing that would cause me to change my opinion in that matter. Although a twit I may be, it has not ever been for that reason.
I feel better now. Thanks for the soapbox!
Getting a critical mass of users on Twitter comes down to a platform that readily supports trolling and button-pushing. To get roughly 4% of the world to sign up for that—even given repressive regimes, pre-literacy, illiteracy, and unavailability of (or disinterest in) technology—doesn’t seem like that heavy a lift for anyone with the resources.
Trolling and button pushing... I'm sure we can find that many chimpanzees up to the challenge.
Quite the rant. Due to the overwhelming amount of Seahawk content we have previously received it is easy to overlook the lack of it in this post. Should have included a Clark update though.
I opened a Twitter account to follow John Clayton and Dave Boling. Somehow that didn't work very well for me and I haven't been on that platform for years. I honestly don't think I've read 1K tweets total, ever. In fact, I skip over the tweets that Joe imbeds in this news letter, so they don't count against my total tweet count. I'm "friends" with some old friends and a few other pretty interesting people and groups on Facebook though so I understand the attraction.
My only reason for posting this is a deep emotional need for Seaside Joe to validate my existence and formally acknowledging that I'm a really cool person.
Twitter isn't a product. If you are on Twitter, YOU are the product.
YOUR eyeballs, YOUR likes/dislikes, YOUR data.
Just like Facebook... a pox on all of them.
I was there in the early days of the Internet. We had such hopes for it. I don’t know anyone from that time who isn’t disillusioned.
I was on a business trip to JSC one time around 1990 when one of the guys excitedly showed me a thing called "Mosaic". I thought it was just a toy until I found out weather radar was available in near real time. THEN it was cool.
When I was first on Twitter (in the very early days of Twitter) I put my "Twitter feed" into my course sites, and I would link course resources or news articles and make comments directed to my students. It was a cool resource. And I met some cool people there, helped edit a book on nuclear energy as a result of a contact made. But watching it morph into a hate-fueled disinformation platform has been depressing. Getting off of it completely was the best thing I have done for myself, over a year ago now.
It has been wildly successful at uncovering the lowest common denominator of humanity
Sorry, Doug, this app's reply setup is a little confusing to me sometimes. I was referring to Paul G's statement he doesn't know anyone who isn't disillusioned. So, I am exhibit a of disillusionment, not exhibit a of lowest common denominator. But, thanks for the uplifting comment!
^ exhibit A, your honor
LOL!
If you are here, that can't be true. But what Twitter does do is it brings out the worst in people at times.
Since Elon said he was stepping down and turning over Twitter to someone else to manage he doesn't seem to have stepped away at all. I have no idea how they can calculate how many tweets a user reads when scrolling through pages of them to find a particular tweet doesn't allow for reading. Half the tweets in my feed are retweets of the same original tweet and I'm sure not going to read it 50 times.
He can limit the tweets all he wants. Twitter information has become so unreliable that it has rapidly lost its once solid resource for news. The problem is none of the other attempts at creating a replacement have been successful because they are designed so differently the navigation through comments is bulky enough to cause people to go back to twitter.
Elon is destroying what made Twitter popular, and it won't get better under him. It also won't disappear. I have read MySpace still exists, so if that can survive, so can Twitter.
You can find the reasoning behind the limitation fairly quickly but a very very rough summary:
Twitters contract with Google Cloud services expired June 30th
Elon did not want to pay a reported bill in the region of $1bil and was trying to migrate all of Twitters servers and engineering off of Google
This meant embeded tweets, videos, links and so on all broke, because Twitter fired most of it's engineering team and couldn't get this done ahead of the June 30 deadline
This rash of linking errors forced far above normal server requests, flooding Twitters servers
Rather than paying Google (or AWS for example) for short term coverage, Twitter implements usage restrictions vs their entire backend crashing under the strain
[Side note: Elon is very clearly moving twitter towards a vaslty reduced userbase, but one that has a decent paid-user %, rather than it's historic open-to-all social media platform]
Haha. And I was about to comment about how clever Musk was to keep finding ways to boost exposure, whether you like him or not. Your added info goes to show that sometimes more news/info is a good thing (so long as it’s not fake news).
I don't have an actual comment on NFL Twitter - I quite happily stopped using twitter when Elon bought it, and never really used it for NFL stuff anyway. Certainly i never read the average persons twitter takes on anything. Quite happy existing pretty much free of all social media.
This is great info, thanks for adding it! I should have known/added that there was more to it than I really understood.
I'm sure the reality is a bit more complex, but just enough context that this wasn't Elon being outright weird and instead a reaction to some tech mess-up related to his "world leading business skills".